Methira Fernando

building @flaireappco & @mindnirvanalife

[Methira Fernando @methira24]

Flaire is officially live 🔥

After 9 intense months, we built the trust layer the creator economy deserves.

This is our answer to payment chaos: guaranteed content for brands, guaranteed pay for creators.

So proud of the team. @quinnwinstonv @ravmax_rdl

[Flaire @flaireappco]

9 Months. The trust layer is here.

Flaire is LIVE 🔥

We launched Flaire today to solve the broken system. We built the secure infrastructure the creator economy was missing.

Thread 🧵

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will undoubtedly have Mythos 2 ready soon.

And I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That’s not my style.

Tesla open sourced its patents and we made the Supercharger network available to all competitors, even though we could have made it a walled garden.

SpaceX launches competing satellite systems with no increase in price or use of unfair terms.

Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform.

…

[Hereafter @idyllicmusing]

Top scientists and military personnel were given a secret workbook from 1977 by the CIA containing instructions on how people could access extra strength and speed with the power of their minds.

[Methira Fernando @methira24]

@DouglasYaoDY Bro what

[Jesse Tinsley @JesseTinsley]

Imagine telling someone in 1999…

The year is 2026.

The President is Donald Trump in his second non consecutive term.

The richest man in the world is PayPal cofounder Elon Musk… but not because of fintech or Paypal. Because of rockets, electric cars, AI, satellites, brain chips and something called “Boring Company”.

Apple is worth trillions but its main business isn’t computers… its selling glass rectangles everyone stares at for 9 hours a day.

People don’t watch TV. They watch teenagers explain geopolitics, finance, and relationship advice in ~60 second videos.

The biggest taxi company owns no taxis.
The biggest hotel company owns no hotels.
The most powerful media companies are social networks where everyone argues with strangers for free.

Kids are making millions filming themselves playing video games.

AI Robots write emails, code, legal memos, songs, essays, and breakup texts.

The internet is mostly bots arguing with humans who are trying to prove they aren’t bots.

You can summon a car, groceries, a doctor, a date, a private jet, or a dog walker from your phone.

People pay real money for invisible currencies, digital monkeys, AI girlfriends and pictures that disappear after 24 hours.

The richest companies in the world don’t sell oil, steel, or cars. They sell attention, compute, data, and addiction.

And somehow, after all of that everyone is still using Excel.

[Sakana AI @SakanaAILabs]

Introducing Sakana Fugu: A full multi-agent orchestration system accessible via a single model API.

Our ‘Fugu Ultra’ model matches the performance of Fable and Mythos, delivering frontier capability without the risk of export controls.

Try it: https://t.co/hhO6qTawgb 🐡

[Polymath Investor @polymathinvest1]

Quick test.

Pick something you think you understand well.
Now imagine you have to explain it to a 12 year old, out loud, with zero specific vocabulary.
Did you get stuck at some point?
That's the exact spot where you don't actually understand it yet.
This is one of my favorite tools for finding the holes in my own thinking.

Below, I re-share the full collection of such tools.

(1/11)

[Midjourney @midjourney]

Announcing a new division of Midjourney called "Midjourney Medical"

[Chris @ChrissGPT]

Mid journey unveils the future of medical scanning:

"Less than a dozen of these machines operating together at full speed can do more full body scans than every MRI machine together on Earth. Our goal is to build a fleet of 50,000 of these scanners, capable together of doing a billion scans a month—enough to bring full body imaging to everyone on Earth."

Using thousands of specialized transducers, this prototype system shoots ultra-precise sound waves through the body at over 1,400 meters per second. As these sonic vibrations echo back, they are captured in data streams of 17 gigabytes per second, measuring changes finer than the width of an atom. A massive 2-petaflop compute ring then merges these thousands of sub-images to map out a highly detailed, 3D internal anatomy of organs and tissues in just 60 seconds.

"This is a new kind of infrastructure. It’s Full Body Ultrasonic Computational Tomography. No such device has ever been built until now, and yeah, we’re calling it the Midjourney Scanner."

My favorite quote from David, was that they want this to be a feel like a genuinely “nice” experience, not a “going to the doctor experience” they’re going to put these inside mid journey spas!

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

Pessimists sound smart. 

Optimists build the world.

[Pierre-Eliott Lallemant @pierreeliottlal]

We went from 0 to 2,200 paying customers in under a year by following @ycombinator's 15 rules:

1/ Do things that don't scale. Get your first 10 customers by hand.

2/ Launch now, not when it's "ready". A mediocre product in front of real users teaches you more in a week than 6 months of polishing in the dark.

3/ Charge from day one. If nobody will pay, you don't have a startup, you have a hobby.

4/ Talk to users every single day. The roadmap you need is sitting in your customers' heads, and they'll hand it to you for free

5/ Always hunt the 90/10 solution. For almost any feature there's a way to capture 90% of the value with 10% of the effort.

6/ There are only two real jobs: write code and talk to users. Everything else (conferences, press, VC coffees, corp dev calls) is fake work.

7/ You pick your customers as much as they pick you. 10 users who love you beat 1,000 who kind of like you.

8/ Growth is an output, not a strategy. Grow before product market fit and all you're buying is churn.

9/ Do less, really well. Pick one or two metrics and judge every task against them.

10/ Know if you're default alive. Paul Graham's question: on current growth and current burn, do you reach profitability before the money runs out?

11/ Don't hire until it hurts. Headcount is not progress, it's burn. Every great startup was embarrassingly small for embarrassingly long.

12/ Momentum is the only real moat in year one. Ship something every week, even something tiny.

13/ Every great startup is badly broken at some point. The game isn't avoiding fires, it's how fast you put them out. Again. And again

14/ Ignore your competitors. Startups die of suicide, not murder. In year one, the only company that can kill yours is your own

15/ Startups rarely die from running out of money. They die because the founders fall out. Brutal honesty with your cofounder is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy

Good luck !

[Jonas @jonaasw1]

cool internet things pt. 6

https://t.co/wTGYG7tYm3 - math visualized
https://t.co/09hFmr9csj - visual instruments
https://t.co/H7iFmVtUFu - every music genre ever
https://t.co/uTCkmA9wVf - a camera that prints poems
https://t.co/m4LrYSv4ib - digital stamp collection
https://t.co/447WHCUPFY - a living digital sketchbook

some of the cool people behind these:
@michelletliu, @marijanapav, @rpavlini, @S_Conradi, @EveryNoise, @S_Conradi, @itsjessyin, @kelin_online

[Nasdaq @Nasdaq]

$SPCX. Now trading on Nasdaq.

[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.

[Candy樂兒 @candyyueliu]

Monako Glass is a Linux computer in glasses form. Run your coding agents on the go. Full announcement video coming soon!

[Methira Fernando @methira24]

@joinshift Way to go!

[Methira Fernando @methira24]

@DulithHerath @rauchg Nicee

[Race 🕊️ @multiplanet1]

Elon Musk's first wife once described what it's like to watch him fail.

She said he doesn't react the way normal people react. When a rocket explodes, most people in the room go silent. Some cry. Some start calculating the financial damage.

Musk pulls out his phone and starts making calls. Not emotional calls. Engineering calls. "What failed. When can we fix it. When's the next launch." His voice doesn't change. His face doesn't change. The rocket that just cost $60 million is already in the past. The next one is all that exists.

She said it was the most unsettling thing she'd ever witnessed. Not because he was cold. Because he genuinely wasn't affected. The failure didn't register as failure. It registered as data. An experiment that produced results. Results that inform the next experiment.

This is why he wins. Not because he doesn't fail. He fails more spectacularly than anyone in history. He wins because failure occupies zero psychological space. It enters as data and exits as action.

Most people lose not because they fail but because they spend weeks processing the failure before acting again. Musk spends zero seconds. The gap between failure and next attempt is a phone call.

[NASA @NASA]

We're building a Moon Base!

@NASAMoonBase will serve as a habitat where astronauts live and work during long-term science missions.

Join us at 2pm ET on Tuesday, May 26, for a live news event where we’ll share updates on our lunar exploration plans: https://t.co/IJXA7xYwju

[Alex Oak @alexoakdev]

Someone built a fitness app using the same psychological mechanics as gambling

This might work better than every normal fitness app 😭😭

You bet money on whether you’ll hit 10,000 steps today

If you fail, you lose your money

If you succeed, you split the money from everyone who didn’t

So disciplined people literally profit off lazy people

Most fitness apps try motivating you with streaks and notifications

This one motivates you with financial fear

Imagine realizing at 11:52pm you still need 1,700 more steps or you lose $30

Entire friend groups would be outside walking laps around their neighborhood before midnight trying not to lose their steppa challenge

It sounds stupid but this would probably motivate people better than any other fitness product

Would you use this yourself?

[Methira Fernando @methira24]

@SpaceX How about Sri lanka? 🇱🇰