Newt

delusions of an amphibian

[Sam Rose @samwhoo]

This might be the most beautiful thing I've read in my life. What a privilege to be alive in 2026.

https://t.co/07BtpKswBu

[CZ 🔶 BNB @cz_binance]

Saw some people panicking or asking about quantum computing's impact on crypto.
At a high level, all crypto has to do is to upgrade to Quantum-Resistant (Post-Quantum) Algorithms. So, no need to panic. 😂

In practice, there are some execution considerations. It's hard to organize upgrades in a decentralized world. There will likely be many debates on which algorithm(s) to use, resulting in some forks.

And some dead project may not upgrade at all. Might be a good to cleanse out those projects anyway.

New code may introduce other bugs or security issues in the short term.

People who self custody will have to migrate their coins to new wallets.

This brings to the question of Satoshi's bitcoins. If those coins move, then it means he/she is still around, which is interesting to know. If they don't move (in a certain period of time), it might be better to lock (or effectively burn) those addresses so that they don't go to the first hacker who cracks it. There is also the difficulty of identifying all his addresses, and not confuse with some old hodlers. Anyway, it's a different topic for later.

Fundamentally:

It's always easier to encrypt than decrypt.

More computing power is always good.

Crypto will stay, post quantum.

[Ryan McEntush @rmcentush]

https://t.co/wdU31Gb8gu

[Aaron Levie @levie]

https://t.co/lXehx9mkQJ

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Agency > Intelligence

I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?

Grok explanation is ~close:

“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.

People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,��� and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.

It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

[Roko 🐉 @RokoMijic]

A Wireheader's Apostasy

If you really understand philosophy of mind it is clear that David Pearce's quest to end suffering is misguided at a logical level and also at an ethical level.

Suffering is what negative feedback feels like from the inside.

You can't end suffering without ending negative feedback. There can't be a clever technical fix for this, because the suffering is the negative feedback in the same way that a rainbow is sunlight reflecting off water droplets.

You can't run a brain on "gradients of bliss" and have it feel blissful all the time but also produce the same distribution of outputs across all environments because feeling blissful occasionally serves a function and that function is not supposed to be on all the time - you become a wirehead.

Feeling slightly less blissful will simply not motivate you to move your hand off a burning hot plate the way the burn qualia will.

This is borne out empirically when you look at people born without pain receptors: they break all their bones, burn themselves, bite their own tongues off, and often die young.

People who take drugs stop doing normal-person things, they turn into zombies who just seek the drug and nothing else. Why? Because the drug is a massive, artificial superstimulus of all positive reward signals that your brain's reward architecture is not designed to handle. It drowns out the subtler reward signals you get from smelling a nice flower or having a social event with friends, so you stop doing those things. This is probably why homelessness and drug addiction go hand-in-hand - if you are homeless, it's hard to fix your life and get positive feedback from normal life stimuli, so you start taking drugs to feel something. But once you are on drugs, the reward of the drug is so much bigger than the reward you could get from a normal life activity that it's not that compelling to give up drugs for those activities.

It's also deeply immoral to try to turn off all negative feedback, because doing so will turn the world into a sh!thole. I would even include things like political correctness in this, as I think that is best thought of as a form of collective social wireheading.

It is actually a really good thing that sick people suffer terribly. It is good that death is often painful and frightening. It is good that romantic rejection stings and makes us feel bad about ourselves.

Why? Because if these negative events didn't come with negative qualia, we would not be motivated to avoid them.

To be a true transhumanist you must not ask to suffer less, you must ask to suffer more accurately, to be punished more when you fail to live up to your goals and to feel a sweeter reward when you do. And to be a true humanist you must embrace suffering as a force for good in the right circumstances.

[Ivan Zhao @ivanhzhao]

https://t.co/fxHYR6S29D

[sysls @systematicls]

https://t.co/VoIXzhpuX5

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

my assessment on where we're at as a society:

0. addiction is the dominant control structure of our late stage capitalism. the smartest algorithms in history are not designed to help us solve problems or become better, they are designed to hijack our reward systems and make us worse and miserable. a species that cannot resist dopamine hijacking cannot align itself and with a superintelligence.

1. loss of agency is more destabilizing than loss of wealth. chaos erupts when people feel powerless. when you can't sleep, can't stop scrolling, and eat junk, you lose self respect. this internal rot is projected outward as rage.

2. psychological breakdown precedes civilizational collapse. psychosis is what emerges when the world changes faster than our shared story can adapt.

3. most modern moral outrage is compensatory.

4. AI will accelerate identity erosion faster than institutions and individuals can respond. our identities are tied to what we do (work) and what we know (intelligence). AI is about to automate both.

5. stability is now a liability, we need plasticity. for thousands of years, success meant creating stability (i.e. building walls, storing grain). with AI, stability is death. success will be rapid adaptation which humans are very good at (though makes them very grumpy).

6. survival must become a conscious and institutionalized value system. this is warriors, caretakers and stewards of existence

7. only a species that values its own continuation can build aligned AI

[Ben Roy @benroy]

https://t.co/QhjuSYLlPc

[pixel @spacepixel]

Can't believe some of ya'll started to believe an inflationary incentive token was a long term hold.

[Newt @newtopolis]

@thenewworld_hq @MichaelAArouet It’s a ratio of two nominal values. It doesn’t need to be adjusted for inflation

[Newt @newtopolis]

@KevinNaughtonJr Time moves faster when you fall into a routine and have a lack of new experiences. It’s why time feels like it gets faster as we age. Want to make time feel slow again? Go to more events, try new things, and create new memories

[naiive @naiivememe]

RIP

[Newt @newtopolis]

@Pentosh1 Literally hold anything but the USD and you’ll be fine. If your plan is to hold any cash over next couple years waiting for a drawdown you may be disabled

[Newt @newtopolis]

@Ashcryptoreal No one gives af about altcoins when there’s no value being driven back into them. Adoption and publicity isn’t enough to drive prices anymore. The space is maturing

[Newt @newtopolis]

@The_RockTrading Love how he decides to start from scratch after already pissing off both democrats and republicans lmao

[Newt @newtopolis]

@KookCapitalLLC Robinhood owns the private shares they are offering as tokens for retail to buy. You’re buying a % of Robinhoods ownership not buying directly from openAI
https://t.co/bzAhbuwQb0

[Robinhood Comms @RobinhoodComms]

To cap off our recent crypto event, we announced a limited Stock Token giveaway on OpenAI and SpaceX to eligible European customers. These tokens give retail investors indirect exposure to private markets, opening up access, and are enabled by Robinhood’s ownership stake in a special purpose vehicle.

[Byzantine General @ByzGeneral]

After a few days of a lot of stuff happening it appears that we're back to "nothing ever happens".

[rwlk @sherlock_hodles]

"don't worry babe i'm getting real time insider information on the israel iran situation"

the insider: