President Trump posts on TruthSocial: I “Love” Justice Neil Gorsuch! He’s a really smart and good man, but he voted against me, and our Country, on Tariffs, a devastating move. How do I reconcile this? So bad, and hurtful to our Country. I have, likewise, always liked and respected Amy Coney Barrett, but the same thing with her. They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly! I do not believe they meant to do so, but their decision on Tariffs cost the United States 159 Billion Dollars that we have to pay back to enemies, and people, companies, and Countries, that have been ripping us off for years. It’s hardly believable! They could have solved that situation with a “tiny” sentence, “Any money paid by others to the United States does not have to be paid back.” Why wouldn’t they have done so? With certain Republican Nominated Justices that we have on the Supreme Court, the Democrats don’t really need to “PACK THE COURT” any longer. In fact, I should be the one wanting to PACK THE COURT! I’m working so hard to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and then people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people. What is the reason for this? They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to “almost” the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Democrat Justices always remain true to the people that honored them for that very special Nomination. They don’t waver, no matter how good or bad a case may be, but Republican Justices often go out of their way to oppose me, because they want to show how “independent” or, “above it all,” they are. I got elected in a Landslide, including winning the Popular Vote, all seven Swing States, an Electoral College “clobbering,” and all U.S. Counties, by 86%, 2,750 to 525. I choose people to help our Country, not to hurt it, and now, based on what I witnessed recently by being the first President in History to attend a Supreme Court session (Which fact was not even recognized or acknowledged, out of respect for the position of President, by the Court — Something which did not go unnoticed by the Fake News Media!), they will be ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship, making us the only Country in the World that practices this unsustainable, unsafe, and incredibly costly DISASTER. I don’t want loyalty, but I do want and expect it for our Country. Yes, I have another way of doing Tariffs, but it is far slower, and more laborious than what was just determined, in a close decision, to be “illegal” or “unconstitutional,” with three powerful, and highly accurate, dissents! Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!! Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide. A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America! President DONALD J. TRUMP

I “Love” Justice Neil Gorsuch! He’s a really smart and good man, but he voted against me, and our Country, on Tariffs, a devastating move. How do I reconcile this? So bad, and hurtful to our Country. I have, likewise, always liked and respected Amy Coney Barrett, but the same thing with her. They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly! I do not believe they meant to do so, but their decision on Tariffs cost the United States 159 Billion Dollars that we have to pay back to enemies, and people, companies, and Countries, that have been ripping us off for years. It’s hardly believable! They could have solved that situation with a “tiny” sentence, “Any money paid by others to the United States does not have to be paid back.” Why wouldn’t they have done so? With certain Republican Nominated Justices that we have on the Supreme Court, the Democrats don’t really need to “PACK THE COURT” any longer. In fact, I should be the one wanting to PACK THE COURT! I’m working so hard to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and then people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people. What is the reason for this? They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to “almost” the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Democrat Justices always remain true to the people that honored them for that very special Nomination. They don’t waver, no matter how good or bad a case may be, but Republican Justices often go out of their way to oppose me, because they want to show how “independent” or, “above it all,” they are. I got elected in a Landslide, including winning the Popular Vote, all seven Swing States, an Electoral College “clobbering,” and all U.S. Counties, by 86%, 2,750 to 525. I choose people to help our Country, not to hurt it, and now, based on what I witnessed recently by being the first President in History to attend a Supreme Court session (Which fact was not even recognized or acknowledged, out of respect for the position of President, by the Court — Something which did not go unnoticed by the Fake News Media!), they will be ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship, making us the only Country in the World that practices this unsustainable, unsafe, and incredibly costly DISASTER. I don’t want loyalty, but I do want and expect it for our Country. Yes, I have another way of doing Tariffs, but it is far slower, and more laborious than what was just determined, in a close decision, to be “illegal” or “unconstitutional,” with three powerful, and highly accurate, dissents! Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!! Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide. A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America! President DONALD J. TRUMP ( TruthSocial: May 10 2026, 6:34 PM ET )

I am the VP of Workforce Strategy at Meta and I built a spreadsheet called the Replacement Ratio that is, without exaggeration, the most elegant financial instrument in this building. Column A is headcount. Column B is quarterly CapEx allocation. Column C is what I call the Narrative Yield — how much each layoff announcement moves our price-to-earnings multiple. At Meta, cutting 8,000 people generates approximately 2.3x more shareholder value as a story than the $27 billion those people actually cost us. Like a controlled demolition where the dust cloud is worth more than the building ever was. I discovered this by accident in November 2022. We announced the first round on a Thursday. 11,000 people. The stock jumped 4% before market close. Our share price was $90 that week. I pulled up the actual savings — roughly $2.3 billion in annual compensation — and compared them to the market cap movement and the ratio was so disproportionate I thought I'd made an error. I had not made an error. I had discovered the Narrative Yield. The announcement IS the product. The terminations are just the input cost of producing it. Then Mark sent the second memo in March 2023. 10,000 more. "Flatter is faster," he wrote. "Leaner is better." "Keep technology the main thing." My team built talking points around each phrase. I remember testing "returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles" and watching three analysts independently upgrade the stock within 48 hours. Not because the ratio mattered. Because the sentence contained the word "optimal" and the word "ratio" and both of those words trigger the part of an analyst's brain that releases dopamine. We cut 21,000 people total. Our stock went from $90 to $600. Mark's net worth grew by approximately $170 billion. That is $9 million per fired employee. I calculated that number on a Tuesday afternoon and then went to get a coffee from the espresso bar in Building 40 that still operates at full capacity. The barista's name is Diego. He makes a very good cortado. He was not in any of the rounds. Our entire global payroll is $27 billion. Every engineer, every content moderator, every cafeteria worker who restocks the oat milk refrigerator in Building 21 next to the motivational poster that says EFFICIENCY IS CARING in Helvetica Bold, which was printed four days before we eliminated the internal print shop. All of them. $27 billion. Our CapEx guidance this year is $60 to $65 billion. Susan Li said it on the call in January — two weeks after we announced the latest round. The combined Big Four spend is $350 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025. Up from $165 billion just two years ago. If I fired every single employee tomorrow, all 72,000, the savings would cover maybe 42% of one year's data center buildout. The humans are a rounding error in the budget of machines that replace them. So what are the layoffs paying for? They are paying for the sentence. The one Susan Li reads on the earnings call: "These actions help us move more quickly while also helping to offset the substantial investments." That sentence is worth $40 billion in market cap. I know because I A/B tested the language with investor relations in March. We tested seven versions. Version C outperformed Version A by 340 basis points. Version C is the one with "actions" instead of "terminations." Version F used "workforce adjustments" and tested even higher but Legal flagged it as too close to the phrasing in the severance agreements. So we went with C. Turns out the market doesn't mind what you do. It minds what you call it. We call it a lot of things. "Flattening the org." "Removing redundancies." "Focusing our investments on our highest priorities." "Raising the bar on performance management." That last one was January 2025. Mark's memo. 3,600 people. He called them "lowest performers." The memo went out on January 14th. The earnings call announcing $60-65 billion in spending went out on January 29th. Fifteen days. My team scheduled both. The proximity is not accidental. You announce the human cost first so that when you announce the machine cost, the narrative is "disciplined" rather than "reckless." Sequencing is everything. We tested the reverse order once, hypothetically, in a simulation. The model predicted a 2.1% stock dip. Discipline first. Ambition second. Always. The performance framing was my suggestion. If you call them layoffs, it triggers severance obligations and unemployment benefits in thirty-seven states. If you call them performance-based terminations, it triggers nothing. Same people. Same desks cleared. Same badge deactivated at 5 AM before they woke up. Different word. Different $180 million in severance liability. I keep a legal pad in my desk where I track the savings per euphemism. "Performance management" saves approximately $50,000 per head in reduced severance. At 3,600 heads, that is $180 million. The cost of drafting the memo was forty minutes of Mark's time and sixteen hours of my team's time. That is approximately the best ROI in the history of corporate communications. Better than the Narrative Yield itself. Each phrase tests differently with different analyst cohorts. Growth-focused analysts respond to "investing in AI." Value analysts respond to "disciplined cost management." Same 8,000 people. Different sentence. Different $40 billion. The notification protocol is standardized now. Laptop access revoked at 5:47 AM Pacific. Badge deactivated at 5:48. Slack channels disappear at 5:49. Calendar cleared at 5:50. Personal email notification sent at 6:00. The thirteen-minute gap between systems going dark and the employee being told why is not cruelty. It is security protocol. We cannot have 3,600 people with simultaneous access to internal systems and knowledge that they have been terminated. The window for sabotage is too wide. So we close the window first and explain later. Some of them find out from the press release. Some of them find out because their phone loses work email at 5:47 and they check Twitter. I do not love this part. But I respect the engineering of it. Thirteen minutes. Clean. We announced the January cuts the same week Mark said "people will be more important than ever." My team wrote both statements. There is no contradiction if you understand that "people" and "headcount" are different financial instruments. People are the future. Headcount is the cost of having had a past. I keep a framed printout of both quotes side by side on my office wall. Not as irony. As a reminder that language is architecture. Meanwhile: we spent $77.86 billion buying back our own stock between 2022 and 2024. $27.96 billion. $19.77 billion. $30.13 billion. Each buyback inflates the share price. Each share price increase makes the layoff announcement look more justified in retrospect. The stock went up because we cut. We used the cash from cutting to buy back stock. The buyback made the stock go up more. The stock going up proved the cuts were correct. I mapped this loop on a whiteboard in January 2024 and one of our financial planning analysts took a photo of it and made it her laptop wallpaper. The total severance bill for 21,000 employees was approximately $2.5 billion. We spent 31 times that amount buying back stock. The humans cost less to remove than the stock cost to inflate. That is not a metaphor. That is the actual ratio. I have it in Column E. Reality Labs lost $60 billion between 2020 and 2024. Sixteen billion in 2023 alone. It was never subjected to the "Year of Efficiency." No one asked the metaverse division to be leaner or flatter or faster. The humans were asked to be efficient so the machines could be profligate. I did not design this asymmetry. I just maintain the spreadsheet that tracks it. The rehire pipeline is my favorite part. Half those roles reopen in Hyderabad and São Paulo within nine months at 31% of the loaded cost. Revenue per remaining employee went from $1.3 million in 2022 to $2.7 million in 2024. Each survivor now generates more than double what their predecessor generated. Not because they work harder. Because the denominator shrank and the numerator — AI-driven ad revenue — grew independently of human effort. We call it geographic rebalancing. The Workforce Transitions team keeps a Lucite tombstone on their shelf from the 2023 round, 11,000 MANAGED DEPARTURES etched in Helvetica, right next to a half-empty bottle of Clase Azul someone brought back from the offsite in Cabo where we planned the 2024 round. The same team is hosting a culture workshop next month called "Our People, Our Purpose." I wrote the talking points. Amazon is doing 30,000. Intel cut 21,000. Microsoft invented "voluntary departures" for 125,000 people, which is the most inspired euphemism since "rightsizing," because it implies the 125,000 chose this. Google cut 12,000 and called it a "moment of clarity." Salesforce eliminated 4,000 customer support roles and cited AI directly. Combined across the industry: 644,000 tech workers laid off since 2023. Combined CapEx on AI infrastructure: $350 billion this year alone. They spent seven to ten times more on GPUs than on severance for the humans those GPUs replaced. The layoffs are the press release for the spending. The spending is the excuse for the layoffs. It is a perpetual motion machine that runs on the difference between what a person costs and what their departure is worth. The free food budget for remaining employees is approximately $800 million per year. $10,000 to $12,000 per person. Artisanal pizza. Sushi bar. Pour-over coffee stations. The campus amenities operated without interruption during every round. Nobody asked the cafeteria to be efficient. I eat lunch there every day. It is very good. The oat milk is organic. Column D is the one I'm most proud of. It tracks average severance duration against local unemployment rates and cross-references media coverage density by market to optimize announcement timing for minimal news cycle disruption. January announcements get buried in earnings season. September announcements get lost in back-to-school cycles. I have mapped every dead zone in the American attention span and they are all on my calendar. January 14th — two weeks before Super Bowl coverage saturates every newsroom — was not an accident. The 3,600 number was calculated to stay below the threshold that triggers a WARN Act filing in California. 3,600 across twelve states. Below the threshold in each. That was also Column D. I presented the Replacement Ratio at our Q2 planning offsite last Tuesday. Someone from Legal asked if we'd modeled the human impact. I said yes. Column D. That's what Column D is. They promoted the spreadsheet to a standing dashboard. It refreshes hourly. Net income last year was $62.4 billion. Headcount is 72,000. The dashboard calculates revenue per head in real time. Every departure makes the number go up. Every departure makes the announcement worth more. Every announcement makes the stock go up. Every stock increase makes Mark $4.7 billion richer per percentage point. I named the Slack channel #narrative-yield#. It has 340 members. None of them are in Column A.

MiMo-V2.6: The Hard Road to Scaling Up RL MiMo-V2.6 is very likely one of the largest single RL runs, by compute, that any open-source model team has undertaken to date. In an era when compute is brutally scarce, we still chose to dedicate a team of several dozen people to one goal over an extended period: scaling up RL. That takes more than research conviction. It takes a vision for AGI, respect for the unknown, and the nerve to walk straight into the hardest problems. The result is a model whose potential was built through mid-training and unlocked through heavy RL. Today, it is the number one open-source model. I strongly recommend reading the technical report. I believe it will become one of those papers that Agent RL practitioners keep reopening and discovering something new in each time. In my view, the research innovations and engineering challenges behind it surpass those of DeepSeek R1, which I was partly involved in. Some will ask: why MixRL instead of MOPD? First, they are not competing choices. We ran MixRL on verifiable tasks of moderate difficulty, including code and related agentic tasks, and found that the resulting models generalize remarkably well. Second, tasks that are difficult to verify, extremely long-horizon, or simply too challenging to include in a joint RL run are trained separately. Including them would substantially reduce rollout efficiency or introduce significant rollout staleness. We then merge the resulting capabilities through MOPD. Games, 3D tasks, and tasks with subjective evaluation signals all fall into this category. There is also a third, slightly cheeky answer. Our team is flat enough and free enough of organizational silos that MixRL simply is not difficult for us. More importantly, everyone enjoys working this way. People from different domains come together every day, driven by the pursuit of AGI and intelligence that can continuously improve itself, to confront and resolve the RL bottlenecks in each field. I will always remember the RL daily update meetings from this period. They were intense and dense, with intelligence emerging in real time. To help the open-source community focus on solving real Agentic RL problems, we have released a Qwen model distilled from MiMo RL trajectories as a stronger starting point for RL, along with 7K diverse environments and a complete RL training framework. We hope these resources will help move Agentic RL research forward. MiMo-V2.6 is only the beginning. In an era when intelligence is easy to replicate, we still choose the hard road toward self-improvement and AGI. Much of what lies ahead remains unknown. But we are willing to keep investing the time, compute, and passion required to take on one hard problem after another and work each of them all the way through, until intelligence crosses into a new regime.

Voice of the Baylor Bears, John Morris joined us @espnthefan to discuss the following: Q: John Morris is with us. John, how are you? John Morris: Very good. Great, thanks. Media Days are fun. They kind of get you thinking about football, don't they? Q: Football is right around the corner. BYU has been part of the Big 12 for a few years now. Looking back, what has stood out to you about BYU joining the conference? Morris: I love it. Baylor actually played BYU the year before they officially joined the Big 12. It was our homecoming game in Waco, and it was just fabulous. It was October, the weather was perfect, Baylor and BYU are such like-minded schools, and your university president even walked in our homecoming parade. Baylor won the game, which made it even better from our perspective, but it was a really cool experience knowing BYU was about to become part of the conference. Q: I've always felt that culturally, academically, and even from a faith-based standpoint, BYU fit the Big 12 much better than it would have fit the Pac-12. If BYU was going to join a Power conference, I don't think there was a better fit. Morris: I completely agree. It really has been a perfect marriage. And now look at what BYU has done. They had a tremendous season last year. I think they probably should have been in the College Football Playoff, and I expect them to have another really good season this year. Q: Expectations are certainly high for BYU, but football is still a game of attrition. I think the biggest questions are backup quarterback, replacing production at wide receiver, and breaking in a new defensive coordinator. Even with those questions, though, the program feels incredibly stable under Kalani Sitake. Morris: Absolutely. Every team worries about the backup quarterback position. Our head coach, Dave Aranda, has tremendous respect for Kalani Sitake. They coached together at Southern Utah, and I think, in a perfect world, those two would love nothing more than sitting in a film room together breaking down tape. Coach Aranda has great respect for Kalani, and I know that respect is mutual. We're excited to come to Provo later this season. Q: If Baylor fans decide they don't want Dave Aranda after this season, I think BYU would gladly take him as a defensive coordinator. Morris: (Laughs.) We hope to keep him. Q: Dave Aranda enters an important season. Baylor won the Big 12 and the Sugar Bowl in 2021, but the program hasn't returned to that level since. Last season ended 5-7. How would you describe the current state of Baylor football? Morris: It's a key year for Dave, and he knows that better than anyone. The 2021 season was the best in Baylor football history. We won the Big 12 Championship, finished 12-2, and beat Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl. Since then, we haven't gotten back to that level. Last year we went 5-7. Injuries were a factor, and we lost several one-score games, but at the end of the day, 5-7 isn't where Baylor expects to be. Photo Credit: Baylor Lariat Link to Full Interview:

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going. First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want. The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?" Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain. As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain. One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan. My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it. Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism. This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate. Now how does this all get to the role of the EF? EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter. This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward. And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally. This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself) EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects). At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting. To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose. I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like: * Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this. * Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash. * Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future. Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%. Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations. The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support. EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

A heads up/reminder LEXI is exclusive to our production! LEXI does not shoot content on her own! Going around my back to contact her always results in me finding out. So if you want a clip with her, make sure you respect our partnership.

I have a lot of respect for Erin Simpson and @anduriltech's position: that the company will not continue manufacturing the FQ-44 Fury under the CCA program without Congress doing its job and passing an actual budget on time (something they've failed to do since 1996). Sellers need buyer dollars to operate - not a crazy proposition In the words of Ms. Simpson: “What we communicate to the Air Force is that we have invested and have gone as far as we can... we will not have a cold start to production in 2027. We will have assets rolling through. That said, even a company like ours can only do so much without procurement dollars.” Western capital markets are solving America's many defense deficiencies, investing $10Bs in its industrial base, and, as always, negligent U.S. politicians, bureaucrats, and antiquated processes are blocking legitimate progress. D.C. is demanding venture capitalist, allocators, and operators shoulder all the risk, to the tune of $170B+ of investment since 2017 (when Anduril was founded), without any semblance of buyer guarantees. Perhaps this isn't surprising. Congress thrives on opacity, inertia, and disequilibriums. What our Senators and House Reps don't comprehend is that this is a material moment in time that will not again come about if D.C. fails to reciprocate in a market mired by regulatory capture and rent-seeking. Streamlining procurement is a no-brainer. Buyer and seller are perfectly aligned. Product-market-fit has never been this obvious. I hope more neo-primes and companies of consequence / influence take this same stance: no further internal investment until revenue recognition is clear and confirmed. Not confident Congress will solve this glaring issue. I'm sure we get another CR. But for the sake of America, one can hope.