A 14-year-old boy followed a girl into a shop and repeatedly st*bbed her because she refused to date him. When he appeared before a judge, the court heard about his potential, his intelligence, and the importance of protecting his future. The judge called him a “bright lad.” But there was another 14-year-old in this case. A girl whose future had already been profoundly changed by what he did to her. In March 2026, the girl was attacked in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, after rejecting the advances of a boy from her school. He had become obsessed with her. After she turned him down, he created fake social media accounts to continue contacting her. On the morning of the attack, he approached her again and asked her out. She refused. He followed her into a shop carrying a six-inch kitchen knife. What happened next was captured on CCTV. He chased her through the shop and stabbed her repeatedly, inflicting wounds to her neck, hands and face. A shopkeeper who tried to intervene was also injured. Police said the girl was extremely fortunate to survive. A slightly different wound could have killed her. The boy admitted serious offences, including wounding with intent and carrying a knife. He spent approximately three months in a secure youth facility before being released on bail. At sentencing in September, Judge Ian Lawrie said custody was the last place he should be. He wanted to construct a sentence that would provide support and rehabilitation. The boy received a 12-month referral order and a three-year restraining order. Then came the girl’s victim statement. She described flinching whenever someone raised a hand near her. She spoke of nightmares, fear, and the loss of the independence she once enjoyed. She was now being driven to work because she was frightened to go outside alone. She was also 14. Youth justice should recognize that children can change. Rehabilitation is important, and a child’s age must matter. But the girl is a child too. Her mother said the family felt failed by the justice system. Parents whose daughters had been killed by former partners also condemned the sentence. A judge saw a boy with a future worth protecting. The girl he attacked is still trying to recover the ordinary freedoms she had before he picked up that knife.

I sat down with Hut 8 CEO @ashergenoot to discuss how he built a $12 billion company by embracing AI data centers and bitcoin mining. This conversation is packed with unique, nuanced insights into an industry that everyone is obsessed with right now. Enjoy! YouTube: Apple: Spotify: TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:45 - Bitcoin mining to AI: the transition 3:09 - Data centers & community pushback 8:52 - Co-location & energy campuses 11:42 - Mega sites vs. smaller urban campuses 13:08 - Hardware innovation inside the data center 17:15 - How Hut 8 lands billion-dollar contracts 20:01 - The River Bend financing structure 24:19 - Build vs. acquire strategy 25:18 - Bottlenecks slowing AI buildout 27:36 - What keeps Asher up at night 30:40 - American Bitcoin update $HUT

Ditch LinkedIn. I compiled all the possible (free) guides you need to catch up with AI: 1. Claude certificate: 2. Claude For Dummies: 3. Stop wasting tokens: 4. Claude is stupid simple: 5. Set up Claude: 6. Switch to Claude: 7. Claude for Work: 8. Claude Skills: 9. Privacy with AI: 10. Prompting Opus 5.5: 11. Deslop Claude: 12. Never ask AI for taste: 13. Claude Motion & Dashboards: 14. AI bubble-burst: 15. What is Jev?: 16. GPC & GPT: 17. Master AI in 23 mins: 18. AI Brain Rot: 19. My free AI tool stack: 20. I hate AI agents: Reading about AI is not using AI. Watching a YouTube video is not using AI. Close LinkedIn. Open Claude. Try one tough task. I am obsessed with making you disgustingly good at AI. No matter whether it is Claude, ChatGPT, or other AI. The only thing that matters is you being best at the work you do and care about. That's what I care about. That's the only reason why I write my free newsletter every week, twice:

I see a lot of people criticizing the new Tesla Roadster. “Who cares? Nobody can afford it.” “Only a handful of people will ever get to drive one.” “Tesla probably won’t deliver on half the promises anyway.” And you know what? I don’t care. You’re missing the entire point. Will I ever be able to afford a Roadster? Not unless I hit the lottery. Will I ever get to drive one? Extremely unlikely. But that’s not the point. It gives me something to DREAM about. I feel like a lot of the Tesla community has forgotten where we came from. When I first got into Tesla, the community was full of CAR PEOPLE. Sure, we loved the technology, the efficiency, and the environmental benefits. Those things were awesome. But at the end of the day, we were obsessed with the fact that these were freaking AWESOME CARS. Remember the early Model S days? YouTube was absolutely flooded with videos of people experiencing Tesla acceleration for the first time. Passengers screaming. Supercars getting embarrassed. People genuinely unable to comprehend how a big electric sedan could accelerate like that. Those videos were RIVETING. You couldn’t stop watching. It was exciting. It was something we’d never seen before. It made you wonder what could possibly come next. Somewhere along the way, I feel like we lost a little bit of that excitement. Everything became about software, autonomy, AI, stock prices, and quarterly numbers. And don’t get me wrong, that stuff matters. But I’m still a car guy. And the new Roadster represents everything that made me fall in love with cars in the first place. It’s the kind of machine that makes a kid stop in their tracks and stare. The kind of car you hang a poster of on your bedroom wall knowing full well you’ll probably never own one. It’s about pushing boundaries. Doing things people thought were impossible. Building something so outrageous that it captures people’s imaginations. Will Tesla deliver on every ridiculous claim? Maybe not. Will it be affordable? Absolutely not. Will it be practical? Who cares?! Not every car needs to be practical, affordable, or accessible to everyone to be worth getting excited about. Sometimes a car just needs to make you say, “HOLY SHIT.” That’s what the Roadster is to me. So no, I’ll probably never own one. I’ll probably never even sit behind the wheel of one. But by God, I’m going to enjoy every second of watching this thing develop, watching it perform, and seeing just how far Tesla can push the limits. Because sometimes it’s not about what you can own. It’s about what you can dream of. And I think the car community could use a little more of that. 🏎️⚡

Real-world problems can’t be vibecoded. When it comes to AI companies, the tech doesn’t have an impact without the services built around it. We at @Felicis invested in a healthcare delivery platform, @joinadaptive, that understands this priority. They’re obsessed with solving the problem of how home health is delivered to patients. Companies can’t just rely on their tech alone without going the last mile. I discussed this on the More Or Less Pod hosted by @lessin, joined by friends @wolfejosh, @RachelJHolt, @scottbelsky, @SAStanford Check out the full podcast on YouTube:

Spent all day setting up and building with my 3D printer and wow I’m obsessed. I cannot believe how frontier models like GPT-6 and Opus 5.5 have completely removed the learning curve. You can just ideate and build stuff. I even downloaded Bambu studio on my Dots VM. Posting a video on my blog YouTube channel in an hour.

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder. On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures. But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first! As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise. Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours. Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure. Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice! The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :) Part 2: neutral atoms and qday The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers. Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low. Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts. My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom". Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions. So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030. Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years. Part 3: post-quantum cryptography There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation. These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer. The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security. Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

Obsessed with the psychological concept of "glimmers"; those quiet, fleeting seconds of absolute peace. The smell of rain, a warm cup of coffee, your dog sighing in their sleep. They are proof that magic exists in the mundane. What was your glimmer today?

Obsessed with Silver Palace's music lately and listening to it nonstop, especially the opening where you choose between Hugin or Munin as your MC. Hugin's voice is soooo!! 😳 This game is honestly so good, the 10 hour beta had me hooked- PLEASE GIVE IT A TRY WHEN IT RELEASES🥴