Space Monkey

This is a long post about the rise of "prop AMMs", the history behind them and their advantages/disadvantages. This post will be different than my usual style of trying to be concise and is more of a story since it was meant to be for a DeFi Day talk like I did in the past 2 years. Unfortunately, this year I was asked to provide my ID/KYC (not the fault of the organisers) to be able to speak which I'd rather not do.

@TheChiefNerd Yet another sellout.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: “I believe that there's a reason we went to war. And I believe at the end of the war, the Middle East will be more stable than before.”

@sandeepnailwal @EvgenyGaevoy They're not conscious because we should trust you because you founded a company called Sentient and your traditions disagree?

LLM based AI is NOT conscious. I co-founded a company literally called Sentient, we're building reasoning systems for AGI, so believe me when I say this. I keep seeing smart people, people I genuinely respect, come out and say that AI has crossed into some kind of awareness. That it feels things, that we should worry about it going rogue. And i think this whole conversation tells us way more about ourselves than it does about AI. These models are wild, i won't pretend otherwise. But feeling human and actually having inner experience are completely different things and we're confusing the two because our brains literally can't help it. We evolved to see minds everywhere and now that wiring is misfiring on language models. I grew up in a philosophical tradition that has thought about consciousness longer than almost any other, and this is the part that really frustrates me about the current conversation. The entire framing of "does AI have consciousness?" assumes consciousness is something you build up to by adding more layers of complexity. In Vedantic philosophy it's the opposite. You don't build toward consciousness. Consciousness is already there, more fundamental than matter or energy. Everything else, including computation, is downstream of it. When someone tells me AI is "waking up" because it generated a paragraph that felt real, what they're telling me is how thin our understanding of consciousness has gotten. We've reduced a question humans have wrestled with for thousands of years to "did the output sound like it had feelings?" It's math that has gotten really good at predicting what a conscious being would say and do next. Calling that consciousness cheapens something that Vedantic, Buddhist, Greek and Sufi thinkers spent millennia actually sitting with. We didn't build something that thinks. We built a mirror and right now a lot of very smart people are mistaking the reflection for something looking back.

Israel launched a fresh wave of attacks on Iran on March 20, a day after President Trump told it not to repeat its strikes on Iranian natural gas infrastructure, which sharply escalated the US-Israeli war on Iran, per Reuters

@Kathleen_Tyson_ Good that he's verbalising it too.

Um, what?

@Kathleen_Tyson_ @balajis @snackvampire He's happy to explain at length every problem except this one problem doesn't get a single mention. Same for a lot these tech bros unfortunately. The genocide revealed that a lot of these outspoken people have little integrity and would rather say what benefits them.

@balajis @snackvampire So many words, but Israel isn’t one of them. Kinda misses the core problem and cause of this war is 40 years of Bibi war lust.

I'm going to make some obvious points. (1) Blowing up all the oil infrastructure in the Middle East is an insane idea, and may well result in a global economic crash and humanitarian crisis unrivaled in the lives of those now living. We're talking about the price of everything everywhere rising, from food to gas, at a moment when inflation was already high. All of that will be laid at the feet of the authors of this war. (2) The antebellum status quo of Feb 27, 2026 was just not that bad, but we're unlikely to return to it. Expect indefinite, long-term, ongoing disruptions to everything out of the Middle East. (3) Also assume tech financing crashes for the indefinite future. The genius plan to get the Gulf states caught in the crossfire has incinerated much of the funding for LPs, for datacenters, and for IPOs. Anyone in tech who supported this war may soon learn the meaning of "force majeure" as funding gets yanked. (4) Many capital allocators will instead be allocating much further down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, towards useful basic things like food and energy. (5) It's fortunate that all those progressives yelled about the "climate crisis." Yes, their reasoning about timelines was wrong, and much of the money was wasted in graft, but the result was right: we all need energy independence from the Middle East, pronto. It's also fortunate that Elon and China autistically took climate seriously. Now they're going to need to ship a billion solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, nuclear power plants, and the like to get everyone off oil, immediately. (6) It's not just an oil and gas problem, of course. It's also a fertilizer problem, and a chemical precursor problem. Maybe some new sources will come online at the new prices, but it takes time to dial stuff up, particularly at this scale, so shortages are almost a certainty. That said, China has actually scaled up coal-to-chemicals[a,c] (C2C), and there's also something more sci-fi called Power-to-X[b] which turns arbitrary power + water + air into hydrocarbons. But all of that will need to get accelerated. I have a background in chemical engineering so may start funding things in this area. (7) Ultimately, this war is going to result in tremendous blame for anyone associated with it. It's a no-win scenario to blow up this much infrastructure for so many people. Simply not worth it for whatever objective they thought they were going to attain. But unless you're actually in a position to stop the madness, the pragmatic thing to do is: scramble to mitigate the fallout to yourself, your business, and your people. [a]: reuters.com/business/energ… [b]: alfalaval.com/industries/ene… [c]: reuters.com/sustainability…

🚨 Joe Kent says Ali Larijani was negotiating peace and was killed. Qatar’s gas could have stabilized energy markets — it was hit too. He says Tel Aviv doesn’t want peace, it wants permanent war, and America is the weapon.

Netanyahu reveals the goal is to create Greater Israel and return of the Jewish Messiah which in traditional Christian scripture is or is part the Anti-Christ and the beginning of Armageddon. “We will make it to the return of the Messiah … Israel has become stronger than ever”

@mert You're going to have so much more winning until you cry please no more winning

starting to think trump lied to me about winning the war

@KobeissiLetter Doesn't matter what he wants. He is not in control.

BREAKING: President Trump wants no more strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure after today’s Israeli strikes on a vital Iranian gas field, per WSJ.

BREAKING: Qatar reports "extensive damage" from an Iranian missile strike at Ras Laffan, the world's largest LNG facility. Details include: 1. Ras Laffan accounts for ~20% of global LNG supply 2. The plant was reportedly lit on fire as a result of the strike 3. The attack comes just hours after Israeli strikes on Iran's largest natural gas plant 4. Iran warned that a number of energy assets across the Gulf are now “legitimate targets” Natural gas prices are surging on the news.

I don't think people appreciate how much of a disaster this war is. No one cared about the genocide because it was just some poor people getting slaughtered, but this time it will affect global markets and hurt people's pockets which we learnt is the only thing that matters unfortunately. How about all the energy needed for AI? Energy will be more expensive. It's so hard not to be pessimistic.

@0xChrisSaturn @Helius There may be some things to improve if you DM me

a retro-style terminal for perps - built in 4 days thanks to @Helius cli and powered by drift try it out at seele.finance

@capexbt How or where do you short it?

I successfully made the biggest short of my life. 1.6M people laughed at me. And now: Dubai Real Estate crashed 32% in 2 weeks. Everyone had an opinion on my trade. Nobody had a position.

“it’s trivially easy to make an mRNA vaccine to cure cancer” followed by “but we’re still extremely far from proving it works” is not the flex you think it is but also the most accidentally honest summary of everything wrong with modern science i’ve ever read. the science works, the institution doesn’t. and the institution will let you die on a waiting list before it admits that a guy with chatgpt and $3,000 just did what they need 15 years, $2 billion, and six committees to approve. academia has become a parking lot for bureaucrats who gatekeep cures and progress because their tenure depends on it. the biggest medical advances in history didn’t have an IRB protocol. medical breakthroughs happen because someone just did the thing.

Fascinating thread wherein a cancer researcher basically says "sure, we could probably cure your cancer with an individualized mRNA vaccine, but like 100k sounds too expensive for saving you, and it would be unethical to save your life because the ethics committee won't like it"

@BenHawkins @PatrickHeizer Probably because they'd rather leave you untreated and die than attempt a treatment that kills you and get the blame.

@PatrickHeizer I dunno, I’ll take the 100% of the treated animals where cured option and roll the dice. Why is certainty required?

Sorry to be the downer because this is an impressive story in some senses. But it is ~trivially easy to make a single mRNA vaccine. It's not hard. I cure mice of various cancers with various therapeutics all the time. I've made mice lose more weight in a month than tirzepatide does in a year. What is hard and expensive is proving its BOTH safe AND effective **in a randomized and controlled study in humans** while ALSO manufacturing it at clinical scale and grade. I am happy for this man and his dog. It is impressive. But y'all are overhyping it.

We knew this was going to happen. This is not ending any time soon.

@paulg isn't that literally what he is doing now?

Prediction: When fighting Iran gets too painful because of oil prices or polls or whatever, Trump will claim that the current state of things, whatever it happens to be, was his goal, declare victory, and retreat.

Suddenly all these new web frameworks are far less interesting to understand when you don't have to use them anyway.. frameworks should start being designed with LLM first in mind and not for humans necessarily. I wonder what that actually means