
CTO @xmtp_. Prev @brexhq, co-founder of @Wantering (acq. 2015).
Vancouver, BC
Joined May 2008
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Nick Molnar retweeted
Head of Design at Stripe on how to stop creating zombie UIs
If we only use AI to make the things that we already make, just faster, then we're definitely missing out on the most interesting part.
From my talk at @lennysan’s Summit, here are four ideas for raising the ceiling, not just the floor:
- Have a point of view [5:38]
- Encode your standards into the machine [9:07]
- Don't confuse done with good [12:21]
- Unleash creativity and artistry [16:19]
Full talk here: youtu.be/GLvFTMtw4Jk?si=-5Ts…
The thing you should know before you port your project to Rust is that you are committing yourself to a life of optimizing CI and local dev perf.
"Once we land X optimization we'll be good" is a sweet lie we tell ourselves to keep going. There is no end.
ChatGPT Intelligent UI is pretty, but it feels designed to exclude plugin developers.
- No spec
- Even if there was a spec, everything relies on a black box server and specific OpenAI services that can change (to power things like image search)
- Private design system and UI catalog
I'm sure the community will reverse engineer it, but it makes tools like MCPJam have a much tougher time.
OpenUI has a great teardown here openui.com/blog/how-chatgpt-…
Comms masterclass from @KentonVarda in this blog post.
My gut reaction to the headline was probably the same as most: celld is a threat to Cloudflare so they decided to take them out while the project was still young.
Tough starting place.
Kenton calmly, patiently, and rationally walks the reader through why that’s not a sound business strategy. How they plan to continue supporting celld, and why having more on/off ramps to Cloudflare is good business.
I certainly hope it’s true. workerd - the example used in the post - isn’t a great case study in how CF wants to open up their platform. Its own README explains why you shouldn’t use it in production, and few do. Handful of niche projects like wdl. It’s a local Cloudflare testing tool marketed as an open platform.
Still, excited to see what comes next.
The team behind @Deno_Land, including @rough__sea (he knows a bit about Node.js), is joining @Cloudflare.
They’ll help make Workers better for Node.js developers and advance workerd as a core primitive for what comes next. cfl.re/4zlzlSa
It definitely is suspicious that OpenAI had breakthroughs in every field of math other than cryptography.
Mathematical breakthroughs are a much more pressing threat than quantum.
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.
It’s not treason. But it’s not not treason.
Oh.
"A Globe and Mail investigation has found that Republican political operatives were on the ground in Alberta this year to assist the separatist campaign in its bid to leave Canada, while harbouring their own aspirations for the province to secede.
The Globe also found that when Alberta separatist leaders went to Washington to meet with the U.S. State Department, they offered up key assets from the province’s resource portfolio, including access to fresh water and royalties on crude oil, in exchange for help transitioning to independence."
theglobeandmail.com/canada/a…
Maybe 10 years ago I was working with a team of cracked Ukrainian developers through an outsourcing firm. Left them alone for the week, and when I came back they proudly showed off the complete Go package manager they built. They were supposed to be working on a billing system.
Nothing prepared me more for working with Claude.
Every company needs some version of this policy. Skip docs are a cancer. Often I would have been better off reading the prompt that went in rather than the output. At least that’s what the person was actually thinking!
We instituted an official AI Writing Policy at @Clay.
Massive thanks to @sophiebits on our engineering team who wrote this.
Originally this was just for eng, but other teams found it so helpful we expanded it company-wide.
Here are the four guiding principles:
1. You must stand behind every idea and sentence
It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you share it.
2. Writing is thinking
Spending time on the writing process teaches you more about your topic. If you circumvent this process, you will walk away with a poorer understanding of the subject matter.
3. More time should be spent writing a document than consuming it
If you generate a document from a short prompt then ask your readers to go through the longer output, you are disrespecting their time. They can talk to ChatGPT themselves if they want to.
4. Longer is not better
AI makes it easy to generate long docs, and it loves padding them with sentences that say nothing. If you're producing docs from a short prompt, consider just sharing the prompt.
You can read (and borrow) the full policy below. Hopefully we all communicate a bit more clearly now :)
Someone needs to bring back the original Uber Eats. The one where they had cars driving around in circles with a trunk full of hot burritos.
I once got a delivery three minutes after ordering. Peak consumer experience
We have 2 more Jev like efficiency breakthroughs and the AI investment bubble pops.
Jevons paradox isn’t instant and there is so much capex already locked in for 2027
Don’t forget that they also have their API at >90% off if you let them train on the inputs/outputs. dev.meta.ai/docs/pricing-rat…
It’s a data game and they are playing to win.
the amount of deeply personal, & actually actionable ai training data fb is likely generating right now through muse is likely insane. even if peripheral.
stuff like what ppl see, want, ask, choose, buy, ignore, & act on. esp through the connectors. it’s basically onavo built in house.
& the compounding effects of that data flywheel are only the beginning. muse is basically fb 2.0 as a company which is why zuck needed to go all out.
Can someone hook this poor Canadian up with a Muse invite code? Wanna see what all the fuss is about.
I don’t care how much Meta has invested in privacy and security…you know they’re harvesting. They can’t stop harvesting. Harvesting is in their blood.
Best personal technology decision I’ve made is getting a big ugly Brother laser printer and throwing out my inkjet.
If you WFH you need a printer (return labels etc). Inkjet cartridges dry out when unused. The printers break all the time.
A Brother laser printer is like an AK47. No maintenance, just works.
You can still write technical blog posts that aren’t slop. This one is excellent
We're making Git hosting more reliable, performant, and scalable.
This post traces 20 years of Git infrastructure and explains how that history led us to design and operate our Git storage, Origin, as if it were a database.
cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-s…













