Zac Peires

Former software engineer and Web3 founder. Prev: @Improbableio & co-founder @animalabs_io & @act_nexus. Exploring new pastures.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Signs you might be trying to get your frontier AI lab nationalized:

You compare it to nukes… threaten half of white-collar jobs… warn recursive self-improvement could end humanity… then race ahead anyway.

In other words, you want the government to save us from… you.

[MONOKO Art & Computation @monokonet]

Inspired by manga lately.
Really loving this shader at 12fps.

[MONOKO Art & Computation @monokonet]

So happy to see the first shaders finding homes. Thank you 🙏

[MONOKO Art & Computation @monokonet]

https://t.co/GkJosMw33W

[Séb Krier @sebkrier]

New paper: we argue AGI may first emerge as collective intelligence across agent networks, not a single system. This reframes the challenge from aligning one mind to governing emergent dynamics: more institutional design than single-agent alignment. https://t.co/vwuHPzRUav

[Balaji @balajis]

The British — perhaps more than any single other culture — are perfectly suited for venturing forth from Britain and setting up startup societies anywhere in the world.

So: assume London is over, for now. And set up New London elsewhere. Ideally by connecting many distributed New Londons, as if all the Chinatowns of the world were part of one commercial network.

[Ika「🦑」 @ikadotxyz]

"Ika could position Sui as a global coordination layer sitting above individual blockchains, capturing value from cross-chain activity while driving institutional integrations seeking compliant, trustless infrastructure."

[Anduril Industries @anduriltech]

See before you're seen.

EagleEye enhances the warfighter’s perception by overlaying digital information onto the real world, delivering vital real-time insights.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

The free market is an evolutionary optimization algorithm that ends up doing something akin to denoising diffusion

[Zac Peires @zpeires]

Outside of stables and finance, what are the odds mass (human) crypto adoption is downstream of an AI-first economy that runs on crypto rails? I.e mass crypto-AI adoption comes first, we follow.

Crypto becomes the mechanic for synthetic and human intelligence to exchange value

[Zac Peires @zpeires]

Anima Update and Post-Mortem (2):

Over the last week, I’ve had some time to reflect on why Anima failed.

There is a commonly said Silicon Valley trope that perfectly encapsulates our mistakes:

“First-time founders focus on product, second-time founders focus on distribution”.

My job was to steer the ship. The core focus - not in order - of the role included: (1) development of the platform/product; (2) fundraising; and, (3) sales and distribution.

Unfortunately, with my limited experience and having come from a product, brand and tech-research background, the weightings I placed on these were gravely incorrect.

I did not place anywhere near enough focus on sales and distribution - lining up revenue.

Now, it’s not to say this would’ve been easy; the Sui NFT market is tiny and we’d have had to actively grow the size of the pie. But, it was doable and should’ve been my sole focus.

Nonetheless, my obsession with product superseded time spent on sales and distribution. Beyond design, we went as far to integrate a CMS to allow teams and projects to edit data themselves - this was largely developed with the game distribution section in-mind - with the idea that the platform would function like LinkedIn or FB, with user accounts and business accounts.

Consequently, when it came to fundraising, it was very hard to convince VCs - Sui Foundation or otherwise - that this was a product worth investing in, as the feasible size of potential monthly profits did not and would not match the monthly runway costs of a company with even 3 developers on staff (a single experienced Sui Move developer today is very often more per year than our entire team’s year runway).

To our community, I’m sorry. I made a foundational mistake. Hard lessons have been learnt to the detriment of our holders (and team).

Nonetheless, I hope you can see the effort we put into the product.

Below, there are links to our build. To caveat, we have purged our DB owing to hiring a developer - we were in a bind - who was culturally and fundamentally misaligned; incorrect database structure and refusal to optimise images. As a result, in order to remove costs as we wound down the company, we purged our AWS infra which (nonsensically and wastefully) had terabytes of images and used an unsuitable non-relational database. The result, the collections listings page is not populated - but it did look beautiful.

However, you should be able to see some of the efforts we put into building a product that I believe, from a user perspective, would’ve been best in-class. This doesn’t mitigate my mistakes, but I thought I’d share.

There will be a follow up post-mortem, where we explore how we are going to distribute the codebase(s) and to whom.

What we released in the last 12 months:

ACT inventory (likely all seen. Run on desktop and click demo):
https://t.co/9leb2VHBAJ

ACT / Anima Genesis contracts:
https://t.co/KDblctFmS2

Anima Launchpad (creator flow is currently still gated)
https://t.co/nmrSDKj3qm
https://t.co/NVLOogX0My

Marketplace landing page:
https://t.co/3bE0w08Zjw

Marketplace item page:
https://t.co/lZpHi5mxgC

Marketplace drops page (unrefined and boilerplate):
https://t.co/t9QeLOU3uI

Marketplace dashboard (log-in to see):
https://t.co/OdefLyGlyK

I realise the above looks somewhat bare, but when it was filled with content and had the full scope of UI - lots of pieces not included, like game distribution page, bids, etc… - it really looked fantastic!

I bear full responsibility for what happened to Anima.

I’ll follow up in the next few days regarding code and even share some of our successes in the last year of trading - 12 month sales volume of tokenised assets (some taking place off-chain with IRL goods) - was strong.

[Zac Peires @zpeires]

In the last six months, as I think is the case with many in the tech space, my ideological views - surrounding regulation and role of state in society - have shifted dramatically.

This is a very important read and something I wholeheartedly endorse:

https://t.co/ce7PHdxw3f

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

People are starting to get it now.

[Zac Peires @zpeires]

There’s definitely a point in what you’re saying, both today and historically.

In terms of today’s polarisation, if I look at domestic factors in the US, that’s not how I weight things.

If I take a more macro look: Russia, China and Qatar have definitely been funding a spread of different US-based ideological moments in order to create domestic in-fighting.

[Zac Peires @zpeires]

There are clear ideological culprits to the madness we’re seeing in the US today.

Whilst postmodernism is clearly the main philosophical strand behind identity politics, driving the fragmentation of western society, libertarianism has definitely played a role.

Both erode a sense of collective national responsibility.

Extreme left and extreme (economic) right seem to lead to patrimonial structures, with civic duty replaced purely by power structures and profit incentives.

Controversial to say I preferred (in-part at least) neo-conservatism? Perhaps neo-con fork (3.0) is necessary

[Zac Peires @zpeires]

@Mawnstar1 Idiocy > likelihood than malicious intent

[Zac Peires @zpeires]

@Mawnstar1 Not convinced by this notion of chaos or polarisation by design - Occam’s Razor: systems are complex and consist of a multiplicity of individuals and competing interests.

The worse thing that has happened to the west is Michel Foucault becoming the dominant academic discourse

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

"If AI and robots don't solve our national debt, we are toast." -Elon

My fellow technology brothers, it is time to build. The fate of the United States depends on it.

[devaux.sui @Theo_de_Vaux]

re prepping meshes weights and rigging for web is... not fun. but a small break from a project I'm working on for some very dope people in the sui ecosystem 😅