Has anything become more beautiful as a consequence of becoming more universal (i.e. more broadly accessible and legible)? It seems like there is a sweet spot - e.g., making the Bible more accessible to illiterate peasants resulted in stained glass, which is arguably a more beautiful representation than words on a page - but beyond a certain scope, things seem to degenerate and become ugly. An airport terminal optimized for use by all humans on Earth is sterile & purposefully forgettable (i.e., less beautiful). The universal language on the internet is brainrot; the universal sound is some swampy local minimum between reggaeton & drill

If you actually study lymphatic drainage you become schizophrenic.

People don't understand how insanely high IQ Newton was. This is a man who had no background in math or algebra until he was ~20. In <3 years, Newton got himself to the frontier, then invented calculus, thought of the inverse square law, and the theory of colors & light. He was so intellectually superior he withdrew from the scientific community because he had no peers. Only when Halley was trying to calculate planets' motion by means of an inverse square law, he remembered he knew this old, extremely intelligent professor; he might be able to help him. When the problem was taken to Newton, he said "it's such and such." How do you know, asked Halley. "I proved it a couple of years ago." That's what led to The Principia; it was the exposition of what Newton had uncovered in his younger years and was lying around as a pile of private papers.

Spicy take incoming. 🔥🔥 The combined bomber offensive in WW2 finally crippled the Axis powers by destroying their fuel supply chain. Then it took the industrial might of the entire US to build tens of thousands of bombers. Now anyone between you and the Middle East can burn down a refinery, tank farm, pipeline, or tanker, with an easily assembled robotic flying bomb that costs less than my AI subscriptions. @PeterZeihan predicted "the tanker war" would happen in the Indian Ocean but it doesn't matter where. There's only one country that could plausibly enforce global peace on shipping lanes and only one industrial power that is self sufficient on oil supply, and it's the same country. Trump asks Iran and Zelensky to please stop blowing shit up for five minutes, but the primary victims of this phase of the kinetic conflict are China and Europe, both places that have spent decade(s) ignoring and/or undermining the Pax Americana and, in Europe's case, going out of their way to destroy their own economies. China wants to be a big boy on the global stage? Let them spend their own blood and treasure pacifying the Middle East. Europe wants to stick it to Trump? It's easier to tell the yanks to get fucked if you don't rely on them for literally every aspect of your industrial infrastructure and economic stability. I've been in rooms with senior energy ministers from Europe and China. The Chinese are rational and pragmatic, the Europeans are functionally comatose, but neither party has a better plan than getting into a bidding war to buy whatever LNG the US can spare, forever. It is blindingly obvious to me that the least unstable future equilibrium is one where oil users localize supply using solar synthetic fuel tech, essentially a silico-industrial form of farm-to-table agriculture. Short supply chains, locally secured. It is equally obvious to me that a generation of people who grew up in the "developed" world are going to endure a decade or more of severe hardship before they, collectively, accept the L and move to the next step. Most people would rather watch their neighbor freeze than admit they were wrong.

I recommend the trope of 20yo AI enthusiasts who think AI is the future of work and will replace human labor, to spend a couple of years in a traditional Fortune 500 company. Feel in person what it’s like to receive an invitation to a meeting about an email about a ticket about a spreadsheet about a SELECT * query. Watch 20 people debate for a month a 10 digit number that is off by one decimal. See how access to any minor piece of data requires a workflow of permissions from five people. Observe how any deployment requires planning at least two quarters in advance. Pay attention to how nobody, even at the highest levels, cares one bit about productivity, let alone innovation, because the only thing they care about is their paycheck. Then tell me AI is going to replace all human labor.

Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash. Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase). Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets. IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster). Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot. Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time? Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.) Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once. Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case. I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026). Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS. Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security. The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.

Goobers in the replies talking about "substrate dependence" as though brains are just wet digital computers. That's a popular meme, but it's actually not the case. Do some more reading.

Many married American women have small businesses where they do every job at a Chinese trinket factory when they could make thrice as much as waitresses for their time. This job is supposed to be automated. xitter.cf/katafyp/status/2106278…

This applies at the level of societies too. We need stories in which a good future is still possible, because people build toward futures they can imagine Belief is part of the causal chain. If enough people believe there’s a path, we’re more likely to find one

you invite more parasocial attention when you post face. we're biologically wired to connect through the eyes. better to remain illegible through, ironically, words alone