Ξxperience

@functi0nZer0 @British_Airways I was thinking the same, glad you asked @functi0nZer0

As an Irish citizen, feels worth asking: @British_Airways what is your policy on business class upgrades relating to the Great Famine?

@PeterMcCormack Best pod, all day, all night

Our little podcast has been doing alright recently. We switched things up a little in February and had a record month. We’ve already beat that this month with 8 days to go. Not bad for a halfwit from Bedford with 5 GCSEs. We don’t have any private funders or secret backers. It’s just me, my son and Curt grafting in a studio in London with a few sponsors. Thanks to anyone who has been a guest, anyone who listens and everyone giving me advice on how to be less fat and more Christian in the comments. Love ya all!

@JTLonsdale You are making a moral argument. He is making an argument for reality

Balaji is a bright guy but he fled the USA and has set his mind totally against our future success. He lives in a world where US is losing and China is winning. This is his fixation. It’s dangerous, and it’s wrong. And this war has embarrassed China, destroyed their 100 cargo planes of war materials and their military ally, and frustrates them. It’s fair to disagree about the attack. But saying that its architects are guilty of any downside is childlike nonsense. They should be proud of their work and their courage to take on this evil. If you’re against the war, do you get credit for the last two decades of literal mass torture and mass rape and repression by this regime, and its terror funding and death around the region? Do you get credit for “supporting” the billions it spends on social media bots and information operations to polarize the US against ourselves, and weaken the west? Do you also get credit for what would have been the next twenty years of that? Are you, Balaji, responsible for that side of it? No? But if you are for it, you get zero credit for fixing any of that, but blamed for ALL the possible downsides? Total BS. The mullahs holding the region hostage shouldn’t get your help to blame others for the damage they do. Geopolitics and war is complex and there are risks on all sides. There is risk in acting, and in not acting. I’m really glad we are taking advantage of the massive innovation and competence gap that exists at this moment, and finally eliminating so much evil. I hope for freedom for the Iranian people and know that the situation is hard and complex, but either way it is good to stop the bad guys and eliminate so many of the worst groups, who have done so much damage, from history. Nobody should get away with what those bastards did for so long; this was long overdue.

@PaulAnleitner Wow

Train Dreams might not have won any awards last night. But this film is like an antidote to our dopamine-addicted world. Slow down your scroll for a moment and just sit with this for a moment. Here’s to the slow work of beauty in transforming the human heart.

@AxelTalksFilm Do not accept

Thirty year old, countless projects lined up, every director wants to work with him, we'll be fine.

@IrishUnity Like other people who've been kneecapped?

“To be patriotic in Ireland is to be understanding of other people’s struggles.” - Kneecap

Say the chain...SAY THE CHAIN!!

@IrishTimesOpEd What's a help life?

Eamon Ryan: Five ways we can bring help life back to our towns and cities irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/0…

@romanhelmetguy He's clearly a Chinese operative

I still can’t get over this. Please realize that if the West falls, they are not only going to take the future away from your kids, they are going to take away the past. They’ll rewrite everything. They’ll erase your ancestors with the stroke of a pen. The ones they don’t erase, they’ll make the bad guys in every story. The idea that Polybius made up the Second Punic War to justify the Third Punic War is obviously insane. But let me explain to you just how insane it really is. The Third Punic War began only 52 years after the Second Punic War ended. 149 BC vs 201 BC. There were many many Romans who lived through both wars. Cato the Elder, the main architect of the Third Punic War, the guy that ended every speech with “Carthage must be destroyed”, literally fought for 15 whole years in the Second Punic War. Jiang wants you to believe that Polybius completely fabricated a two decade long devastating war, that happened all over Italy itself, within living memory, for which almost every Roman male was recruited and 33% of fighting age Roman men died. He wants you to believe that some 65 year old Roman guy would go “Huh, I didn’t realize my city was captured by this Hannibal Barca character and the population of Italy laid waste when I was 15. I must’ve missed it.” Obviously there is a ton of archaeological and literary evidence for the Second Punic War and the existence of Hannibal Barca that is independent of Polybius. That should go without saying. But I want you to really stop and think about the kind of person who comes up with this theory, makes a video about it, and posts that video on YouTube. This is not a guy with a few facts wrong. This is not an innocent misunderstanding of history. If Western civilization falls, these are the people who are going to be teaching your kids.

@VitalikButerin Disagree. You can source all important technological leaps to what seemed to be meaningless products at that time. Eg Community notes came from Twitter, a social media. Gaming gpus > LLMs You should instead be serving all eth devs in what they need. And bake ideology in to L1

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

@ProudofusUK What about the Irish the British enslaved?

Pirates stole an entire Irish village. A hundred and seven men, women and children. Taken from their beds. Sold in North Africa. Only two ever came home. It was 1631. And it was normal. For thousands of years, the sea belonged to pirates. Barbary corsairs enslaved over a million Europeans. They raided as far as Iceland. No nation on Earth could stop them. So Britain built the largest navy in history. And went hunting. They smashed the slave ports of North Africa. Three thousand people walked free in a single day. They chased pirates across the South China Sea. Ocean by ocean, the hunting grounds went silent. Britain built 46 bases to keep them that way. Every shipping lane on Earth. Protected. Today, 80% of everything you own arrives by sea. Britain didn't just rule the waves. She freed them. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧 Be part of us: proudofus.co.uk 🙏

@RupertLowe10 Holy shit

The soaring cost of living is suffocating, but let’s not pretend that this is some unstoppable phenomenon. This is caused by politicians, and it can be solved by politicians - just different politicians who have the courage to do what needs to be done, however unpopular that may be. Above all else, we need to brutalise the size of the state. I mean brutalise. Like nothing that has ever been seen. A public sector bonfire that is visible from space - that is what Restore Britain would do. We would deliver a Britain that lives within its means. In fact, we would be forced to go further. The immediate priority has to be paying off the national debt. Vast interest repayments on that debt are a boot on Britain’s neck. Billions and billions, just spent on interest. No household could live like that, so why can we allow the country to do so? This is debt in our name. It's on us. Our children and grandchildren. What an inheritance that is. We need to cut the debt, not just the deficit. I am going to be entirely honest here. That will be painful - really, really painful. There are no easy solutions, no easy times. We had that, and it’s led us here. To hard times. We now need hard solutions. That’s just the honest truth. Don’t like it? Don’t vote Restore Britain. I’m not promising some utopia like the others. I’m telling the truth. What a mad idea that is. There is one answer, and one answer only. Hack down the size of the state, and drastically reduce tax. Bring it all down, in a way that’s never been seen before in Britain. And yes, that will mean the state does less. GOOD. I want hardworking families to keep more of THEIR money, and they can decide how it’s spent. Thresholds raised, rates slashed. VAT, alcohol duty, fuel duty - all cut. Resist the stealth taxes they all pretend don’t exist. We will REWARD work. I think the state is bad. I think the individual is good. I trust the individual to make the decisions that are best for them and their family. I do not trust the bureaucrat to spend your money in the best possible way. Do you? Growth only comes from the following things. A far smaller state. Lower taxes. More people working. Fewer people scrounging. Cheaper energy. Stronger borders. A secure society. Actual production. I want the Government to do a very small list of things, but to do them very well. Protect our people, protect our borders, protect our interests. Other than that, no thanks. That is the only way to get the cost of living under control, there is no other way. We must crush parasitic Britain. There is now a political party dedicated to doing exactly that. Restore Britain.

@chinmusic111 @thepalmerworm It's actually pretty simple - doing bad things to people make you feel bad. Even the Romans knew this

@Eth_Experience @thepalmerworm I Q’d this axiom too. It seems to me that reality is “bad” at least as often. Certainly the things that happen in reality FEEL “bad”. The problem with this one is that good and bad are subjective terms without the use of their comparative companions “better and worse”

What Jordan Peterson is trying to say (but keeps muddling) Peterson is gesturing toward a true insight - that science presupposes realities it cannot justify by its own methods. Those include: intelligibility of the world reliability of reason normativity of truth meaningfulness of ‘better explanations’ goodness of knowing rather than not knowing These are ontological and moral preconditions, not scientific conclusions. Where Peterson goes awry is that he slides immediately from ontology into symbolic theology and Jungian myth, collapsing: God into archetype Good into evolved narrative Truth into adaptive meaning That move weakens his case, because it makes the foundations of science look psychological or symbolic, rather than metaphysically real. So when he says “the gap between believing in God and believing in Good is very narrow”, he is aiming at something but imprecise. The real gap is not narrow or wide - it’s categorical: Good is ontological (a feature of reality) God is metaphysical (the ground of that reality) Gad Saad is saying something different. Saad’s response is textbook scientistic when he says: “the epistemology of science is fully and unequivocally decoupled from religion” he is swapping epistemology for ontology. Science may be methodologically decoupled from religion, but it is not ontologically self-grounding. Worse, Saad explains religion as an ‘evolved instinct’ which immediately undercuts his own trust in reason. If religiosity is adaptive illusion then so is truth-seeking, then so is ‘rationality’ and so is ‘science’. Evolutionary accounts explain how beliefs arise, not whether they are true. Using evolution to justify epistemic trust is self-undermining. Saad’s position only ‘works’ by rhetorically borrowing realism while functionally denying it. The core problem with both sides is that they are arguing God v atheism, when the real divide is ontological realism v ontological nihilism. Science does not require revealed religion, scripture or ecclesial authority - but it does require real being, intelligibility, normativity, truth and real good. If those are denied, science collapses into instrumentalism, power optimization, narrative management and technocratic control. At that point, ‘science’ becomes engineering in service of will, not knowledge of reality. 2020 onwards (and long before that) has been a masterclass in the denial of reality in the ‘name of science’.

Yes

Stablecoin rules in the UK are being finalized, and are at risk of preventing the UK from being globally competitive in the digital economy. For example, the Bank of England is proposing a cap on stablecoin holdings for individuals and businesses. The UK has a long history of being a financial hub. Embracing and encouraging innovation, especially when other countries are moving fast here, is important for maintaining that. The current direction of the rules does the opposite, and will act as an innovation blocker. If you're from the UK you can sign the petition by @StandWCrypto_UK to set out a pro-innovation strategy for blockchain and stablecoins. Link below.

@peter_szilagyi Zoom out

When you realise both the boomers and the zoomers got it wrong on what the real store of value is.

@PeterMcCormack So you're thinking one step ahead but not three steps ahead 1 - a lot of job loss 2 - deflationary environment, significantly cheaper services, cheaper products, cost of products go down a lot 3 money printing for jobs programs 4 inflation 5 everywhere is now north UK

So many have no idea how much AI is going to shift the world over the next 18 months. Everyone who uses a screen can be replaced by an AI agent which is smarter, cheaper, faster, works 24/7, and requires no employment benefits. What do you think capitalism does with this?

@intocryptoverse Queue bankless intro music

The crypto industry has essentially just been looted by people pretending to like the technology. As sentiment fades, they will all pretend like it never happened and they will distance themselves from it. And that will ultimately set-up the bottoming process.

Jaron Lanier wrote about two possible realities in his book Who Owns the Future. Either utopian where we respect property rights of intellectual property (writings, images, videos that trained the LLMs) or dystopian - where we do not