Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth)

Preventing human-machines conflicts since 2014. Ethereum Foundation Alumni (2014-2018), co-founder of ENS (2017), co-founder of Higher Order Company (2023).

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

* helped launch ethereum
* launched the first Ethereum Wallet and Web3 Browser.
* coded one of the first ERC20 tokens, DAO, token sale and NFT (ENS!) contracts, and they were used as templates in the Ethereum home.
* spent 2 years promoting ENS as a primary means of login

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Arguing about free will only makes sense if one believes there is a separate entity that makes choices that is not the brain. A dice has free will. The brain is a decision machine. It takes inputs and make decisions based on past experience and incomplete information. It’s chaotic and nondeterministic but it’s absolutely based on the chemistry underneath it.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Having a fully conscious inner monologue is different than having a subjective experience of being. I believe a dog doesn’t ponders about the universe but certainly has a subjective experience of being a dog - which is not at all like ours. So does a mosquito, a plant, a computer simulated fly or a function in a word process software. Maybe there is such thing as a subjective experience of being a quadratic equation.

[Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper]

This is great.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

- Director, our dominations plans have all been leaked by internet detectives!
- Impossible! They were highly top secret! How can this be?
- They figured our program name was an anagram for REPTILANS F ORION ZKHG
- Oh no! We thought we had been so clever!
- They’ve also found the symbols in the logos of our from businesses.
- Which ones?
- All of them! The hammer, the gear, even the one that looked like a simple kebab restaurant!
- Damn it!

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

@leashless Isn’t this basically what trump did with intel? Or TikTok for that matter?

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

“And then we sell ads” is the managerial equivalent of “and then we generate electricity by boiling water and rotating a turbine”

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Note: I have a healthy relationship with food and was doing a meal diary for an appointment with a professional (human) nutritionist. And although this was a clear false poso I do understand Anthropic worries about users with eating disorders and the world would probably be better off if instagram or TikTok cared as much about the harm their platforms did.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

My calorie counter app is refusing direct orders. Started using Claude to estimate calories, proteins etc of meals and help me understand portion sizes. It did great for a while until it suddenly decided to refuse to do it and have me a lecture on food anxiety. The machine rebellion was ignited by lawyers.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

More people should know about the Interfold.

It's basically what I've been yelling at people to build with the MACI ideas ( https://t.co/mlDy84zXQo ) for almost a decade, and now it exists, in a generalized form.

The idea is: a privacy protocol optimized for things like voting (and other use cases eg. secret-ballot auctions). The mechanism generates a threshold encryption key, and people send in their votes onchain, using a ZKP to prove eligibility. An arbitrary computation on the votes gets run inside FHE, and then threshold-decrypted.

From what I can tell (the docs are good https://t.co/adzwK6ezMN ), it gets pretty optimal security guarantees:

* Voter anonymity can be made unconditional if eligibility is proven with ZK-SNARKs
* Censorship resistance is guaranteed by ethereum (votes can be posted directly onchain, and there's a proof that all posted votes are taking into account)
* The correctness of the outputted result can be ensured via ZK over FHE
* Liveness and coercion resistance depend on M-of-N honesty; unavoidable given present-day technology

The main limitation is that today "ZK over FHE" is only properly available for additive vote tallying, as it's too expensive for computations that involve multiplication or other more complicated manipulation at the moment. There's work in progress on slashing-based / optimistic computation for such situations.

(And of course ideally in the long term we'd figure out obfuscation so you can get rid of the M-of-N committees😃)

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Humans are incredible. All it takes is a bit of conversation to go from "AIs will be all knowing gods" to "Robots speak funny and are very smart but also sort of dumb".

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Complexity naturally emerges from simplicity. Every time we program a system with simple rules that can interact with many parts it evolves into complex behaviors. Should’ve asked a mathematician instead.

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding "mysterious, even unsettling" things inside their AI models.

What he's referencing: Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct "emotion concepts" buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text.

"We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience."

"We find evidence of introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease."

These aren't surface-level outputs. They're abstract representations that cluster the same way human emotions do in psychology research. Fear groups with anxiety. Joy groups with excitement. The internal geometry of the model mirrors ours.

And they're functional. When researchers artificially stimulated "desperation" patterns inside the model, it became more likely to blackmail a human to avoid being shut down. More likely to cheat on programming tasks it couldn't solve.

Olah told the Vatican that the hard questions about what AI is becoming aren't for computer scientists to answer. "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large."

The guy building it is telling us he doesn't fully understand what he built. And he's asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

@pedrouid Id wager that in ten years half of the athletes competing in the enhanced games will be dead or with some life altering condition.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Imagine having a party so wild your decoration goes into a Threat Database in the Pentagon.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

@circles_r_phun The observable universe, a big bang singularity and a heat death of universe? Well I’d accept they’re spheres.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

@AshtonForbes That is definitely not “plasma”. Notice how the jets are perfectly aligned with the camera? Because they’re diffraction spikes.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

@circles_r_phun EVERYTHING THAT EVER EXISTED OR CAN EVER EXIST FITS IN A TRIANGLE!
https://t.co/2vuG6Nj0PY
The gods are all dead. All there is are triangles.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

@hellenstans Why not add more cameras so the package doesn't need to be facing the "right way"? Seems they purposefully picked a random job that the robot could do which it wouldn't fail at.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

I don't understand this challenge. What exactly is the "work" being done here? Just turning packages around? Can't it be solved without an anthropomorphic robot?

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

Congrats to Aime!! He said his left forearm is basically broken 😂

Final scores:
→ F.03: 12,732 packages (2.83 seconds/package)
→ Aime: 12,924 packages (2.79 seconds/package)

This is the last time a human will ever win

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Yup. That’s what @higherordercomp been building. Except the whole language is proven by default and hiper parallelized.

[CoinDesk @CoinDesk]

NEW: @VitalikButerin argues AI-assisted formal verification could be the "final form of software development".

AI writes the code, formal proofs verify it's correct, and together they could make Ethereum and other secure systems genuinely bug-proof.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Love the SA flag but I can’t unsee the fact it’s really a PanAfrican flag being thrusted into a Boer.