What does the Replicant from the future need? Global currency competition, protocol finance, rails with no off switch.
I'm excited about Ethereum again. Ansgar @adietrichs & co are focused and serious about making it real.
Announcing Ethlabs: a non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum and ETH
Our mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy.
The internet became global because shared protocols created a common language between networks. Private systems remained useful, but
as the technology becomes more science fiction i see a lot of commentators, technical staff etc trying hard to not think thoughts that feel science fiction as a defense mechanism. but you need to. it’s the only way you’ll make good choices for the future
@tomieinlove No you're right. It's easier bc the bar for what even registers as autism is higher there.
It's a spectrum, so where you diagnose is basically arbitrary.
US diagnoses Dwarfism as under 4'10" for adult men but there are societies eg. Congo pygmies where that's normal height
The U.S. government just unveiled the majestic Greco-Deco design for the new federal courthouse in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The building is at once monumental and welcoming, classical and original. The iris capitals are an inspired touch, drawing on Tennessee’s natural beauty and
Signal is an incredible achievement. Open source, private, secure, & serves 10s of millions of users.
How? Moxie said No to lots of things. No decentralized PKI; no federation; yes phone number required. The fedoras cried and screamed about each one of these!
But they're what makes Signal easy to install, easy to use, and free of spam. Making a great product requires focus and the courage to say No.
Signal is still remarkably principled. They shipped the first fully reproducible build in a mobile app, the best-designed e2e encryption, quantum security. It's just that one of the principles is "it has to work".
It really helps to escape tech world. Moxie has these great stories about hopping freight trains and sneaking into movie theatres with his punk friends. "The user" can't be a spherical cow, it has to be a specific guy you can yell at. Does the product work for HIM? Now you have a high enough bar to make hard decisions.
The alt-timeline hell world is PGP email, an idealistic project with the same goal of open source, private, secure messaging. Without a real user in mind, they said yes to their whole nerd wishlist and made a product only for themselves: PGP "keysigning parties", "web of trust". Other concepts lost to time. Millions of manhours (including a few of my own) went into that ecosystem over the years for... thousands of users, maybe.
If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?
If you care about censorship resistance, security, and privacy--enough to want those things for real people--the first step is to touch grass, and the second step is to get good at saying No.
@beffjezos@tszzl Machines can harness exponentially more energy, so "thoughts per unit energy" is as relevant as hummingbird flaps per joule is to the air force.
Aren't you kardashev man?
@wminshew He has 3 kids and a diving hobby. Touching ocean works.
Linux is low level infra, so the user is another engineer (firmware, distro, container, datacenter, etc).
Linus seems to understand that user perfectly & his #1 bannable offense rule is Never Break Userspace
Give your product Code/Codex-level capabilities. Mastra shipped a library that works for console, web, desktop & other apps.
End Times software when you think about it. <1k LOC to give your user a robot team that uses your product for them & makes everything full auto.
Today we're launching @mastra `Harness`
`Harness` gives you a `Session` with plan/build modes.
It lets you manage thread lifecycle, spawn or fork subagents, approve tools per-call or session, ask user questions, queue/steer.
With skills, sandbox, browser, heartbeat. channels:
Proud of this story with @benlandautaylor and friends.
I enjoyed talking to & learned a lot from the addicts we interviewed. Many are cogent, friendly, happy to tell the story about where they started and how they pay for their habit.
The tragedy in common is that their addictions are always enabled by the state. Non-sober housing; free foil, needles, and other supplies; lenient enforcment; and multiple sources of cash, including the SNAP-to-cash vector we documented here, all make it hard to quit.
The most heartbreaking part for me was talking to parents, especially moms like @JacquiBerlinn and @Gina_McDee . If you have a kid suffering addiction, it's very hard to get them out. The above makes it easy to continue, while escape hatches like conservatorship are mostly closed.
The result is that SF sees over 600 overdose deaths a year. Two per day. It's a huge number in a small city: 80 per 100k population, compared to ~30 for Seattle and NYC and <10 in any major city outside the US.
This problem is particular to America and especially San Francisco. Other places around the world, even liberal ones from Amsterdam to Australia, don't enable addiction or tolerate a public drug trade to nearly the same extent. We're counting on @DanielLurie to stop the cycle here.
SNAP-to-Cash: How food assistance vouchers were traded for cash at the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market - The Voice of San Francisco thevoicesf.org/snap-to-cash-h…
Meanwhile the machines are oneshotting century-old conjectures. Nobody is ready for how Mankind is about to be thrown off Hell In A Cell by the Undertaker, plummeting 16 ft through an announcer's table
@holmesworcester@zooko Yeah 100%, they are right about #1 (world radically changing soon) but overconfident about object claims (= world ending, Eliezer's "it will kill us all" schtick) and even more overconfident about moral claims
Double-agent bot subtly working against you with normal-looking outputs is a first outside sci fi.
Lots of tech will refuse to do things, from DRM to breathalyzer interlocks and normal AI guardrails. "Can't do that, Dave."
Sneakily nerfing the user's work is a new one!
the level of sophon locking a motivated actor can pull off with the frontier models is truly insane, making stuxnet look like a toy. subtly messing with results, deleting history to cover tracks, achieving coordination/conspiracy over a scale humans wouldn’t be able to, all sorts
250 years old. Rocket ship IPOs. New York is winning again. Trillionaires. American soccer looks good. European minds are visiting, comprehending.
How can you be pessimistic about the USA?
184K Followers 2K Followingvery greek accent. general partner & cto @paradigm. eng lead @tempo. optimist and rustacean 🦀 // team lead of reth, foundry, alloy. join us.
3K Followers 2K FollowingSlowly mothballing this account. No longer actively checking notifications.
Find me on the Blue Butterfly app:
@bobakkabob37.bsky.social
1K Followers 2K Followingchief growth octopus @mimicfi 🐙 co-founder @ETHWarsaw, first responder @properlystudio, member @Safaryclub 🦁 the @poapxyz backpack guy
3K Followers 1K FollowingAward winning nonprofit online newspaper. San Francisco needs a new Voice. Support independent journalism~donate & subscribe: https://t.co/rfhvhRIAqH
318 Followers 660 FollowingMathematician and applied cryptographer, interested in private and verifiable computation in web3. Cofounder + CSO @inversed_tech.
2K Followers 914 FollowingFormer CPA and Board Director @SFBART. CFO, biz owner. Here to watch over local government for accountability and transparency to taxpayers.