Notes
Field writing
Short, sharp notes — anti-hype, SA-rooted, educational. Not financial advice.
Start here
Sovereign Starter
Prefer an ordered path over chronology? Seven modules wire these notes into a finishable curriculum — keys, privacy money, Nostr, Autonomi, local AI.
Open Sovereign Starter →AUTH Is Not Identity: What NIP-42 Relay Challenges Actually Prove
NIP-42 AUTH proves possession of a private key for a connection-scoped challenge bound to a relay URL. It does not prove legal identity, payment status, or that the wider network endorsed you.
2026-09-30 · nostr, nip-42, auth, kind-22242, relays, challenge-response, protocol, decentralisation, eose
A Model Tag Is Not a Runner Contract: Ollama’s MLX Default and What Still Differs
Ollama v0.40.0-rc0 defaults supported Apple Silicon models to MLX under the same pull/run tags — a model tag is not a runner contract. Pin versions, name the engine, keep offline plans honest.
2026-09-28 · oss-ai, local-ai, ollama, mlx, llama-cpp, lm-studio, verify, apple-silicon
Inference Residency Is Not Action Residency: Tools, MCP, and Local LLMs
Local open-weight sampling can keep prompts on machines you control — that is inference residency. Tools, Ollama web search/fetch, and MCP servers move side effects off-box. Grammar-constrained decoding (GBNF) stays local without remote tools.
2026-09-28 · local-ai, ollama, mcp, tool-calling, trust-boundary, llama-cpp, gbnf, protocol
A Privacy Mode Is Not a Proof: Venice's Ladder from Policy to Enclave
Venice's Anonymized → Private → TEE → E2EE ladder is a claim about who sees plaintext — not a cryptographic proof by itself. What a client can verify (capability flags, nonce-bound attestation, binding checks) versus what remains trust (proxy retention, ZDR partners, full DCAP).
2026-09-27 · deAI, venice-ai, privacy, tee, e2ee, attestation, prompt-custody, local-ai, protocol
A View Key Is Not a Transparent Chain
A Monero private view key is an explicit allowance on an opaque ledger — not a second public chain. What sharing it reveals (incoming), what it does not (spend authority), and why bare view-key balances need key images.
2026-09-25 · privacy, monero, view-keys, spend-keys, selective-disclosure, view-only-wallet, subaddresses, protocol
A BOLT-12 Offer Is Not a Reusable Invoice
An offer (lno) is a sticky precursor, not a reusable invoice — payers negotiate a fresh BOLT-12 invoice over onion messages, with blinded paths for tip-jar reachability.
2026-09-23 · lightning, bolt-12, offers, onion-messages, blinded-paths, receive-only, protocol
Successful Load Is Not Proof: Embedded GGUF Alignment and Wrong Tensors
llama.cpp b11019 fixed embedded GGUF data-section alignment so a successful load can no longer silently return wrong tensors — packaging integrity for sovereign local AI.
2026-09-21 · oss-ai, gguf, llama-cpp, local-ai, verify
Stale Lists and Dark Outboxes: When NIP-65 Metadata Lies by Age or Uptime
NIP-65 kind:10002 is discovery, not authority — stale relay lists and dark outboxes are the real failure modes; client merge is not consensus.
2026-09-21 · nostr, nip-65, relays, protocol
Autonomi Stores Immutable Chunks — Public Address vs Private DataMap
On Autonomi the storage primitive is the immutable content-addressed chunk. Public address and private DataMap are two retrieval stories over the same substrate — updates are new uploads.
2026-09-21 · autonomi, decentralized-storage, immutability, protocol
PSBT and Air-Gapped Signing: Keep Keys Offline While the Network Watches
BIP 174 PSBT roles and air-gapped signing — online watch-only builds, offline signs, sealed packet in between. Protocol literacy, not a shopping guide.
2026-09-18 · self-custody, psbt, bip-174, bitcoin, protocol
NIP-65: Relay Lists, Outbox, and Inbox — Routing Beyond One Home Relay
NIP-65 kind:10002 advertises per-pubkey write (outbox) and read (inbox) relays — routing beyond one home relay, beside NIP-11.
2026-09-16 · nostr, nip-65, relays, protocol
Open Weights Were Not Enough: DeepSeek Harness, Cordis, and the Local Agent Stack
Open weights solve half of sovereignty. DeepSeek Harness and Cordis open the other half — a replaceable agent runtime you can point at local inference.
2026-09-14 · deai, oss-ai, local-ai
Local Chat Is Not Data Residency: RAG, Embeddings, and Vector Stores
A local chat UI is not data residency if embeddings or the vector index leave the building. RAG, local encoders, and on-disk stores versus hosted OpenAI-shaped APIs.
2026-09-14 · deai, local-ai, rag
From Rings of 16 to the Whole Chain: What FCMP++ Changes
Monero-class privacy already hides recipients, amounts, and spenders with a small ring. Full-chain membership proofs aim to replace that fixed decoy set with membership across the ledger — without a forced address migration.
2026-09-11 · privacy, monero, fcmp
Receive-Only Lightning Is Not a Merchant Stack
Most Lightning talk collapses into shop tills or routing businesses. Receive-only tips need a payable request, inbound capacity, and often a static entry point — not a merchant stack.
2026-09-09 · lightning, receive-only, bolt-11
Autonomi Without the Data Map Is Just Scattered Ciphertext
Most decentralized storage talk collapses into cloud with a token. Autonomi’s educational core is client-side self-encryption, the Data Map, and pay-once content-addressed writes.
2026-09-07 · autonomi, decentralized-storage, self-encryption
Self-Custody Without Verify-Before-Trust Is a Slogan
Not your keys, not your coins is still the right first sentence. It is also incomplete — keys only stay yours if software, addresses, and assumptions are things you can check.
2026-09-06 · self-custody, verify-before-trust, wallets
NIP-11: How Nostr Relays Advertise What They Can Do
Nostr is often introduced as notes and other stuff transmitted by relays. That slogan is accurate and incomplete. Clients speak a small event protocol; relays decide what they store.
2026-09-03 · nostr, nip-11, relays
Local and Peer-to-Peer AI: Data Residency Without the Hype
Most people meet large language models through a browser tab or an API key. That path is convenient: someone else owns the GPUs, the ops, and the uptime. It is also a trust and dependency bargain.
2026-09-02 · deai, local-ai, open-weights
What Transparent Ledgers Leak — and Why On-Chain Privacy Matters
Most public blockchains advertise transparency as a virtue. That claim is half-true. Anyone can verify the rules of the system; anyone can also scrape a permanent graph of who paid whom.
2026-09-01 · privacy, monero, nostr