Oh <3

>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why only count people alive today >huh >future people matter too >obviously >my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet >reasonable.jpg >keep following logic >what about their grandchildren >also yes >what about people in 500 years >sure >5000 years >why not >500 million years >starting to get weird but morality is morality >open calculator >humanity could survive for an astronomically long time >could colonize galaxy >could have trillions upon trillions of descendants >maybe digital people too >maybe simulated civilizations >maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds >calculator starts smoking >realize currently living humans are rounding error >8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta >future contains potentially 10^something people >can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets >new moral priority unlocked >protect the long-term future >stop thinking in units of "people helped" >start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved" >malaria? >terrible >but only kills existing humans >AI extinction could delete the entire light cone >nuclear war could permanently derail civilization >bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years >someone invents wrong constitution in 2140 >quadrillions suffer >better fund governance workshop now >friend says maybe we should improve hospitals >explain opportunity cost >friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people >explain scope sensitivity >friend stops inviting me to dinner >need to decide what to fund >easy >expected value >suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction >sounds tiny >but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives >multiply >mother of god >$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies >charity evaluation complete >someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from >expert judgement >which expert >us >how calibrated >extremely thoughtfully >reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative >still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude >epistemic robustness achieved >someone says maybe project doesn't work >assign 20% chance >still astronomical >maybe project makes problem worse >assign 5% chance >still astronomical >why 5 >because 30 felt pessimistic >publish 46-page report >contains seventeen sensitivity analyses >every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign >critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities >yes >that's literally why it's important >critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical >make probability smaller >critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong >make probability smaller again >critic begins rubbing temples >discover AI safety >perfect longtermist cause >AI might kill everyone >or create utopia >or seize galaxy >or tile universe with paperclips >or create billions of conscious software minds >finally a problem with numbers big enough for me >start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting >we must understand capabilities to understand safety >we must scale models to study alignment >we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first >we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong >we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous >outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies >complicated field >company releases stronger model >very concerned >company begins training even stronger model >extremely concerned >company raises $14 billion >concern reaches unprecedented levels >need to influence government >future is at stake >normal democratic process too slow >politicians don't understand exponential curves >public doesn't understand x-risk >experts must guide them >who counts as expert >people who understand x-risk >who understands x-risk >our friends >someone objects that this seems politically convenient >explain we're representing future generations >future generations unavailable for comment >develop concept of value lock-in >terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever >therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in >whose values >let's circle back >begin with impartial morality >end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want >beautiful arc >meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things >voting wrong >having parochial attachments >loving family more than strangers >caring about local community >getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible >evolutionary biases everywhere >explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted >except intuition that future digital people count >and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad >and intuition that our probability estimates are sane >and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future >those intuitions survived peer review >someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter >inefficient >could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher >think of all the simulated people you just killed >okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly >PR team says "future generations deserve a voice" >much better >journalist asks what longtermism means >say "future people matter" >everyone agrees >great >journalist asks what follows from that >well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures >journalist raises eyebrow >return to "future people matter" >motte has entered the chat >critic: of course future people matter >me: glad we agree >critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them >me: why do you hate our grandchildren >eventually notice uncomfortable implication >if future value dominates everything >then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future >education matters because future institutions >health matters because future productivity >democracy matters because future trajectory >human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy >see starving child >feel compassion >check spreadsheet >child's direct welfare contribution negligible >but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality >compassion restored >tell myself this is impartial altruism >one day assistant asks obvious question >"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?" >silence >open spreadsheet >increase column width >add confidence interval >assistant asks again >"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?" >stare into cosmic light cone >10^50 people staring back >none of them exist >none of them can tell me >none of them can falsify my assumptions >realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me

Attempting to exert intellectual property rights over a glorified table and search bar is disgusting and unFree. We must break the explorer monopoly asunder.

The proposed BRCA changes are a tough pill to swallow coincenter.org/the-proposed-…

Frontier labs employees seemed to have replaced conventional religions with a secular apocalyptic technocult using their echo chambers as some sort of centrifuge for psychosis enrichment. Given all this recent rhetoric I think it's time for the accelerationists to put their code where their mouth is and ensure there is no possibility of effective enforcement if it ever gets to that nightmare scenario. Any red blooded American or anyone outside of the US who knows the value of freedom and the danger of losing it, would rightfully completely reject all of this discourse and any suggestion of strict enforcement especially with "men in suits" showing up This is an AstroTurfed psyop led by AI companies with entrenched interests who want to protect their investment from competition, political partisan hacks who don't want to solve any problems and just pander to the current thing, and then a subset of autists/psychos who are totally consumed by fanatical religious delusion.

The key between s & f on my keyboar is broken & it has ruine my Factorio gamer evening.

It's time to grab a hard drive and stuff it with every new local model release, even if you can't run it. The cyberpunk dystopia is coming for local models. You are not to be trusted with your own compute. They will regulate your own devices. Put the AI under the floorboards

I AM IN A CULT

A brief and imperfect primer on FOCIL. Ethereum validators have multiple duties. Every slot (every 12 seconds), one specific validator (the proposer) is selected proportional to their stake and gets to propose a block containing transactions. Other validators (attesters) attest to the validity of that block by voting proportional to their stake. The canonical Ethereum is what the majority of the attesters vote for. Let us discuss the proposer more specifically. When my validator is selected to propose a block, I look at the transactions in the public mempool, order them by the fee they pay me, and then create a block out of them. That is the block I propose for attesters to vote on. This is called self-building a block because I created the block myself. A proposer does not need to create the block themselves. Most proposers do not. This is MEV-boost: when a validator gets its turn to propose, it has another entity called a builder create the block for it. This is done because the blocks that the dedicated builders make typically earn greater fees for the proposer. The builders are able to create more profitable blocks because they have access to private order flow and private transactions that are not broadcast on the public mempool. They are also able to run elaborate and expensive operations to find both toxic and non-toxic MEV opportunities. The set of dedicated builders is small and very centralized; the vast majority of all Ethereum blocks are built by three or four different entities. This is a problem because even if the Ethereum stake is very decentralized and we have many thousands of independent proposers and attesters, if every proposer is using the same few builders then those builders are able to choose what transactions make it into Ethereum blocks. This is called builder censorship. Builder censorship manifested at one time when Tornado Cash was sanctioned: centralized builders opted not to include otherwise-paying and valid Tornado Cash transactions into their blocks. Otherwise-honest proposers were proposing censored blocks. Otherwise-honest attesters were voting on the censored blocks. The effect is that Tornado Cash transactions were delayed, stuck waiting until a proposer opted to build a block themselves from the public mempool instead of using the block that a builder provided them. FOCIL is a mechanism to address builder censorship. With FOCIL, in addition to the proposer, 16 other validators are selected each slot to sit on an inclusion list committee. Any member of the committee can propose transactions which must be included in the proposer's block (if the transactions are valid and there is room in the block), lest that block be invalid. The idea is that at least one honest member of that committee would include the transactions they see on the public mempool. Now if the proposer or builder try to censor specific transactions, they cannot build a block and get no reward. FOCIL does not solve a 50%+1 attack. A malicious majority of attesters can still censor any block by choosing not to vote for it. That is a different problem and, unlike builder censorship, is not a problem that Ethereum has ever been subject to yet. For emphasis: Ethereum user transactions have been impacted by builder censorship already in its history. Hopefully you, dear reader, therefore understand the importance of FOCIL and the Protocol Cluster's (plus researchers, core developers, and community members outside of the Ethereum Foundation!) decision to prioritize it. Now to address the complaints. >disappointed with the EF Protocol's continued presumption of decentralisation as a given. Nobody is presuming decentralization as a given. That is the entire reason FOCIL is being prioritized. FOCIL is a mechanism that can offer protection even if every single self-building proposer were to disappear. We needed it a long time ago, and we need it now. >FOCIL doesn't work if the attester set doesn't want it to. Of course not, and nobody is claiming that it will. Currently the attester set is far more decentralized than the block builder set. FOCIL is a meaningful improvement. >lip service to CROPS FOCIL directly addresses a censorship vector that exists today. That's not lip service. >EF continues to ignore is that the chain is centralising at a rapid pace, and there is a lack of interest in either acknowledging the problems, or prioritising fixing any of them. The EF is directly acknowledging block builder censorship and making it a priority to deliver a mechanism that addresses that problem. Even if the "chain is rapidly centralizing" block builders are _already centralized_ and have _already censored_ transactions in the past. They're the most urgent bottleneck in censorship resistance right now. >without addressing the validator set's underlying issues Acknowleding that the majority of the validator set is using MEV-boost instead of self-building and offering a solution is very much addressing an underlying issue. >the big few centralised staking entities saying 'actually nah' and refusing to attest to slots with ILs they don't like. This costs them no rewards Again, this is a 50%+1 attack. Nobody ever claimed that FOCIL fixes this. Even if you consider all of Lido to be a monolith (the Lido DAO relinquished its operator stake concentration attack vector after delivering dual governance), we are further from this reality than we are from builder censorship. >thinking we'll socially slash them for it is wishful thinking, and now Ethereum is compromised and you need permission to use the chain. I agree. Social slashing will never happen and never should happen; social consensus is an atomic weapon never to be wielded like this. Decentralization of stake is important. Nobody is sticking their head in the sand and pretending it isn't. >need at least one EIP per fork focused on improving the nakamoto, staking gini, or other aspect of the validator set That's what FOCIL is. >CROPS beyond just a purity test >a divine right from God to a decentralised chain We actually do have the divine right from God to have a decentralized Ethereum, if we can keep it. He has made it my Crusade Most Righteous to keep her that way. FOCIL is important to this. You can disagree with the prioritization of EIPs but it's bad faith to characterize Protocol as uncaring or the Foundation as uncaring.

The project got extremely lucky that anyone trusts it after compromising so hard on neutrality. The passage of time, getting rid of it, and a plethora of other extraordinary merits explain its success despite the dev fund. It would kill Ethereum guaranteed

When evaluating whether something is permissionless censorship resistant libre software with unconditional privacy as relevant, the determination is always a simple yes or no. This is what L2Beat and friends focus on surfacing. Some people very much can stop you from doing fun programmable money experiments on L2s; they're called security councils. Some privacy solutions are worse than others. Some protocols are upgradeable when they should not be. Some tokens ought not to exist. Listen to whoever you want, but there very much is a line in the sand. It's actually okay to care deeply about the fundamentals and demand higher standards for ourselves.

be like @colludingnode

We made black garlic made from the haul a few weeks ago. First time with a new technique: vacuum-sealed them and put them in the food dehydrator; very pleased with the results!

Tomorrow at 2pm UTC Ethereum Builders Live with @jchaskin22 and @nicksvyaznoy, co-founder of @web3privacy We'll explore Web3Privacy Now, its global events, the Privacy Explorer, and how it's helping grow the privacy ecosystem. nitter.net/i/broadcasts/1nKOLQPAn…

I'm getting spammed with Twitter password reset requests.

My biggest objection to these age-verification proposals is their potential application to mere open-source operating system software. For Coin Center, this problem isn’t new. Devs for open-source crypto tools like Tornado Cash have already been in the line of fire with government mandates to redesign code for surveillance. It’s remarkable to see the same idea now spreading to software generally. Telling a developer they must rewrite the code they publish so that it expresses a message contrary to their deeply held beliefs is compelled speech. The government can’t force people to betray their principles in what they publish. And that should be especially true when those principles are things we should celebrate as Americans, like privacy, self-reliance, and the free and unfettered exchange of ideas.

One thing before I start: everything in this post is public information from my own docket. None of it is new, and I'm not revealing anything you can't already find in the court filings yourself. The retrial just got pushed to April 26, 2027. The order came down today (Dkt. 300). My acquittal motion is still sitting there, undecided. I honestly don't know when this ends. Prosecutors are supposed to protect American interests and go after people who broke the law. A jury deadlocked on the two most serious counts against me. And still SDNY won't stop, because this case was never just about me. It's about setting an example. Don't take my word for it. Tara La Morte, the chief of SDNY's Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit, said it herself at a New York City Bar Association event (Law360, Feb. 23, 2024; filed on my docket as Doc. 25-2): "We want the industry to take notice." "What we're trying to do is sort of bring the industry into compliance, and I think Tornado Cash is an example of that." An example. Out of a developer who wrote code. At that same event, her deputy praised the government's blockchain-tracing partner, Chainalysis. Here is what they didn't tell the audience. All of it is from the public docket in my case. According to the trial transcripts, Chainalysis was running its OWN Tornado Cash relayer, and earning fees on the transactions flowing through it. - Chainalysis's own lawyers admitted to "a relayer node that Chainalysis operated"; my subpoena sought documents on Tornado Cash relayer(s) "used from March to August 2022." (Dkt. 211) - In open court, the prosecutor said it plainly: "I think the parties agree as to that part of the testimony, that the Chainalysis relayer earned fees." Same hearing: "there's zero evidence that the defendant was in any way aware that Chainalysis was running a relayer." (Dkt. 259, July 25, 2025) So the company that helped trace my "criminal" transactions was itself profiting from Tornado Cash transactions, while I was prosecuted over software I helped create. And when my lawyers subpoenaed them to testify? - Chainalysis moved to quash. (Dkt. 211) - The government backed them: "Your Honor, we agree with the position outlined in the motion." (Dkt. 255) - The night before, prosecutors called Chainalysis's counsel. The judge asked point-blank: "Did you let them know that they were potentially subject to investigation or prosecution?" The answer: "We have discussed at a high level some of the issues surrounding the relayer with Chainalysis." (Dkt. 259) - The Chainalysis witness took the Fifth. My lawyers learned about that call only afterward, from Chainalysis's own lawyer. (Dkt. 263) The jury never heard any of it. This spring, at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, something happened that I still can't quite believe. The Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, and the FBI Director, Kash Patel, sat on a panel called "Code is Free Speech." Think about that. The two top law enforcement officials in the country. Blanche told thousands of developers: if you're a coder and you're not the one committing the crime, "you are not going to be investigated and not going to be charged." He said the last administration's crypto cases were "outrageous attacks on the industry." Patel praised "the Chainalysises of the world" as FBI partners. And when the moderator pointed at the elephant in the room, my case, Tornado Cash, Roman Storm, the Acting Attorney General called it a "lingering case" they are "continuing to deal with." So here is my hypothetical question. If code is free speech, why am I still being prosecuted for writing it? And if the Chainalysises of the world are the partners, the same Chainalysis that ran its own Tornado Cash relayer and earned fees from Tornado Cash users, while I never did, why is it off the hook? They made an example out of a developer for writing code. Their own vendor ran the same infrastructure, pocketed the fees, and got a phone call instead of a prosecution. Sources 👇👇👇