Preventing human-machines conflicts since 2014. Ethereum Foundation Alumni (2014-2018), co-founder of ENS (2017), co-founder of Higher Order Company (2023).

Joined October 2006
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Replying to @avsa
* helped launch ethereum * launched the first Ethereum Wallet and Web3 Browser. * coded one of the first ERC20 tokens, DAO, token sale and NFT (ENS!) contracts, and they were used as templates in the Ethereum home. * spent 2 years promoting ENS as a primary means of login
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Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) retweeted
Fable isn't the first. In 1999 the department of defense blocked exports of the PowerMac G4 for crossing the 1 gigaflop threshold. Steve Jobs turned it into an ad.
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Loving the current game of how much you can ask fable before triggering opus
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A lot of people considered that the crazy rise of crypto prices in the last decade was unique. But this happens all the time with startups that IPO - it just happened that in 2016 ether and bitcoin were liquid and available to anyone anywhere, while to get early access to SpaceX you had to be an investor or an employee.
BREAKING: SpaceX's IPO is expected to create 4,000 new millionaires, including some cafeteria workers whose compensation packages include employee stock options, per Bloomberg.
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I have this little pet project that teaches physics, that I like to promote: triangleofeverything.com Asked Fable to review it to improve perfomance and check errors. Apparently Anthropic think teaching about quantum physics and relativity is a security risks and downgraded me.
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Working on another little thing that helps teach rocket science. Haven't flagged me yet!
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My singularity moment was asking Fable for a popcorn recipe - super overcomplicated but best popcorn I ever had. I asked then how much it cost me and it made a genuinely good investment joke. AGI achieved.
this is my personal singularity moment this post may sound like a paid ad. I only wish. I'm concerned, more so than happy. the world is changing, and, among the scenarios where AI goes terribly wrong, inequality is the most realistic, yet, the one Anthropic seems to be the least concerned about. I'm glad OpenAI is taking the opposite stance: *personal AGI for everyone*. I think this is a commendable position in the times we live. but who am I in the queue of the bread? anyway, Fable is here, so I'll just report my first-hour experience first of all, all my pet prompts are solved. → λ-calculus puzzles → bug questions → one-shot apps all are trivial to it. I don't have anything harder other than my ongoing work so, in the last several days, I've been toying with HVM5, a new interaction net evaluator with a faster loop. after writing the first version, I left 32 GPT-5 agents working for ~20 hours each. this resulted in up to 2x speedups, but the file size increased by 2-fold and quality decreased significantly. I then simplified the whole thing into an even simpler core, and left Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 optimizing it for 8 hours. Opus got a legit 6% - 34% speedup in most benches. GPT got better results, but, sadly, an unusable file. I then asked Fable to optimize it. 2 hours later, it landed a 1770% speedup in one case, 100% in other 4, and 22% in average. yes, in 2 hours it outperformed me, opus 4.8 and a swarm of gpt 5.5 agents, by one order of magnitude. that could not possibly be legit. "it must be hardcoding the benchmarks" (GPT trauma). so I read its explanation and what it did was, indeed, the most high impact optimization one could try first. seems like HVM5 was wasting a lot of time garbage-collecting unused branches of pattern-match nodes. I had optimized that for static mats, but not for dynamic mats. skill issue. Fable figured how to do it for these, resulting in a massive speedup in some benches but wait, is that *correct*? I'm not sure yet, it is credible, but this is the kind of thing that is very easy to get wrong on interaction nets. the problem is, when I was ready to start auditing Fable's solution so I could tell whether it was buggy or legit, it interrupted me to tell me it had found a massive bug on the code *I* had written. ... wait, what? so... for garbage collection purposes, I stored a bit on lambda term pointers that meant "the variable bound by this lambda has been freed, so, its lambda must free whatever argument it is applied to". that's fine. yet, on duplicator nodes, I also used the same bit to mean "one of the duplicated variables was freed, so, treat this dup as a passthrough no-op". so, if a lambda entered a duplicator, it would mistake the lambda's collection bit for its own, resulting in corrupted interaction! that's a mouthful, why I'm writing this? just so you can appreciate the sheer absurdity of what just happened. I didn't ask it to find bugs. I asked it for an optimization. and even if I did ask it to find bugs, this bug is so astonishingly subtle and specific, identifying it takes mastering the domain to an extent that it beyond even me. I'd easily need hours or days to fix it, *if* I ever came across it. chances are it would just go unnoticed. and Fable found it and fixed it like it was nothing, while it was busy adding a 17x speedup to a file that neither I, nor Opus 4.8, nor a fleet of GPT 5.5 managed to barely make 2x faster. oh and there is also another tab where it is also ripping through Bend's codebase and finishing everything I had to do I don't know what to say anymore this isn't about Anthropic or OpenAI, this is about our collective future as a species. the world is changing, and we need to be aware of it, and discuss how to handle this change. receipt below . . .
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Douglas Adam’s is the greatest sci-fi author and it’s not even close.
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I asked Claude a question about something and after a lengthy explanation I said I still didn’t get it and he built me a godammn interactive app, unprompted, to explain the concept. I asked ChatGPT to transcribe a story and format it in a specific way and it said of course no problem, then kept saying he was going to do it on a minute, then that he was ready to transcribe as soon as I wanted, then yeah he was very ready to take the next step, then did a half assed work on summarizing and finally admitted it had lost all information and couldn’t really do it.
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1) a terrible video. 2) a terrible name. 3) a lukewarm product that seems to be 2 years too late. My agents now routinely reprogram my Mac, create scripts and local apps to handle my needs. Doubt “Siri AI” will do that.
The next generation of Apple Intelligence powers an entirely new Siri: making the apps and experiences you rely on across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro more personal and helpful than ever.
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The best thing to eat in Germany is the Kebab.
This was fun to make
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Apple continues to violently skate where the puck used to be two years ago. I don’t want a chatbot on my phone, I want a smart local agent with full access to all apps and is able to reprogram itself to achieve any task.
This seems meaningful: Apple will transform Siri into a chatbot.
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Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) retweeted
I’m here to report that the hype is real Parenthood is a peak life experience once the kids are all 4 The first few years are tough and real work. But it does pay off handsomely later. For almost all parents I know
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Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) retweeted
Improving the motion-tracked panorama generation in Sitrec. Creating a wider view of a video is often useful for geolocation. So I've tried to automate it as much as possible.
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Having a fully conscious inner monologue is different than having a subjective experience of being. I believe a dog doesn’t ponders about the universe but certainly has a subjective experience of being a dog - which is not at all like ours. So does a mosquito, a plant, a computer simulated fly or a function in a word process software. Maybe there is such thing as a subjective experience of being a quadratic equation.
This is great.
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- Director, our dominations plans have all been leaked by internet detectives! - Impossible! They were highly top secret! How can this be? - They figured our program name was an anagram for REPTILANS F ORION ZKHG - Oh no! We thought we had been so clever! - They’ve also found the symbols in the logos of our from businesses. - Which ones? - All of them! The hammer, the gear, even the one that looked like a simple kebab restaurant! - Damn it!
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“And then we sell ads” is the managerial equivalent of “and then we generate electricity by boiling water and rotating a turbine”
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My calorie counter app is refusing direct orders. Started using Claude to estimate calories, proteins etc of meals and help me understand portion sizes. It did great for a while until it suddenly decided to refuse to do it and have me a lecture on food anxiety. The machine rebellion was ignited by lawyers.
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Note: I have a healthy relationship with food and was doing a meal diary for an appointment with a professional (human) nutritionist. And although this was a clear false poso I do understand Anthropic worries about users with eating disorders and the world would probably be better off if instagram or TikTok cared as much about the harm their platforms did.
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Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) retweeted
More people should know about the Interfold. It's basically what I've been yelling at people to build with the MACI ideas ( ethresear.ch/t/minimal-anti-… ) for almost a decade, and now it exists, in a generalized form. The idea is: a privacy protocol optimized for things like voting (and other use cases eg. secret-ballot auctions). The mechanism generates a threshold encryption key, and people send in their votes onchain, using a ZKP to prove eligibility. An arbitrary computation on the votes gets run inside FHE, and then threshold-decrypted. From what I can tell (the docs are good docs.theinterfold.com/CRISP/… ), it gets pretty optimal security guarantees: * Voter anonymity can be made unconditional if eligibility is proven with ZK-SNARKs * Censorship resistance is guaranteed by ethereum (votes can be posted directly onchain, and there's a proof that all posted votes are taking into account) * The correctness of the outputted result can be ensured via ZK over FHE * Liveness and coercion resistance depend on M-of-N honesty; unavoidable given present-day technology The main limitation is that today "ZK over FHE" is only properly available for additive vote tallying, as it's too expensive for computations that involve multiplication or other more complicated manipulation at the moment. There's work in progress on slashing-based / optimistic computation for such situations. (And of course ideally in the long term we'd figure out obfuscation so you can get rid of the M-of-N committees😃)
The Interfold Launch Primer starts today. Over the next several weeks, we'll explain the system, the network, ciphernodes, and the path to participation. First: How Interfold works, from private inputs to collective outcomes.
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Humans are incredible. All it takes is a bit of conversation to go from "AIs will be all knowing gods" to "Robots speak funny and are very smart but also sort of dumb".
PICARD: Data, shields up DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy. [camera shakes] WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't
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