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AI
Hedgie @HedgieMarkets
🦔Glendale Community College used an AI system to announce graduate names at this weekend’s commencement, and the system skipped hundreds of students entirely. Families who had traveled to watch their graduates walk across the stage instead watched the ceremony move on without their loved one’s name being called. An administrator told upset parents it was “a lesson learned” and that the affected section “didn’t require AI.” This follows similar AI failures at UT Austin and Thomas Jefferson University.
My Take
A college could not be bothered to have a human read names at the one ceremony families spend years saving for. That sentence captures everything wrong with the current AI rollout across institutions that have no business automating their most personal functions. Reading graduate names at commencement is not a productivity bottleneck. It is the entire point of the event, and handing it to an AI tells you the people running these schools have stopped distinguishing between work that benefits from automation and work that exists to honor people.
Hospitals, courts, customer service, and government agencies are running the same experiment, and the failure mode at Glendale will repeat across every category until the executives signing the contracts are forced to absorb the cost themselves. Right now the cost falls on the families whose graduates got skipped, the customers whose tickets get misrouted, and the patients whose records get misread. Until that incentive flips, the rollout continues.
A new Version of Nostr VPN
@TFTC21
Martti Malmi, one of Bitcoin’s earliest developers, just released a new version of Nostr VPN, an open-source mesh VPN that replaces the entire trust model of traditional VPN services.
Traditional VPNs route all your traffic through a central server operated by a company you have to trust. They see your data. They require your email. They can log your activity. They can be subpoenaed, hacked, or shut down. Even modern mesh VPNs like Tailscale, which improved on this by sending data peer-to-peer, still require you to authenticate through a centralized coordination server using third-party accounts like Google or Microsoft.
Nostr VPN eliminates the central server entirely. Your identity is a Nostr keypair, a self-generated cryptographic key pair with no registration, no email, no third-party account. The underlying transport layer is FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System), a self-organizing encrypted mesh network where nodes authenticate each other, route traffic for each other, and establish connections without any central authority or global topology knowledge. Each node’s Nostr public key (npub) serves as its network address.
The architecture uses two layers of encryption: hop-by-hop encryption between peers and independent end-to-end encryption between mesh endpoints with periodic rekeying for forward secrecy. When direct connections fail due to NAT issues, the system falls back to Nostr-based multihop routing through other FIPS nodes rather than relying on company-operated relay servers. Peer discovery and NAT traversal happen through public Nostr relays using encrypted gift-wrapped messages.
The new release adds native desktop apps for macOS, Linux, and Windows, an Android app, Nostr-based multihop routing for when NAT holepunching fails, and improved network management. It supports UDP, TCP, Ethernet, Tor, and Bluetooth transports simultaneously on a single mesh.
This is what happens when you apply Bitcoin’s design philosophy, permissionless, self-sovereign, no trusted third parties, to networking infrastructure. Built by one of the people who helped Satoshi build Bitcoin in 2009.
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