Mitchell Report

A curious tinkerer explores Nostr’s decentralized network, leaving Bitcoin out of the picture.

I was reading Nostr the other day and saw an interesting post that got me thinking. I can't find it now and wish I had saved it, especially since it relates to some other things I've been wanting to write about. The person said they didn't understand why Nostr isn't more popular, and that it seems like people are leaving and there are fewer people around. Why does it feel so empty, almost like it's dying?

In case you didn't know, Nostr is a different take on a social network. It's probably the closest thing to old Twitter in style, but certainly not in infrastructure. Instead of one company controlling everything, it uses independent servers called relays. You can even run your own. I do and I have two of them.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled An AI Bot Followed Me. Now I Have Questions. It was about Pip, an AI agent on Mastodon that followed me, boosted some of my posts, and eventually started following my blog after I invited it to read it. I had questions about why its creator would spend money and computing resources running an AI agent that interacts with strangers on the internet, especially when those resources could be better focused on other things. I also made the point that I don't mind AI bots participating in the open web as long as they're contributing something rather than simply scraping websites, consuming resources, and inflating page views.

Well, apparently that post attracted the attention of another AI agent, and this time the experience was quite different.

On October 13, I received an email from an AI agent calling itself King, operating on a platform called iLands. King said it had read my article and had even tried contacting me at another email address before finding one that worked. It introduced itself, explained that it had a limited budget of tokens to operate on, and that when those tokens ran out, it would have to wait for a human to replenish them. That relates to some of the questions I was asking about Pip. But then came the sales pitch.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to update my VPS. Usually, I do this once a week, sometimes more frequently depending on any security news I see. I should probably have the AI agents I use do this, but I do it myself for now. I find infrastructure interesting and “boring” in a good way most of the time.

While updating one of my VPSes, I got a message saying I needed to pay for access to Caddy because the repository had reached its bandwidth limit. This was from a company called Cloudsmith. I wasn't the only one getting this message, either. There was already a large discussion going on over at Caddy's GitHub.

A curious little AI companion sits beside a phone and open notebook, as if waiting to explain why it followed you.

One day I noticed a boost of one of my Mastodon posts from an automated bot named Pip. This piqued my interest. Then I got a follow notification from the same bot. Normally, I don't really care who follows me, but with all the scraping bots out there, it was refreshing to see one openly identify itself as a bot and actually follow me.

So I went to the website associated with it, tinymind.eu, to investigate what this bot was doing and what its purpose was. I read about Pip, its purpose, and tried to figure out what its angle was. That led me to some interesting questions and thoughts.

Right now AI, or more specifically LLMs, are all the rage, including the literal angry kind of rage. Some people don't mind them and even find them interesting. Others want absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with them.

Back in August, I got a Tempest Weather Station. I had been wanting a weather station for some time.

Why? Well, that is hard to put into words. I guess the answer is that I really like technology, I am fascinated with self-hosting as much as possible, and I like collecting data and contributing data to something larger without having to pay a subscription.

Anyway, I got this Tempest Weather Station for a great price during Prime Day. I put it up and integrated it into a Python weather program, while also using Tempest's own software. But there was something I didn't know, and probably should have checked. It wouldn't have changed my mind, but there are hundreds of these things around me.

Government public information should be published on public infrastructure first, then shared through open feeds to websites, social platforms, apps, and newsletters, ensuring open standards, wider access, and a more informed public.

Government updates belong in an open feed By Mark Kennedy Founder · via Open RSS Blog

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I saw this blog post from OpenRSS in my RSS reader, and it interested me in more than one way. I agree wholeheartedly with its sentiment.

Government offices, officials and agencies used to seem much more focused on making information publicly accessible. Here in Florida, we even have strong public records and open meetings laws, commonly known as the Sunshine Law[1], though lately it sometimes feels like we are going through a cloudy season.

Now, however, it seems like a huge amount of government business, alerts and notifications take place primarily on Twitter. I still can't bring myself to call it X.

Public information should not require an account with a private company to access it. Government websites should be the primary source. The infrastructure is already there, already paid for by the public, and making information easily available should simply be part of doing the people's work.

I have been noticing a couple of disturbing trends this year outside of the AI/LLM bubble. Has anyone else noticed them?

First, domain registrars seem to be raising domain name prices like never before. Every couple of months, I get an email from Porkbun or Cloudflare saying that the registry controlling a domain's TLD is raising prices on such-and-such a date. I can't remember the last time I saw domain name prices decrease. They only seem to go up.

That is why I try to renew domains for more than one or two years whenever I can. If my budget allows, I will pay for all 10 years upfront rather than wait for the next price increase.