Freedom maximalist. Good vibes only.
Joined March 2008
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9 Aug 2024
Zcash is winning.
medium.com/@zooko/48579b8977… ⤵️
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.
Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.
I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."
"They just come with the table, man."
They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.
This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.
I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.
"Did we…?"
"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."
Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.
My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."
Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.
I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.
Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.
I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.
Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
I think I've been an asshole to Anthropic... I apologize.
I'm just disappointed by how this all is being handled. We just created an incredible tech capable of bringing progress and we're doing whatever this stupid circus is. Why can't we operate as a functional civilization
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Anthropic’s announcement downplays the jailbreak while suggesting that jailbreakability is inherent.
So what David is saying doesn’t sound far off in that context
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After watching David become a spin-machine for the admin on All-In, often contradicting his prior views & principles...it's hard for me to believe Anthropic simply refused to fix a bug.
Easy to believe admin decided to take a politically-motivated opportunity against Anthropic.
I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:
— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.
— Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.)
— A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.
— In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.”
— In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.
— In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community.
— The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.
— Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
I once had to defend my crazy cousin in college, he always got in fights and we knew he was wrong and we defended him anyway. So I get it David. But after this administration’s ridiculous claims about Anthropic being a national security threat, no one believes this.
I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:
— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.
— Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.)
— A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.
— In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.”
— In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.
— In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community.
— The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.
— Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.
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1. if transacting with superintelligent models outside of the boundaries of a lab becomes difficult due to national security / ai safety concerns and so on, it will mean the Coasean boundaries of the labs will grow to encompass all interesting industry, creating a truly cyberpunk chaebol-capitalism type of future, where the goverment sort of runs them but they also sort of run the government
2. as if there weren't already enough reasons to break up your family, leave your home, the Zone of Thought will increase the attractiveness of migrating to try and have your child on american soil, so they can have 1000x the effective brain power of people born elsewhere
3. every country should probably try and either work towards a new ai security pact with the americans immediately or pool every ounce of national resources to try and create their own ASI labs lest you become complete intellectual, economic, and moral vassals to the united states of america and the output byproducts its ASIs (you wont even get to talk to them). if they succeeded (big if) this will imply a more global race and more risk factors than was previously implied by the formerly only "beating china" narrative -- but many will prefer it to the superintelligent monopolar value lock-in
4. the other alternative is to keep the tension between safety and concentration of power at the top of mind and for the government/labs to push for solving it, rather than instrumentalizing all other values to be subservient to minimizing ai harms. insofar as safety means defending properties of the fragile world we like, the diffuse nature of power is one of those properties
5. historically the americans have been really quite Benign about their global public goods hegemony despite the ability to extract significantly more rents than they do, and it makes it easy for people of all stripes to fight for america rather than under it. we probably don't have to, but i hope america overall works towards export promotion of american models rather than export control
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
As a person who enjoys doing stupid projects, AI is a godsend: I have done more stupid projects in 2026 than in my whole life previously
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
9h
exacto, la privacidad diaria es cotidiana, y Zcash da esa posibilidad.
yo soy de LATAM! đź©·
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Has there been anything good written about the failure of Mistral to keep up with both the Big Three and Chinese labs?
They have talent and national backing, but despite being Europe’s only frontier lab (Google Deepmind’s UK lab aside), they haven’t been able to close the gap
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
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I've been thinking of doing guitar / composition / music production lessons exclusively for Zcash... show of hands / RT anybody that might be interested?
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RT @jasonnelson: Possible hot take: Anthropic is learning the lesson Meta/Facebook learned years ago with their failed Libra Cryptocurrency…
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
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Why is keccak sitting away from his dad?
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Obviously financial privacy is needed under oppression, but it's also needed under peace—it's necessary for freedom. That's why Zcash fights to maintain legal status; not because we are willing to compromise on fundamentals, but because we want a society that upholds this right.
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. :-)
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
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I’m Valens, running for ZCG June 2026.
I’ve posted my full answers to the community questions (including Zooko’s on the much larger treasury) here:
forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/z…
Thank you for the consideration, ZCAP!
Calling all Zcash Community Advisory Panel members! Now is the time to vote for the Zcash Community Grants Committee members. zfnd.org/zcap-poll-now-open-… The ZCG will control something on the order of $100M worth of Zcash over the next couple of years. More if ZEC goes up!
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ugh i was doing something with Fable yesterday and now i'm continuing the same project with GPT 5.5, and it's annoying how GPT 5.5 makes more mistakes which requires more iterations with me
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
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. :-)
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Should NOT remove the dev fund, but I am in favor of decreasing %'s similar to emisssions to balance everything as we move into the distant future. Also am a fan of NSM which I think its indirectly relevant here. $ZEC
Jun 11
Should we change how the Zcash dev fund works / is being used?
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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
This is part of my answers to the questions from the ZCG candidates, which you can read at the following link to find out what I think about some aspects of Zcash:
forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/z…
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