Stefan Romanski

The generalist's curse, the polymath's blessing.

[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

The #Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

https://t.co/Iq8t1wzuCz

[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

The countries listed on the billboard have one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, making the heavily state-controlled media one of the outcomes of such regimes.

[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

In case politicians do understand, and I'm certain the majority of them have grasped the broader concept by now, this would be exactly what they want - absolutely state-controlled media, among other things.

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

Some politicians in the UK think it is a good idea to introduce identity verification for using VPN services.

It could be that these politicians do not understand what they are proposing. The alternative, that they do understand, would be even worse.

Whistleblowers, activists, and journalists depend on anonymous VPN services. Requiring identity verification for VPN services would put them at risk. It would also have a chilling effect on online debate (VPNs can help people post anonymously on social media).

In authoritarian countries, VPN services are crucial forcriticizing the government. That is precisely why such governments seek to ban or restrict them. Hopefully, the UK will not join that list.

[Sam Bent @DoingFedTime]

14 seconds to get admin,
some times 14 seconds of recon is all it takes.
'hacker forums' in 2026 are in a sad way.

[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

This still leaves you unable to visit many websites from Linux.

We'll see how all this plays out, but migration to decentralized platforms is clearer on the horizon than ever.

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[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

California's Assembly voted 68 to 1 to exempt open source Linux from its age verification law, then extended age-gating to browsers and websites in the same bill.

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[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

However:

• The same bill extends age-gating obligations to browsers and websites.
• The EFF reads this as a net expansion of the regime, not a narrowing.
• SteamOS is not exempt because it ships Valve's proprietary Steam client on top of Linux.

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[Schmidt @schmidt1024]

Your browser history is a complete profile of your life

Delete it regularly

Treat it like mail you don't want lying around

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

The EU age verification app is presented as “completely anonymous”. But the risk is that member states (the countries are supposed to create their own versions of the open-source EU app) use it to introduce identity verification that makes it impossible to post anonymously on social media.

The idea behind “completely anonymous” is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography to break the link between the age credential issuer (EU governments) and the regulated services/sites. Currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality, contrasting Ursula von der Leyen’s claim that the app ”is technically ready to be used”. But more importantly, the app is designed to always function without ZKP technology; if ZKP is unavailable, the app falls back to a non-ZKP model. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional extra feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time.

This means that the EU could decide at any time that ZKP may no longer be used, and in one stroke the app would fall back to its default mode, meaning that every post on social media carries an ID tag. By that point, an infrastructure will already have been rolled out; people will have gotten used to it, and it will be harder to roll it back.

More details on https://t.co/wTVKHMS1zg

[Tuta @TutaPrivacy]

Don’t call it age verification. Call it centralised personal data collection. And understand that it serves surveillance, not safety for children.

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

As high-profile websites vanish, it’s a reminder that the web has no built-in archival layer.

But some publishers are now blocking the Wayback Machine.

What’s at stake if the web stops being archived? Our new FAQ explains: preserving the public record matters. 🌐📚 https://t.co/fifJnv3xiu

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

[ThinkingWest @thinkingwest]

Charlemagne tried to rebuild Rome, and ended up birthing Western civilization

[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

@kepano AI tokens will be the new drug.

[Schmidt @schmidt1024]

How decentralized are crypto networks really?

#Monero: 25,863 nodes
#Bitcoin: 23,795 nodes
#Zcash: 978 nodes

Sources: https://t.co/x4kUJYdJOn · https://t.co/vt7vHQ7gQt · https://t.co/8o1tPvDEbh

[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

On the other hand, this makes it easier for people to filter out the media they shouldn't follow.

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

Love the Wayback Machine? ❤️
Here’s your chance to stand up for it 📣

When news can't be archived, we all lose part of the public record 🕳️📰

Tell major publishers: keep journalism in the #WaybackMachine.
✍️ Sign here: https://t.co/fUrdNz60RD

This campaign is a project of @fightfortheftr ✊

[PeterSweden @PeterSweden7]

They are launching.

The new European W social is launching in a few days and will require a government issued ID and biometric scanning to be allowed to make an account.

The new social media platform was announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Will you be signing up?

I won't.

[ThinkingWest @thinkingwest]

Daily reminder that you need to be stacking *physical* books. Why?

-they can’t be changed
-you can pass them on to your children
-they’re a break from a screen
-you don’t lose entertainment when your battery goes out
-they make great decorations
-they smell amazing

[Tuta @TutaPrivacy]

On Press Freedom Day, let's remind everyone that journalists need protection, also online. 📰 🌐

Share this & Spread the word!

#PressFreedomDay26

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

Ghostty is leaving GitHub. I'm GitHub user 1299, joined Feb 2008. I've visited GitHub almost every single day for over 18 years. It's never been a question for me where I'd put my projects: always GitHub. I'm super sad to say this, but its time to go. https://t.co/DQDemHdytV

[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

Unlike previous bubbles, this one has proven utility. The infrastructure is already here. The "pop" won't be a market crash, but a silent dependency on "good enough" output.

I like AI, but not like this.

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[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

AI tokens will be the new drug. This isn't a bubble, but a trap.

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[Stefan Romanski @stefromanski]

We're developing a psychosomatic limb.

The play is technofeudalism. Hook us on cheap tokens until we can't think without them. We feel smart while using AI, but feel paralyzed, and even scared, the longer we don't.

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