Kirushik ☮️

Thanks to everyone who broke bread (and beer) with us at Dive Bar Berlin meetup last night. It's not The Last Supper: see you next month. 🍻

168 merchants joined Early Access List. More and more businesses are ready to move to a new payment infrastructure. The window closes April 30th. 3 days left.

Because I get asked a lot. Why we must fight Palantir, in brief. 1. Programmers working on the Internet have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not a single country. The Internet has been designed since its inception as a universal system for the sharing of knowledge without censorship. The Internet is not the property of any one government or nation. 2. The Internet enables mass surveillance at a scale unimaginable to the Gestapo and the Cheka. Far too many programmers have wasted their lives at building surveillance systems under the guise of Web advertising. Today, these web tracking systems are being used to monitor, control, and even kill humans by companies like Palantir that seek to combine state violence with corporate efficiency, and thus create a new form of technofascism. 3. Surveillance justified by external national security threats will be turned against citizens inside the nation-state. Mass surveillance was once the exclusive domain of the NSA, but today it has been privatized to corporations like Palantir that are unaccountable to any democratic process. What begins as fear of external foreign nation-states turns inwards to focus on immigrants, dissidents, and eventually to anyone that might challenge the status quo or try to exit an increasingly dysfunctional society. 4. Everyone is a target. The “enemy within” continually expands until it encompasses the entire population of a nation regardless of their status and beliefs, justifying evermore paranoid and totalizing surveillance. The line between policing and military operations blurs, with legal frameworks being replaced by technological violence operating with total impunity. 5. Surveillance can only be defeated by building software and hardware to defend ourselves. Meek calls for regulation or moralizing demands for human rights are useless in this era. Any rights must be enforced by the hard power of code. Code, not laws, can be used to uphold the right to privacy by making surveillance difficult, if not impossible, even by nation-state adversaries. 6. We are ruled by a senile gerontocracy. Unlike the generations that fought in the world wars, most of our current rulers are degenerate pedophiles who would sacrifice the well-being of the youth and the entire planet due to their infantile desire for wealth and power. Technology of surveillance and automated warfare reflects their increasingly desperate attempts to maintain archaic forms of domination. 7. The American Empire is unraveling. Once, the United States of America presided over a globe where it could enforce its rule via the status of the dollar as a global reserve currency and a network of equally global military bases, but new regional powers now directly challenge the United States as its empire dissolves in the face of internal economic stagnation, political corruption, and the inflation of the dollar. 8. In a real war, fantasies of total technological dominance always backfire. When a faceless drone kills a child’s father, that child will one day take revenge regardless of the cost, something forgotten by those raised in comfortable suburbs. Going beyond zero-sum games, one can only truly win a battle against a people by demonstrating your victory provides a better way of life, increased prosperity, and an inspiring philosophy. 9. Oddly enough, proponents of fully automated warfare support a universal draft. Deep-down, these keyboard warriors know that their technofascist fantasies are a paper tiger when up against determined opponents that engage in asymmetric warfare. They also know none of their children will fight in a war for their state but they would be happy to see other people’s children come home in body-bags. 10. The problem is not whether AI weapons will be built; we must hold responsible those who are building them. No matter which country is deploying automated killing machines, no one is absolved from the murder of civilians and the destruction of infrastructure due to the parlour-trick of shifting the blame to AI. 11. Atomic war is on the horizon. As various states descend into wars over increasingly scarce natural resources, the possibility of tactical nuclear strikes over Teheran, Kyiv, and other areas of conflict has returned to the historical stage. Increasingly geriatric and authoritarian rulers face less guardrails than before to deploying nuclear weapons, and may even be willing to sacrifice the survival of humanity to appease their own petty egos. 12. Our goal is a world of peace where every person can be empowered by the Internet. Modern war is the quintessential game of sending young people to the meat-grinder. Why die for the profit of corrupt rulers when one could build real wealth and power for yourself using the Internet? 13. We should fight for the world we want, and build the tools needed by future generations. Pacifism would be suicidal in this period of global turbulence and resource wars, but real hard power lies in technology: Programmers should be creating technologies to live a free life and prosper in a hostile society of surveillance and control, and decentralization is the only way these technologies will survive against the inevitable repression. 14. The State will not help us. The state is a dying pre-Internet institution that increasingly resembles nothing but a Ponzi scheme fueled by taxes and debt. None of the youth alive today will likely inherit any benefits, such as welfare and health care. 15. Centralized and opaque algorithms are a danger to free speech. Propaganda is the flip-side of surveillance, as continual propaganda prevents anyone from even thinking of challenging the system. Social media monopolies promote propaganda to create a generalized idiocy while silencing those that would dare to criticize the reigning order before they can organize against it. 16. Building new forms of social organization with each other is vital to survival. The traditional mediascape of politics and entertainment exists to distract us from building networked solidarity and distributed autonomous organizations across borders. The hierarchical state is as relevant to us as the medieval church and kings were to the formation of the joint-stock corporation and the labour union. 17. Digital identity is the next step in their system of control. Within the next few years, access to the Internet–including in Europe and the United States–will require biometric national identity cards, using the flimsy excuse of “protecting children.” The real goal is to gatekeep free access to subversive political content and halt cross-border communication in order to prevent new forms of self-organization and resistance from emerging. 18. Only when one can be anonymous is one truly free. The freedom to express oneself without censorship and surveillance is a vital precondition for both the autonomous use of reason and the democratic evolution of society. Technology must enable the freedom to selectively reveal ourselves to the world–so that we can become who we want to be–by preserving the right to privacy over the Internet, including not just individual privacy but the right to transact and form contracts privately. 19. America created the first global surveillance state, but it will not be the last. Too many have forgotten or perhaps taken for granted the revelations of Wikileaks and Snowden. States across the world from China to Russia are creating even more powerful global surveillance systems and propaganda machines. Leveraging private defense contracts in countries across the world, Palantir seeks to make itself the operating system of a cross-border global secret state while it pushes its own farcical version of ethno-nationalism. 20. Culture wars are a psyop. It is ironic that “Epstein class” virtue-signals about traditional morality and the superiority of forms of ethno-nationalism, while trying to return to the rule of hereditary elites, even in the United States. Rather than reverse the gains of the Enlightenment, we take the side of our ancestors who fought a centuries-long battle for individual liberty, scientific progress, decentralized markets, bottom-up democracy and the emancipation of humanity from feudal monarchs and their make-believe mythologies. 21. New forms of technology can reshape the world. Technology is not just a tool, but the world we live in and an extension of our cognitive capabilities. The co-operation of humans with the collective intelligence embedded in AI could accelerate human progress and overcome planetary crises such as climate change and atomic war that threatens the survival of our species. 22. Live free or die trying. We must bear eternal vigilance in the struggle against fascism, and the battlefield is technology. There is no middle ground: Technologists must choose whether to work for the enslavement of humanity or to create new spaces for freedom. These are my personal beliefs, not those of @nym. Yet as a philosopher that founded a tech startup, I have a responsibility to respond to this manifesto of Palantir and it's so-called "philosopher-CEO" Alex Karp.

holy fuck, a hair dryer at a Paris airport broke Polymarket weather markets & made someone $34,000 richer - polymarket was settling Paris temperature bets on a single Météo France sensor sitting near the Charles de Gaulle runway perimeter - basically unguarded - the guy bought the long-shot outcome (like "22°C" when everyone expected 18°C) for pennies, since nobody thought it'd hit - then he walked up to the probe and briefly heated the air around it with a portable heat source, spiking the reading just long enough to register as the daily max - temperature snapped back to normal in minutes, the market resolved in his favor, and he cashed out - twice, on April 6 and April 15, before Météo France caught on and filed charges hyperstitions.

Football x Crypto Kalatori is partnering with FC Belgrano, an iconic Argentine club. We’ve integrated our platform to enable seamless crypto payments for fans across 10+ networks and 100+ currencies with instant conversion. More details soon.

normie sf girl just invited me to build “adult legos” as a date 😭😭😭 I told her I’m down as long as she didn’t suggest it because she thinks I’m autistic

Haha those doofuses at ai2027 predicted we'd have professional level hacking abilities and the top ai company would be at $26B in revenue in May 2026. It's April and we already have superhuman hacking and $30B in revenue, why would you take forecasters this bad seriously???

These are exactly the kind of people we want building our robot overlords.

Anthropic and the Department of War are... at war. But who can we trust to govern superintelligent AI? The government, or the market? Two people who strongly disagree on this are @deanwball (ex senior advisor to Trump) and @DKokotajlo (ex OpenAI). So I asked them to debate it! But this goes way beyond a simple debate. They also had to red-team their own arguments and steelman each other. It's a new format called an ANTI-debate (more info below). Lmk what you think! 00:00 - Intro 03:42 - Daniel’s Story 04:34 - Dean’s Story 06:52 - Opening Statements 19:54 - Rebuttals 25:45 - Free Debate 36:32 - Steelmanning 45:40 - Red-teaming 51:38 - Synthesis 1:17:30 - Closing Statements

The reporting on OpenAI and Sam Altman that I've been working on for the past year and a half, for @NewYorker, with @andrewmarantz: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

Kalatori: 0.4% Just saying.

One week. 83 businesses. We opened our Early Access List one week ago - and the response surprised us. Requests came from across the globe, not only from LatAm. 3 months full access, on us. No complex setup, no hidden fees.

My dudes, you do NOT install anything someone from an online meeting tells you to install. Do NOT FOMO into installing shit. Anyone will understand that for security considerations you refuse to install something. And if they don't, you really want to stay away.

Scott Aaronson review of the AI Doc: "If I had to summarize Roher’s conclusion, it would be something like: go ahead, enjoy your life, have children if you want, but understand that now is a time of world-historical promise and peril much like the early nuclear age, so pay attention, and demand of your elected leaders that they ensure that AGI is developed in a pro-human direction, because tech leaders (even the relatively well-intentioned ones) are trapped in a race to the bottom and can’t get out on their own. Honestly, I’d have a pretty hard time improving on that message."

New supply chain attack this time for npm axios, the most popular HTTP client library with 300M weekly downloads. Scanning my system I found a use imported from googleworkspace/cli from a few days ago when I was experimenting with gmail/gcal cli. The installed version (luckily) resolved to an unaffected 1.13.5, but the project dependency is not pinned, meaning that if I did this earlier today the code would have resolved to latest and I'd be pwned. It's possible to personally defend against these to some extent with local settings e.g. release-age constraints, or containers or etc, but I think ultimately the defaults of package management projects (pip, npm etc) have to change so that a single infection (usually luckily fairly temporary in nature due to security scanning) does not spread through users at random and at scale via unpinned dependencies. More comprehensive article: stepsecurity.io/blog/axios-com…

If you care about financial privacy, then this is probably the most important research you will read all year. The Dutch Court of Audits has released a paper on the effectiveness of AML measures, and lo-and-behold: it found that there is no evidence that AML actually works. These laws are what are used to debank law-abiding citizens, throw developers in prison, surveil every transaction you make, and collect your identity in central databases that end up hacked. Governments have built a complete and total surveillance dragnet around your finances under the guise of AML, and this Dutch Court just said the quiet part out loud: AML is discriminatory, overly expensive, and we have no proof of it stopping crime.

This is amazing, I love it And also Someone is going to vibe-code the doomsday virus, your family has only 2 years to live

New research from KU Leuven (COSIC) shows serious weaknesses in Microsoft’s PhotoDNA. These CSAM detection systems don’t just pose major privacy risks, they’re also not robust: they can be bypassed with small changes and potentially weaponized to trigger false positives against innocent people. esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/news/cos…

Here's the video: "I spent the last week vibe coding immunotherapies for dogs" youtube.com/watch?v=nHJKpC…

Kalatori Early-Access List is open! Crypto payments for LatAm businesses ready to grow. Simple integration, fast transactions, no hidden fees. First 3 months on us. Honest feedback in return. Join now: kalatori.org