shenwilly.eth

Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/0…

I like ethereum It has managed to capture my attention for nearly a decade. I suspect it'll easily do so for another Thank you to everyone that has worked on the machine that is the sum of ethereum and everything built upon it

New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵

sharing pathfinder - a tool for exploring the space between two concepts

How to make public repository to private:

@DavidDeutschOxf @michael_nielsen drop a dye into still water!

@michael_nielsen This is *much* harder than it sounds. A tribute to those who built up the arguments for modern atomic theory. My best guess without looking anything up is the angles and symmetries of crystals. But that's not really a 'demonstration'. OK now I asked ChatGPT. Nothing useful.

Curious: without looking it up, could you demonstrate the existence of atoms, to a bright but skeptical highschooler? I don't mean proof-by-authority, I mean: you could actually (with not-very-complex equipment) carry out experiments that would show this

Today, @coinbasedev is announcing x402: an open standard/protocol to bring onchain payments to the web. Join us in killing the API key, and making the agentic and payable web a reality. All in one line of code. Imagine a future where crypto is the default to pay for *anything*.

Wake up, @Google is adopting ZK. One reason ZK will be adopted is it reduces the security overhead of companies who manage large data sets of sensitive information. It is not uncommon for companies to spend 10s of billions a year protecting this data. Reduce sensitive data -> Reduct costs -> Adoption

1/ Today, we’re excited to share three updates from the EF board and management team.

Computers used to scream out in pain when we connected to the internet. This was a warning and we did not heed it.

@arjunaskykok hopefully includes the auto admin interface

A Django-fork web framework. plainframework.com

Spirited Away

We’ve added /llms.txt and Markdown to @stripe docs: docs.stripe.com/llms.txt Use the .md pages to quickly move Stripe knowledge into your LLM of choice. 📄

Mentally where I’m at

it's happening

see in realtime the gpus you're about to buy

ethereum will win

# the nightmare bicycle imo, the most important idea in product design is to avoid the "nightmare bicycle". imagine a bicycle where the product manager said "people don't get math so we can't have numbered gears - we need to have labeled buttons for gravel mode, downhill mode, ..." this is a hypothetical "nightmare bicycle" that Andy diSessa imagines in his book Changing Minds. as he points out: it would be terrible! we'd lose the intuitive understanding of how to use the gears to solve any situation we encounter. which mode do you use for gravel + downhill?? turns out, anyone can understand numbered gears totally fine after a bit of practice. people are capable! along the same lines - one of the worst misconceptions in product design is that a microwave needs to have a button for every thing you could possibly cook: "popcorn", "chicken", "potato", "frozen vegetable" bla bla bla. you really don't! you can just have a time (and power) button. people will figure out how to cook stuff. good designs expose systematic structure; they lean on their users' ability to understand this structure and apply it to new situations. we were born for this. bad designs paper over the structure with superficial labels that hide the underlying system, inhibiting their users' ability to actually build a clear model in their heads.

And now for some positive news: I'm excited to announce the publication of a new paper, co-authored with ECB director general (and noted Bitcoin skeptic) Ulrich Bindseil, on the utility of public crypto networks as financial infrastructure. This is our best attempt to explain the unique attributes of DeFi for any asset, including RWAs, as compared to traditional market infrastructure. We break those attributes down to unique time structures, streaming payments, omni-asset settlement, programmability, and disintermediation. We also consider (and mostly dismiss) the utility of permissioned networks which seem to be popular with international orgs like the IMF and BIS. The paper provides examples of unique DeFi primitives that could only exist on a public blockchain, and also considers their limitations. So give it a read (link below) and let us know what you think. Some of you here gave Ulrich a lot of flack for his papers questioning the utility of Bitcoin and might be interested to see how he's a lot more bullish on DeFi. Part of my motivation for doing this was to have a single point of reference to share with all the TradFi and government people who still ask "what is crypto good for?"