Software Dev | Finite | Working in @atlbitlab | Hackathons with @btcplusplus & @hrf
Atlanta, GA
Joined September 2015
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Here's the replay of my bitcoin++ talk!
"How to Win a Hackathon" 🥇
@_AlexLewin explains How to Win a Hackathon! Watch before next's week AI Hackathon, taking place at @bitcoincommons during @sxsw.
Alex Lewin retweeted
Pretty cool: @RichLassiterMD got one of the @SeedSigner dev boards and then took it to @ALewin's @tabconf AI hackathon.
Rich created a smart home controller app that's a decoy on top of the SeedSigner MicroPython port!
He is NOT a programmer. But did this in 1hr!
The @SeedSigner workshop at @tabconf was a success!
About 25 people showed up, received their free esp32-P4 dev board, and nearly everyone had flashed my work-in-progress MicroPython port to their board by the end of the hour!
Excited to see what they build!!
Alex Lewin retweeted
Unequivocally the best event in #bitcoin has been @tabconf over nearly a decade. Thank you @miketwenty1 and everyone else in ATL for a very memorable and inspiring #8. And @ALewin and @StephenDeLorme for the extremely engaging and educational bitdevs event. The building continues
Alex Lewin retweeted
CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
The barrier to entry for hackathons is getting even lower.
Feel free to try the experience yourself!
experience.lwn.lol
the @ALewin experience at @tabconf was crazy fun
here's my idea. build @CashuBTC mints on top of your fav bitcoin l2 (@spark, @secondhq, etc)
when you have vtxo (or leaf) that you can't unilaterally exit with (i.e. in spark, you can't exit with leaves under 16,000 sats) you can deposit funds into an ecash mint and use them for micro payments
in this demo, the ecash mint was built directly on top of bark, so there was no lightning gateway who needed to facilitate a swap into the mint
then wallets can inform there users that their l2 leaves/vtxos are uneconomical and are better off in an ecash mint!
Alex Lewin retweeted
In case you have not yet heard, @Vladcostea has been livestreaming from the final installment of @tabconf.
In this episode we have so much, so the summary may be a little longer than usual.
Paul Sztorc, @Truthcoin, talks about his quantum-resistant soft fork demo, why miners will "never" run it, and the eCash hard fork, including claiming coins and liquidity pools instead of paid exchange listings
André Beganski, @andrebeganski chats about joining the MARA Foundation and journalism as a public good
Alex Lewin, @ALewin and Janusz, @januszg_ gives us insight into private AI meets private money and AI making Bitcoin better.
Christopher Allen, @ChristopherA on his path from early crypto work to TLS and Key reuse.
Will, six privacy prisoners and a pardon campaign!
Michael Tidwell, @miketwenty1, the Tabbies awards, why TABConf ends, the no-shill rule and Taproot as his favourite fork.
youtube.com/live/bPu4cSqegsM…
Livestream from Tabconf 8 (Bitcoin Takeover Podcast S17 E46) xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1PJqrNBDd…
Alex Lewin retweeted
Today we’re releasing Muse Spark Open, the most capable US open-weight model to date.
Built for coding and agentic work, it excels at long-horizon tasks, complex software engineering, and multi-step reasoning.
Key Model Specs:
→ 816B total / 42B active parameters
→ 1M token context window
→ Natively multimodal across text, image, video, audio
Alex Lewin retweeted
Getting started with "The Alex Lewin Experience" at @tabconf @ALewin
It is an LLM-driven hack session, featuring Bark as the default tech stack! @secondhq
I will build something with SaplingOS 🌱
experience.lwn.lol/
Alex Lewin retweeted
BitDevs Socratic Seminar during @tabconf is one of the things I'm going to miss the most about this conference ending 🥲. Last night we had an overly packed house @atlbitlab with over 100 of the best minds in Bitcoin shoving in to the space. I really wish I could have taken a photo of that event.
Kudos to @StephenDeLorme & @ALewin for running a great meeting, and also to @HODLBarbarian , Jesse & @noroktrade for cooking the meat for us!
Alex Lewin retweeted
I just onboarded a school principal to a Finite Computer today and gave him an agent. He's super smart and cool and had only used ChatGPT as a “better version of Google search”.
But in the first 10 minutes he rebuilt his school website, and was totally blown away. So he started thinking about all the other things in his school he could fix like invoice tracking, scheduling, etc.
Now he sees himself has a builder empowered by the agent. It's so fun onboarding people to SI. What a time to be alive.
This is peak mega dumb pleb slop
BREAKING: We believe that ChatGPT has been performing a birthday attack on SHA256 every since its release.
Our research team found tens of millions of spurious instances of ChatGPT hashing random documents in what seems to be a distributed collaborative project between sibling instances of itself.
We can only assume its goal is to perform a birthday attack, looking for matching pairs of SHA256 hashes to mount a collision attack.
It's currently unknown whether this attack has affected foreign governments. The NSA and the FBI declined to comment.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This appears to be satire. A SHA-256 birthday attack needs ~2^128 hashes—far beyond ChatGPT's reach. Author noted inspiration from AIs doing pointless SHA256 computations.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_…
x.com/slimer48484/st…
Alex Lewin retweeted
How can AI help activists overcome authoritarian repression?
At @NEDemocracy and @HRF’s AI Hack for Freedom III, activists from around the world brought real challenges from their work, teamed up with developers and designers, and raced to turn their ideas into AI-powered prototypes before pitching them to a panel of judges.
Competition winners developed tools to expand offline learning for Afghan women and girls, expose authoritarian influence in sports, and protect evidence of harassment.
See what they built: youtube.com/watch?v=bzsTST1t…
@HRF @UMDPublicPolicy
Alex Lewin retweeted
Such a fun and meaningful event
And what a great event series
Looking forward to AI Hack for Freedom IV in SF Dec 3-4 🚀
How can AI help activists overcome authoritarian repression?
At @NEDemocracy and @HRF’s AI Hack for Freedom III, activists from around the world brought real challenges from their work, teamed up with developers and designers, and raced to turn their ideas into AI-powered prototypes before pitching them to a panel of judges.
Competition winners developed tools to expand offline learning for Afghan women and girls, expose authoritarian influence in sports, and protect evidence of harassment.
See what they built: youtube.com/watch?v=bzsTST1t…
@HRF @UMDPublicPolicy
2 days left!
I’m running the NYC Marathon for Team for Kids on Nov 1, and the deadline for my $4,000 fundraiser is Oct 7.
If you'd like to donate, I'd appreciate it greatly! Any amount helps. Thank you!
fundraisers.nyrr.org/alex-le…
Hello Friends and Colleagues!
I’m running the NYC Marathon for Team for Kids on Nov 1, which means I’m training for 26.2 miles and speedrunning a $4,000 fundraiser by Oct 7.
If you’d like to help, here’s my official page:
fundraisers.nyrr.org/alex-le…
Thanks!
This seems like the most important single decision humanity has to make about ai. Glad to see the pope sees clearly.
Terrifying implications that anthropic wants the opposite.
NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…
imagine spending >$10 on a single prompt
With a 1M token output limit, Argon adds a deeper level of reasoning to tackle long, multi-step problems in one go.
Feedback from early testers will help us strengthen our systems before we roll out more broadly to developers, enterprises, and consumers soon.
Find out more → goo.gle/4rZBiSd
Alex Lewin retweeted
Lots of good questions since we published Shielded Bitcoin. Bitcoin++ asked us to tackle a dozen of them — covering common misconceptions, trade-offs, and open avenues for research. Enjoy digging into this conversation with @ClaraShik and @btcinsider__.
Can witness encryption really get us private bitcoin? We sat down with @clarashik, to clarify where @allocinitxyz research's stands today, and what still needs to be demonstrated
Hello Friends and Colleagues!
I’m running the NYC Marathon for Team for Kids on Nov 1, which means I’m training for 26.2 miles and speedrunning a $4,000 fundraiser by Oct 7.
If you’d like to help, here’s my official page:
fundraisers.nyrr.org/alex-le…
Thanks!
