Beachbum retweeted
A school under a tree in Delhi. A node behind a hotel router in Prague. Neighbours helping neighbours in Benin City.
The parallel society is already taking shape.
Local Area Network tells the stories of people building it.
Read Issue 01: logos.co/zine/lan-issue-01.p…
🤖 Made with AI
Beachbum retweeted
1/ Blockchains secured settlement. PriFi is about securing everything around it.
It combines privacy-preserving systems with user-controlled hardware.
To reduce what those outside a transaction can learn and what intermediaries can control across the full transaction lifecycle.
Beachbum retweeted
Live Amanda's story.
Make decisions and see how a life of feeds, metrics, and comparison shapes her mental health, future, and vision of herself.
“Social Media Control and Surveillance” is live.
Time to rethink the choices shaping our digital lives.
logos.co/past-present-future…
Beachbum retweeted
21 years of evolution of web design trends.
The Pirate Bay homepage in 2005
vs.
The Pirate Bay homepage in 2026
#WebDesignHistory
ALT The Pirate Bay homepage in 2005
ALT The Pirate Bay homepage in 2026
Beachbum retweeted
Every serious platform eventually faces the same question.
Can it run DOOM?
I joined @Logos_network a month ago.
Diving into local-first approach to software & Logos Basecamp, that’s exactly what I asked.
After an unreasonable amount of time spent, I can confirm...
Beachbum retweeted
This Monday, Logos LAN in the park.
Bring a laptop. Run a Logos node, build on the stack, leave with something running.
No talks, no booth, a build session on the grass.
Berlin, 15 June, Park an der Spree, 12:00 to 18:00.
Free, register: luma.com/sau167c5
Beachbum retweeted
A 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan got so angry at journal paywalls in 2011 that she built a pirate website holding 88 million scientific papers, and last month she turned the whole thing into an AI that lets you ask one question and get the actual research as the answer.
Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan, and the website is called Sci-Hub.
The AI she just launched is called Sci-Bot. It lives at sci-bot.ru and almost nobody outside academia knows it exists yet.
Here is the story, because it is one of the strangest things to happen in science publishing in the last 50 years.
Elbakyan was born in Almaty in 1988, the year the Soviet Union started to collapse. She taught herself programming at 12. She read Soviet science books that explained things her family used to call miracles. She got into computer security at university and graduated in 2009 with a degree she barely needed because by then she was already a serious hacker.
Alexandra moved to Moscow that fall. Then Germany. Then a research internship in the United States. She was working on brain-computer interfaces, the kind of research that requires you to read hundreds of papers a year just to keep up with the field.
And every single one of those papers was locked behind a journal paywall that cost between 30 and 50 dollars to read once.
She did the math. A graduate student in Kazakhstan could not afford to read science.
The first thing she did was learn how to get around the paywalls one paper at a time. She passed the trick around to other students. They asked her for papers constantly. She got tired of doing it manually.
So in September 2011, in three days, she wrote a script that automated the whole thing. A user pastes a DOI. The script logs in through a donated institutional credential. The paper comes back free. The website caches it.
The next person who asks for that paper gets it instantly because the previous request already saved a copy.
That was Sci-Hub. Three days of code. One graduate student. Done.
15 years later, the cache holds 88 million scientific papers. Almost every piece of scholarly literature published before 2020 is sitting on her servers. Researchers in 190 countries use it. Studies in Nature have shown that roughly half of all academic paper downloads worldwide now go through Sci-Hub, not the publishers who actually own the copyrights.
Elsevier sued her in 2015 and won a 15 million dollar judgment. She did not pay. The American Chemical Society sued her and won an injunction. She did not comply. Courts in India, France, Russia, and the UK have tried to block the domain. She just moves it. Sci-hub.se. Sci-hub.ru. Sci-hub.ee. The site has had over 20 domains and is still up.
Nature put her on its list of the 10 people who mattered most to science in 2016. The New York Times compared her to Edward Snowden. The Verge called her the pirate queen of science.
She has not been to the United States in over a decade because she would be arrested at the airport.
The Sci-Bot launch in April 2026 is the part that nobody is talking about.
She took the 88 million paper database and put a small language model on top of it. You ask a question in plain English. The model searches the entire shadow library, pulls the relevant papers, synthesizes an answer grounded in real citations, and links you to the full text of every source. Free. No login. No institutional credential. No paywall.
Three real scientists tested it for a Chemical and Engineering News article last month. They asked it medical and chemistry questions. The radiologist said the answer he got was usable. The chemist said the gaps in recent literature were obvious but the older science was solid. The publisher community is furious.
What she built is what the paid academic AI tools are trying to build. Except the paid ones are limited to what their parent publisher legally owns. Hers is limited to almost nothing.
Alexandra still lives somewhere in Russia. She does not give her address. She does not do video interviews. She gives talks over Skype with the camera off. She runs the largest illegal library in human history from a laptop and a donation page.
A graduate student who could not afford to read science built the system the entire scientific community now quietly depends on.
The publishers have spent a decade trying to shut her down.
She just shipped an AI that makes their entire business model outdated.
Beachbum retweeted
The largest open library in human history, Anna's Archive, has been ordered to pay Spotify and the three largest record labels on the world $322 million.
The defendant has not appeared in court and is not going to. The site is still up with two backup domains standing by and there's nothing the censors can do.
Anna's Archive currently holds 63 million books, 95 million academic papers, and 1.1 petabytes of mirrored torrents. It is free. It is searchable. It is run by a pseudonymous person nobody has identified after four long years of searching.
In the four months since the music industry filed the first of three coordinated lawsuits, the library has lost six domain names and added two million books to the catalogue. The cartel is suing it faster every month, and it is growing faster every month.
In December, Spotify and the major labels filed. In January, OCLC, the company that runs WorldCat, won a default judgment of its own. On March 6th, thirteen of the largest book publishers in the United States, including HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, Elsevier, Wiley, and McGraw Hill, filed a third lawsuit in the same federal court.
The publishers' complaint runs to seventy-four pages. They call Anna's Archive a "brazen pirate operation." They call it "an illegal supplier of stolen content to the AI industry."
The same publishers are simultaneously suing Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, and NVIDIA for training their models on the same corpus the publishers want Anna to destroy. The cartel argues, in two parallel federal courts, that the corpus cannot be used by anyone. Not the pirate who built it. Not the AI company that downloaded from it. Not the graduate student who pulls a paywalled paper from it at two in the morning.
Anna did not respond to any of the three complaints. Anna has never responded to any complaint. Anna is a name on a blog and a public key on a server and a person, or maybe several people, in a jurisdiction nobody has identified after four years of searching.
The judgment is uncollectable. The permanent injunction binds Cloudflare, Public Interest Registry, Njalla, the Switch Foundation, Tucows, and nine other named intermediaries. The Greenland registry is not on the list. The Greenland registry has not complied.
The site currently lives at .gl, with .pk and .gd standing by. The corpus has always moved faster than the censor. The censor has always called the corpus piracy. The corpus has always survived the censor by becoming the readers themselves.
The publishers' lawsuit cannot reach the torrents. The torrents are already seeded across continents and IPFS nodes and personal NAS drives owned by people the publishers will never find. The default judgment is paper. The corpus is everywhere.
The cartel will win every lawsuit but they will lose the war. The publisher who walks into court next month with a fresh filing will be filing against a defendant who has, in the time since the last filing was sealed, mirrored another half million books to another seven hundred volunteers in another forty countries.
There is no defendant to find. There is only the next upload. It is already seeding.
Beachbum retweeted
In the last few weeks:
🛑Google flagged privacy phones as fraudulent
🇫🇷France criminally charged Elon
🇪🇺 Meta faces $12B fine for not knowing who you are
🇪🇺EU proposed behavior profiling ID for every login
🇬🇧 Palantir UK contract: your data kept 2 years after exit
🇬🇧UK passed facial recognition nationwide
🇬🇧PlayStation mandated face scans to talk to friends
🇩🇪 Germany pushing IP retention with no judicial review
🇷🇺 Russia confirmed the internet has an off switch
➡️Time to take your privacy seriously
Beachbum retweeted
Local-first is the answer to centralised censorship.
Basecamp is the ready-to-run distribution for the unified Logos stack — wallet, messenger, file sharing, and explorer working together from day one.
What it is and why it matters: press.logos.co/article/logos…
Beachbum retweeted
Online anonymity is an illusion, for now.
λPrize-0016: build a truly anon forum on Logos.
Society needs a decentralised version of Reddit.
No usernames. No history.
Yet moderation works, w/o central authority.
Want to be rewarded for building one? ↓
build.logos.co/prize
Beachbum retweeted
Elon Musk avait dit un truc qui m'avait marqué sur l'allocation de ressources. En substance : passé un certain niveau de richesse, l'argent n'est plus de la consommation, c'est de l'allocation de capital.
Cette phrase change tout.
L'économie, dans le fond, c'est juste un problème d'allocation. Tu as des ressources finies et des usages infinis. Qui décide où va quoi ?
Imagine une cour de récré. 100 enfants, des paquets de cartes Pokémon distribués au hasard. Tu laisses faire. Très vite, un ordre émerge. Les bons joueurs accumulent les cartes rares, les collectionneurs trient, les négociateurs trouvent des deals. Personne n'a planifié. Et pourtant chaque carte finit dans les mains de celui qui en tire le plus de valeur. Le système maximise le bonheur total de la cour. C'est ça, la main invisible.
Maintenant fais entrer la maîtresse. Elle trouve ça injuste. Léo a 50 cartes, Tom en a 3. Elle confisque, redistribue, impose l'égalité. Trois effets immédiats. Les bons joueurs arrêtent de jouer, à quoi bon. Les mauvais n'ont plus de raison de progresser, ils auront leur part. Les échanges s'effondrent. La cour est égale, et morte. Elle a maximisé l'égalité, elle a détruit le bonheur.
Le problème de la maîtresse, c'est qu'elle ne peut pas avoir l'information que la cour avait collectivement. C'est le problème du calcul économique de Mises, formulé en 1920. L'URSS a essayé de le résoudre pendant 70 ans avec le Gosplan. Résultat : pénuries, queues, effondrement. Pas parce que les Soviétiques étaient bêtes, parce que le problème est mathématiquement insoluble en mode centralisé.
Quand Musk a 200 milliards, il ne les consomme pas, il les alloue. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Chaque dollar est un pari sur le futur. Et lui a un track record. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. Il a démontré qu'il sait identifier des problèmes immenses et y allouer des ressources avec un rendement spectaculaire.
L'État aussi a un track record. Hôpitaux qui s'effondrent, éducation qui décline, dette qui explose, services publics qui se dégradent malgré des budgets en hausse constante. Le marché identifie les bons allocateurs, la politique identifie les bons communicants.
Le profit n'est pas une finalité, c'est un signal. Il dit : tu as alloué des ressources rares vers un usage que les gens valorisent suffisamment pour payer. Plus le profit est gros, plus la création de valeur est grande. Quand Starlink est rentable, ça veut dire que des millions de gens dans des zones rurales ont enfin internet. Quand un ministère est en déficit, ça veut dire qu'il consomme plus qu'il ne produit. L'un crée, l'autre détruit, et on appelle ça redistribution.
Dans nos sociétés il y a deux catégories d'acteurs. Les entrepreneurs et les bureaucrates. L'entrepreneur prend un risque personnel pour identifier un problème, mobiliser des ressources, créer une solution. S'il se trompe il perd. S'il a raison, ses clients gagnent, ses employés gagnent, ses fournisseurs gagnent, l'État collecte des impôts. Il est la cellule de base du progrès humain.
Le bureaucrate ne prend aucun risque personnel. Son salaire est garanti. Au mieux il maintient une rente existante. Au pire il la détruit par excès de réglementation, mauvaise allocation forcée, incitations perverses qui découragent ceux qui produisent. Mais dans aucun cas il ne crée.
Regarde les 50 dernières années. iPhone, internet civil, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA, ChatGPT. Toutes des inventions privées, portées par des entrepreneurs, financées par du capital risque. Pas un seul ministère n'a inventé quoi que ce soit qui ait changé ta vie au quotidien.
La France est devenue le laboratoire mondial de la dérive bureaucratique. 57% du PIB en dépenses publiques, record absolu. Une administration tentaculaire, une fiscalité qui pénalise la création de richesse. Résultat : décrochage face aux États-Unis, à l'Allemagne, à la Suisse. Fuite des cerveaux. Désindustrialisation. Dette qui explose.
Et le pire c'est que la mauvaise allocation s'auto-renforce. Plus l'État prélève, moins les entrepreneurs créent. Moins ils créent, moins il y a de base fiscale. Plus l'État s'endette et taxe. Boucle de rétroaction négative parfaite. La maîtresse pense qu'elle aide, et chaque année la cour produit moins.
Dans nos sociétés, ce sont les entrepreneurs, toujours, qui font avancer la civilisation. Les bureaucrates au mieux maintiennent une rente, au pire la détruisent. Aucune société n'a jamais progressé en taxant ses créateurs pour subventionner ses gestionnaires.
La question n'est jamais qui a combien. C'est qui alloue le mieux la prochaine unité de ressource pour maximiser le futur de l'humanité. La réponse depuis 200 ans n'a jamais changé. Ce ne sont pas les fonctionnaires.