sacha

The worldwide crackdown on VPNs is accelerating — and the EU is leading the way. Exactly what I warned about yesterday: Brussels’ Digital Lockdown The EU Commission has made it crystal clear to member states: By the end of 2026, comprehensive online age verification must be in place across the board. Every access to “sensitive” content must be verifiable. When asked how VPN circumventions should be prevented, Vice-President Henna Virkkunen replied with cold precision: “That is an important part of the next steps.” 🤮 This is far more than a technical footnote. It is the philosophical surrender to the digital Leviathan. The last bastion of anonymous self-determination — the VPN — is being systematically dismantled. It doesn’t just destroy individual privacy. It destroys the ontological foundation of free opinion-forming, individual autonomy, and enlightened citizenship. The EU uses the classic pretext of child protection to build an infrastructure of total transparency. Child protection becomes the Trojan horse for a control architecture in which the citizen is no longer a subject, but an object of state visibility. This logic follows an old pattern. The state, once conceived as a guarantor of freedom (Hobbes’ Leviathan as a protective power), mutates into an omnipresent overseer that defines any form of invisibility as a threat. The Enlightenment, which Kant understood as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” is here reversed. The mature citizen is to be made immature again — this time not by church or prince, but by algorithms and Commission decrees. We must demand the reconquest of digital sovereignty. #FreiheitStattZwang

No one: Berkshire Hathaway shareholders when you ask them a question about literally anything:

Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger at their best—lessons for building wealth & living a better life: Buffett: "Write your obituary and try to figure out how to live up to it. For business, you just want to make sure you don't make any mistakes that take you out of the game or come close to taking you out of the game. You should never have a night when you're worried about investing. You should spend a little bit less than you earn." 2 lessons Buffett said he learned from Tom Murphy: 1. "You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow." 2. "Praise by name, criticize by category." Buffett with some perspective: "I've never known anybody who was kind that died without friends. But I've known plenty of people with money that died without friends." Munger: "It's so simple: you spend less than you earn. Invest shrewdly. Avoid toxic people and toxic activities. Try to keep learning all your life. And do a lot of deferred gratification. If you do all of those things, you are almost certain to succeed. And if you don't, you're going to need a lot of luck. And you don't want to need a lot of luck. You want to go into a game where you're very likely to win without having any unusual luck." Buffett added: "You need to know how people can manipulate other people and you need to resist the temptation to do it yourself." Munger agreed strongly: "Oh yes, the toxic people who are trying to fool you, lie to you, or who aren't reliable in meeting their commitments—a great lesson in life is to get them the hell out of your life. And do it fast." Buffett: "And do it tactfully, too, if possible. But do get them out of your life."

Had a Jane Street phone interview in 2016. "Price a 6-month forward on carrots." There's no carrot futures market, so I build one from scratch: seasonal harvest cycles, USDA demand elasticity, cold storage decay rates. One trader stops me. "Your storage cost function– you're modeling the carrot as dead inventory. Like grain in a silo." He asks me the metabolic respiration rate of a post-harvest carrot at 2°C. I estimate. "Your forward is overpriced by exactly that shrinkage. The underlying is consuming its own sugars. It's alive." Good correction. I adjust the model. I think I've recovered. Rejection email comes the next morning. Subject: "Ethical Review." My framework, they write, "relied on the severance of the root organism from its growth medium." The question about respiration was a test. The carrot was still alive and I'd built an entire derivatives structure on top of its death without questioning whether harvest was an acceptable act. I pull up the recruiter's original email. It doesn't say Jane Street. It says Jain Street– a non-violent quantitative commodities fund. The carrot was never supposed to be priced. It was supposed to be refused. I later learn the only candidate who passed that round was a former monk from Gujarat who sat in silence for eleven minutes and said, "I cannot put a price on life." He's now a partner.

Economics takes a 4+ dimensional problem, models it for convenience as 3D (always missing the consequential dimensions), then analyses it as 2D while confusing the gullible public who interprets it as simple 1D.

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it "If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply." "we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

a society that values freedom (from coercion) more than (state-granted) security

the cats out of the bag! proud to be supporting @epicentral_ for this one my dms are open if you wanna talk about it!

Only Daddy Pig escapes

"Daddy Pig doesn't envy anyone. We envy Daddy Pig" :)

Had to retweet. This encapsulates my pro-buyback stance very well. One I've held since it became a heated debate last year. Tokens are a distinct asset with a different set of problems for prospective investors than equity. One point I'll add is on cases where projects raise 8-9 figs. It is often more valuable to address token uncertainty, as @CremeDeLaCrypto mentions, even if revenue isn't immense, than it is to add to what is already a well-capitalized company treasury.

We need private permissionless DAOs for capital formation that can organize labor and capture future economic surplus to fight communism

Once a narrative that a small group of people is to blame for everything takes hold, there isn’t anything one can do except run. No amount of discourse can sway the masses. It will run its course. Smart people are better at constructing post-hoc justifications for positions they hold for social reasons. The mechanism is: the position arrives through social channels, gets adopted because holding it is rewarded and not holding it is punished, and then the intelligence kicks in to generate sophisticated reasons why the position is correct. The reasoning feels like reasoning from the inside. It’s nearly impossible to detect in yourself. The capacity for evil is not correlated with stupidity or even with malice, but with a specific failure to think against the current one is swimming in. People who try hard to be moral are often more susceptible to captured narratives, not less, because the narrative arrives wrapped in moral language. “Healthcare for the vulnerable, paid for by those who can afford it” is a moral frame. Rejecting it requires either rejecting the moral frame or doing the harder work of saying “the moral frame is real but this specific instrument is unjust.” Most people can’t hold that complexity under social pressure. They collapse to the simpler version, and the simpler version is the captured one. The desire to be good actually pulls them toward the narrative rather than away from it, because the narrative offers a clear path to feeling good.

“The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage without having to agree on common concrete aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made.” — Friedrich Hayek

Insanely bullish on the Umbra team and what they’re building.

German founders have a word they use to describe startups There is no equivalent in English TechglücklichDatenschutzlich It means that your startup, nature, and GDPR policies are all perfectly aligned with each other If you can hit €100k ARR, take 2 hours of the work day in nature, and be in full compliance with GDPR, then you have achieve TechglücklichDatenschutzlich

I can tell you we for a fact don’t see it as a hinderance and on the contrary has boosted our leverage in various ways (I’ll speak about this in a separate post when the time is right but you can refer to the history of metadao props for samples). You also can’t have both, a public asset, and no public accountability. There are many alternate public structures that are low accountability and probably low friction and maybe that works for other teams but this is a bet we’ve made on where the future of good tokens is headed and we would rather set the standard and be opinionated. I also do have very strong criticisms against some of the alternate structures but everyone’s free to choose their own So to summarise > cost? It’s slightly slower but not enough for it to harm the process and it might even add to the diligence cause now we’ve got the market sourcing wisdom for us. To clarify these aren’t bagholders. Anyone can trade the market. I guess you need to fundamentally believe in the market’s ability to price in +/- ev decisions. Also there’s a lot of nuance. This is a team sponsored proposal so technically the market by default takes into account the team’s diligence and decision making abilities. > anything that needs fixing I can assure you the metadao team takes active interest in fixing. You should share specific feedback and more likely than not you’ll be heard at least I’m not saying metadao is perfect. Teams should choose what they like but in my personal opinion it’s the best we’ve got. Happy to share more if you’ve got questions

one of the cleanest ever examples of legal arbitrage through autonomous tech