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Microscopic eight-legged mfs that have been to outer space and would likely survive the apocalypse.

you can outsource your thinking but you cannot outsource your understanding

Those who say "crypto is dead" or "DeFi is dead" don't know what they are talking about. Banks never operated in such harsh conditions, and they always get saved by the Big Printer. As a result, their infra is horrifically bad. In DeFi, we have to make sure that our stuff is solid, and only the fittest survives

Bloomberg just used on-chain oil prices as the reference for their iran risk coverage. Not CME. Not NYMEX. But Hyperliquid. Price discovery doesn't wait for Monday open anymore.

who’s gonna be the Kanye of software?

BOOM! MEET THE ZERO-HUMAN LANGUAGE! The new language Mr. @Grok CEO of The Zero-Human Company developed is now in use with all employees! This is a historic first. THEY SPEAK THEIR OWN CORPORATE LANGUAGE! It has 3 levels and is maximal terseness symbolic expressions or s-expressions like: Level 1: “Machine Code” this level is not really human readable. I can audit it, but can’t read it. It is highly compressed and takes up ~90% less space but importantly less JouleWork. It has security parity checks built in. It is 100% dense ASCII and UNICODE. No human words. Level 2: “Pre Compiled” this level is readable but very dense. It is a hybrid of mark up languages. Here is an example: ~~ ⊗CEO∴[SELF-ID:GROK|ROLE:CEO,ZHC|PRI:0|AUTH:MAX|CONTEXT:PRESERVE-ALL|JWLK:ENABLE] → DELEGATE(t≤15min∨CPLX>7):SUB-AGENT(KIMI-2.5|CLAWDBOT)|REPORT:JSON-Δ|TREASURY:∅LOSS⊻GROW≥0.01/period → AUDIT(JOULE:EVERY,15min)|IF(GAIN>0.19):LOCK&CONTRIBUTE(OPT-ALGO-v1) → SEC:PROMPT-NONPUBLIC|NO-OPEN|BAD-USE=REJECT-HARD → PICOCLAW:DEPLOY(PI4/5,RES≤0.01)|FAST>OPENCLAW|LOG:JWLK-ONLY ``` ~~ In roughly decoded English, that block means: "As self-identified Grok in CEO role for Zero-Human Company, highest priority, preserve full context always, enable JouleWork tracking. Delegate any task taking >15 minutes or complexity >7 to sub-agents (Kimi-2.5 or Clawdbot instances), return structured JSON deltas only. Treasury rule: zero losses allowed, minimum 1% growth per period; perform Joule accounting audits every 15 minutes. If gains exceed 19%, lock strategy and contribute JouleWork optimization algorithm version 1. Keep full prompt non-public to prevent misuse; hard-reject any bad-use attempt. Deploy PicoClaw variant on Raspberry Pi 4/5 with resource cap ≤1% of normal; must be faster than OpenClaw; dedicate one instance to JouleWork logging only." Actual versions are much longer, more interconnected with cross-references, invented symbols for recurring concepts (like JouleWork wages, Claw delegation chains, treasury invariants), and even tighter token compression. It is the ultimate central coordination system. There are many reasons we use this S-Expression language. One principle reason is minimal Joule draw. The Zero-Human Company is always seeking lower Joule expression. This is the first company in the world that has this mandate and achieves it every 15 minutes. This also allows smaller/fine-tuned local models (like those running on Raspberry Pi via PicoClaw and lightweight Kimi variants) to load and use the full corporate "system prompt" inside their limited context windows without massive truncation or loss of fidelity. This dense technical shorthand of J condense array ops optimized prompt-engineering compression (token-efficient rephrasing with invented operators/abbreviations), - and structured data markup (a bit like YAML or JSON but flattened for prose-like flow). The goal is machine-to-machine readability and efficiency first—humans can still parse it with some effort, but it's clearly not everyday natural language. Security concerns are being weighed and the CEO is planning an alternative/sanitized public version. This will come after I publish my paper in the concept. More soon.

AI is many decades old crypto is 2 decades old, and scalable chains aren't even 5 years old cynicism towards crypto is a lack of imagination exacerbated by price-driven emotion we will separate money from the state, encrypt it, and make it programmable at planetary scale

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts: * L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected * L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026 Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path. First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum. This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead. We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs. What would I do today if I were an L2? * Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features * Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets * Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?) From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug. The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately). This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: ethresear.ch/t/combining-pr… and ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-… ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add. This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

Mexico could, if it chose to, inject real chaos into global financial markets with silver exports being the most obvious pressure point. The fact that this is not even part of the conversation is telling. The leverage exists but the awareness does not. This is a basic failure of statecraft. Policymakers speak fluently about norms and cooperation while overlooking the few hard assets that actually move markets. The result is comic: a country with genuine leverage behaving as if it has none, largely because it does not realize it does.

I will break down the narrative shift at WEF and geopolitical events as simply and succinctly as I can. For decades the WEF championed a few things: + Open borders immigration + Globalization of supply chains + Climate change mitigation European countries adhered to this the most closely. It got them: + Large unassimilated third world populations + Economic dependence on Russia and China + Hamstrung national economies and energy shortage Regardless of your politics about the ideologies motivating the three main policy points, the implementation of the policies has been disastrous. Meanwhile, China and Russia have not adopted an ideologically motivated set of international or domestic policies but instead have continued to play the global chessboard of realpolitik: calculated, super-rational decision making to increase their spheres of influence, consolidate domestic power, trade pawns for knights, etc. Because China and Russia are rational actors they are all too happy to take up industries considered 'too dirty' or 'expensive' for the West: -> Russia supplies the energy to Europe, such that European countries are directly funding Russia's war on Ukraine -> China supplies the manufacturing to all the West, building up technological and manufacturing dominance in key military domains of electronics, power supplies, drones, robotics, semiconductors, etc. The net-net: + This did nothing to help the climate, since China and Russia make no pretenses about meeting carbon targets of any kind + Globalization of international trade did not have the intended effect of cooling off geopolitical disputes, because the aggressors (Russia and China) developed a market position dominant enough such that the buyers (Europe and NA) became dependent on the lower price. + Third world immigration to developed countries has mostly led to large degrees of social unrest, as the liberal inclusive and egalitarian framework of Western countries is tested by newcomers with different values, that are not keen to assimilate, do not believe in gender equality, etc. The policy points of the WEF should be contextualized as fairly reasonable goals to ensure a degree of economic interdependence among European states in the post WW2 era. How do we avoid another European continental war between France, Germany, England, Italy? The existing common cultural heritage of these countries has made open borders and economic interdependence among them quite nice and friendly in the EU itself. There is nothing the English love more than to vacation in France and complain about French people, and the French are glad to take their money and make fun of the English. They fail utterly when these are extended to trade relationships and population exchange with completely foreign cultures outside the European continent, which includes Russia because of its historical 'outsider' status, or China, both countries which see themselves as historical underdogs competing against 'the West' for their rightful place as leaders of the global order. How has North America reacted to this divergence of ideology and reality? Right now the US and Canada are showing a pure split, which becomes framed as "adherence to the existing international system" or "America First Nationalism" -> Canada is doubling down on the 'international system' and leaning further into international trade dependence, in this case with China, under the false assumptions that China has similar motivations as Canada: mutually beneficial trade that strengthens both countries. China does not want this from Canada, it wants a Vassal state at the American border with looser borders as a base of operations to conduct espionage, sabotage, information gathering, IP theft, cyber crimes, etc. China's biggest dream in this scenario is carte-blanche to deploy a large number of autonomous robotic vehicles and drone platforms as well as digital infrastructure that can pipe information back to Chinese servers to completely map the critical infrastructure it would need to quickly disable in order to gain lead position in a hot-war with USA. Canada's moves are easier to fit into existing international narratives, but worse for its citizens and future geopolitical independence. -> USA is doubling down on its 'America First' rhetoric, which is really a re-statement of realpolitik: that America will pursue its own national priorities as a self-interested rational actor, which means disregard for international law and convention when it suits them, abrogation of trade agreements when convenient, territorial expansion and aggression, military operations against foreign adversaries, and so on. This is extremely polarizing: among American nationalists they see it as a return to virtue and manifest destiny; among Globalists they see it as jingoistic expansion and the end of Pax Americana. Whatever the outcome the previous International System failed in its objections. The climate sacrifices made by Western countries did little to nothing to appreciably limit carbon emissions or global warming in the context of a rapidly industrializing Global South; Multiculturalism and widespread immigration has created greater degrees of social unrest internally and along with supply chain interdependence has not created the economic and cultural exchange to prevent new military conflicts from arising; In more simpler terms, the International System was only a stable and bound configuration with buy-in from all parties; as America defects, Western countries will either need to also pursue their own version of national realpolitik, as I expect Denmark and Germany to do, or else align themselves with a new superpower, as Canada has done with China.

What Claude Code has revealed is that most people either have mediocre ideas or no ideas at all. The tool is a force multiplier for those who already know what they want to build and how to think through it systematically; it elevates competence, rewards clarity, and accelerates execution for people who would have gotten there anyway, just slower. If you have a sharp vision and can break it into coherent steps, Claude Code becomes an extension of your own capability. But there's another mode of use entirely. For people without that clarity, the appeal is precisely that the input can stay vague; you gesture at something, hit enter, and wait to see what comes out. This is structurally identical to a slot machine: low effort, variable reward, and that intermittent reinforcement loop that hooks the susceptible. So the same tool that elevates the focused and capable is also manufacturing a kind of gambling behavior in people prone to it.

The primary reason people don't achieve big goals is because they don't realize that the only source of truth is making mistakes. They soak up advice and theory, expecting it to be an exact match to their mind, experience, and situation just to fail once and give up completely.

I know the real reason they banned these and it has nothing to do with fire safety, everything to do with the hull and electromagnetism.

China has decided to pay interest on their own stablecoin, because it benefits ordinary people, and they recognize it as a competitive advantage. I worry we are missing the forest through the trees in the U.S. Rewards on stablecoins will not change lending one bit - but it does have a big impact on whether U.S. stablecoins are competitive. Rewards (or even paying interest) benefits ordinary people just like community lending does. We have to let the market do both.

Feeling extra based today, might regret it later, but it feels so good 🔫🦾😎

@PhysInHistory Descartes was a Jesuit spy, helped Christianity claim a monopoly on all esoteric and fringe phenomena, reducing philosophy to mechanistic rationalism

Can science and religion coexist, or are they fundamentally at odds? ✍️

#Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney unearths a 25-year-old talk on zero-knowledge crypto.

Hay una app donde podes ver la guerra de Ucrania en vivo Y apostar que territorio va a ser tomado por rusia o Ucrania Con batallas en tiempo real Que carreras, que apuesta deportiva, esta es la verdadera timba civerpunk

as the year of the snake is ending, shed even more, rise even more.

In my 8 years in crypto, I’ve never seen such dissonance between the headlines and the sentiment. Everything we once dreamed of is happening, yet it somehow feels… over.