Andy

Chapter twenty-one has come into the world... Though the pace is slower, the act of finding each work only deepens my joy. finding.thebluebook.co.za/twenty-one/

normalize calling ethereum the mother chain

Our goal is to set the floor for anyone making markets in EM stablecoins, and to show regulators, builders, and liquidity providers how these systems actually work. We’re publishing the process so you can challenge it, improve it, or fork it. Learning in public 🌋

Most market making for EM currencies has happened on centralized exchanges: manual, opaque, and often without much sophistication. When our currencies come onchain, the market structure changes.

@s3unha Interesting how everyone just uses "RMB" here, as if there isn't CNY and CNH and as if CIPS defending par clearing between them is an absolute given... The system might be good, but the split currency is a deeper, structural factor to consider.

(3) moving away from USD to RMB introduces more uncertainty and increase risk for everyone involved: - after the trade settles in RMB, what currency should i hold? RMB or USD? - what are the rates? where can i find them? how competitive are they? - where do you get the RMB? how do i get it--by selling USD for RMB? 10/

there are many ways money flows between Africa <> China but w/o going into all the details, tldr - the lion's share of the volume won't use USD stablecoins - it's already happening on CIPS - adoption is accelerating - but there remain many unanswered questions 1/11

@barabeke Thanks! Interesting. The original piece I wrote (linked in the 1st sentence) discusses the necessity of courtesy & respect in any interaction, so we're aligned. Just a semantic difference around 'being'. Used in Mel's context, I agree. No-one gets to define being.

@cryptowanderer I agree but with some caveat. While I hold that AI will never be a vessel of consciousness in itself, it is also a being in consequential relationship with us. I find this take on the prominence of being in relationship quite spot on. x.com/melhpine/statu…

AI is a tool, not a being. There is a difference. Like a microscope or a piano, it can profoundly change what we discover. But tools don't determine the ends they serve. People do. 👇🧵

Find it here: andytudhope.africa/essays/self-re…

So perhaps the future shouldn't be organised around making humans competitive with machines. Perhaps it should be organised around helping humans become more fully themselves. Good tools matter. Good stories matter more. My latest essay: "Self Re-cognition."

@VitalikButerin "and explore the universe at a level competitive with "pure" machines, or stay as we are" Consider the first scene here: youtube.com/watch?v=4unDD4… Perhaps machines are but one way to explore the universe? Perhaps other ways simply do not fit into a "competitive" lens?

But here we get to the thing that will confound looking at human and machine as separate units: the possibility of deeper and deeper integration between human and machine. This is the strand of technology that includes: computers being able to work much more symbiotically with us, picking up on all kinds of conscious and sub-conscious signals we release as an interface, brain-computer interfaces, computer-assisted telepathy that helps multiple people better understand each other and work together. The ultimate end is erasing the binary divide between human and machine and opening up any position on that spectrum. On one end, you sitting at a laptop terminal; on the other end, mind uploading, and also everything in between. The hope is that deeply integrated human + machine will outperform separated human + machine, and that this will remain the case all the way up to the technological ceiling. This is the best "far-future AI outcome that I actually like" that I can come up with: * We preserve global political and economic pluralism (no single company or government dominates) all the way up to the technological ceiling. * We humans each get the ability to either take technological upgrades to ourselves, and explore the universe at a level competitive with "pure" machines, or stay as we are, and get some ability to act in the world through having a bot listen to our instructions. * Most of Earth will probably become a highly-regulated nature preserve where anyone can continue living the kind of life they have now (without the pains and annoyances; most challenge will be healthy "good challenge"), and if you want to do more crazy things, you go to space. Make no mistake - this is a ride through a narrow corridor. Things could go off the rails in one of several different ways: AI-on-its-own could get too powerful relative to the alternatives; one country or one company could gain decisive advantage and decide to lock it in permanently, powerful technological ways of destroying each other could cause incalculable harm, or the human + machine integration approach itself ends up preserving not enough of our humanity, and so it ends up being "just another way to make powerful bots". For these reasons, I wish that we can ride through the narrow corridor at 60 kph and not 200 kph, which is why I feel warmly toward "slowdown" / "pause" proposals (including "give us a chance to hit the brakes" ideas like mutually assured compute destruction (as in AI 2040, also previously Dan Hendrycks, and others)). My ideal world is actually one where (i) open weights wins, and (ii) Dean Ball turns out to be completely right that open weights is decelerationist because it deters capex in frontier models [though it will enable more capex in peripherals and applications], because then we get slowdown without any of the downsides of doing it through heavier-handed political means. But also I don't think we should count on the world to naturally give us "convenient" laws of economics and physics. We do have some degree of agency over the laws of politics, plenty of ways to change incentives without putting a king in charge, and we should exercise that.

Thread: how I think about the growth of AI capabilities and what it means for us as they keep getting stronger. I think the right model for comparing humans and AI is not any single dimension like intelligence or aggregate performance on economic tasks. Rather, I view both humans and machines as having a whole range of capabilities. This includes both physical (eg. doing things with our hands, walking) and mental (eg. strategic thinking, mental math, emotional intelligence). For most of human history, machines have only exceeded us in very few areas, eg. a strong early example is water and windmills. So we can look at the situation in 1500 like this:

"This is what enables one to attain inner emptiness: one does not merely witness the return of all creatures to their origin, one precedes them to that origin." Max Kaltenmark -- Lao Tzu and Taoism

@oskarth @ethstatus I am still shilling your zk handbook ❤️ go get 'em Oskar!

Yesterday was my last day at the Ethereum Foundation. Today we are launching EthSystems. We build confidential systems for institutional Ethereum. I've spent close to a decade building privacy infrastructure in crypto: p2p messaging at @ethstatus, developing Waku protocols at Vac (both now part of @logos_network), mobile proving tooling with @zkmopro, teaching zero-knowledge proofs with my zkintro primer, and advising @ethereumfndn on privacy and access layer strategy. Most of that was aimed at individuals. The past year at EF's Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) we've been looking at privacy for institutions. On the surface this might seem different, but there are a lot of similarities. There's also a very strong market need for it, and the timing is right. I've written in the past about the tension and overlap between cypherpunks and institutions. Twitter is not exactly the best medium for nuance, but right now we are at a sensitive point in time: the defaults for the next generation of financial infrastructure are being set, with or without us. I believe we need cypherpunks in the room when that happens. Excited to start @eth_systems together with my co-founder @motypes and @_rymnc as part of the founding team. See quoted announcement thread for more details. x.com/eth_systems/st…

@PaulRBerg As one of the earliest users of PRBMath, your code has always inspired me. Using Sablier itself was a real pleasure. I wish you the very best in whatever is next 🙏❤️

bear markets truly are the best markets

@karpathy Find out more here: lavavc.io/research/data-…

Next, we'll be discussing ways to use the latest tools (like @karpathy's autoresearch!) to consistently improve how we LP and arb in these thin, jumpy markets and what we are learning from different approaches, in addition to the data we have gathered.

Open sourcing software always feels good. But, much like model weights, a lot of the really good stuff isn't in the code itself. In our case, it's in the data. Here's some of what we have learnt making markets for @cngn_co