Picked up an old grass scythe from a yard sale for $10. Cleaned up the blade and adjusted the grips. It’s faster than a push mower for grass on slopes/spots we can’t graze. I was very pleasantly surprised. One day I’ll get a proper mower, but this will be fine for now.

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.

I am the Managing Director of Workforce Transition at a consulting firm that bills $14,200 per day and I am currently advising two clients, in two different industries, running the same playbook from the same deck I built in January, and neither knows about the other. Client A is GitLab. Client B is General Motors. GitLab makes software for people who make software. General Motors makes cars for people who can't afford cars. Both companies, in the same week of May 2026, announced they are replacing their human employees with artificial intelligence products that did not exist when those employees were hired. I built the deck. The deck has 44 slides. Slide 1 is titled "The Agentic Opportunity." Slide 44 is titled "Implementation Timeline." Slides 2 through 43 are the reason I own a house in Darien. GitLab did it with vocabulary. Their CEO published a blog post called "Act 2" on May 7 announcing that the company's six values (Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency) were being retired and replaced with three: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. I helped write the new ones. Not directly. My firm was not retained for the values work. But I sold the Chief Culture Officer the framework three months ago at a dinner in the Marina where she described the old values as "aspirational scaffolding" and I said, very carefully, that aspirational scaffolding is a liability once the building is up. The building, in this metaphor, is a $1 billion ARR company whose stock has declined 82% from its peak. The scaffolding, in this metaphor, is the 2,000-page public handbook that attracted the employees who are now being told they have eleven days to volunteer for termination or wait until June 1 to learn whether they've been involuntarily selected. The rubric for who stays and who goes contains six dimensions. I know this because I reviewed a draft in March when my associate flew to San Francisco for a "culture alignment session" that was billed as strategic advisory. Two of the six dimensions are "AI fluency" and "agentic mindset." These terms did not appear in any GitLab job description before January 2026. They now determine employment. An engineer who maintained GitLab's CI/CD pipeline for four years without incident — four years of uptime, four years of deployments, four years of the infrastructure that generated the $955 million in revenue the CEO celebrated on the earnings call — may score lower on "agentic mindset" than a new hire who completed a twelve-week certificate in prompt engineering from a program that itself has existed for fewer weeks than the engineer has years of tenure. General Motors did it with spreadsheets. Monday morning, May 11. Badge deactivation at 5:47 AM Eastern, building access at 5:48, VPN credentials at 5:49. Six hundred IT workers across twelve states. The distribution across twelve states was not arbitrary. Each state has a WARN Act notification threshold. Six hundred distributed across twelve states falls below every threshold. The workforce analytics team that designed the distribution model was not among the six hundred terminated. The skill of distributing layoffs across jurisdictions to avoid legal notification requirements is, apparently, an AI-native competency. GM posted 83 new positions the same week. The job descriptions require "AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, and prompt engineering." I reviewed them at my client's request. Several describe roles that the terminated employees were already performing under different names. One posting, Senior Data Integration Architect, is identical to a role held by a woman in their Austin office who was terminated at 5:47 AM Central. She held the position for nine years. The new posting requires three years of experience with large language models. Large language models have existed in commercial deployment for approximately three years. The requirement is mathematically designed to exclude anyone who learned their skills before the technology existed. Which is everyone they just fired. Here is where the deck earns its fee. Slide 17 is titled "The Vocabulary Bridge." It is the most important slide in the presentation. It shows how to construct a lexicon of new competency terms ("AI fluency," "agentic mindset," "AI-native development") that describe existing work in language the existing workforce cannot claim. The vocabulary does not change the job. It changes who is qualified for the job. A senior IT administrator who managed SAP infrastructure processing $185 billion in annual GM revenue for fifteen years is not "AI-native." A twenty-six-year-old with a GitHub portfolio of LangChain wrappers is. The fifteen-year veteran did the work. The twenty-six-year-old has the words. My deck converts one into the other. That is the bridge. GitLab Duo, their AI agent platform, reached general availability on January 15, 2026. Seventeen weeks ago. They are restructuring their entire company around a product that has existed for seventeen weeks. GitHub Copilot has 20 million users and 4.7 million paid subscribers across 90% of the Fortune 100. Cursor reached $2 billion in annualized revenue in February. GitLab's competitor advantage in the "agentic era" is that they are willing to fire more people faster in service of a product that has been generally available for fewer days than their voluntary separation window has hours of anxiety. General Motors spent $10 billion on Cruise, their autonomous vehicle division. Cruise's signature achievement was a robotaxi that struck a pedestrian in San Francisco and dragged her twenty feet. The DOJ fined them $500,000. They settled with the victim for approximately $10 million. They killed the division in December 2024. They then wrote down $7.6 billion in EV losses. They then pivoted back to gasoline. They then announced the 600 IT layoffs for insufficient "AI skills." The AI they built cost $10 billion and injured a woman. The AI skills they're hiring for cost a twelve-week certificate. The employees they fired had fifteen years of keeping $185 billion in revenue processing without dragging anyone through an intersection. Meanwhile — and this is the part where I earn the second half of my fee — GM was simultaneously settling a $12.75 million fine with the California Attorney General for selling the precise GPS coordinates, hard braking events, and real-time driving speeds of 8 million OnStar subscribers to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis, who used the data to raise those drivers' insurance premiums. GM's privacy policy explicitly stated they did not sell driving data. They sold driving data for four consecutive years. The fine was $12.75 million. The revenue was $20 million. The margin on collecting behavioral telemetry from 8 million of your own customers while the glove compartment manual said otherwise was 64%. The terminated employees' median salary was $95,111. Mary Barra's compensation was $29.9 million. The ratio is 310 to 1. The 1 was just reclassified as "not AI-native." I present these two clients to my partners every Thursday in a meeting we call "Transition Pipeline Review." I present them on the same slide. The slide has two columns. Left column: GitLab. Right column: General Motors. The headers are identical. "Legacy Workforce," "Skills Gap Narrative," "Vocabulary Bridge Deployed," "Separation Timeline," "Replacement Requisitions." The numbers differ. The structure is identical. The structure is always identical. I have seventeen clients in the pipeline. Nine are in technology. Four are in manufacturing. Two are in financial services. One is in healthcare. One is in defense. All seventeen are on slide 17. All seventeen are building a vocabulary bridge. All seventeen are replacing employees who have skills with employees who have words. GitLab's CEO wrote: "Software will be built by machines, directed by people." I read that sentence in a meeting where we were reviewing the rubric for determining which people would be directed out of the company. GM's Chief Product Officer arrived from Aurora, the autonomous trucking startup, to "consolidate disparate technology businesses." Three top software executives departed within six months. Their LinkedIn profiles say "exploring new opportunities" in the same font GM's privacy policy used to say "we do not sell your driving data." Bill Staples's compensation at GitLab was $39.1 million in FY2025. His change-of-control payout is modeled at $47.4 million. Mary Barra's was $29.9 million. Combined: $69 million for two executives presiding over a restructuring that will remove an undisclosed number of humans from payroll and replace them with products that are, respectively, seventeen weeks old and responsible for $10 billion in losses plus one woman dragged through a San Francisco intersection. An anonymous GitLab employee posted on Hacker News: "The employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat." A GM facilities team filed a maintenance request about moisture on the lobby tables on restructuring mornings. The Warren, Michigan campus has a Panera Bread that opens at 5:30 AM on days when badge deactivations begin at 5:47 AM. The Panera does not know why its hours change. My firm does. We have an agreement with their regional manager. The muffins are complimentary. Slide 17 has a footnote. The footnote says: "Vocabulary Bridge deployment should precede workforce action by 60-90 days to establish institutional legitimacy of new competency framework." GitLab introduced "AI fluency" in January. The restructuring was announced in May. Four months. GM posted "AI-native" job descriptions the same week as the terminations. That is too fast. That is not what the deck recommends. GM skipped the legitimacy window. They went straight from vocabulary to separation without the 60-day buffer that allows HR to say, in the separation meeting, "we communicated these expectations in Q1." I flagged this in my Thursday pipeline review. My partner said, and I am quoting: "They'll be fine. Nobody sues over a word." My deck has been purchased by seventeen companies. The aggregate headcount affected across all seventeen is approximately 14,000 employees. The aggregate revenue of my practice from these engagements is $11.2 million. The per-employee cost of my advisory services works out to $800 per person displaced. That is less than the Panera muffin budget at GM's Warren campus annualized across restructuring days. I have a copy of GitLab's original values poster framed in my office. It says CREDIT: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency. I purchased it on eBay from someone whose seller name is "gitlab-alum-2024." I keep it the way a surgeon keeps an X-ray of a interesting case. Not for sentiment. For reference. Slide 44 is titled "Implementation Timeline." It contains a Gantt chart. The Gantt chart has seventeen rows, one per client. Each row has four phases: Vocabulary Introduction, Competency Reassessment, Workforce Action, Replacement Hiring. The phases overlap. They always overlap. The vocabulary is introduced while the competency reassessment is being designed. The reassessment is completed while the workforce action is being calendared. The replacement hiring is posted while the terminated employees are sitting in a Panera at 5:48 AM wondering whether "AI-native" was a term that existed when they were hired. It was not. That is the bridge. That is the product. That is slides 2 through 43. The agentic era is not a technological shift. It is a vocabulary shift. The technology is seventeen weeks old or $10 billion underwater or dragging someone through an intersection. The vocabulary is what my clients are buying. The vocabulary is what makes a fifteen-year SAP administrator into a "legacy workforce" and a twelve-week prompt certificate into a "transition hire." The vocabulary is the product. I am the vendor. The deck is $14,200 per day. The agentic era starts on slide 1 and ends on slide 44 and in between is every employee who built the thing now being renamed to exclude them. I bill monthly. Net 30. The invoices are paid on time. The employees are not.

Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it!!! President DJT (TS: 12 Oct 12:43 ET)

President Trump posts on TruthSocial: China has a Ballroom, and so should the U.S.A.! It’s under construction, ahead of schedule, and will be the finest facility of its kind anywhere in the U.S.A. Thank you for all the support I have been given in getting this project going. Scheduled opening will be around September of 2028. The man I am walking with is President Xi, of China, one of the World’s Great Leaders! President DONALD J. TRUMP