🇺🇸 🇧🇩 🇵🇸 frmr - product @aztecnetwork, eng @flexport & @wework, 2x founder, alum @utexasece. wisdom is intelligence about happiness https://xitter.cf/t.co/Ngota8uQ1H
DFW
Joined November 2021
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rafi retweeted
It’s so hard to stay consistent with running for me. I do good for a week then just fall off. It used to be so easy in high school and college. I realized it’s not a discipline issue but rather a loneliness issue for me. I built an app to help me 👀 🚀
runpal.fit
rafi retweeted
If anyone saw this in their city or town, they would think:
"This is what liberation looks like. We are so grateful to the foreigners bombing our civilian and economic infrastructure and dropping bombs in our neighborhoods."
Iranian girls in particular are swooning with joy:
rafi retweeted
calling humans meat computers that eat too much food was a completely optional way to address the issue btw
rafi retweeted
In 2017, I stepped onto the Facebook campus in Menlo Park. They took us to the Oculus VR lab first. A geeky engineer gave us a demo of the VR features and ended on the haptic gloves that let you "feel" virtual objects without touching anything real. Then he paused, voice almost reverent: “Imagine connecting anyone in the world… real social interaction… without ever leaving home.” The demo was amazing but I walked out with a strange feeling. This guy is "solving for humanity" and is excited about a world no longer needs physical human connection
We passed a long hall of developers. One guy—Black, friendly—leaned over his monitors and asked where the group of us (mostly Africans) was from. We chatted. His desk had big screens, half-eaten snacks, the faint smell of takeout lingering. His neighbor, paler watched curiously but, too timid to join. The desks were comfortable, the food smell everywhere, as it was available in every corner. It all felt… contained. Like this campus was its own sealed ecosystem, where the world outside was just data to optimize.
Fast-forward to 2020. I work at Andela, where we placed remote engineers with Silicon Valley teams. Some companies flew their leads over to meet the "remote" teammates in person. When they visited the Kigali campus I went to dinner with them. They were 5. Of this dinner I vividly remember 2 conversations. One guy launched into how "all humans are actually lactose intolerant after infancy… we're the only species that keeps drinking milk." They all nodded, confessed their own intolerances like it was a quirky universal truth. Then came the photos: a dog's birthday party. Balloons, cake, friends invited. The owner beamed like it was his kid's party. I love dogs. But something twisted in my chest. These are the people shaping the tools billions use every day—yet their version of care, connection, family… felt redirected, abstracted.
Now it's 2026, and Sam Altman says training an AI costs less than "raising a human"—because it takes "20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time before you get smart." He compared childhood—first steps, heartbreaks, scraped knees, bedtime stories, learning trust—to server racks and electricity bills. I think back to that VR promise of connection without leaving home… to offices smelling of food and isolation… to dogs celebrated like children while real human messiness gets optimized away
rafi retweeted
Fast, lift, sprint, stretch, and meditate.
Build, sell, write, create, invest, and own.
Read, reflect, love, seek truth, and ignore society.
Make these habits. Say no to everything else.
Avoid debt, jail, addiction, disgrace, shortcuts, and media.
Relax. Victory is assured.
rafi retweeted
Crypto is…
Desperate gamblers chasing their first bag.
Investors funding the buildout of the global casino.
Bankers hypnotizing the masses to collect their vig.
…all meaningless and ephemeral without the cypherpunks, who defend the dream of encrypted and unstoppable cash.
rafi retweeted
Many are asking if they can move their Next.js projects from Vercel to Replit?
Yes!
- Go to Import then GitHub
- enter repo URL
- Agent will take care of the rest
It will set up the dev and deployment environments!
For companies moving lots of work, happy to help + discount.
rafi retweeted
had to dig this ole thing out
& that's that, it was a good run. I'll share more later iA but TLDR I've left aztec
To all @aztecnetwork, ty for the opportunity to help grow something so groundbreaking & so necessary for web3/the internet. Godspeed
next for me - rest & exploration 😌
rafi retweeted
After finishing the Noir course from @CyfrinUpdraft, here's the deal:
1. Focus on Section 4 Mixer, that's where you'll learn how to build the real use case application.
2. Rest is foundational - speedrun by reading the written lessons + ChatGPT: "help me understand this lesson" then do the quizzes.
3. Can one-shot whole course in a weekend.
🎯 Super valuable for ZK beginners, even if you don’t know what ZK is yet. And by the end, you'll be ready to cook a real @NoirLang ZK apps!
If you love Rust, you’ll looooove @NoirLang
Noir is a Circom alternative for writing ZK circuits (and in my opinion is way better) and luckily I’ve created a course on Updraft to teach you how it works👇
rafi retweeted
Blockchain was supposed to free us from the chains of the traditional financial system by enabling everyone to be their own bank and own their data.
Yet here we are, 17 years after the Bitcoin whitepaper was published and 11 years after the Ethereum ICO…and the world still functions mostly the same. Many have lamented over “real-world applications” and widespread adoption, but what utility has the space offered, really?
If you’ve been to any Web3 conferences in the past few years, you’ve likely experienced this vibe of stagnation. NFT markets, DeFi protocols, tokens – nothing really innovative. Nothing that creates new fundamental value for anyone except the already wealthy elite.
Blockchain has always been able to provide some degree of financial sovereignty, but without being able to privately transact, it’s not true freedom.
The Web3 industry has been hesitant to address privacy as a core value, not just as an ethical one, but a practical one. It’s hard to build for maximal privacy that is useful, fully self-sovereign, and threat-resistant. Most people simply didn’t want to do it.
As a result, enthusiasm to build in this space has plateaued. People are fatigued with the same products doing the same things for maybe a fraction of a cent less or a millisecond faster.
When we started building @aztecnetwork in 2017, I wanted to see radical disruption, people building applications, products, and services that enable activities that either scale existing services or open them up to a much wider base of participants.
Many people either abandoned cypherpunk ideals to chase a hot narrative, or quit their projects altogether. We kept building for maximal privacy.
At @ZuBerlinCity earlier this month I joined a panel on the future of Ethereum, and to my great satisfaction, there has been an enormous shift towards embracing privacy. People are starting to realize that without it, blockchain has no utility, but they still think that enabling privacy in their applications is out of reach.
People don’t seem to realize how ready the technology is. It’s not 12 months or 12 years away – privacy is here now, ready to be used.
@ZKPassport is a private proof of identity application.
@stealthnote_ is a private, anonymous message posting platform.
@nemi_fi enables private DeFi transactions.
These products are proof that self-sovereignty and financial freedom can be private and secure with blockchain, and this is only the beginning. This space is finally ready to create fundamental value for the world, to disrupt the incumbents.
We are ready to break free of our chains.
rafi retweeted
1/4 @__zkhack__ wrapped up during @BerBlockWeek and Noir builders showed up strong.
Congrats to the winners👏
🏆 Kinky Swap – Grand Prize
🤓 Anon Proxies – Most Technically Proficient
🌟 God’s Hand - Builder’s Choice #1
🌟 Dude, Where’s My Flag? – Builder’s Choice #2
rafi retweeted
Do that personal security review you've been putting off. Set up Yubikey 2fa everywhere (and add a backup). Save the recovery codes. Run through all your old wallets and consolidate into a new one, with the seed stored offline. Sell your failed investments. Clean house.
rafi retweeted
1/3 Age verification online usually means giving up personal info, but it doesn’t have to.
@ZKPassport uses zero-knowledge proofs to let users prove they're over a certain age without revealing their birthdate, name, or any personal data.
aztec.network/blog/zkpasspor…
