To be fair I haven't watched the whole thing but if you have to say "i don't believe in one-world government" and then say "but ... AI should be regulated globally" well... I'm gonna have trouble taking you seriously. and If I were an alien and saw Earth's bricolage of ideology; our delightful tapestry of market power, cultural norms, and political bodies; our ceaseless but imperfect struggle toward harmonious pluralism; and our rejection of unified control, sanitization, and regulation, I think I'd say, "Wow, these people, divided as they are, also developed brilliant AI...!?" Well, I'd be much happier than meeting the Borg, or anything so homogeneous as a globally regulated technological society. We would be at once less threatening and intensely more interesting.

I wrote about Flock for our latest edition of peer2peer and why this moment feels different, including whats driving the public backlash to surveillance tech and the unsettled Fourth Amendment questions.

What if AI lets us do for intellectual endeavors what DNA did for taxonomy? We categorize thought by its visible traits: law, math, philosophy, programming, history. But those may be like classifying species by appearance. If seemingly unrelated tasks consistently activate the same internal routes in neural networks, we may discover a deeper taxonomy based on the underlying operations of thought itself. Statutory interpretation might turn out to be computationally closer to debugging software than to other kinds of legal reasoning, just as DNA revealed unexpected relationships between species that looked nothing alike. AI may not just learn our categories. It teach us how we misdrew them from the start.

well it's been a year and I'm sad to report that my cholesterol is basically unchanged, slightly worse but very much within typical variation. I still use the filters and will continue because they definitely do improve espresso quality and the east of keeping the machine clean.

This thread is even more important if CLARITY fails to pass. We need to be building defensively. Remove trust and control from the system or that trust will be the hook for regulation and criminal prosecution, sometimes warranted sometimes not.

Initial review of new Clarity Act version in the Senate. BRCA remains intact; we can still protect the devs. Let's pass this thing and make America the capital of real crypto: a place where you can ship open source code without felony liability.

I'm genuinely confused by the argument here. It seems to be: open-weight AI models reduce the profits of American VC-backed companies; many leading open models currently come from China; therefore open AI is somehow "communist." We've never applied that logic to any other technology. Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, and countless other open-source projects destroyed proprietary software margins and dramatically reduced returns for some investors. We called that competition and innovation—not communism. If the concern is reliance on Chinese AI, make that argument. If the concern is national security, make that argument. But "this technology makes it harder for incumbents to earn monopoly-like returns" has never been a definition of communism. It's often just what technological progress and real free markets look like.

Something has shifted in the last few years... Digital rights groups have become very shy about cryptocurrency work even where regulation of those technologies directly impacts principles like code as speech and warrantless surveillance online. Crypto groups have become increasingly focused on institutional and financial markets questions and a bit less dedicated to the original mission: replacing government and corporate infrastructure with free and open peer-to-peer systems. We want to talk more about the peer-to-peer part and maybe earn some stronger alliances with the larger freedom tech movement. As a small first step, we're launching a new space to talk about tech authoritarianism and the peer-to-peer alternatives: Peer-to-Peer from Coin Center. Please subscribe and share.

Senator Wyden has always been, and remains, one of the great champions of a free and open Internet. His unwavering support for the principle that developers should be free to publish software—even in the highly charged arena of crypto—is principled, deeply American, and correct.

HUGE. Looks like we got a non-partisan vote out of Senate Banking with the BRCA still intact. I'm thrilled. The last minute compromise reflects Coin Center's analysis from last January, there were some steps forward since then and then back but we are feeling very comfortable.

Senator Cortez-Masto's attempt to narrow the BRCA is substantial. He proposal would fail to protect nodes, miners, and smart contract software developers. All of these are neutral infrastructure providers. They make the tech work. 1/

Senator Warren is wrong to call Tornado Cash a "service." It was immutable software that could never have been effectively sanctioned without full bans on publishing the blockchain. That's why it wasn't sanctionable and the Fifth Circuit agreed. 1/