We have RIoTS already... two more letters and we get a Scrabble.

If we'd had RIoTS this stuff might've already been fixed.

I feel like a lot of the problems in our world would be fixed by RIoTS.

How hard is it to find some high-protein fruit juice these days?

Given that there's no strong regulation that forces fruit juice to be made from fruit, I'd wager that this is already a product line.

"Contains 0% Juice"

you can't call it juice if there's no juice

> We're still not even sure if humans have thoughts.

Sorry, what? You don't think you have thoughts?

Descartes will want a chat about that.

I'll give you the strategy that works for me.

Do NOT talk about privacy, E2EE, or any of that. To regular people, "privacy" has negative value, so even if they wanted something, your talk of private communication and not being scanned by data brokers and governments will make them want it less.

So what to do then?

I present Signal as a novelty and focus on one single feature: "hey, video calls work much better than WhatsApp! Try it out!"

Bam, instant download.

Why do you say negative? My impression is that it has zero value to them.

"zero value" would be neutral. Eg, if you tell someone, "Try DuskDozerIM, let's message on there! I like this thing where doubletapping the emojis plays a fun random little animation". Then maybe this is "zero value" to them and their response would be "whatever, sure, let's try it".

What I'm saying is if you go, "Try DuskDozerIM, let's message on there! It's private and secure, the government and large ad companies and data brokers can't read your messages and harvest your data" then you evoque a feeling of suspicion (negative value) and their response will be "look, I already have like a thousand apps, I don't really want one more".

One additional way you can confirm this hypothesis is that almost everybody has given WhatsApp access to { all contacts ; all notifications ; all permissions } but if you sell them Signal with the "privacy/security" angle and watch them install it, you will notice they hesitate for a sec and then reply "no" to contacts, notifications and permissions, as if they're suddenly trying to inhabit the conspiracy-theorist-cum-privacy-activist mindset. Which they're uncomfortable with, and don't like. Negative value.

That... is a great idea. Does the audio call go through your app? Or the regular network?

Through Beacon via encrypted VOIP!

I love how your idea of the failed murder dinner party seems to still include an actual murder ; the problem is only the absence of an arrest.

> My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking.

I've been looking to do this setup. Would you share a few details of which tools you've used?

RethinkDNS does everything for me. You're tied to their DNS server if you want to use the in-app interface to make changes to the blocklists in use, but that's not a hard requirement. As a bonus, it also supports actual VPNs (wireguard, http connect, and socks proxy). If you don't care to micro-manage it, trackercontrol is also pretty good. There's other apps as well, like personalDNSfilter.

In this setup you're explaining, the phone is doing all the work though right? Filtering DNS and sending traffic to a wireguard VPN, is all done on the phone.

But it's not tunnelling traffic to a desktop station which then processes that traffic like its own (filters DNS as set up on the desktop, and forwards traffic through the same VPN that is set up on the desktop). Am I getting this right?

My setup is similar: A server at home runs Unbound for recursive DNS, filtered by Hagezi's blacklists. The phone (running GrapheneOS) consumes the DNS service through a Wireguard tunnel. This is 100% self-hosted and does not rely on Tailscale or a third-party DNS service. All the mobile carrier or WiFi hotspot used sees is a single encrypted connection to the server.

I absolutely love this. I thought Tailscale was necessary to establish that kind of wireguard tunnel. Would you have a link to a tutorial or write-up on how you got this set up?

I'm also interested. I use tailscale and there is supposed to be a way to configure it to use my pihole DNS, but there is something in Android that prevents that. I think I have to set a custom DNS on the phone.

A "prompt" is what goes into the LLM, so I'm not sure what you mean by "a final prompt HTML".

I often compose prompts from various sources (my "AGENTS.md", "CURRENT_TASK", "CURRENT_PHASE", ...). Last year I was composing in markdown and that got very tedious very quickly. I tried various text and text-like formats, and it turned out HTML is already one of the best formats for this, including for an "AGENTS.md" (which I keep in HTML despite the required ".md" extension).

Of course, if you build up your prompt entirely by hand (copy pasting snippets, etc.) you can get away with markdown or plain text. That works okay for some harnesses, but it leaves too much control (or more accurately, opportunity to misunderstand) to the harness.

Monet's often been classified as A Genius Impressionist, so arguably one step above A.I.

If there were suddenly thousands of websites advertising "taking chemicals" as cure-all solutions, and a two-year fad where thousands of accounts advertised "chemicals" on social media, and vernacular use of "taking chemicals" meant "self-inject unregulated substances from unknown foreign manufacturers", then do you see how it would make no sense to make this pedantic point to dismiss any concern over the new "taking chemicals" craze?

Maybe I wasn't clear, when I say people should be dismissed for saying "taking chemicals," I mean that they don't get to turn the conversation into a battle of anecdata to try to make their arguments.

For the vast majority of these chemicals, there's no evidence they do anything beneficial. Until there is, you're an idiot for taking them and our regulators are idiots for letting them be marketed to you as if there are benefits.

The entire conversation is goofy because once there's solid enough evidence of safety and efficacy, we just call it a "drug" like any other drug, but somehow a lot of the voluntary lab rats in this craze trust a gas station kiosk more than a billion dollar RCT.

TLDR I agree with you