zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ

Freedom maximalist. Good vibes only.

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Announcing https://t.co/qYiMdHjH0X! 𝟘 𝟙 ❒ 🔨

Strengthen cryptography with AI.

Cryptography—both current and post-quantum cryptography—depends on hashes. SHA-256? SHA-3? BLAKE3? Nobody knows if they are secure. We're going to find out!

Come help accelerate scientific research!

HashSmash is an open science-acceleration project in collaboration with @yukonresearch, @eigenlabs, @projecteleven, and @ShieldedLabs.

[Joel Valenzuela @TheDesertLynx]

Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs) were once on Zcash's roadmap, but now are controversial.

For ZSA supporters: why do you want them?

What use cases would you be most eager to see them used for?

[zack @zack_overflow]

optimism is probably the only trait that matters now that intelligence and technical skills have been commoditized

it's the only thing that matters

[Wes Felter @wmf]

Many people are confused that a M5 Pro is better than M6 or a Core 288 is better than a Core 305 but they understand that last year's 7 series is better than this year's 3 series. The mistake is putting the generation up front when the tier is more important.

[Jon Walch @JonWalch]

Excited to announce my new company: @OffworldPrivacy

We take private crypto assets, like @Zcash , and put them in private DeFi on @HeliusPrivacy and @aztecnetwork

First products: trust-minimized shielded Zcash bridge and private lending protocols

DM for the investment memo

[Nate ⓩ🛡 @nate_zec]

If you're the subset of Utilitarian that believes score aggregates should respect individual preferences, here's mine:

My Util score is whichever input to aggregation produces an aggregate score of -∞ for any world where people decided how to act by aggregating Utils. 😉

[Péter Szilágyi @peter_szilagyi]

Reality of our days:

1. I am sitting on a set of vulns (4+) that allows me to remotely take over a consumer home automation device I have (3+ diff ways).
2. The vendor doesn't only serve consumers, but also critical infra (announced partnerships include pharma manufacturing plants, airport logistics, hospitals, etc) across various locations in Europe and the US (not the same product line, ofc, so maybe moot).
3. Claude and Astra refuse to help me explore even my own device, so now I'm using Chinese hosted models for investigating.
4. The vendor (with a revenue of $0.75B) does not maintain any security disclosure practice whatsoever, nor does respond to emails.

So, to recap, I need to outsource vulnerability hunting of (potentially, I don't know) critical western infrastructure to Chinese models, because the western models refuse; and the vendor doesn't give a shit. Fun timeline.

PS: The vendor is Swiss.

[Dev @zkDragon]

Ironwood coffee!

[Jeremiah @jeremiahrogers]

Alright why is Zcash crashing? Genuinely curious.

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

@klaehnr Thanks!

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Hey, if you're interested in hashing a whole bunch of data super efficiently, could you please look at this sketch of an API and tell me if it would fit your use case? It supports: incremental, multithreading, batching, limited memory, back-pressure. https://t.co/5iyAxNRJpq

[Jason McGee 🛡 @aquietinvestor]

We have another addition to the Shielded Labs team! Michael Guima (@michael2xl) is joining as our Community Lead. He’ll help us build stronger connections with the Zcash community and keep people informed about our work. He’ll also develop educational resources and documentation that explain the technology behind our projects and make Zcash governance easier to understand and follow.

Michael leads @zcashbrazil, where he has built a team whose contributions span education, software development, design, and community building. They publish news and tutorials in Portuguese, organize events such as Zcon Vozes, and represent Zcash at Brazil’s major crypto events. They created the Zcash Global Discord, a central gathering place for the Zcash community. They also helped launch ZecHub DAO and advise new communities as they get started. Under his leadership, the team has developed and continues to maintain more than ten open-source products. These include the first Zcash faucet on mainnet, ZebraPi—the first plug-and-play Zebra node—and LiveZEC, which lets livestreamers receive ZEC donations. Much of their work serves the wider Zcash community, well beyond Brazil.

Michael also developed @openzcash, a community resource that brings together information about Zcash and presents it in a clear and useful format. It lets people explore how grants are funded and paid, follow governance proposals, and review voting results, with links to the underlying sources. I’ve been especially impressed by the depth of the data and the thought he’s put into presenting it. It’s a strong example of his ability to turn complex information into something the community can easily explore and use.

I’ve long admired Michael’s contributions to Zcash and often interacted with him during my time on Zcash Community Grants. The energy he brings to his work and how much his team accomplished always stood out to me. Under his leadership, Zcash Brazil has become a model for other regional Zcash communities.

Michael will continue to lead Zcash Brazil in a more limited capacity as he takes on his role at Shielded Labs. I’m looking forward to working closely with him and seeing what we can build together.

Please join me in welcoming Michael to Shielded Labs!

[Michae2xl ᙇ @michael2xl]

Thank you Jason, for the opportunity, for the trust and for the kind words. Thank you Zooko, Mark, Nate and everyone at @ShieldedLabs for the warm welcome.

To the Zcash community, to my team at @zcashbrazil who built all of this with me, and to everyone who has been part of this journey: none of this happens alone.

AI is changing how everything gets built, distributed and adopted. I believe the next narrative will ask for union. Independent teams, different cultures, different paths, but together, because ZEC is unique.

Shielded Labs live the mission every day, and it's a great honor to be part of this team.

Let's stay united. The work continues.

[lucid. @lucidzk]

probably the greatest edition of @WSJ ever printed. zillions!

[Dariia Porechna 🇺🇦 @FutureDies]

@privacymage @cyberaxe @FrostForger @zooko Awesome collab

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

@klaehnr All of the above! 😂 Can you point me to some Rust code of yours that uses BLAKE3 and briefly say what kind of performance (i.e. latency-v-throughput and what number and size of input messages)?

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Huh. I just received a large number of new messages in my twitter/x DM's that say they were sent weeks ago, but I'm pretty sure they weren't there yesterday. Looking at them, it seems like people wrote them to me weeks ago. 🤔

[privacymage @privacymage]

cast another spell and we drop to almost 98 bits flat on 🧙‍♂️ 39 rounds, smashing!

@cyberaxe @FutureDies @FrostForger @zooko

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

@IsaacKing314 I experimented with some lesser-known chars that are technically quote marks, for that purpose …

[Isaac King 🔎 @IsaacKing314]

There desperately needs to be a punctuation mark like quotes but that signifies a paraphrase.

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Update: I asked my AIgents to try it, and they weren't able to get either the stable release or the unstable v2 release to compile anything faster than cargo/rustc does. 🤔 https://t.co/0NTXQsHtVK

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Oh boy! This sounds awesome! (Haven’t tried it yet.) Rust is the best programming language for AIs because of the safety orientation and tooling, but the long compile times are a big limitation. This appears set to eliminate that friction!

https://t.co/GBUL7Eur5F

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

UX latency is the most frustrating (lack of) advancement in computing over the last ~50 years.

IBM, way back in the 80s, found that user productivity shot up *exponentially* as system response time dropped. The "Doherty Threshold" was defined as ~400 milliseconds; the maximum amount of tolerable UX latency before interrupting user flow state.

It's unbelievable how many modern operating systems (*cough* win11) violate this threshold constantly.

Literally all you need to do as a Dev is pay attention. Add a "Doherty Threshold" to your test suite. There's so many different profiling tools, and especially with how good models are, really no excuse. Sure, some stalls are unavoidable, but that's when you pull out other UX tricks to at least give the illusion of responsiveness.

Crazy how much vintage computing hardware feels immeasurably more responsive despite having thousands of times less overall performance.