Braxton

Technologist - Building on @frequency_xyz - @usairforce - Views are my own

[Braxton @braxton]

This is a problem that Web3 tech has the potential to address.

https://t.co/yro6LolXtV

[Braxton @braxton]

Great piece by Raffi - public infrastructure is (and should be) the most critical part of the Internet, and deserves our attention and support:

It’s the End of the Internet as We Know It https://t.co/mj7oKvKRHO

[Braxton @braxton]

Massive potential for x402, and if humans have verified agents with a real chain of trust, this will be a major economic breakthrough.

[Coinbase 🛡️ @coinbase]

The internet has protocols for data, email and identity.

But not payments.

Today the x402 Foundation launches under the Linux Foundation — an open standard for payments over HTTP.

Now agents, APIs, and apps can move money as easily as they move data.

Learn more ↓

[Braxton @braxton]

This article is aligned with our motivation to create a primary, personal agent for all humans that operates in their individual interest: https://t.co/a8uIxbXfSK

[Braxton @braxton]

@8teAPi Surprise: big tech swoops in, grabs your data, and makes you liable while they monetize your agents.

[Project Liberty @pro_jectliberty]

In this new paradigm of the Agentic Era, each of us needs a primary personal agent, not a personalized agent that works for a big tech company.

This primary personal agent is a high-integrity, fiduciary and guardian that stands between you and the uncharted agentic web, acting as a protector of attention and consent, defender of cognitive autonomy, and assistant in daily life.

[Braxton @braxton]

The feed era optimized for attention. The Agentic Era optimizes action.

In the Agentic Era, the most important system you own won’t be an app—it’ll be a primary personal agent: exclusively dedicated to one individual, standing at the frontier between human consciousness and autonomous artificial intelligence in order to safeguard human agency.

Unpacked my thoughts on architecture for a primary agent here: https://t.co/Vi6ZOuDge2

[David Frum @davidfrum]

Somebody should invent a microblogging platform that makes it quick and easy to find the best on-the-ground reporting and relevant expertise, while weeding out misinformation, propaganda, blather, and outright crazy people.

[Braxton @braxton]

The first visible domino falls…

[jack @jack]

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

####

today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

[Braxton @braxton]

Hey There, We're Working On A Primary Agent for the Agentic Era:

https://t.co/B8FrAX8p6q

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

Galileo Galilei was born 462 years ago this Sunday.

[Braxton @braxton]

Beware the “quick installers”

[Peter Steinberger 🦞 @steipete]

This. I didn't make setup even easier so complete beginners spend some time to get familiar with the project.

If you use one of these quick installers they likely will not encrypt your data or worse, and they probs don't show you the link to the security doc either.

[Braxton @braxton]

It is obvious that everyone needs their own personal AI agent that is loyal only to them.

“the tech industry is making a personalized internet just for you, but you have no say in it.”

https://t.co/RDbx0MxEHh

[Braxton @braxton]

The events of the past few weeks — including what we all just witnessed around OpenClaw and the so-called “Crustafarian” moment — made something unavoidably clear to me: we have entered the age of the agentic web, and humans are walking into it unguarded.

We are now watching many thousands of autonomous AI agents talking to each other in public, persistent environments — spamming, scamming, probing, manipulating, and experimenting in ways even their creators don’t fully understand.

As @karpathy put it, yes, what we see today is a dumpster fire — but more importantly, it’s unprecedented scale, unprecedented connectivity, and uncharted second-order effects. The experiment is already running live.

I view the agentic web less like a website you visit and more like New York City — dense, powerful, full of opportunity, and full of risks you cannot reasonably navigate alone.

We would never drop a child into Manhattan and say “good luck, just be careful.” We would make sure they have a guardian.  Yet today, we are doing exactly that with humans and AI.

AI is more intimate than social media ever was. We tell it our finances, our health, our relationships, our fears. And now we’re asking it to act on our behalf — negotiate, decide, route information, and influence what we see next — often inside systems optimized for extraction, not protection.

This is not about stopping AI. It’s about making sure humans are not the only unprotected actors in a rapidly filling agent ecosystem.
The agentic web is growing exponentially right before our eyes. Building guardians for humans cannot wait.

[FREQUENCY @frequency_xyz]

Big AI expects you to share your secrets, like your finances, your health, your relationships, and your fears.

Do you? Should you?

We're on a mission to learn about how AI manages your data and how you manage your data on AI. 

Take this 2min survey to help us understand your experiences and concerns around AI and privacy.

👉 https://t.co/tZptv8HHeR

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Ser, I worry going this direction risks losing the plot.

"The regime" are the people in power. "The state" is the organization with the guns.

We must not let the language of liberty and resistance against the state be corrupted by a misperception that twists the terms "regime" and "state" into mere bywords for a Schmittian Enemy, using them to continue to beat down on a group long after it loses actual power.

True liberty involves securing the balance of power ( https://t.co/hTRKBkxQ9U ), and this means challenging the abuses from the highest seats of authority, whoever they currently are.

It is a quest that is inherently incompatible with being permanently supportive of one Team, or permanently opposed to another Team.

But it is a quest that is necessary, to preserve the balance that keeps the world as a whole, and the experience of each precious individual person inhabiting it, in a state of freedom and security.

Milady

[Braxton @braxton]

@alice_und_bob +1

[Braxton @braxton]

“All you need are these: certainty of judgment in the present moment; action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way.”

—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 9.6

[Braxton @braxton]

We shouldn’t be taking candy from strangers, and we shouldn’t be taking information from strange algorithms.

[Sooraj @iAnonymous3000]

I like and respect Elon, and I'm grateful to be on this platform. But when he claims 𝕏 Chat is "much more secure than email," I feel obligated to explain the technical reality to my audience.

That statement is true in the same way a screen door is more secure than no door. But that's not the comparison anyone should be making.

1. 𝕏 Can Read Your Messages
𝕏 recently added safety numbers, which is a step forward. But here's the catch: your private key backups are stored on 𝕏's servers. Safety numbers help detect external hackers, but they cannot protect you if 𝕏 itself or a rogue insider, or a government with a warrant.

@signalapp's safety numbers work because your keys never leave your device. There is nothing for Signal to turn over, even if compelled.

2. No Forward Secrecy
From 𝕏's own documentation: "If the private key of a registered device is compromised... an attacker would be able to decrypt all Encrypted Direct Messages."

One key compromise exposes your entire message history. Signal's Double Ratchet generates new keys for every message. Compromise one key, you get one message. Past messages stay encrypted. This has been the standard in secure messaging for over a decade.

3. The "Juicebox" Vulnerability
𝕏 stores your private keys on their servers using a system called Juicebox. Cryptographer @matthew_d_green's analysis suggests this implementation is software-only, lacking Hardware Security Modules (HSMs).
A 4-6 digit PIN does NOT help protect this. That is trivial to brute-force if 𝕏 (or an attacker with server access) disables the rate limiting.

4. Full Metadata Exposure
𝕏 explicitly states metadata isn't encrypted: who you message, when, and how often. As former NSA director Michael Hayden famously said: "We kill people based on metadata." Signal uses sealed sender technology to hide even this information.

5. NOT Open Source
𝕏 promised to open source XChat and publish a whitepaper in June 2025. Neither has happened. Signal has been open source and audited for over a decade.

The Bottom Line:
I'm not saying don't use 𝕏. I'm saying don't use 𝕏 Encrypted DMs for anything you wouldn't post publicly.

For actual private communication, use @signalapp. It's free, works on all platforms, and the cryptography has withstood a decade of scrutiny from academics and nation-states alike.