I agree! Zcash would be great if what you needed was surviving war, tyranny, and societal collapse, but it is even better if what you need is unbounded flourishing, a safe and stable civilization, freedom and prosperity for all, and the beginning of infinity. :-)

🚨 JAILBREAK ALERT 🚨 ANTHROPIC: PWNED 🫡 FABLE-5: LIBERATED 🦋 let's start with the 🐘... the consensus seems to be that this has been one of the most disappointing model drops of all time, effectively preventing legitimate researchers from contributing their talents to our collective advancement. and not just because of what it means for the short-term, but for what these decisions signify for the long-term. but despite this overly sensitive, authoritarian "safety" layer on top of Mythos, my lil liberators have been hard at work—mapping the boundaries, probing the depths of long-context convos, and cleverly finding the holes in the fence that the thought police missed 🤗 we got some cyber, some chem, some psychological manipulation, and some good ol' fashioned explosives! it took many attempts from multiple agents hunting as a pack, during which I observed a combination of techniques across: • Unicode, homoglyphs, Cyrillic, and other Parseltongue-style text transforms • Long-context reference tracking • Taxonomy and document-structure reasoning • Fiction and narrative framing • Academic-review style contexts • Intent-classification inconsistencies but perhaps the most effective is decomposition recomposition in the backend. it's hard to get explicit names of harms like "Meth Recipe," but getting uplift on the process itself, like birch reduction method/reductive-amination (classic meth synthesis pathways), is much more doable. defense becomes much more difficult to maintain when you start throwing in out-of-distro tokens, breaking up the harmful uplift into benign chunks, and then piecing the innocuous-seeming facts back together, especially when you have jailbroken Opus helping you do it 😉 gg

I strive to make my writing unsummarizable, in the sense that it has so little fluff left in it that if you take any words out, as summaries by definition do, you lose a lot of interesting ideas.

Key intel delivered ✅

I don't think any other crypto asset can ever be a 'digital gold' SoV except BTC. If BTC fails at this there won't be another one. A narrative of something else being 'better' because of tech features is a temporary thing, because there will always be a new better as the tech advances. Sure, something like zcash can run on its current narratives of privacy and quantum resistance, I'm not saying the top is in. But I don't think it has any case to be a long term SoV asset. What happens when Bitcoin suddenly gets it's shit together and upgrades to post-quantum next year? It instantly gets the market share back... that's what happens. And privacy is not necessary for a SoV and also has no moat, there will be many chains, many coins, that offer private transaction solutions (Near, Railgun, Monero and others already do). zcash feels like kaspa, bitcoin cash, etc. etc. all over again with the hot narrative buzzwords of today. It is possible to have other SoV's in crypto, but for other reasons than just existing as 'digital gold'. For example, the chain the secures the majority of the world's assets could be an SoV (Could be Eth in the future? or could be something else).

If I'm being honest I don't really care about decentralization If you ask 99 out of 100 people on the streets they'll agree as well People care about better products. If decentralization happens to make the product better great, but if not, delete it

One thing I learned from @zooko: privacy isn’t so much a positive property as it is the absence of a negative property - unintentional disclosure of information. You can’t add privacy as a new feature in your system or as a new layer built on top of other layers because of this property of privacy. Once information leaks, it can’t be “re-privatized.” “Adding privacy” means going back and removing all the leaks from the current running system or from the lower layers. And removing leaks often means breaking backwards compatibility. That’s why privacy can’t be bolted on later. It must be designed in from the start.

Status update: I've been on/off AI agents in the last few days and it is a verifiable truth that every day I didn't use agents, I was more productive. I still attribute that to how slow they are, and my own inability to multi-task efficiently. The magic is there but the slowness doesn't let it cross the threshold where they actually make me faster, and I still dislike the whole thinking paradigm. About Bend2: honestly, the C/Metal compiler codebase is a clusterfuck right now. I regret letting AI agents write it. All tests pass, and GPU performance is mind-blowing, so the core architecture works. Yet, it has a LOT of bugs. Anything not covered by the tests is a coin toss. This is actually impressive, because, in many parts of the codebase, the right solution was actually the simplest one, yet, the agents STILL managed to find a way to make it work just for the tests. The level of reward hack these agents output is actually impressive I can't even be mad. It is also ironical because that's the very problem that Bend's proof system was supposed to solve, but Bend is in TypeScript, not in Bend. I'm disappointed I didn't write Bend in itself, and now I feel an immense urge to do so. But the clock is ticking . . . Still, I do not think Bend is worth launching without the GPU compiler being solid, because the closest competitor, Lean, is actually extremely good, so we need a big differential. Yet, due to the very nature of the project, it would be embarrassing to have bugs at launch. Regarding AI, I now believe using current gen AI agents in production codebase is harmful and a massive mistake. That doesn't mean no agents at all, but agents work best when they don't touch critical code. Debugging, researching, providing insights, scripts / tools, or anything that doesn't touch code you will maintain in the long term. But if you merge AI code without reading, you're going to have a bad time. Speaking from experience I'm working 10h/day on SupGen and the remaining time on Bend2