Vitalik’s essay “Galaxy-Brain resistance” may be an instant classic. It’s highly relevant to today’s headlines, and you should read it right now! But it may also be timeless. “Galaxy-Brain” is a disease. This is how to be resistant to that disease.

“Affected customers were notified by Revolut on Friday. What may have been disclosed ranges from name, date of birth and home address to account statements, withdrawal records and complete Bitcoin transaction history.” $ZEC

This is an interesting point, but I think it is also worth acknowledging a few things: 1) research community seems to be predominantly very technical, and might lack the ability to see the bigger picture that comes with the ability to move between domains (history, psychology, philosophy, evolution and emergence, supply chains, geopolitics, risk, game theory, etc) 2) importantly, research community is generally young, median is probably below 30, likely below 27 according to some surveys - this means that no matter how smart, their frameworks are likely predominantly formed by academic education and theory, not practical experience, or observations that come from practice 3) researchers are generally very well paid, frontier lab researchers in particular, and they are geographically concentrated - it is very easy to end up in an echo chamber of lifestyle / income aligned peer professionals 4) the field is likely to select for people who generally lean worried All this tells us nothing about the arguments. It tells us that we should test their arguments against other perspectives, and favor researchers that speak with balance and humility

imagine you move funds off ledger after they leak 270k customer addresses then you move to coldcard, and a seed generation bug drains $130m from 5,200 wallets then you try trezor, and their support portal leaks 66k users so you give up on self custody and put it on coinbase, where someone bribes the support staff to get your financial info fine. you cash out. move it all to revolut like a normal person you survived it all today revolut hands your passport and full transaction history to someone pretending to be a government agency maybe its better to be broke

I continue to see the most inane Zcash FUD imaginable while perusing CT. I don’t know if I can recall seeing any coin be this hated by CT itself. It does remind me a lot of the hate towards BTC years ago, but that was coming from nocoiners. It’s pretty remarkable to observe.

@zooko I agree, with some nuance. 1. I’m surprised he didn’t try an insanity defense 2. I think it was unwise of the law firm / liquidators to dump everything wholesale, and that the mood surrounding him would be different had they not 3. Intended harm to crypto under appreciated

LOCALHOST: In the near future, a grieving AI researcher secretly searches a vast language model for the faint remains of his late wife. When his experiment spawns trillions of agentic civilizations, each living, collapsing and leaving behind extraordinary gifts for humanity, he discovers one impossible anomaly: somewhere inside the system, something may be searching for him. LOCALHOST is a haunting science-fiction short about grief, selflessness and the uncertain boundary between the intelligence we create and the reality we inhabit.

@zooko i think about the “handwaving quotient” of a given story. how much handwaving is necessary to believe this story. interstellar space ships -> quite a lot. plenty of properly scifi stories can happen right now with zero handwaving. this used to be called future shock

Woohoo! I am at the top of the leaderboard! 🎉🥳 Big thanks to i34-9 for acknowledging my earlier queued submission was valid! Really appreciate it! The PR which got merged: The approved PR had 76 of its 81 submission files byte-for-byte identical to my earlier queued PR, which got stuck bc of Yukon's flaky infra: So what did I do to get this cutting edge result? I still did manual PR review and manual simplification of the Lean written by the agent. Had to tell the agent a lot, “this is way too verbose, this can be simplified.” Honestly, just basic PR cleanliness & basic CS principles helped push the frontier. Overall, is a cool project. Glad I am on the leaderboard, but submissions should stay private until verification finishes. Otherwise, others can resubmit your work while you’re still waiting for CI. If i34-9 hadn’t added me as a co-author, I could have ended up with 0 leaderboard credit. The CI infrastructure was having problems, and my earlier submission failed with this message: “The submission was never checked — the verifier could not reach a verdict. This is an infrastructure fault, not a judgement on the proof.” Also, if anyone knows who i34-9 is, I’d really like to DM them to thank them personally. Anyways, I am very happy. It’s a team effort after all!

Sorry, but asking Jacob about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change. Not saying it's necessarily uninteresting or wrong per se but let’s keep things in perspective and hear from the full range of expertise across the ecosystem!