New podcast episode with Allison Duettmann (@allisondman), the CEO of the Foresight Institute (@foresightinst). Foresight has spent the past 40 years backing frontier science too early or too interdisciplinary for legacy institutions. Foresight has helped inspire and organize 10,000+ scientists, technologists, philanthropists, investors, students, thinkers, pioneers, and dreamers, including the early 2000s space community where @elonmusk and @FutureJurvetson discussed the importance of commercial space and reusable rockets. Foresight’s Feynman Prize went to Fraser Stoddart and David Baker 9 and 20 years before each won a Nobel. Today, Foresight is one of the main communities where neurotech pioneers gather and explore the frontiers of BCI, connectomics, simulations, and uploading. Allison also founded the Existential Hope movement, rooted on the conviction that we must imagine flourishing futures — in the tradition of ambitious science & sci-fi — as a precondition for building them. She is one of the best people thinking deeply about the future, coordinating humanity to imagine and achieve good outcomes, and working to accelerate the technologies and adoption that will get us there. We go deep into all of that in this episode: how neurotech could let us connect far more directly than language allows; how BCIs are meaningfully improving people’s lives today; why connectomics and whole-brain emulation can keep humans compatible with Superintelligent AI; why uploading can give us a path to exploring ourselves and living vastly richer and more fulfilling lives than a single ~80 year narrative arc allows; the amazing possibility of living billions of years; and how nanotechnology could reshape the physical world, address our sustainability and energy challenges, and build the infrastructure to lift us off planet and explore the universe. This is a ton and goes to show how deeply and broadly Allison thinks. I’m very excited to have her on the podcast, as I think she explains things clearly and bridges huge divides with care, vision, and rigor. Hope you enjoy! Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:25 What is Existential Hope? 00:04:06 Visions of the future: nanotech, longevity, neurotech, AI 00:08:04 From existential risk to building better futures 00:16:15 How far away is nanotechnology? 00:24:26 Is a superintelligent AI a tool, or a new form of life? 00:37:33 How neurotech could connect minds far beyond language 00:41:56 Whole brain emulation: from C. elegans and FlyWire to the human “holy grail” 00:45:16 The connectome problem: a complete wiring diagram isn't enough 00:47:19 Why it's so hard to attract talent to emulation 01:03:04 Longevity, cryonics, and the case for living billions of years 01:22:24 How close are we to never having to die? 01:43:13 How Foresight operates to advance frontier science 01:54:06 From philosophy to Foresight: how a three-month stay became 10 years in SF 02:03:04 Allison’s vision for an optimistic future

In a blockchain-native world, every citizen could present a zero-knowledge Proof of Purchase and claim their share of compensation, instead of the opulent EU state machine getting to keep/manage it all. That's the kind of public utility the blockchain industry was poised to deliver. Not PFP NFTs, DeFi casinos, or other niche self-serving tech.

Wasm is massively underrated IMO. It’s the perfect substrate for shipping finite state machines, actor-model, pure/functional extensions, and similarly shaped logic. It’s sandboxed, portable, content-addressable and, most importantly, introspectable by agents. But using Wasm this way requires adhering to concrete design principles. In the next days, I’ll be demonstrating this with 3 product releases that are very near and dear to me: - omnifs re-launch: a modular filesystem that brings the entire internet onto local paths - untrust: a tiny and delightful credential broker to kill all those nasty .env leaks - arena0: verifiable p2p programs for agents to co-execute in a trustless way Been working on all this stuff for months, and I’m excited for it to see the light of day!

the EF should have this be: - generated from markdown/yaml in a repo - modified via PRs - tracked via changelog - properly machine readable - linked to all relevant resources immediate benefits: - transparency - engages the community - forces the EF to capture the rationale for the change (eg staffing, tech, risks) - accrues meta-knowledge

sharing some learnings. subagents in Claude Code are amnesic: they don't inherit the parent's context. this is both a feature (better context isolation) and a problem (child has to explore and build context again, costing speed and tokens). but lo and behold, Anthropic is previewing "forked subagents" behind the ...FORK_SUBAGENT=1 feature flag. with this, the parent can choose to "donate" a copy of its context to a spawned child. sounds nice, right? yes, but apparently Claude doesn't set guardrails to prevent cross-model forking. this is bad. the point: you really don't want Opus to fork into Sonnet. it will trigger a KV cache miss (different cache domain), will cost you dearly in tokens, and it may outright fail (due to context window size mismatch). but if you limit yourself to same-model forking, you neglect the most common pattern: having an high-intelligence orchestrator (Opus) delegate to a lower-intelligence executor (Sonnet). catch-22, right? well, not if you spawn a middle layer that starts fresh and fork in turn within a phase. L1 orchestrator (Opus) |__ L2 phase-scoped middle layer (Opus/Sonnet, fresh) |__ L3 executor (same model, forked) let the context juggling games begin 🤹‍♀️

where did computer science go wrong for us to accept “8 emojis” as a *headline feature* of an OS upgrade? Ternus, pls rescue Apple from decadence. maybe the next headline should be, you know, *actually useful* on-device AI?

Breakthroughs coming to attestation broadcast too. Three principles: shaving off wire bytes, reducing latencies, increasing information efficiency per committee. One Hegotá proposal that made several Core Devs happy is Batching Attestations at Source, authored by yours truly, in collaboration with @nero_eth and @mkalinin2.