61 Photos and videos
Jun 11
One of my favorite podcasts chatting with @sternhenri who's quickly becoming one of my favorite people to work with.
Great guest choice @jacksondahl
Jun 11
Dialectic Ep. 48: Henri Stern
Modern technologists--especially in crypto--are often deeply principled or impressively pragmatic.
@sternhenri is both.
I talked to Henri about digital privacy, the moral weight of building technology, the painful reality of realizing the market doesn't want what you're selling, and crypto's 'boring' era.
Henri is co-founder and CEO of @privy_io, which @stripe acquired last year. Privy focuses on enabling developers to let their users hold crypto, and Henri works across a number of Stripe's efforts to bring more of the financial world onchain (in large part thanks to stablecoins).
Timestamps:
0:00 - Opening Highlights
1:40 - Intro to Henri
4:51 - Start: Technical Decisions are Moral Decisions
15:41 - Ambition, Startups, and Crypto
23:39 - Why Digital Privacy Matters: Self-Determination, Security, and Identity
41:52 - Embedded Wallets, the Pivot, and Privy's Core Bet
55:18 - Reinventing Around Stablecoins Without Abandoning Crypto-Natives
1:06:42 - Joining Stripe, Privy Today, and What Stripe Is Becoming
1:22:54 - Crypto's Future, Power Laws, Optimism and Pessimism
1:38:14 - Closing: Asta, Stripe's Leaders, Being French, and Never Compromising
Available on all platforms below.
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Jun 9
Enticing summer reading list recommendations from @restofworld.
Mid-way through Elements of Power and it's quite good. Wallet Dancers & Silicon Elsewhere might be next up.
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Vinny retweeted
Jun 2
anyway my proposal for a cool internet thing they should turn into a movie after the backrooms is @qntm's there is no antimemetics division, i think this would go extremely hard
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May 28
We built deposit addresses so that getting crypto into products is safer and easier: @privy_io automatically bridges and swaps your crypto to the chosen destination.
Important for app builders who need to make it easy for their users to onboard their crypto.
1/ Today, we're launching universal deposit addresses.
Each user gets one persistent address that accepts crypto deposits across supported chains and automatically settles funds into the token your app expects.
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May 27
Starting a book club with friends has been one of the best life improvements I've made in the last year.
We meet 2-3x per book, rotate who picks, and chat about publishing and other reads in between.
Makes reading more purposeful and fun, and the guy time is invaluable.
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May 27
Books read so far:
- Neuromancer
- Wayward
- And Then There Were None (best-selling mystery of all time, h/t Agatha Christie)
- Dungeon Crawler Carl
Next up: hard pivot to canon dad non-fiction
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Vinny retweeted
May 27
Privy is FAST
1/ Privy now has reduced latency across all chains.
Two improvements are live today:
✔️ All wallet operations are 30-45ms faster.
✔️ For @Solana trading apps, a new swap API delivers end-to-end latency under 200ms.
Here's what we shipped 👇
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May 21
Summer PSA: TickCheck.com exists, and you can mail in ticks for pathogen testing if you get bitten.
Big results for me.
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May 20
Entire feed is this post, and I love it.
May 19
New blog post: The third wave of American philanthropy
Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history.
How much does this all add up to? And how meaningful is that in the context of philanthropy today?
I was doing some simple napkin math to wrap my head around the scale of what’s coming, and radicalized myself in the process. I had dramatically underappreciated the scale of the philanthropic capital that’s about to become available and the corresponding gap in talent and organizations that will be needed to make the most of it.
This piece aims to directionally sketch the scale of what’s coming, the gap in operational capacity needed to absorb it, and what we can do to fill it.
(Link to full post in reply)
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May 18
Increasingly finding excellent reads via Twitter thanks to people like Sam and a surprisingly-good book recommendation algo.
May 18
The shortlist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, which I am a judge for, has been announced! The shortlist:
The Escape from Kabul | Karen Bartlett
Israel: What Went Wrong? | Omer Bartov
Shattered Lands | Sam Dalrymple
For the Sun After Long Nights | Nilo Tabrizy & Fatemeh Jamalpour
Three Years on Fire | Andrey Kurkov
The Wall Dancers | Yi-Ling Liu
The Elements of Power | Nicolas Niarchos
Stalin’s Apostles | Antonia Senior
orwellfoundation.substack.co…
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May 18
Texted a friend about training my handstand. Never texted him about this before.
Targeted AI slop ad on his feed within the hour…
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Vinny retweeted
May 10
My friend at the NSA said they know almost everyone who has ever bought zcash and I asked him how and he said they go on twitter and search for people who tweet “just bought zcash”
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Vinny retweeted
May 8
You can now test our new email aliases feature in @BraveNightly on desktop!
Email aliases allow you to sign up for services without revealing your real email address to preserve your privacy.
While the feature is just on desktop for now, we plan to bring it to mobile as well.
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Alyssa Liu went viral during the Met Gala for her rant on the state of the public perception of data centers.
"We are being manipulated into ceding the compute frontier. Data center development is vital to national security." She adds, "Karen Hao's overstimation of data center water consumption by a factor of 1000 has done irreparable damage to the nation's efforts to stay ahead."
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