james

People underestimate the intelligence gap between classmates at the same elite college. So I have a friend, let's call him Joe. Asian American, met him at one of those "gifted" summer programs. Top of his class at MIT CS, worked at a top quant hedge fund, also a YC founder. He is significantly smarter than me. One day I said "man, you were probably like the smartest kid at MIT when you were there." He looked at me like I had horns and said "dude not even close. There were so many times I felt dumb." He then told me about a classmate of his, let's call him Ron. White guy. He was a legendary math olympian, and MIT classmates called him the Great White Hope. Joe was struggling with a math problem set, no progress after hours of laborious work. He finally swallowed his ego and asked Ron for help. Ron was playing video games, thought for a few minutes, and solved it with very little effort. Joe was stunned. That was his come to Jesus moment when he realized the limits of his intelligence that nature endowed him with. That there were levels to this. I was reminded of this story when I read the Scott Wu profile on Colossus.

walking on bedford avenue on a saturday feels surreal in 2026. there is no history left and not even a hint of nostalgia. the people have completely turned over. you might as well live in richmond, va or any other tier two city and find yourself more connected to place.

38 hours and counting... my codexes have started to pull all-nighters for me 🥺

The cleanest way to “freeze” quantum-insecure coins is just to sunset *all P2PK UTXOs at a defined block height.* Give Satoshi and anyone else, say, 3-5 years to move them. If they haven’t moved to quantum resilient addresses by then, they are assumed to have been lost or forfeited by their owners. Nothing wrong with sunsetting old network components that present vulnerabilities. This gets rid of the “confiscation” language. It’s a technical bug fix/security upgrade.