MichaelJ / MichaelJ is on Nostr

Building the library of Alexandria

Last Notes

2026-05-18 17:26:17 UTC

I promise I'm not dead. Just been quiet and focused on, well, a lot of things lately.
Changed my day job recently, and I'm working on a Nostr relay. Among other things.

2025-12-08 20:50:55 UTC

- reply

I'd be curious to see performance benchmarks between IndexedDB and SQLite WASM.
You'll have to use shared workers pretty heavily, but that gives true parallel processing across tabs, rather than just concurrent work on a single OS thread.

2025-10-15 12:59:16 UTC

Has anyone else noticed that the psychology around AI is similar to the psychology that prevailed around COVID?
Trying to do everything with AI, much like lockdowns and vaccine mandates, is something that looks insane on its face, yet it seems many people don't recognize the problems.
I think it's due to a lack of first principles thinking. Few people know what their first principles are, so they are unable to reason about and judge novel situations when they arise.
Some examples.
Indefinite lockdowns were obviously wrong, because there is more to human existence than mere health.
Vaccine mandates were obviously wrong, because informed consent is a core principle of medical ethics.
Replacing people with AI is obviously wrong, because it is good for people to do dignified work.
Yet in all three cases, many seemed, and continue to seem, blind to these obvious conclusions.
Anyway, this article, while lengthy, is an excellent primer on the insanity of the AI industry. It's full of first principles thinking. Read it to help see past the hype.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/

2025-03-18 14:11:23 UTC

We host Alexandria and our other projects on a private git server using OneDev.
Would other #nostrdevs be interested if we began providing a public git server as a (probably paid) service for others to host their projects?
Our goal is to break dependency on GitHub, and this would be a step in that direction.
#nevent1q…cch8

2024-07-02 03:03:20 UTC

#nostrdev please...slow down and test stuff before putting it out. Literally every Nostr app I've tried to use today is buggy to the point of being unusable. I'd rather see slower releases that actually work than bleeding-edge apps that run like it's the 23rd hour of a red-bull-fueled hackathon.

2024-05-18 20:26:07 UTC

For the devs, what languages are y'all writing clients in?
#asknostr #development #nostrdevs

2023-12-09 16:52:24 UTC

We live in an anti-child society.
Case in point, when was the last time you saw an apartment complex with a playground for kids? Dog parks? Gotta have 'em. Kid parks? What are kids?

2023-11-19 06:12:23 UTC

- reply

If I can pull out my college philosophy for a moment, the soul is classically understood to have three parts: the passions, the will, and the intellect. You can subdivide those parts, but that's not important at the moment.
An AI that can factor in logic and emotion to generate consensus can imitate the passions and the reason, but where's the will? AI does what we tell it to do. If we built one that could decide it's goals for itself, we'd be talking something human-like, but I think that's a long way off, if it's achievable at all.
Even programming an AI to be human-like doesn't necessarily solve the problem. We still gave it a directive (act like a human), and it can't will do do something else.

2023-11-13 18:16:12 UTC

Is there a literature/great books community on Nostr yet? If not, who would be interested in helping me moderate one?