It's an underappreciated triumph of Ethereum client developers that PeerDAS has now been running for nearly a year with basically no problems. PeerDAS was a complex task: it's the first large-scale instance of a blockchain that achieves consensus on the availability of data without needing any single node to download the entire block. Decentralized consensus without replication. And yet, it worked.

Glamsterdam will bring snap sync to the next level. With snap v2, the Block-level Access List, which is basically a state diff, is used to replace the traditional healing phase. The result, it becomes faster and simpler to sync a node. Clients are ready with Glamsterdam. Snycing has never been that smooth.

qwen3.8-flash-next ethereum client 100+ GB of local downloaded wikipedia + gutenberg + science articles what else? (Getting rid of the need for centralized pinning services in IPFS is definitely high up the prio list)

Note: you can repoint your wallet RPC to localhost, though make sure to set your node up so it functions as an RPC. However, many in-browser dapps will not work as effectively this way, and many others hardcoded their RPC to their own server. I am increasingly becoming a fan of avoiding browser dapps entirely and just doing everything by command line. Just did a full end-to-end test: updated my ENS record using a local python script reading and sending through my local node.

Reminder: you can now sync an ethereum node within half a day and with aggressive settings the space it takes up on disk can be under half a terabyte. EIP-4444 and hard work by client teams on optimizing snap sync has improved things *a lot*. Glamsterdam will improve the sync situation further still (eg. Nimbus's new sync protocol uses it)

HABEMUS TESTNET — DAISUGI v0.1 A post-quantum Ethereum testnet using hash-based SPHINCS signatures with non-native account abstraction. Big thanks to @riva_labs and @GiulioRebuffo. Coming next: • Frame Transactions • Signature aggregation via LeanSPHINCS Believe in somETHing. Link ⬇️

Glad to see that Ethereum L1 will have a new strong prediction market contender that is dedicated to decentralization, and being ethical and not corposlop, and to actually trying to do interesting and meaningful things with this class of economic primitive.

There continues to be a lot of quiet dissent against the regime, which expresses itself any time some kind of channel appears (in this case, the "election" taking place right now) (The goal is not to literally get Putin to politely step off his chair; the election is of course manipulated to hell on multiple levels, and even if he loses he will just ignore it. Rather, the realistic goal is to delegitimize the regime as much as possible, denying it the internal cohesion it needs to pursue the "total war" path so that it has no choice but to take the peace path)

The fact that Yabloko, Russia’s oldest liberal opposition party, is fielding 98 candidates in 42 regions feels like a small miracle for antiwar Russians whom restrictive laws have prevented from openly expressing their views. As wartime repression deepens, the country may not see such candidates on the ballot again. My report from Moscow, along with @PaulSonne

I dislike the recent trend of people who clearly continue to believe >80% of the core effective altruist beliefs disavow EA and say "oh we're definitely not that, we're [rebrand]" purely strategically, purely because they sense that dunking on EA is "cool" now. It's much more honorable to just come out and say "yes, that was our intellectual upbringing and those continue to be our core values, and also here are specific points where we disagree, and here's our argument for why we think for those specific points are the subset of EA that causes what you perceive to be the problem with the whole thing". And so with that I will say: Yes, effective altruism was a significant part of my intellectual upbringing and its core values of care for others, cosmopolitanism and rigor around effective resource allocation continue to be very important to me. And also here are specific points where I disagree with what I think is the subset of that style of thought that has backfired in the largest ways:

One small example of the core d/acc thesis (improving passive defensive technology improves safety and at the same time improves freedom and most other properties of social organization that we care about) is soundproof walls. We used to have much weaker soundproofing, and we had much more restrictive behavior rules, disputes (both inside families and between them), evictions, etc. Later, we solved that problem by making and deploying better walls, and now this is an issue that we all have to worry about much less. What are the "soundproof walls" of the 21st century that we have not yet built or sufficiently deployed?

Screenshots of the Philip Morris website. (reminder: they're a leading cigarette company) It's a good calibration point for how good modern marketing is at dressing up pretty much any corporate (or, for that matter, government) behavior and making it sound responsible and safe.