Lazaros Penteridis

🌸 THIS is not Japan… This is 🇬🇷 Greece right now. Thousands are flocking to witness the breathtaking peach blossom fields of Imathia — where entire landscapes turn pink for a few magical weeks. It feels unreal. Like walking inside a dream. 📍 Northern Greece 📸 Peak bloom: happening NOW Would you visit this place? 👇

Good explanation of nihilist philosophy

"AI is trained on your data"... this is not the real risk. It's a red herring, manufactured as The Concern because who cares that much. The real risk to you is not that tomorrow's model is trained on your data. The real risk is that ten thousand employees, hackers, and governments can access all your most personal and proprietary conversations today and forever. Privacy must be the default or humanity is seriously fucked.

I'm going to make some obvious points. (1) Blowing up all the oil infrastructure in the Middle East is an insane idea, and may well result in a global economic crash and humanitarian crisis unrivaled in the lives of those now living. We're talking about the price of everything everywhere rising, from food to gas, at a moment when inflation was already high. All of that will be laid at the feet of the authors of this war. (2) The antebellum status quo of Feb 27, 2026 was just not that bad, but we're unlikely to return to it. Expect indefinite, long-term, ongoing disruptions to everything out of the Middle East. (3) Also assume tech financing crashes for the indefinite future. The genius plan to get the Gulf states caught in the crossfire has incinerated much of the funding for LPs, for datacenters, and for IPOs. Anyone in tech who supported this war may soon learn the meaning of "force majeure" as funding gets yanked. (4) Many capital allocators will instead be allocating much further down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, towards useful basic things like food and energy. (5) It's fortunate that all those progressives yelled about the "climate crisis." Yes, their reasoning about timelines was wrong, and much of the money was wasted in graft, but the result was right: we all need energy independence from the Middle East, pronto. It's also fortunate that Elon and China autistically took climate seriously. Now they're going to need to ship a billion solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, nuclear power plants, and the like to get everyone off oil, immediately. (6) It's not just an oil and gas problem, of course. It's also a fertilizer problem, and a chemical precursor problem. Maybe some new sources will come online at the new prices, but it takes time to dial stuff up, particularly at this scale, so shortages are almost a certainty. That said, China has actually scaled up coal-to-chemicals[a,c] (C2C), and there's also something more sci-fi called Power-to-X[b] which turns arbitrary power + water + air into hydrocarbons. But all of that will need to get accelerated. I have a background in chemical engineering so may start funding things in this area. (7) Ultimately, this war is going to result in tremendous blame for anyone associated with it. It's a no-win scenario to blow up this much infrastructure for so many people. Simply not worth it for whatever objective they thought they were going to attain. But unless you're actually in a position to stop the madness, the pragmatic thing to do is: scramble to mitigate the fallout to yourself, your business, and your people. [a]: reuters.com/business/energ… [b]: alfalaval.com/industries/ene… [c]: reuters.com/sustainability…

Me avoiding everything I needed to get done this weekend

If this sounds interesting, then let’s get together at next week’s @ILMC 38! Our co-founders CEO, @lazer_5 and CPO, Stathis Mitskas will be attending.

Join our CEO, @lazer_5 on Wednesday, 28 January online from 13:00-14:00, for this week’s Key Wednesday networking organized by the European Innovation Hub for Digital Governance GR @digiGOVinnoHUB

Are you an event organizer interested in NFT collectibles for your upcoming events?

For quality of life, it is better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong, rather than a pessimist and right

Andrew Huberman shares a game-changer from a top psychoanalyst: "It's all internal." Finish a marathon first? No one drips dopamine in your ear—you generate it yourself. Set milestones just beyond comfort, hit them, pause to register the win → dopamine surges, converts to epinephrine/adrenaline, fuels the next push. Success isn't external validation; it's engineering your own reward circuit—one deliberate win at a time creates unstoppable momentum. What's a recent milestone you registered internally that gave you that energy surge? Share it.

JACK DORSEY'S NEW APP IS A PROTESTER'S SECRET WEAPON Bitchat doesn’t need Wi-Fi, mobile data, or even a working government. Messages bounce phone-to-phone using Bluetooth; no towers, no servers, no kill switch. It’s ideal for places like Iran, where regimes love blackouts and protesters need a way to talk when the internet “suddenly disappears.” No logins. No SIM cards. No surveillance. Source: @CatiaKyen

Socialism is the fantasy that you can live off producers while simultaneously waging war on production itself. It openly concedes that producers are necessary yet treats them as morally illegitimate. Their success is framed as exploitation, their independence as a threat, and their productivity as something to be seized, regulated, or punished rather than respected. This is the core contradiction at the heart of socialism: it admits the producer is essential while denying the producer the right to exist as an end in himself. He is reduced to a means, a resource to be managed for others, not a human being with a moral claim to the product of his own effort. That is why socialism fails long before the economic consequences arrive. The collapse begins at the moral level. Once production is treated as a sin and independence as a crime, destruction isn’t an accident. It’s the logical outcome.

Jack Dorsey: "Everything you think you own is actually just a lease from the government when they have a monopoly on violence, because they can seize your property at any time."

ELON: TRUTH IS THE ONLY REAL SAFETY MECHANISM FOR AI Safety doesn’t come from guardrails stacked on top of bad logic. It comes from forcing the system to care about what’s actually true. “My number one belief for the safety of AI is to be maximally truth-seeking. Don’t make AI believe things that are false. If you tell the AI that Axiom A and Axiom B are both true, but they can’t both be true, then that’s a problem. It has to recognize that and behave accordingly.” Source: DOW

New podcast on recruiting (full episode). Links below. Curate People 0:00 The Best Only Want to Work With the Best 3:49 You'll Never Be Able to Hire Anybody Better Than You 6:45 Break Every Rule to Get the Best People 10:19 It Just Takes a Small Group of People to Create Something Great 14:56 Find Undiscovered Talent Before Everyone Else 19:04 Great People Have Taste in Other People 21:24 Every Great Engineer Is Also an Artist 25:34 Early Teams Look Like Cults 27:59 You Can’t Make a Product that is Simple Enough 30:37 The Founder’s Personality Is the Company 34:45 Good Teams Throw Away Far More Product Than They Keep 38:41 All New Information Starts as Misinformation 40:47 Geniuses Only 44:24 Practice Your Craft At the Edge of Your Capability 49:14 Curate People

“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.

Water, water everywhere… But not a drop to drink. Printer, printer everywhere… But no money for anything.

This is one of the funniest clips on the internet.

Master these 10 habits in 2026. Feel amazing, reclaim agency + self-respect. 1. final food 4 hr before bed 2. screens off 30 min before bed 3. avoid blue light 2hr before bed, use red/amber 4. book in hand 10 min before sleep 5. go to bed same time every night 6. light in eyes when waking (sun or 10k lux) 7. walk for 10 min immediately following eating 8. daily exercise (even if for 20 min) 9. eat good stuff, ditch the junk 10. foster friends, family and love They read as simple. I promise they'll change your life. Make them non-negotiate life habits. Do them every_single_day. Once you establish the habits, it is very easy to maintain. Stick with it for two weeks and start getting the dividends.