Purtle

i expanded this eval to 25 languages and evaluated gpt-5.4 medium /fast in codex you can see the full results below github.com/banteg/minigit…

Introducing EVMbench—a new benchmark that measures how well AI agents can detect, exploit, and patch high-severity smart contract vulnerabilities. openai.com/index/introduc…

AI benchmarks are losing their relevance Solving abstract puzzles or passing theoretical exams doesn't prove real understanding At some point we're going to hit a wall with these artificial tests and realize that assessing human intelligence is harder than we thought

Cryptocurrency was an experimental financial operation conducted by the central intelligence agency please return to your normal job, thank you for your cooperation.

@parsec_finance 🙏

After 5 years, parsec is shutting down. Not how we wanted our story to end, but we are proud of what we built and the value we provided along the way. We are eternally grateful to those that traversed the ups and downs onchain with us. It was quite the ride 🔭

@cremieuxrecueil Isn’t there a survey by the EU agency for fundamental rights showing high prevalence rates of sexual violence in sweden compared to other european countries?

People often say Sweden has an extremely high amount of rape relative to its neighbors. But when you define rape consistently, the disparity with its neighbors collapses. For example, using the same definitions, Sweden doesn't have that much more rape than Germany.

[ ZOOMER ] ETHEREUM FOUNDER VITALIK BUTERIN SAYS THE ORIGINAL VISION FOR L2'S "NO LONGER MAKES SENSE", UNLESS THEY CAN "EXTREMELY SCALE" OR DO SOMETHING NOVEL: X

Twitter was better than X. - Thread > Articles. You could quote tweet specific arguments. The new algo now kills threads. - Short 280-character tweets forced concise thinking. The art of brevity is super needed in this AI slop world. - 'For you' reduced the need to follow new accounts, making it tough for new creators to grow. To grow now, you need loud, polarizing, clickbait posts. - Creator payments distort incentives: Twitter was about organic idea-sharing for the sake of it. Not commercialized attention that incentivizes spam, bots, and rage-bait. View count is great though. Elon & Nikita are now fixing problems they themselves created.

Mark Carney’s speech at Davos was eloquent and sobering, and rightly praised. Yet Friedrich Merz’s address is likely to prove far more consequential in practice. I strongly recommend listening to it in full. “Germany has gotten the message.” That was the core signal. Merz deliberately spoke in his imperfect English to underscore it. Though more technical and dry than rhetorical, he projected a seriousness and resolve I haven’t heard from a European leader in years. Germany now appears determined to push and, if necessary, force through the European Parliament the key EU reforms laid out in the Draghi report. The goal: position Europe to survive and compete in the era of great-power politics. Read the speech sentence by sentence. Watch for concrete policy commitments, industrial targets, and fiscal priorities. The European revival agenda got off to a slow start and many wrote it off, but I think it may be accelerating now.

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free” This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( trustlessness.eth.limo ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means. “efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec. These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience. Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY. Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms. Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant. Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign. This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away. This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need. The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others. Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.

@VitalikButerin milady

Welcome to 2026! Milady is back. Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later) But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission: To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet. We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build. These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord. Ethereum is the rebellion against this. To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more. Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will. Wishing everyone an exciting 2026. Milady.

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

@Okonomiyakiguy 🎄

Apparently 2 million people were watching this on TV. Merry Christmas 🎄

I have this theory that when traders do a lot of podcasts, or they have their own, it makes them say an unnecessary large amount about the market, and forces them to take opinions, and ends up making them seem noisy and less of a signal. For one, this game requires you to have strong opinions that are weakly held. You need to be able to be bullish at the open and flip short ten minutes later if the flow changes, but I think the moment you voice a "thesis" into a microphone, your ego attaches to that outcome and you start subconsciously start filtering for data that proves you right to avoid looking stupid, so you end up trading your reputation instead of the chart. Probably even more so because of the schedule aspect, there is a huge conflict. The market gives you setups on a random distribution, some weeks are great, some are dead, but your pod demands a fixed schedule. If you have to record every day but the market is doing nothing, you’re forced to manufacture an opinion just to fill the air. That is the literal definition of noise. You end up performing for an audience rather than for the market.

Gen Z is spending more on essentials than previous generations, yet their wages aren't keeping up, per WSJ:

@PacmanBlur huh? where have you been

Speed is the holy grail. If you enjoy optimizing every millisecond of latency across the entire stack, come talk to us:

I have never been more certain that if AI development stopped today, we would still have massive & rolling disruption across society & the economy for the next ten years as people figured out how to harness what models can already do. And the end of AI progress seems unlikely.

a theory of mine is that social media has completely broken the mind of Gen Z and millennials when it comes to work their whole lives they have been told to pursue college, work really hard at their 9-5 job, go above and beyond for their boss, then save some income to hopefully purchase a home and family one day all the people who followed this path are now watching their savings crumble away due to inflation. homeownership feels out of reach like never before then they turn over and look at the 21 year olds making millions of dollars posting content on YouTube and TikTok. they are able to live with freedom, not beholden to a corporation, while also getting paid enough to afford everything they want people see this and start questioning themselves. money doesn’t feel real in an economy where there is so much bifurcation between the have and have nots the point of a job becomes meaningless. you fail to find purpose in your life anymore. and while these millionaires are the outliers, their content is the one that shows up in your feed over and over again it is truly detrimental to society and i’m not sure anyone has a real solution to fix it

Notice a big psychological split between the AI trade and BTC trade: AI is the optimist’s trade. BTC is the pessimist’s trade. BTC is the debasement play. A pure liquidity proxy: Debt is too high, so system prints fiat, and BTC protects you when the currency gets diluted. AI is the productivity play. Real growth. If output increases drastically, the world can outgrow its own debt. BTC protects you from the bad times. AI rewards you in good times. No wonder many dislike BTC as optimists build the future. I think this optimism is why I like Ethereum and Solana because they too are optimist's trades. But they can't compete with AI for liquidity and attention flows.

still crazy how cardano keeps sitting in the top 10(excluding stablecoins) nobody knows how it stays up there