Hey everyone, some personal news I’m really excited about... For the past few months I’ve been working on a book proposal with my friend and colleague Tim Sullivan (@Tim_Org). We’re excited to share that it’s just been acquired by Crown Currency at Penguin Random House! We’re calling it (for now) Inside The Machine: How Computer Science Rewired Everything. Most of us talk about tech in terms of the shiny stuff — apps, gadgets, platforms, and the people who built them. But this misses a bigger, more interesting story. Computer science didn't just hand us new tools. It changed how we think about problems in the first place — what even counts as a problem, what looks like a solution, what we optimize for, and what we ignore. Over time, this way of thinking has seeped outward and saturated everything else. You see it in markets that run like algorithms instead of human institutions, in media that’s tuned for engagement, in companies organized more like software than trad hierarchies. Even in the way people talk: inputs, outputs, signals, noise, etc. Once you start noticing it, it’s hard to stop seeing it everywhere. Tim and I have spent years separately reporting on tech, business, science, and economics, and then also as editors on the a16z crypto editorial team. Throughout, we kept running into the same big question: what happens when the logic of computing becomes the logic of society? This book is our personal attempt to answer that — to trace how these ideas spread (often without us realizing) and how they’ve reshaped the systems we all live with, including the tradeoffs that come with them. We’re still super early in the process, but we’re thrilled it’s happening. If you want to follow along as the book comes together, we’d love that. In the meantime, tell us: what’s your favorite example you’ve seen of computer science thinking sneaking into everyday life? Could be in business, politics, dating, whatever — we'd love to know what you all notice.

widow’s bay is live action courage the cowardly dog for adults

my daughter took her first steps and said her first full sentence this week she looked my wife dead in the eye and said flatly ‘biggie go away’ then she took 10 steps all by herself

Today, we’re launching an ambitious new school called The Horowitz Andreessen Academy. Based in San Francisco, The Academy serves the most promising young high school graduates. We think this can be an elite institution that attracts top tier talent. One that prepares students for the future rather than remaining stuck in the past. The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era. They'll learn primarily by pursuing their own projects, either individually or in groups. There are classes and guest lectures, too, from some truly amazing people who have built modern-day Silicon Valley. The Academy is designed as a network, since that’s the reason students go to school in the first place. Core to that network are our 10 Founding Partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The network includes over 50 hiring partners and over 200 speakers and mentors. To join as a hiring partner or faculty member, you can apply on our website. We raised $42M in funding led by @a16z. I'll be CEO and @pmarca and @eriktorenberg will join me on the board. Applications are open for our Founding Class Fellowship, which will be one year and tuition-free. Eventually, pending regulatory approval, we plan to offer a two-year program that charges tuition, similar in cost to an elite private university. We're looking for the most unusually ambitious young builders on the planet. Come join us in San Francisco: theacademysf.com/

Introducing The Horowitz Andreessen Academy.

While I’m disappointed by today’s Senate vote, it doesn’t change the fact that crypto’s fundamentals are stronger than ever. Billions of dollars are moving onchain, leading payments companies and financial institutions are adopting blockchain technology, and entrepreneurs around the world are building new financial products that bring money into the internet age. Our work in DC is far from over. We’ll keep working for clear rules that protect consumers and let entrepreneurs build.

I'd put my P(abundance) around 99.99%, what about you

The new CLARITY Act text reflects years of bipartisan negotiations and is stronger for it. I urge the Senate to vote to advance the bill tomorrow.

1/ grateful to @a16zcrypto for recognizing the importance of ensuring financial institutions can use/build on permissionless networks. The article published today gives a brief synopsis of the paper (&framework) @m_mosier_ @malekanoms (link ⬇️).

RT @zooko: Lattices strike back! Lattice Jolt itself sounds *very* promising, and this is a really enjoyable argumentative post by Justin T…

lattice > hash

The fastest and simplest zkVM just got: - post-quantum - 2-3x faster - shortest proofs of any post-quantum zkVM (under 100 KB today)

Can confirm! if you see this as your dream job, pls hit me up

".We writers can pontificate about what AI will do to the craft all we want. The reality is that most writing isn’t some artful monomyth. It just needs to work. Does it explain things clearly? Can readers trust it? Is someone — anyone — behind the wheel, making decisions here? In short, is the writing doing its job? The extent to which a human was involved will matter in some cases and not others. The nice thing about these questions is that they apply equally well to writing produced by a person, a model, or some increasingly entangled combination of the two. They’re also useful in industries like ours, where scams (often written by AI) and jargon (too often written by humans) can easily distract from realgoals and values"

very @drewcoffman coded

The “AI is killing taste” discourse has been bugging me, so I went back to some of my favorite social science research to try to understand what’s going on. Slop isn't new — Grub Street was cranking out paid doggerel in the 1700s, with echoes of the same kind of moral panic as today. The solution appeared as easy then as it does now: that magically knowing what’s good will save us. But that leads to the question: What do we actually mean by "taste"? It turns out to be at least three different things in one trench coat. So I drew on three strands of social science to disaggregate the idea: research on how cultural hits (songs, books, movies) are socially contingent, work on how and why network position matters when it comes to seeing new possibilities, and the case for apprenticeship as the basis for judgment. Where I landed: in the age of AI, the scarce resource isn't taste. It's the social infrastructure that produces the people we say have it.

One useful thing about AI detectors is they’ve made some old writing problems much easier to see. I wrote about AI “tells,” and what they can actually teach us about writing, which habits to fix, and how the better test is a question editors have always asked: is the writing doing its job?

Local minima are extremely rare in high dimensional spaces, so if you ever feel stuck in a rut it’s probably just because you aren’t considering a wide enough set of orthogonal options