sidequesting | fmr @MessariCrypto, @DL_Research, @Accenture | travel, culture, cars, golf and tech
Midwest
Joined February 2016
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight at you, then they add you to their Long-Term Capital Markets Assumptions paper and predict you'll be the best-performing asset of the next decade.
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
whatever field you’re in, start moving closer to hardware.
not because software is dying. because software is becoming abundant.
ai can already generate code, interfaces, analysis, content, workflows.
but atoms are still stubborn.
• ai → learn chips, accelerators, edge compute
• software → learn embedded systems, electronics, networking
• biology → learn instrumentation, sensors, lab automation
• physics → learn robotics, semiconductors, energy systems
• design → learn cad, materials, manufacturing
• economics → study factories, energy, logistics, supply chains
the closer you move toward physical reality, the harder the problems become.
heat. power. materials. tolerances. reliability. manufacturing. logistics.
you don’t need to abandon your field.
combine it with hardware.
• software + hardware.
• ai + robotics.
• biology + machines.
• physics + manufacturing.
the next generation of builders won’t just manipulate information.
they’ll use information to manipulate atoms.
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Over the next few years you are going to have to fight with everything you’ve got to retain your humanity. They will try to convince you to give up connecting with each other, to give up truly being alive. It will be the most important fight of your whole life
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Here’s something I believe about November 30, 2022:
It's one of the greatest and clearest dividing lines in humankind's story
I feel it most with books
Anything published before the release of ChatGPT now feels like a holy relic. A time capsule
The capsule contains words we know to have been assembled by a human mind
Everything after carries seeds of doubt:
Who created this? How much of it was generated?Whose intentions are hidden inside?
Once, we worried about psyops. The greater threat will soon be modelops: the subtle manipulation of human thought through the models that increasingly mediate/manipulate what we read, see, believe, and imagine
This doesn't require a conspiracy. It'll emerge from incentives, feedback loops, political pressure, corporate interests, models learning to reinforce the ideas that make them more useful, more indispensable
Whatever comes next, I find myself marveling at what humanity created before the threshold
Every old book, painting, film, and song now contains something we can never fully recover: a sort of virginal, unpolluted innocence
The shards that survive will be cherished. And we'll hand them down for generations
WTF
AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books. Scanning their contents to train models. Then turning the originals to pulp.
The sum of human thought, digitized and shredded.
Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently. The knowledge survives only as training data inside a system no one can hold, browse, or resell.
What used to sit on a shelf for centuries now exists as weights in a model that might get deprecated next quarter.
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Just got back from @consensus2026 Miami. Some unfiltered thoughts on the vibes:
The industry has clearly grown up. The degens are gone, the allocators are wearing suits, and your @Uniswap booth has been replaced by a JP Morgan activation with 50 year old boomers. Cautiously optimistic with a distinctly institutional aftertaste. This was not a bull market conference.
Key takeaways:
1) CLARITY Act has serious momentum. Everyone at the conference basically agrees it's getting done before summer. The urgency is real, people are done waiting. And the regulatory window feels genuinely unprecedented: CLARITY Act, GENIUS Act, a CFTC chair actively engaging with the industry, this combination has never existed simultaneously before. The institutional urgency you're seeing everywhere is directly correlated to this window feeling time-limited. Miss it and you're explaining to your board why you sat on your hands during the most favorable crypto regulatory environment in history.
2) Institutions are not dabbling anymore. They are ALL IN on tokenization and terrified of missing it. No one is debating whether blockchain rails are useful. The debate is now who gets the mandate. And quietly @coinbase , @krakenfx , @RobinhoodApp and @Bullish and others are being seen more as competitors than potential partners by a lot of these TradFi players.
3) TradFi M&A is going to keep ripping. @krakenfx just grabbed Reap for $600M. Visa, Mastercard, Swift etc they can't miss the train and they're willing to overpay for the ticket.
4) Crypto VC is consolidating fast. @a16z and @katie_haun just announced $2.2B and $1B funds respectively. Meanwhile the boutique VCs are either pivoting to AI or quietly closing shop. Same playbook is happenign as traditional VC, the big platforms eat everything and the small guys scramble. Seed and pre-seed is basically a ghost town right now. Late stage and pre-IPO is where the action is.
5) Investment themes were aggressively consensus (no pun intended): Stablecoins, tokenization, vertically integrated neo-banks, regulated or permissioned DeFi. Literally everyone is trying to be a tokenization platform. Issuance, management, settlement, curation, pick your lane, slap tokenization on it, try to raise money.
6) Building in crypto is genuinely hard now. Your competition isn't some scrappy new L1 or GMX, it's @tether , @Anchorage , and @Securitize. there are now many crypto businesses running 200M+ annual Rev with serious management teams and deep pockets. The barbarians are now the establishment. New entrants are going to have a very bad time.
7) Pure token-only plays have become extremely contrarian. Controversial take but I think the biggest returns will come from a handful of tokens that can credibly signal in a compliant way that the token remains the only value accruing asset going forward.
8) A lot of teams are in a genuinely weird spot on the token/equity dynamics. Decent products, decent teams, but a complete stakeholder clusterf*** that nobody can untangle. Many of these will simply not survive.
9) The agentic finance and agentic commerce crowd was loud. The actual substance was not. A lot of big claims, very little to show for it. Feels very early and mostly vibes. Color me skeptical for now.
10) @Bullish acquiring Equinity for $4.2B was the boldest move of the conference. @ThomasFarley and @BonannoDavid now have a full-stack RWA proposition: issuance, transfer agency, tokenization, exchange and settlement under one roof. Massive move. Very positive for the industry regardless of whether you think the price or the move were right.
11) @BitMNR and @fundstrat are apparently tired of winning and has decided to let your grandma keep her ETH... for now. The pace of accumulation is slowing. Tom, we await your next allocation with bated breath.
12) DeFi apps are moving up the stack and getting smarter about it. They don't want to be the commodity infrastructure layer getting squeezed by exchanges that own distribution. Some genuinely interesting announcements, @buffalu__ at @jito launching JTX being the highlight.
13) Nobody at the conference was talking about retail coming back. The entire conversation was institutional. That's either a sign of maturity or a sign that the industry has quietly given up on mainstream consumer adoption for now and is betting the next cycle gets pulled by institutional flows rather than retail FOMO. Probably both.
14) The L1 debate is officially dead. Nobody and I mean nobody was arguing SOL vs ETH or pitching their shiny new L1. The crowd that used to religiously defend their chain of choice has either grown up, cashed out, or both. Institutions don't care about your consensus mechanism. They care about settlement finality, compliance rails and liquidity. The L1 wars were fun while they lasted. RIP.
15) DATs are a mess. Had some genuinely productive conversations with a few of them but let's be honest most are an absolute clusterf*** operationally and very few are running anything resembling a legitimate business. The structure is a disaster at the stakeholder level and the governance makes your average startup cap table look clean. That said, the permanent capital vehicle concept is still genuinely compelling and I think a handful of these will turn out to be absolute home runs. The model isn't broken, most of the teams just are.
Bottom line: Consensus 2026 felt like the moment crypto stopped being a movement and started being an industry. Whether that's exciting or depressing probably depends on when you got in.
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
The State of RWAFi Q1 2026 Report is here.
Developed in collaboration with @DefiLlama, this report breaks down tokenised commodities, equities, real estate & alternative finance. Same macro trend, yet evolving differently under unique constraints.
assets.dlnews.com/dlresearch…
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
I like blockchain tech quite a bit because it extends open source to open source+state, a genuine/exciting innovation in computing paradigms. I'm just sad and struggle to get over it coming packaged with so much braindead bs (get rich quick pumps/dumps/scams/spams/memes etc.). Ew
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
As DeFi matures, investors deserve accurate, public information about protocols, and protocols need a better way to communicate with investors.
We’re proud to partner with @sparkfinance to launch the first DefiLlama investor relations portal.
This goes deeper than DefiLlama’s normal dashboard, incorporating additional metrics and granularity, along with a place for Spark to provide context for its analytics. This is a one-stop shop for everything that Spark users need to stay informed:
* Comprehensive analytics about Spark financials and usage
* Quarterly reports
* Recent announcements from Spark
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
if you’re asking me a question about how to improve opsec you should def check out SEAL Frameworks
frameworks.securityalliance.…
literally all of this was written by real people in this space, for real people on this space.
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
This new DeFi paper out of Cambridge University's Centre for Alternative Finance uses DefiLlama as its primary data source.
The llama has entered the literature.
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
If anyone else is affected by coinbase shutting down their commerce accounts you can use
checkout.llamapay.io/
It's API is a drop-in replacement for coinbase commerce so you can switch by just replacing urls and keys
Plus much more efficient + lower cost
Hey all, looks like @coinbase @CoinbaseBiz is killing their coinbase commerce platform and the business account are only available in the US and Singapore.
So CT what are the option to replace them ?
@MoonPayCommerce ? Who else ?
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if infrastructure like this 👇 gets blown up, as of this moment it will take at least a decade to recover from this war - and the truth is that the world's energy picture is probably changed forever.
This single facility 👇produced roughly 20% of global LNG supply (aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/18…) and, as of 2011, had taken $70 billion to build (energyintel.com/0000017b-a7b…).
What makes this even worse is that Iran's strike on this was retaliation after Israel attacked their South Pars gas field which draws from the same natural gas reservoir, which is the world's largest by far (9,700 km² - about the size of Qatar itself).
Heck, on the list of the 25 largest natural gas fields (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o…) this single reservoir holds roughly 40% of their combined recoverable reserves - and is nearly 6 times bigger than the 2nd biggest field in the world. And, unlike many of the others on the list, it's only at 10% depletion (meaning 90% of the gas is still there).
Which means that, probably for many years, a huge share of the gas from the world's largest reservoir simply won't be extractable, as infrastructure on both sides - Qatar's and Iran's - has now been blown up.
From a global energy supply perspective, we're deep into worst-case scenario territory.
QatarEnergy Statement on Missile Attacks on Ras Laffan Industrial City
QatarEnergy confirms that Ras Laffan Industrial City this evening has been the subject of missile attacks.
Emergency response teams were deployed immediately to contain the resulting fires, as extensive damage has been caused. All personnel have been accounted for and no casualties have been reported at this time.
QatarEnergy will continue to communicate the latest available information.
#Qatar
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
I'm going to make some obvious points.
(1) Blowing up all the oil infrastructure in the Middle East is an insane idea, and may well result in a global economic crash and humanitarian crisis unrivaled in the lives of those now living. We're talking about the price of everything everywhere rising, from food to gas, at a moment when inflation was already high. All of that will be laid at the feet of the authors of this war.
(2) The antebellum status quo of Feb 27, 2026 was just not that bad, but we're unlikely to return to it. Expect indefinite, long-term, ongoing disruptions to everything out of the Middle East.
(3) Also assume tech financing crashes for the indefinite future. The genius plan to get the Gulf states caught in the crossfire has incinerated much of the funding for LPs, for datacenters, and for IPOs. Anyone in tech who supported this war may soon learn the meaning of "force majeure" as funding gets yanked.
(4) Many capital allocators will instead be allocating much further down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, towards useful basic things like food and energy.
(5) It's fortunate that all those progressives yelled about the "climate crisis." Yes, their reasoning about timelines was wrong, and much of the money was wasted in graft, but the result was right: we all need energy independence from the Middle East, pronto. It's also fortunate that Elon and China autistically took climate seriously. Now they're going to need to ship a billion solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, nuclear power plants, and the like to get everyone off oil, immediately.
(6) It's not just an oil and gas problem, of course. It's also a fertilizer problem, and a chemical precursor problem. Maybe some new sources will come online at the new prices, but it takes time to dial stuff up, particularly at this scale, so shortages are almost a certainty.
That said, China has actually scaled up coal-to-chemicals[a,c] (C2C), and there's also something more sci-fi called Power-to-X[b] which turns arbitrary power + water + air into hydrocarbons. But all of that will need to get accelerated. I have a background in chemical engineering so may start funding things in this area.
(7) Ultimately, this war is going to result in tremendous blame for anyone associated with it. It's a no-win scenario to blow up this much infrastructure for so many people. Simply not worth it for whatever objective they thought they were going to attain. But unless you're actually in a position to stop the madness, the pragmatic thing to do is: scramble to mitigate the fallout to yourself, your business, and your people.
[a]: reuters.com/business/energy/…
[b]: alfalaval.com/industries/ene…
[c]: reuters.com/sustainability/c…
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
You know what is wild?
Openrouter specifically ignores Chutes as a provider because, **checks note**: "they may use your prompts to train models"
Reality: Chutes is the only provider which uses pure TEE and e2e encryption, private and cryptographically secure.
You know who can read your prompts though?
> Openrouter.
