Let's build a formally verified compiler together Collaborative automated research can be an amazing tool for formal verification, and vice versa We're launching two new challenges on @paradigm Puzzles to help complete Solidus: a formally verified Solidity compiler in Lean 🧵

Talked with a few folks inside of AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic) about what they think of the future of software engineering. The “closer” to shipping production code engineers are, the less they believe software engineering will be “solved” fully by AI. The opposite true as well

NYS & California anti manufacturing (CNC, 3D printer, lathe, etc) legislation is the #1# defining legal/technical freedom issue in this political moment, IMO. even beyond AI control in Ukraine, open source drone designs and home manufacturing has played a critical part in the war effort. grassroots knowledge is currently turning the tides against a literal superpower that is willing to burn money and conscripted lives, in one of the most inspiring triumphs of human perseverance of the 2000s I am no manufacturer of firearms, but the right to make what you want and make your own choices about whether what you build is lawful rather than having it technically imposed on you, is a fundamental human right and the right to run open source software that bypasses local protections of your choice is also your right. this is already enshrined as speech, and there are decades of ideation on it without these inalienable technical rights, there is no society. they are core parts of numerous, disparate protections provided by our Bill of Rights this is before you even consider that policing home manufacturing requires mass surveillance and criminalization of open source software (in which protections can be trivially removed) and even open hardware (which can operate all of this machinery on a plug and play basis) if you cannot make your own stuff, you are at the mercy of those that can. more reliant on capitalism. weaker in a struggle. less decentralized. it is an enormous L to society, and a stain upon a state I am otherwise proud of that this managed to pass any kind of political process, mostly via lobbying and other forms of payola you have to ask yourself, why do these laws target equipment like 3d printers, which are not substitutes for gun mills and cannot produce functional pressure bearing parts? one answer is that it is harder to change federal serialization laws. but this seems to me akin to banning hands, because if there are no hands you cannot fire the gun instead of educating the youth on how to compete on a global scale, reminding New Yorkers how to make things, as a state littered with decaying factories that used to define their country. instead of taking back economic power. we cower in fear of a few un-serialized guns (that are already illegal), in a country where they outnumber people and that will never change I have been a New York resident all my life. I will never put state mandated software on any of my equipment. my printers, my CNC, my drills, nothing. I believe this is my right, to use the software I develop for the hardware I own. I will keep making things using open hardware and software, same as before the bill I believe I am a contributing member of society. but, you can come get me if you disagree, @KathyHochul, you have my address.

Support for opensource, privacy, sovereignty and censorship resistance is something really nice to see in the ethereum ecosystem. But please listen to someone who has created a company and a product around those values, has kept it going for 8+ years and has paid the consequences of building something that adheres to these values. Learn from my mistakes. I fear the way you are advertising these values, you are not reaching anybody new. You are preaching to the choir. The way I see you bang the drum for these values is only going to appeal to the people who are already strong believers in them. I don't see anyone trying to think of how to bring new people in and introduce them to these concepts, explain why they are good and incentivize them to use them. Incentives rule everything around us. "I will build cool things on Ethereum, the blessed world computer, or die trying" does not bring in new people. It makes us sound like a cult. It's offputting. Instead I want to see successful apps on and around ethereum using the right CROPS values and still succeeding in bringing in new people, incentivizing users and monetizing successfully so we can have a sustainable ecosystem. I want to see us mentor new people towards achieving them and creating such companies. I want to see you all thrive while building opensource apps. Not struggle for 2-3 years, burn out and leave and then be replaced by new zealots for our cult. It pains me to see people burn out by listening to well intended but otherwise completely dangerous advice on how to build products. And yes that will mean some compromises on the way because in the end that's the real world. And you are building apps for other people not only for yourself in your ivory tower. I will help and assist everyone who wants to build opensource, sovereign apps, privacy apps, CROPS or whatever cool kids call them nowadays as long as they are actually solving real problems and trying to get new users in. I want to see ethereum win. And I will do anything I can to see this come to fruition.

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.

i look at pure research with a bit of contempt. it's for people who don't get their hands dirty and don't want to take the risks of seeing their idea perform in production. you just spent years in an insulated ivory tower, while others have a live feedback loop collecting data in the trenches.