I feel real gratitude to Alex Bornstein for his stint as Executive Director of the Zcash Foundation. He said in his farewell letter ( “Zcash is strongest when we choose cooperation over competition and assume good faith in one another.” Thank you, Alex!

Announcing 𝟘 𝟙 ❒ 🔨 Strengthen cryptography with AI. Cryptography—both current and post-quantum cryptography—depends on hashes. SHA-256? SHA-3? BLAKE3? Nobody knows if they are secure. We're going to find out! Come help accelerate scientific research! HashSmash is an open science-acceleration project in collaboration with @yukonresearch, @eigenlabs, @projecteleven, and @ShieldedLabs.

Zcash just gave away more than $8m in retroactive grants, including millions of dollars of retroactive grants to a lot of people who selflessly worked to protect all users during the AI bug crisis this year. But that’s not even the best thing about what just happened… ⤵️

So apparently an app on Solana has been giving people tokens backed by ZEC, and apparently there are tens of thousands of people who chose to receive this reward. Well now there's a whole HOWTO for those folks, thanks to bentertainer and ZecHub:

Okay Twitter, help me out with a weird question. If you say "that's a BIG FUCKING CAR", you're putting the stress on the second syllable of "fucking". It's equivalent to saying "that's a big fuckING car". Which is clearly "that's a really large car." Now, if you put the emphasis on the first syllable, you get "that's a big FUCKing car", which is clearly "that's a large car people have sex in." In other words, the emphasis changes what the adjective semantically means. Anyway, the question: is there another PG-rated adjective I can use instead to talk about this?

Made with Claude Opus 5.5. The fearmongering about AI always makes us forget that NOTHING WENT FOOM, as was always predicted. Send this to your doomer friend who has a very high P(Doom). Accelerate.

My neighbor three doors down the street died. Nice lady, always walked her dog and we’d wave at each other. No spouse or kids, apparently. Her siblings put everything in the house up for sale. I went in, looking for bookshelves - my kids and I prefer sliced trees, even as my wife prefers glass rectangles, to read from. One of the items that caught my eye was a gazetteer. You don’t see these much anymore, but it’s a paper book of every single road in a state. Doing archaeology for a decade, even post smarty pants phones, we used these as the canonical record of random county roads. I don’t know why she had a gazetteer. And I think in a few gas stations and bookstores you can still find them. But they’re a relic from before Google Maps. It was a sign that my generation is in some ways from a bygone era. It’s kind of a lonely era - we’re the only generation to both remember the world before the internet was in your pocket (or your desk) and also native to the internet. It’s hard to articulate what new generations have lost. The present is 100% better than the past, but there’s certainly trade offs - it’s two steps forward, one step back. That doesn’t make progress a mistake, just that there were certain charms and benefits to the past that kids today miss - like learning to navigate without a GPS, with a paper map and a compass.

Keystone XL pipeline was delayed by Obama, restarted by Trump, cancelled by Biden and restarted again by Trump. Offshore wind started under Biden was cancelled by Trump. Biden paused new LNG export. Trump has paused new onshore wind. Separately, people are mad about energy costs.

We're having the biennial Zcash governance debate. And once again, I'm re-listening to Mike Munger and Russ Roberts: “Choosing in Groups”. Zcash is not a nation-state, and it is also not a set of non-cooperating individuals. So what is it, then?

One of my pet peeves is how DTrace, a true work of art and a godsend for teaching system visibility, got degraded in MacOS over the years. I used it to set the baseline expectation that one's OS should be knowable and transparent. Now, alas, most of my scripts no longer work.

@dismad8 @simonsarris @morganlinton @sigilante @GustavoValverde @orthodoxmason @FutureDies @theblockprof @followjason @Pronatalism @alexanderlee314 @dimabuterin @TimSweeneyEpic @sebkrier @NoelleInMadrid @literalbanana @CJHandmer @siobhan_huggins @LazPieper @BillHughesDC @mbateman @alexlmiller @intangiblecoins Follow over at The Other Plaice