30 entries for September 2025

Trade 1: Short XAUEUR

If real rates [(yield minus inflation)] are falling and negative, that generally means that central banks are enacting extremely loose policy.

[Increasing US rates and real rates is generally bad for gold.]

Positioning	Bull Market	Bear Market
Long and increasing	Very Bullish
Long and stable	Bullish
Long but falling	BEARISH
Short and stable		Bearish
Short and getting more short		Very bearish
Short but buying back		BULLISH

When the market anticipates an upcoming event, it will tend to position in the direction of least regret.

[If XAUEUR isn't available on your platform sell XAUUSD and buy EURUSD.]

[If I make this 1% better each time, it will be 1.62x better after 49 times].

[A good rule of thumb for new traders is to set the stop loss an average day range away from the entry. If I know nothing else about a security, I do this. Anything smaller risks to be stopped out by noise.]

[Add 3 pips to stop loss for slippage.]

[Position size is the output, not input.]

Fallacies of distributed computing

1. The network is reliable;
2. Latency is zero;
3. Bandwidth is infinite;
4. The network is secure;
5. Topology doesn't change;
6. There is one administrator;
7. Transport cost is zero;
8. The network is homogeneous;

personal mark

There are 9 circles shaping the rocket. The circle count can be further reduced to seven or even four , but this yields shapes that are too simple and not very interesting.

It is easy to simplify things, the trick is to know when to stop.

Rethinking the Future of Bluesky: Challenges and Possibilities of a Decentralized Social Network

The fact that a banned account in one unit can simply join another underlines both the promise and the difficulty of decentralization. What one person sees as resilience, another may see as irresponsibility.

Open Social

in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

['Social aggregation' features like global search, notifications, feeds, and shared moderation are what] blows the “personal sites” paradigm out of the water. People are social creatures, and we want to congregate in shared spaces. We don’t just want to visit each other’s sites—we want to hang out together, and social apps provide the shared infrastructure.

The web Alice created—who she follows, what she likes, what she has posted—is trapped in a box that’s owned by somebody else. To leave it is to leave it behind.

Those megabytes of JSON you got on your way out are dead data. It’s like a branch torn apart from its tree. It doesn’t belong anywhere. To give a new life to our data, we’d have to collectively export it and then collectively import it into some next agreed-upon social app—a near-impossible feat of coordination. Even then, the network effects are so strong that most people would soon find their way back.

Open social frees up our data like open source freed up our code. Open social ensures that products can get a new life, that people can’t be locked out of what they have created, and that products can be forked and remixed. You don’t need an “everything app” when data from different apps circulates in the open web.

nobody can take away your files

atproto, nostr, webxdc, solid, remotestorage, and 'dApps' each have a different focus and data flow.

but i can't help but see them as collections of "web apps".

and think it'd be possible and cool to give each web app the combined user base of the others.

might not share the network, but you can share the gui.

is it naive to wish that their web apps could support multiple or all of these instead of rebuilding similar apps per platform? isn't it made of the same stuff/standards but just read/writing data differently?

when i see "writing, photos, bookmarks, todos" rewritten because "platform", i can't help but think of "5 networks of screenshots posted from the other 4".

Daily Bread

Visual diary of what kids in different parts of the world eat.

Observations on 6 years of journaling

["Rubber-ducking" is a programming term referring to people solving their own block by explaining it to another person; the lister can be replaced with a rubber duck.]

my journal is my rubber duck.

It's Not Just You: Music Streaming Is Broken Now

[Artists on Spotify are paid from a common fund divided in proportion to their number of streams in each payment period. Audiobooks are also sharing from the same pool. Scammers can flood the platform with fake plays that reduces the payout from all the others.]

[Anyone can upload tracks to even verified pages for independent artists because there isn't much vetting on the distributor or platform side and the cost is almost negligible.]

[One dark practice is creating songs from royalty-free loops and setting the date as early as possible in order to block any usage of them via Content ID; this is also not vetted by distributors or streaming platforms.]

Slow social media

the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving relationships and fostering connection, they're advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged, lonely, and unhappy. And once TikTok figured out that short-form video with a recommendation engine is digital crack, all other social media platforms quickly sprang into action to copy their secret sauce.

pagination is more humane than infinite-scroll since it gives users a natural breathing point where they can decide whether they want to keep going

The Left looks for traitors, the Right looks for converts.

How I coined the term 'open source'

I am the originator of the term "open source software" and came up with it while executive director at Foresight Institute. Not a software developer like the rest, I thank Linux programmer Todd Anderson for supporting the term and proposing it to the group.

I said little, but was looking for an opportunity to introduce the proposed term. I felt that it wouldn't work for me to just blurt out, "All you technical people should start using my new term." Most of those attending didn't know me, and for all I knew, they might not even agree that a new term was greatly needed, or even somewhat desirable.

Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive—a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic—just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.