oh excellent — do you mind sharing the source then? earliest reference i could find for the first one was a 1941 book titled Money and Men that had a fictional dialogue involving Franklin. for the second quote the earliest reference i could find was a book by Gertrude Coogan from 1935 called Money Creators in which she attributed the quote to Franklin without a source.

No need to use fake Franklin quotes when real ones from him on the subject are plentiful:

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/a-modest-enquiry-into-the-nature-and-necessity-of-paper-currency

nothing came of it?

https://soapbox.pub/blog/announcing-ditto

ditto is probably the best nostr web client.

you referring to some other alex or something else entirely?

did you check to see whether large amounts of the code and features were laundered by claude from other existing apps? if your app has unique features then it shouldn’t get rejected—appeal it and highlight the unique features and check to see if claude used something like react native or flutter. the framework code sometimes triggers a false positive since other apps use the same exact code.

lesson learned: if you market your product as a potential super cyber-weapon that is too dangerous for the masses, don’t be surprised if it gets hit with export controls.

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

For those who may not know, this quote is Neil Postman’s summary of Huxley’s idea in his preface to the book “Amusing ourselves to death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”.

Would definitely recommend reading it:

I prefer this reading of the Fitzgerald translation:

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Iliad-Audiobook/B00HUWO1T2

They were actually forced to back when they initially lost their payment rails. I remember it was check in the mail or bitcoin back then. They’ve since got their fiat rails back, but still accept bitcoin.

Their fork of mastodon is no longer interoperable with the larger fediverse, but it never really was because all the major instances blocked gab’s as soon as they switched to mastodon in 2019 after mastodon called them bad names:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastodon/