Zach Henderson

Born Again ✝️ | I help SMB leaders build AI-capable organizations - not just AI-equipped employees. Your competitors aren't waiting. Neither should you.

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

My journey back to Christ started slowly

After decades of agnosticism, simple statements on podcasts, radio, and TV captured my curiosity

After many years of ridiculing believers, I was being led to belief

And then in an instant, God was with me

I'll never forget that moment

Of all the ways He could reach out and snatch me back

He did so with a singer on American Idol

And even as I sit here today and watch Roman's performance back again, I realize I never even heard the lyrics

It was his energy, his possession of the Holy Spirit at the end of the song

As he jumped around on stage, I turned to my mother and said, "God is speaking through that man."

It was the first time in my life that I used the word God in full belief

I was born into a Christian family and attended church as a child, but this was different

This was real

This was Truth

This was God

I was born again in that moment

My life has changed in every single possible way since that moment

I've faced trials that once crippled me

I've conquered demons that once inhabited me

I've learned how not to shy away from my failures, but to embrace repentance

I've accepted that I'm a sinner and that He is the only path to righteousness

I learned to read the Bible daily

To pray continuously

To maintain a dialog with God

To speak openly, loudly, and proudly about my faith

To become not just a church goer but a church grower

To find pure joy in my trials and tribulations in this life

To not merely follow Jesus, but to mirror Him

To embrace emulating God in spite of my inadequacies

To never fear failure, knowing He will always catch me

Pride prevents men from embracing God's command of emulation

Jesus showed us the way

He showed us how hard it will be

He showed us how to face the challenge

He gave us the blueprint for grace, mercy, and justice

And He died for us so that our failure to meet those standards would not prevent an eternal relationship with Him

To my brothers and sisters in Christ, I implore you to preach with the vigor of Roman Collins

To those of you on your journey to Christ, continue embracing that little voice leading you to the Light

To those of you rejecting Him, I pray that you accept His mercy

Thank you, Roman, for being an unabashed messenger of God

Thank you God for never turning Your back on me

May every prodigal son and daughter return, Amen.

And speaking of those lyrics, they couldn't be more powerful:

Never would have made it
Never could have made it, without You
I would have lost it all
But now I see how You were there for me
And I can say
I'm stronger, I'm wiser
I'm better, much better
When I look back over all You brought me through
I can see that You were the one I held on to
I would have lost my mind a long time ago
If it had not been for You
I made it through my storm
And my test because You were there
To carry me through my mess
I can stand here and tell You
I made it
I would have gave up
But You were right there
Somebody just need to testify to someone next to 'em
When I look back over what He brought me through
I realize I made it because I had You to hold on to
Is there anybody in this house other than me that can
Declare that you made it?
Tell your neighbor
I wish I had some help here
I wish I had just two or three people
That would just declare it
Never would have made it
Never could have made it, without You
I just love to encourage myself
Sometimes I just look in the mirror and say
I am stronger
I am wiser
I am better, so much better
When I look back over what He brought me through
I realize I made it because I had You to hold on to
But I never would have made it
I never could have made it without You
Oh I, good God almighty
Never would have made it without You
Sing it one more time
All I need is it one more time
Everybody sing with me
Never would have made it
Never could have made it without You

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@tunguz Change manager with a techy title

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

Semantics, but we differentiate between product & platform today where in future years agents will more seamlessly spin up bespoke "products" from a platform for the user.

Until the UX, reliability, and performance step up considerably, there will be plenty of skinned agent products that print money.

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@0xMovez I, for one, vote we call them Ralphs. For the culture.

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

Get ready for "Loop Engineer" to flood LinkedIn in 3...2...

[Movez @0xMovez]

Claude Code creator:

"Now I don’t prompt Claude anymore - I have loops that are running. My job is to write loops."

In this 30-min speech, Boris revealed his actual Claude setup for daily coding.

Claude Code + loops + dynamic workflow

Worth more than a $500 vibe-coding course

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@onlysweatequity @thesamparr Click Grok button

"Store the transcript of this video asbtxt file"

Feed transcript dot txt to Claude Code

"Craft copy skill from this transcript"

/convert

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@alliekmiller

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@NobodymrRobert

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@PewPewPew7Z7 @aakashgupta Agreed. There isn't a single, human-built subterranean tunnel/compound on earth that the government doesn't have the capability to detect.

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@hthieblot http://192.168.xx.yyy

Found the coolest archive of documentation on how to build old weaponry. As a kid, I felt like I stumbled into the most fascinating library in existence.

The dub dub dub was a different world back then.

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

Hey guys - what's the skinny? @wirthkarl @nimbalyst

Opus 4.8 selected in model picker but the agent is confirming it is running on 4.7 w/o access to 4.8. Thanks

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@alexabelonix Yeah, that reward function comment was a light bulb moment.

Started playing with the idea to leverage ZKPs as anon/pseudon protection for crowd sourcing intelligence years ago.

The ability to integrate at the model training level unlocks some pretty sophisticated value.

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

Buried in this rabbit hole of gold for quantum junkies is this nugget:

Verifier programs for ZKPs produce the ideal reward function for language models.

This would appear to be an early heuristic for LLM truth arbitration while unlocking an entirely new industry for experts to monetize their wisdom behind a pseudonymous curtain.

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

Add churches to the list as well. I actually rebuilt my old church's site with Claude code, but since I moved, I've decided to plug it into a Hermes agent that the church admin can easily interact with for ongoing maintenance, feature requests, custom theme changes at holidays, etc. Gives them complete control going forward and I can largely hand it off. Perhaps a model for some of your son's clients.

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

Honestly, if he *doesn't* lean into it, it may have a greater impact.

If I'm hit with a subject line that actually motivates me to open the email, and then I see a polished kid on there pitching me something I need with a quick, catchy video, I'm probably more intrigued.

Just consider the customers that aren't a good fit, and perhaps limit the percentage of those in the pipeline.

Small biz, mom & pop shops, restaurants, retail, blue color businesses, real estate agents - all great targets, and I'm sure I'm missing a few.

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@Hunter_Lott_ @kevinasrx #4 probably would have piqued my curiosity
https://t.co/NPrnZ7SbMu

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

Have him set up a simple marketing copy agent for split testing email subject and body copy.

Have a research agent dig up what it can on the business owners (socials are often a gold mine), generate a persona map, align personas with tried and true copy formulas, and fire away.

Biggest mindset with this approach is accepting rejection and learning from it. The silver lining depending on how agentic workflows are designed is the rejection can get completely abstracted if so desired.

@grok based on my profile, what subject line do you think would get me to open?

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@Hunter_Lott_ @kevinasrx Video demo that embeds directly into the email with a link to the site.

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@Ronycoder @grok provide a full, time-stamped topic breakdown of the video

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@OldRowSports Travis Etienne

[Zach Henderson @BasedCampZH]

@LCSlates @Shpigford @stripe @levelsio