i put the “crypto” in “cryptocurrency.” head of cryptography at @aptoslabs | math, research, engineering 💍 + 👶 + 🏍️ = ❤️
Austin, TX
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I used Opus 5.5 to build a nuclear power plant. A couple short prompts, fixing various radiation leaks and overheating conditions.
I don’t really understand fission. Nor thermodynamics. But Claude is good at both.
Is vibe-nuking the future of energy?
I used Opus 5.5 to formally verify the Claude Agent SDK using Lean. A couple short prompts = 16 PRs fixing various bugs and race conditions. Video attached.
TLA+ also works well. I sometimes combine Lean and TLA+ to look for issues around data flow, concurrency, and state mgmt.
I don't know either language well, but Claude is excellent at both. This approach is super useful for formally modeling your code and finding bugs that a human probably wouldn't have spotted.
Is formal verification the future of coding (or at least, bug finding)?
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alin.apt retweeted
Sharing 𝔹itℤ : a PCS for circuits written anywhere (in any ring/field or collection of those), using binary fields under the hood.
eprint.iacr.org/2026/2141 with @recmo, @mmkostrzewa, @shreyas_twt, @wu_s_john, @AlexAbdugafarov, @ZKFriendly, @XanderGoot
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If "AI alignment is the process of guiding an artificial intelligence system's goals, behavior, and actions so they match human values, intentions, and ethical principles,"
and we're supposed to stop everything and work on it,
can someone answer this basic question at least:
What are the correct "human values, intentions and ethical principles" we should aim to match?
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This is pure gold 👌
>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
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Another day, another TEE break: ddropattack.eu/
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alin.apt retweeted
Congratulations to Aptos Labs' @XiangZhuolun and his co-authors: Simple-IT has been accepted to IEEE S&P '27! 🎉
The paper shows that BFT consensus can be made quantum-resistant without trading away performance.
Learn more below.
Simple-IT: Signature-free consensus can be as simple and as practical as signature-based consensus.
Joint work with Qianyu Yu, Juan Villacis, @giuliano_losa and @wang_xuechao
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.14404
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Did anyone try an ecdsa.fail submission for this?
[New] Quantum Discrete Logarithms on Elliptic Curves with $5n/2+o(n)$ Logical Qubits and $\widetilde O(n^2)$ Toffoli Gates (Sunghyeon Jo and Gye Jin Lee) ia.cr/2026/2014
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alin.apt retweeted
Instead of panicking over some far-fetched Terminator scenario, governments could instead focus on *actually* protecting people by creating and enforcing clear, cryrptographic standards for digital identity.
p*someone steals your identity >> p*doom
🔓 Revolut has reportedly confirmed it handed customer passports, ID documents and bitcoin transaction histories to a fraudulent party posing as a government agency.
unchainedcrypto.com/revolut-…
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alin.apt retweeted
I haven’t been as excited about a programming language since when I first started learning Rust.
Lean4 is an extremely powerful language. However, one thing it’s missing is good tutorials and examples! So I built an online Lean4 learning tool!
I predict Lean becoming one of the most popular languages in the coming years amongst AI labs, blockchain researchers, and agents. It’s what powers verifiable auto-research.
Lean4 increases the velocity at which humanity can make mathematical discoveries.
To be ahead of the curve, learn some lean today!
Open to feedback and suggestions! 😅
leanlanguage.app
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alin.apt retweeted
no, it required a super majority to peg out to one of a set of known PAKs. but one of the PAKs just further proxied to anyone:
nehanarula.org/2026/09/07/li…
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alin.apt retweeted
I've just published a new blog post on my website, "Why AI is Systematically Incapable of Revolutionizing Science":
michaelstraka.com/aiscience
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I hope most who see the memorial fountains, and/or the 9/11 museum, do not feel this way.
Can I just say… I despise this. Just two open wounds in downtown Manhattan that we failed to rebuild.
We could’ve built a beautiful 9/11 memorial and still built back the twin towers bigger and better than before. Instead we have these gaping holes, a monument to the weakness and incompetence of the people running NYC.
Honor the victims and REBUILD.
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