Y2K web design in the 2000s – Sony in 2002 – Jamiroquai in 2003 – Microsoft Games in 2002 – Swift 3D in 2002

Bot detection & human verification will be one of the most urgent demands for businesses over the coming years. Agent swarms will suffocate every website and form; small companies and government websites are most vulnerable. There is a huge gap in the market for this right now. When we looked at what offerings were in the market to use at X, there was not a single company that brought together all the latest technologies so we had to do it all in-house.

it will be so awkward when all the money in the world has been invested in ai tools and none has been invested in infrastructure for human+machine society to function

I signed the "pacing letter" about slowing the rate of AI capabilities development because we either have reached or soon will reach the point where human experts cannot make robust assurances that frontier AI systems won't do dangerous and unpredictable things. AI systems are becoming smarter than the best humans in some areas, and, almost by definition, it's very hard to predict what something smarter than you will do. There's no sense racing into an outcome where smarter-than-human AIs are doing unpredictable things, indeed it would be insane. What exactly is "winning" in this context? Am I supposed to be jealous that some other country will build more machines it can't control quicker than America? "Race" was always a bad metaphor for this enterprise anyway, dramatically understating the stakes at play. It is time to bring the "race" era of AI development to a close. It'd be great for the government to be a partner in this next phase of AI development, when concentrated efforts on alignment, interpretability, security, monitoring, and the like will be necessary. Diplomacy will also be necessary here given that the large negative externalities that could be associated with one country racing ahead will be felt globally. Maybe it's just my own personal experience, but I've felt AI policy get much more petty and tribal this year. Things have felt more personal, more bitter, meaner. I hope we can rise above that stuff. This really is much more serious than all those shrill little quarrels.

Polkadot light clients now fit on a microcontroller. Here is an ESP32 following the relay chain on a 9V battery 🔋 It verifies finality proofs locally, so it can securely read the state of any parachain without needing to trust an RPC provider. Next: hooking it up to the Devnet 👀

For crypto founders, the biggest lesson from @fomo and @Pumpfun ascendance is that the distribution model of the last 5 years for apps is moot. Web3 is dead, wallet connect is dead, dApps are dead. The new plan is vertically integrated mobile: hide the crypto mechanics entirely. Single balance across chains, integrated onramp (Apple Pay is king), no bridges, no seed phrases or private keys (sign in with Google or X). For wallet apps themselves, this presents an existential crisis. The user demands simplicity & the feeling of safety. In the past, your wallet was a gateway to crypto. Now, I hold a deposit in each app I use and I don't yet care if they talk to each other. As always, we go through bundling and unbundling cycles. If Phantom and Jupiter and Metamask were bundling, we are now seeing a great unbundling.

RIP the World Wide Web (1993-2026)