January 2025

ppq.ai is a website that allows you to use pretty much any AI model using bitcoin micropayments (via the Lightning Network) instead of having to apply for a subscription or pay with a credit card. I hate that the modern web requires email accounts and either subscriptions or ads for everything, and love the idea of using micropayments for non-recurring and/or anonymous and/or just plain more convenient purchases online.

This is one of my favorite applications of micropayments I’ve seen so far. Excitingly, they have an API key in addition to the web interface, which meant that I was able to get neovim working like the Cursor code editor using the avante neovim plugin by customizing my config! So now, I finally have a way to accountlessly, privately, and subscription-less-ly pay for a service I very much want to use. Exciting times! I will gladly pay for this service now for my AI code-editing needs, over paying flat rates for subscription-based things like Cursor. I will try to do a writeup on how to do this soon.

• Idea: Quote Scrolls - Looping scrolls with quotes on them that people can sift through. Would be good for museums to be able to collate a bunch of famous things said about/by the place/person on exhibit.

• I wonder if there is a portable version of Markdown files? Something like a PDF, which includes all embedded image or other data, but also has the nice edit-ability properties of a Markdown file. One of the troubles with Markdown now is figuring out how to export/import them around. Do you just zip the .md and image/video files referenced in the same directory? What if the path to the desired image or video wasn’t in the same directory when you wrote it? This could perhaps be something as simple as a standardized and agreed-upon way to put referenced files of different types in folders of the same name (e.g. a “videos” and “images” directory standard co-located with the .md file).