I was registering to vote in NYC (deadline is Oct 24th!) and saw a prompt to volunteer as a poll worker and out of curiosity went through the sign up flow... other than the atrocious UI surprised to see what languages they want interpreters in. Anyway let's see if they allow me to be an Election Hero!
Ken O’Friel retweeted
Interesting perspective from Torsten Slok at Apollo today. It complements my Telegraph piece last week about whether economists are properly accounting for the inflationary impact of the great unbundling, and the growing customer preference, especially in banking, to stop being the product.
In this case Slok identifies a financial stability risk associated with everyday normies finally figuring out what they’re actually worth and not being ripped off. Though it’s a bit depressing if true, since it implies financial stability is entirely dependent on most people being a mug. [Tho I think monetary and finance scholars have always known this.]
The @BostonCollege Investment Committee (an LP and my beloved alma mater) asked for a few thoughts on what's happening in AI. I recorded a test run yesterday morning and then shared it with my partners, who encouraged me to share it more broadly... so here you go!
This is not a sales pitch, it's just a reflection on what we're seeing. And it wasn't intended to be shared, so please pardon the rough edges.
loom.com/share/c016702964a04…
Ken O’Friel retweeted
Grabbed a few pints with @ofrizzle and learned two things:
1. You’re a few taps away from meeting dope people
2. Some Japanese dudes can box and somehow have better hair than me
Pulley shuts down Dec 8.
Carta is taking the equity cap tables, but Pulley also ran the token cap table for many crypto companies, and Carta's migration doesn't touch tokens and digital assets.
So we're offering to help manage seamless transitions for crypto teams.
To Pulley token cap table customers: we will match Pulley's transition plan with Carta to honor your current pricing for year one, we rebuild your token cap table from your export ourselves, and while you keep Carta for equity.
Let us know how we can help! We'd love to work with all crypto companies looking for a new token cap table home.
Learn more here: toku.com/switch-from-pulley
Ken O’Friel retweeted
I am turning MAX BULLISH right now. Just like a river boat gambler holding his last chips I’m looking at the landscape and thinking fuck man we are in the fast take off stage right now.
I want to put it all max levered long on the high beta names and walk off into the orange glow of the sun. My bullishness has absolutely nothing to do with the math problems that are being solved most of them don’t matter that much.
But it’s more the realization that every AI lab just had. They all woke up and said wait a minute what are we doing selling $200 a month subscriptions to idiots who are making slop apps and nonsense substack articles when we can just subsidize a few super geniuses by giving them real compute to work on an important problem.
No one really cares about navier stokes besides some CFD simulation cycles. But what if we put these compute resources on real valuable problems? That opens up a whole new world. The bull case for AI has always been to me discovering new drugs or even verifying they work/don’t work reliably… I was thinking way way wayyyy too small.
There are hundreds of problems in engineering that if you got the experts in the room with real compute and even if they made a marginal improvement it would be worth hundreds of billions to the economy. Imagine we can build a steep slope device at 0.3V that’s worth like several generations of lithography nodes, or we can design a sub 100 femtojoul/bit optical IO and cut datacenter power by 40%, or even something as simple as more energy efficient molecular separation to replace distillation which is like 15% of all industrial energy use.
This is the real shit guys. The labs are realizing quickly this is the REAL frontier this is the final land grab. Open source can never compete here because they don’t have the capital and resources this plays right into the labs hands. They can’t give everyone a 10,000 agent swarm but they definitely can give it to Exxon mobile and charge them $50M dollars for it if it means they find more oil or Dow Chemical to create a new kind of super glue or to Moderna to computationally create different mRNA therapies… the list goes on and on.
A big reason why I never cared much for AI is despite all the normies going googoo Gaga over it is that literally they don’t have any clue what to do with it. Like if you were mediocre before AI you are mediocre after it, nothing changed u just got more skills that you don’t know how to use and you have no imagination or intuition. It’s the same reason why education is a waste on the majority of the population because let’s be real most of you aren’t going to be deriving differential equations or using epistemological concepts on your day job.
But you give this kinda compute and unfettered AI in the hands of people who are world class. They will cook. It’s the reason why Deepmind has a Nobel prize and no other lab does because deepmind actually hired or worked with the top biochemists and biophysicists to develop alphafold.
AI alone isn’t going to discover anything. Don’t fool yourself and grow up already if you still think AI is going to just figure out large scale nuclear fusion on its own then you are simply lost in the sauce at this point and are beyond saving. The pragmatic answer has always been use the AI to automate the busy work and keep the human experts for the actually thoughtfulness and intuition.
I think the AI labs will wake up now and realize selling coding tokens and image models to normies to make Disney characters isn’t the best business in the long run. Actually using the compute for real serious innovation is and it’s really easy to monetize this upfront.
I expect AI labs to stop looking like API companies and start looking like real research labs now. Thank god.
Congrats to the @0xPolygon team on the Open Money Stack launch!
Proud to see them continue pushing the ecosystem forward.
Ken O’Friel retweeted
Our test results are public on Finnrick.com. If a product isn't listed yet, it's still being processed by Finnrick.
Though payroll infrastructure has not changed in decades, this pilot with @plumenetwork and @WisdomTreeFunds is proof that it finally is. Employees can now receive part of their salary as $WTGXX shares that start accruing yield the moment pay lands.
Ken O’Friel retweeted
Landed in Miami and suddenly feel an urge to receive my payroll in digital assets via @usetoku
Ken O’Friel retweeted
This is why Americans are the deadliest fighters on earth.
I met a priest yesterday who just got accepted to chaplain school in Newport. I asked him the obvious question: Marines or Navy?
Navy, he said. His face fell a little. He told me he could never be a Marine because every Marine is a rifleman, and as a priest he can’t carry a weapon.
He’s hoping to get assigned to a Marine unit anyway. All chaplains are Navy officers, so that’s the only door in.
I laughed. I feel a little bad about that.
Then I explained to him what “Devil Doc” means. The Marine Corps doesn’t have medics. They use Navy Corpsmen.
I told him: when you get out to the fleet, find a Marine sergeant with a couple of Purple Hearts and tell him Devil Docs “aren’t real Marines.”
Be prepared to duck.
Marines are violently particular about who gets to wear their uniform. Navy Corpsmen and Navy chaplains who have eaten dirt alongside them in combat qualify. Full stop.
My dad was Air Force. Not even Navy. I remember going to VFW halls with him as a kid. Someone would ask him what service, he’d say Air Force, and the room would chuckle a little. Then they’d find out he was a medic, and the air in the room changed. Something close to reverence.
Dad hated being honored. He had one line he used to deflect it:
“I didn’t do much. Save your praise for my cousin the PJ.”
That always broke the ice.
PJs are the Air Force special operators who go into hell to pull downed pilots out.
They will take casualties and are prepared to die to rescue a single pilot or crewman.
The math doesn’t math out. Why would any combat force take multiple casualties to rescue one air force jet jockey?
What the padre is about to learn is that the military has a hierarchy that has nothing to do with rank, and nothing to do with the service stitched on your chest.
Have you deployed?
Have you seen combat?
In every firefight there are men who move toward the guns and men who hang back. And when the guy at the tip of the spear is pinned down, bleeding, with rounds cracking past his head, there is exactly one word he screams into the radio.
“Medic.”
Here is the catch, and it is the whole reason America fights the way America fights.
That Marine is willing to push forward into fire BECAUSE he knows the Corpsman is coming. He knows the medevac birds will land in the hot LZ.
He knows the Devil Doc will drag him out by his plate carrier if it comes to that.
And, if the medic can’t help, if he has what Dad called “injuries incompatible with life,” he knows that chaplain will crawl on his belly to administer last rights and deliver him to heaven.
The F-15 pilot punching out over enemy territory knows the same thing. He knows the PJs will move heaven and earth to reach him, and turn whatever is shooting at him into a smoking crater of hell on earth on the way in.
This is the quiet math underneath American violence.
Our warriors are the fiercest on earth not because they are more aggressive, not just because they are better trained, or better equipped, though they are all of those things. They are the fiercest because they know, in their bones, that when they key the mic and call for help, help is coming in hot.
Take that away, and you don’t have the U.S. military anymore. You have a security force.
🚨“WE GOT HIM! My fellow Americans, over the past several hours, the United States Military pulled off one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History, for one of our incredible Crew Office Members, who also happens to be a highly respected Colonel, and who I am thrilled to let you know is SAFE and SOUND!” - President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸
Ken O’Friel retweeted
Plume Launches Tokenized Payroll Pilot Using WisdomTree’s WTGXX
Plume, together with Toku and WisdomTree, has launched a payroll pilot that lets eligible employees receive a portion of their wages directly in shares of WisdomTree’s tokenized money market fund, WTGXX. The program is designed to test payroll distribution into onchain yield-bearing assets and accelerate real-world adoption of tokenized funds.
Source: xitter.cf/plumenetwork/status/20…
Payroll, tokenized.
We’re rolling it out first with @usetoku and @WisdomTreePrime
Eligible Plume contributors can now choose to receive a portion of their salary in shares of a regulated money market fund.
Tokenization becomes true infrastructure when it integrates into familiar financial workflows.
This is how real-world assets integrate with our everyday lives, starting with something as simple as getting paid.
Ken O’Friel retweeted
“If you kill or threaten Americans anywhere in the world — as Iran has — then we will hunt you down, and we will kill you.”
- Proud to be an American 🇺🇸🫡
Overnight, on President Trump’s orders, the Department of War commenced OPERATION EPIC FURY — the most lethal, most complex, and most-precision aerial operation in history.
The Iranian regime had their chance, yet refused to make a deal — and now they are suffering the consequences. For almost fifty years, Iran has targeted and killed Americans, always seeking the world’s most powerful weapons to further their radical cause. Last night, unlike any previous president, President Trump began dealing with this cancer.
We will not tolerate powerful missiles targeting the American people. Those missiles will be destroyed, along with Iran’s missile production. The Iranian navy will be destroyed. And, as President Trump has said his entire life, Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.
The United States did not start this conflict, but we will finish it. If you kill or threaten Americans anywhere in the world — as Iran has — then we will hunt you down, and we will kill you.
Our warriors are the best in the world, and they are fully unleashed to achieve our objectives. May God’s providence protect them in this vital mission.
🚨BREAKING: MULTI-TRILLION-DOLLAR PAYROLL INDUSTRY GOES ONCHAIN VIA CANTON
According to an official press release from @CantonNetwork $CC, the network has played host to the first ever private payroll transaction.
The major milestone was facilitated by @cantor8 and its @C8Wallet, alongside @usetoku (an enterprise-grade application layer for global payroll).
"This is the kind of real, everyday financial activity that shows blockchain can be integrated into core operational workflows without exposing sensitive data or compromising regulatory constraints", said @digitalasset CEO @YuvalRooz.
It is no coincidence that Canton was chosen as the host network, given its ability to offer blockchain advantages like instant settlement and low costs, while also making sure sensitive data remains private.
“For the network to succeed, the experience for the both the company and the end-user, whether that’s a trader or an employee receiving their salary, has to be seamless and secure,” said @KNP42777, CEO of Cantor8.
Ken O’Friel retweeted
People say stablecoins have PMF, but when you dig in, you find that it's still primarily used for crypto use-cases. Once you unlock privacy onchain, you're going to see more and more traditional businesses move onchian.
This is exciting and congrats to @cantor8 for this first transaction.
$CC @CantonNetwork
🚨BREAKING: MULTI-TRILLION-DOLLAR PAYROLL INDUSTRY GOES ONCHAIN VIA CANTON
According to an official press release from @CantonNetwork $CC, the network has played host to the first ever private payroll transaction.
The major milestone was facilitated by @cantor8 and its @C8Wallet, alongside @usetoku (an enterprise-grade application layer for global payroll).
"This is the kind of real, everyday financial activity that shows blockchain can be integrated into core operational workflows without exposing sensitive data or compromising regulatory constraints", said @digitalasset CEO @YuvalRooz.
It is no coincidence that Canton was chosen as the host network, given its ability to offer blockchain advantages like instant settlement and low costs, while also making sure sensitive data remains private.
“For the network to succeed, the experience for the both the company and the end-user, whether that’s a trader or an employee receiving their salary, has to be seamless and secure,” said @KNP42777, CEO of Cantor8.






























