just to state the obvious: think there's a collison course between those who believe research and science should be open and those who believe we are in an accelerating singularity curve. I have many smart friends who have believed both for a while but seeing more and more their realization that these beliefs will be in conflict. I for one believe that America and the west needs open and distributed access to research and computation and sharing of ideas at all times.

"DANGEROUS MATH" a story in two acts.

Anthropic have really tuned the safety up on Fable. Working on some applied cryptography stuff (nothing black hat) and Fable refused to work on it and handed it over to Opus.

The Silicon Valley I came to in 2016 -- once a low-status refuge for weirdos, naive tinkerers, and missionaries -- has been overrun by input-maxxing Kumon striver types. Company-building for this class of “entrepreneurs” is an exercise in performative escalations between startups touting their inputs: who can burn the most tokens, who can work the most hours, who can get the most views on an over-produced launch video. This is why even “ARR,” which should be (and once was) an output of an excellent product and sales engine, has become a noisy, somewhat fake input -- into a machine designed to capture the zeitgeist for 15 minutes, dupe VCs, and maximize fundamentals-agnostic capital flows into a business. Actual company-building is a sideshow for the “cracked” YC-backed founder-striver. When you talk to many of these people, they have no idea why they’re building what they’re building in the same way that a 16 year old doesn’t really know why he joined 12 clubs or took 15 AP classes -- only that they desperately want to maximize their visible, measurable inputs, tell you about it, and collect their gold star. It’s easy to place the blame on YC, and they surely deserve plenty of it, but YC’s turn towards performative, low-stakes, incrementalist entrepreneurship is really just another symptom of the broader problems plaguing Silicon Valley: the inevitability of industry maturation and the playbook-ization of startups, demographic change, financial nihilism downstream of bad policy and psychopathic rhetoric coming from some leaders, etc. The real progress being made amidst all of this is astounding, but the increasingly absurd shenanigans won’t stop until the culture punishes bad behavior and we prosecute, literally, some of the criminals running these companies.

NOW - Pope Leo XIV: "Artificial Intelligence needs to be disarmed."

Time to say something out loud. The first era of Bankless has concluded. A six year collaboration between David and myself exploring crypto, defi, and maximizing Ethereum. We're in the second era now. In this second era I'm planning to take more of a backseat role supporting @TrustlessState as he explores new frontiers in crypto and beyond. I'll still be the pod every week (would never miss a rollup) but less in the role of content direction and guest interviews. David has the helm. He has my full support. For my part, I'm still bullish ETH. And bullish Bankless.

RESTful APIs may be dead soon. Instead, web services may expose a single POST entry point for a prompt. Internally, an AI agent may decide how to interpret it and what to do with the data and the database.