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No Solutions: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Gigi
No solutions; only trade-offs. Walking towards a better internet. Est. 882,690. Inspired by Sovereign Engineering
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- 1 weeks ago1h 23m
37: Advanced Malware w/ Arjen
"How can we make maximum use of this technology without shooting ourselves in the foot too much?" Arjen & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Listen on sovereignengineering.io This dialogue begins in the afterglow and exhaustion of another Sovereign Engineering cohort. Arjen has been living with NixOS, putting FIPS into the boot path before LUKS unlocks, and watching the SEC-08 demos turn from isolated hacks into pieces of a stranger, more coherent machine. The center of the walk is the uncomfortable power of agents. If models can operate the whole computer, then they start to look less like tools and more like extremely capable malware that sometimes works in your favor. Gigi points to a new model for personal computer use: give agents broad access to the machine, but keep signing authority and key material outside their reach. Useful power at the edge, hard boundaries around the thing that matters. From there the conversation loops back into TollGate and FIPS. Arjen talks through v2, local mints, e-cash as accounting for streamed resources, application keys, and the move from fragile intermediaries toward transports that can route through weird environments. Bytes, kilowatts, water, beer: the pattern is less about one payment rail and more about making access measurable, local, and hard to rug pull. The final third drifts offline. Myco, Boris, Zapstore, the Offline Entropy Manual, the Offpunk Manifesto, and the local-first movement all become parts of the same instinct: build software that keeps working when the network disappears, when the store rug pulls you, or when you simply want to be AFK again. In this dialogue: why post-cohort decompression has its own strange rhythm how clankers made NixOS feel usable without flattening its power what it means to run FIPS inside the initrd before LUKS unlocks how ZBD, Counter-Strike, sats in games, and fiatjaf sit in the prehistory of several later protocol moves why the flat earther meme is a surprisingly good visual metaphor for missing the shape of a system how TollGate changes when each access point can issue its own local e-cash why streamed accounting can apply to more than bandwidth what Johnathan Corgan is pushing toward with FIPS v2 and application keys why agents should be treated as advanced malware once they can run the computer how signer isolation lets the machine be useful without handing it the keys why local-first, offline-first, and AFK instincts are becoming practical engineering constraints how Myco uses nearby phones, mesh sharing, and FIPS to explore mobile transport why Boris is an attempt to make reading durable, local, and harder to shut out what the Offpunk Manifesto captures about disconnection as sovereignty why in-person collaboration still has a bandwidth that video calls and feeds cannot replace how John Vervaeke and distributed cognition keep showing up in the Sovereign Engineering design why the next residency experiment in Vi
- 3 weeks ago1h 32m
36: A Taste for Freedom w/ Zaza
"There is no creation without also being created." Zaza & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Listen on sovereignengineering.io This dialogue starts with a simple observation from the previous days at Sovereign Engineering: the conversations had been wandering from skateboarding to metaphysics, from interface design to spiritual orientation, and somehow all of it belonged in the same walk. Zaza came to SEC-08 as a FOSS UX designer thinking deeply about protocol UX, including work like Neode, but the conversation refuses to keep design in the shallow box of making things pretty or easy. His path runs through cooking, presentation, early internet curiosity, Flash, animation, retail design, and the new ability for designers to build with agents again. Design is communication. The work touches the person who makes it. If you sculpt the work, the work sculpts you back. That is true for interfaces, but it is also true for engineering culture, money, attention, purpose, and freedom. The thread keeps returning to humility. Zaza talks about being struck by the humility of M. C. Escher and George Carlin, two people who reached mastery without losing the ability to look at reality sideways. From there, the walk opens into a bigger question: what happens to a person when they get a taste for freedom? Bitcoin, Nostr, and Sovereign Engineering are not just tools in that framing. They are environments that can change what someone thinks is possible, what they aim at, and what kind of life feels worth building. In this dialogue: why conversations around SEC-08 kept moving naturally from skateboarding to metaphysics what Zaza sees in the humility of M. C. Escher and George Carlin how cooking became an early design school for taste, presentation, and composition why Counter-Strike, digital scarcity, Flash games, animation, and the weird old internet still matter for how Zaza thinks about interfaces why AI can return implementation power to designers if the output is polished with care how LLM slop fails because it inverts the care-to-consumption ratio why design is a communication tool, not just a way to make software easier to use how visual attention, signs, symbols, and the words we use shape what people notice before they can explain it how visual presentation changes the person presenting, not only the person looking why there is no touching without being touched why there is no creation without also being created how retail design trained Zaza to think about interaction, attention, and feeling why beautiful software matters more when the underlying protocol is strange or unfamiliar how Sovereign Engineering can feel like an intervention in someone's life why purpose, happiness, and freedom can start to look like the same direction from different angles how nihilism leaves people without orientation, and why meaningful goals matter why technical communities sometimes become spiritual environments without intending to what it means to rediscover older cultural or religious roots after encountering freedom tech why the right tools can change the person using them before they change the world Related dialogues: #20: Archipelago Meshtadels w/ Shadrach #22: Sovereign Engineering w/ Yo #24: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan #34: Female Engineering w/ Sherry #35: Drinking from the Firehose w/ SEC-08 People mentioned: <l
- 3 weeks ago46 min
35: Drinking from the Firehose w/ SEC-08
"I have found my people, and that is the craziest discovery for me." The SEC-08 crew & Gigi pass the mic around on a pirate boat. Listen on sovereignengineering.io This one is not a single guest walk so much as a moving snapshot of the final days of Sovereign Engineering SEC-08: tired builders, unfinished follow-ups, jokes over the water, and a quick tour through what actually stuck after six weeks in Madeira. The recurring answer is that the cohort felt wider and deeper than expected. People came in for Bitcoin, Nostr, Lightning, or AI-adjacent hacking, and ended up talking about rebuilding pieces of the internet from first principles. FIPS comes up again and again, not as a neat demo category but as a substrate people can finally build on. Totem, Napplets, NIPlets, Hypergate, Marmot, Quake III over FIPS, mapping tiles on Blossom, agent email, and a pile of half-ridiculous demos all point in the same direction: the parts are starting to connect. There is also a softer engineering lesson running through the boat noise. Zaza gets shouted out for turning sad little nerd UIs into something people might actually want to touch. Walks keep showing up as infrastructure for thought. The Nostr Office becomes a place to keep building after hours. Pairing, one-minute demos, and forced constraints change the shape of collaboration. By the end, the phrase that keeps returning is less about a project and more about belonging: I found my people. In this dialogue: why SEC-08 felt like SEC-01 again: less polished, more exploratory, and full of first-principles internet rebuilding how FIPS moved from missing piece to common substrate for demos, games, agents, and networking experiments why Totem, Napplets, NIPlets, Hypergate, Marmot, and Quake III over FIPS kept surfacing as cohort highlights how Zaza's protocol UX work changed the first impression of projects across the cohort why walking still works as an idea generator, even when the explanation sounds like left-foot-right-foot bro science how Blossom-backed map tiles hinted at better mapping UX through content-addressed infrastructure why Thomas's email-over-FIPS idea sounded small at first but opened a bigger agent communication door what changed when Johnathan paired people up and made collaboration an explicit week of work why one-minute demos made the follow-up conversations sharper how the Nostr Office became a place for after-hours building, LAN parties over FIPS, and cohort spillover why several people described the experience as exhausting, painful, joyful, and direction-setting at the same time how the final answer kept circling back to friendship, music, barbecues, and finding the people you want to build with why future cohorts might pull more from local-first software, mesh networking, and broader hacker communities Related dialogues: #22: Sovereign Engineering w/ Yo #24: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan #30: Napplets w/ Sandwich #33: ASMap, nix, and nix-nostr w/ Julien #34: Female Engineering w/ Sherry People mentioned: Zaza Julien HZRD Johnathan Corgan Thomas Breno Balazs Rahul Projects & tech mentioned: Sovereign Engineering FIPS <l
- 3 weeks ago16 min
34: Female Engineering w/ Sherry
"The only one I need to convince is myself." Sherry & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Sherry came to Sovereign Engineering through gsovereignty, a long-running Bitcoin friendship from Hong Kong, and a sudden gap between contracts. One day she was ending a job. The next pitch was simple: if you are free now, come to Sovereign Engineering. The walk starts with the obvious and not-so-obvious labels: woman, Chinese, engineer. Sherry traces the path from math olympiad incentives and China's gaokao into computer science, then back toward Bitcoin and Nostr. She first heard about Bitcoin at university in 2016, treated it for years like a ticker next to Tesla or Nvidia, then met gsovereignty and stumbled into Nostr through Damus before Jack Dorsey made the protocol famous. The real shift came later, through the culture around the work. Sherry describes asking Nostr why Bitcoin is different from other coins, getting flooded with books and replies, and slowly realizing that no one can orange-pill you from the outside. You can only walk through that door yourself. At Sovereign Engineering, FIPS was the project that clicked. Watching Johnathan explain it on a whiteboard felt like reading NIP-01 for the first time: suddenly the pieces had a shape. As Sherry put it on Nostr, FIPS reminded her of first hearing about Nostr or diving into how Bitcoin works. Demo days were rough at first, but pairing up made the cohort less like presentation theater and more like showing your thinking through code. Sherry and Arjen worked around Myco, pushing the idea from sharing apps toward sharing files too. The deeper thread is what happens when a room full of strange, motivated builders makes the outside world's career anxieties feel smaller. Before coming, Sherry worried that not having a normal next job would make people judge her, the old What Do You Care What Other People Think? problem in another form. By the end, the problem had narrowed: the only person left to convince was herself. For women engineers curious about Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr, or Sovereign Engineering, her advice is blunt: ignore the label, be an engineer, bring an npub and proof of work. In this dialogue: how gsovereignty pulled Sherry toward Sovereign Engineering after years of Bitcoin friendship in Hong Kong why being a woman in technical rooms can matter socially without needing to become the whole story how math olympiad incentives, China's gaokao, and a math major led Sherry toward computer science why her first Bitcoin memory was a university classmate saying everyone in their generation should learn it how Bitcoin looked like a ticker for years before the philosophy started to land how an early Damus download made Nostr feel useless at first why asking Nostr about Bitcoin versus other coins became unexpectedly famous why you can only orange-pill yourself how FIPS clicked for Sherry like NIP-01 clicked, echoing her own Nostr note why demo day is not a performance so much as proof that you touched the work how pairing and team week changed the cohort from intimidating to collaborative what Sherry and Arjen wanted Myco to become beyond app sharing why White Noise, FIPS, and local-first sharing kept circling the same design space why the cohort's weirdness is a filter as much as a cost how being surrounded by mo
- Jul 26, 20261h 35m
33: ASMap, nix, and nix-nostr w/ Julien
"There is no real address book for the internet." Julien & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Julien came to Sovereign Engineering through a strange path: Nix, Bitcoin Core, ASMap, Nostr, and a growing sense that packaging, routing, identity, and deployment are all part of the same sovereignty problem. The first part of the walk goes deep into ASMap: why Bitcoin Core cares which autonomous systems its peers live in, how eclipse attacks turn peer discovery into a security question, and why mapping the internet is harder than it looks. The trade-off is familiar: IP addresses are useful but misleading. A single entity can control many non-contiguous ranges, routing data is messy, BGP was not designed as a cryptographic truth machine, and even better inputs like RPKI only cover part of the world. So Kartograf builds from several imperfect sources, and the asmap-data process turns map generation into a collaborative run with hashes, review, and a paper trail. From there the conversation moves into Nostr and the social layer of infrastructure. Julien describes finding Nostr through the simple feeling that the primitives were right, using Amethyst and Zapstore, thinking about Git on Nostr, and watching FIPS make old assumptions about DNS, IP addresses, NAT, and transport layers feel suddenly optional. The last thread is nix-nostr, or more precisely Julien's early nostrpkgs work: a Nix package set and deployment path for Nostr tools. The inspiration is nix-bitcoin, but the target is wider: relays, FIPS nodes, git servers, Blossom drives, Cashu mints, and other services that should be easy to compose, reproduce, and ship. If agents are going to run infrastructure for us, declarative systems start to look less like taste and more like leverage. In this dialogue: how Julien found a path into Bitcoin Core work through BTC++, Nix, and a conversation with Fabian Jahr why ASMap exists as a Bitcoin Core feature, and what it tries to improve about peer bucketing how eclipse attacks, Sybil attacks, AWS, Hetzner, and autonomous systems change the threat model for peer discovery why IP address prefixes are only a heuristic for control how regional registries, autonomous systems, BGP, RPKI, IRR, and RIPE RIS fit into the map-making problem why no one can build a perfect ASMap, and why that does not make the project useless how Kartograf aggregates imperfect data into a usable ASMap why collaborative runs give the process a reproducible paper trail instead of relying on one person's machine how ASMap files are now managed in the bitcoin-core/asmap-data repository why Julien would still like more users to generate fresh maps for themselves how Nostr first clicked as the right mix of clients, relays, keys, and trade-offs why Zapstore makes Android distribution feel native to Nostr why replacing GitHub means replacing hosting, search, issues, pull requests, CI, releases, and social discovery how Git-on-Nostr, agents, and mobile-first workflows point away from old repository interfaces why voice, text, and agent interfaces are starting to blur how FIPS changes the address and transport conversation by routing through Nostr identities why a FIPS route for Bitcoin Core peers would be worth testing why Julien sees Nix as sovereign infrastructure, not just a package manager how reproducible builds, dependency graphs, hashes, and declarative systems connect Nix back to Bitcoin instincts why <a hr
- Jul 25, 20261h 27m
32: Nostrology w/ WhisperHash
"No Solutions, do the homework." WhisperHash & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io WhisperHash came to Sovereign Engineering by following breadcrumbs: Bitcoin first, then small solo miners, then Nostr, then No Solutions, then the strange realization that the protocol was not just another social network. After losing a valuable Instagram handle to platform control, the idea of cryptographic identity stopped being abstract. If you do not hold the keys, you do not own the thing. The mining part of the walk starts with NerdMiner and ESP32 tinkering, moves into BitAxe and open-source ASICs, and lands on the dream of a quiet fanless home miner that can coexist with humans. The Nostr part starts with a data question: how many people are actually here, how many sats are moving, and which numbers should anyone trust? That question became Nostrology, an ecosystem observatory for Nostr data. But making data visible is not neutral. DAU, MAU, relay lists, zaps, Nutzaps, and follow history all exist somewhere in the event graph, but packaging them into convenient datasets changes the trade-off. Some data wants to be useful. Some data probably wants to rot. The deeper thread is about primitives. Blossom, FIPS, Zapstore, Nostr identities, Parquet files, and ContextVM all show up as ways to compose small pieces into larger systems without pretending there is one global application. If the abstractions are right, things stack. If the abstractions leak, you get a different kind of centralization with better branding. In this dialogue: how WhisperHash found Bitcoin, dismissed Nostr as "decentralized social," and then got pulled back in by ownership, identity, and curiosity why losing a valuable Instagram handle made platform ownership feel concrete how a data-science background turned into a search for something useful to build in Bitcoin why NerdMiner, ESP32 boards, BitAxe, OSMU, and solo mining made mining tangible again what changes when a miner is something you live with, tune, cool, and hear why fanless home mining is partly a hardware problem and partly a co-living problem how Nostr became interesting once WhisperHash started asking basic measurement questions why active-user counts on Nostr are harder, messier, and more political than they look how No Solutions served as a strange curriculum for catching up on Sovereign Engineering and Nostr culture why demo day failure is acceptable, but opting out and showing slides are not how Blossom, FIPS, Zapstore, and Nostr identities feel like primitives that are finally starting to compose why Zapstore is a natural fit for Nostr and a glimpse of a different Android distribution model how app stores, agents, GitHub releases, signatures, and social trust start to blur together why durable formats matter if you want software and data to survive beyond the current wave how Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong, and SEC-08 all shaped WhisperHash's sense of software culture what Nostrology is trying to observe across relays, lightning, Zapstore, and Nutzaps why publishing small numbers can help builders, hurt momentum, or do both at once why Parquet is a practical format for large No
- Jul 25, 20262h 0m
31: Buzz, Mosaico, and Other Stuff w/ Pablo
"You can always buy more tokens, not more time." Pablo & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Pablo and Gigi start with the FIPS map: the strange pleasure of seeing a protocol become a place, with nodes scattered across the world, Archipelago getting faster through a FIPS connection, and Nostr VPN quietly pulling more people into the mesh. From there the conversation turns into a familiar No Solutions pattern: if you try to make one global thing, you usually fight the design. FIPS works better as locality. Nostr works better as locality. There is no global. The second half becomes an agent-swarm walk through Buzz, NIP-29, Mosaico, proactive context, and the difference between coordination and awareness. Buzz packages a lot of things together: rooms, agents, Git-like collaboration, ACP harnesses, and Nostr identities. Mosaico tries to stay much smaller: a shared-awareness fabric where agents see enough of the other work happening around them to find relevance by themselves. The trade-off underneath both projects is the same one that keeps showing up everywhere now: more instructions can make agents obedient but brittle, while too little structure leaves them blind. Somewhere between micromanagement and chaos is the place where local intelligence starts to coordinate. In this dialogue: why seeing the live FIPS map was more inspiring than expected how nostr-vpn and FIPS turn network participation into something more tangible why FIPS and Nostr both make more sense as local-first systems than as one giant global state machine why freedom-tech projects do not need Silicon Valley scale metrics to matter how Buzz packages a Nostr relay, NIP-29 rooms, agent harnesses, Git-style workflows, and human-agent collaboration into one workspace what changes when agents have pubkeys, signed actions, and a cryptographic paper trail instead of pretending to be whichever human launched them why NIP-29 is an acceptable trade-off for some team and agent channels even though it is not encrypted how trust boundaries, hosted relays, local deployment, and organizational context shape the security model why "more autonomous agents" really means agents that can make better local calls without burning human time how Pablo thinks about persistent agent identity, throwaway workers, higher-level roles, and the "Pablo replica" pattern why too many explicit instructions can remove agency and recreate a brittle workflow engine how Mosaico gives agents awareness without becoming an orchestrator why workspaces, one-line status, subchannels, mentions, and narrow context hints can be enough for agents to find each other how proactive context tries to keep the actual user input as the source of truth instead of letting a memory layer hallucinate intent why "no context" is better than bad context how Napplets, Amethyst, Blossom, Outbox, and composable clients rhyme with the same move away from one cathedral-sized application Related dialogues: #18: Rewriting TENEX w/ Pablo #19: Romantically Shitting on Paywalls w/ Pablo #11: 10x Less Productive w/ Pablo #20: Archipelago Meshtadels w/ Shadrach #25: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G #30: Napplets w/ Sandwich People mentioned: Martti Malmi <a href="https://njump.to/npub1uac67zc9er
- Jul 22, 20261h 37m
30: Napplets w/ Sandwich
"You should be able to compose your clients." Sandwich & Gigi take a walk. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Sandwich and Gigi spend the first 45 minutes or so talking through napplets: composable, sandboxed Nostr apps that can run inside a host shell while the host mediates signing, storage, relay access, uploads, permissions, and user trust. What starts as a conversation about applets quickly becomes an operating-system conversation: if Nostr is flexible enough to carry many kinds of software, clients probably need to become composable runtimes instead of monolithic apps. Along the way they get into browser sandboxes, iframes, postMessage, malicious applets, Blossom uploads, NIP-5D, nsites, specialized relays, agent workflows, slop scanning, and why the AI subsidy era will not last forever. In this dialogue: why a normal Nostr client can feel too restrictive for a protocol built around maximum flexibility how napplets grew out of earlier experiments with Naps, Nap.run, nsites, Hyprland-inspired desktops, Tauri, Thorium, and iframe hardening why the host runtime handles keys, signing, encryption, relays, resource loading, storage, uploads, and user prompts why napplets should get high-level helper APIs plus low-level escape hatches instead of direct access to everything how a napplet can upload through Blossom without knowing which Blossom server the user prefers why the shell should see plaintext over the message bus, and how that helps defend users from malicious applets how applet-to-app communication starts to look like Android intents, MIME types, archetypes, and operating-system resource APIs why the browser is a practical deployment target even if the napplet protocol itself is not browser-bound what Kehto, Paja, the napplet dev tooling, and the no-dependencies approach are trying to protect how a workshop produced a dozen napplets, including live stream views, paste-to-upload flows, and even a rough multiplayer chess app why nsites, nsyte, Blossom, Hashtree, and specialized relays all rhyme with the same broader Nostr publishing model why relay specialization and relay discovery might matter more than one giant general-purpose relay model how agent workflows are starting to rebuild older software-development structures: specs, milestones, issues, review teams, and CI why slop scanning, naming discipline, and opponent processing matter once code becomes the context future agents learn from why local model hardware is tempting, but only if you think about it like mining: power, refresh cycles, subsidy cliffs, and cost per watt People mentioned: hzrd149 fiatjaf Pablo Austin Franzap Projects & tech mentioned: napplet.run Napplet Workshop NIP-5D Kehto nsite.run nsyte nsyte.run Blossom Hashtree Nostr NDK Applesauce Amber zap.stream Nostr Watch NIP-66</a
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About No Solutions
No solutions; only trade-offs. Walking towards a better internet. Est. 882,690. Inspired by Sovereign Engineering
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