sudo_ml

freedom security privacy robots consciousness | Lead & Chairman @sovright_, @sovchip, EF Silviculture | @synthetix_io @Anchorage private equity | @wharton 2007

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

Want to know what the Zcash community is thinking without the drama?

We built Zenzcash: AI summaries, rewrites that take the heat out of inflammatory language, filters for tone or account age, audio playback, tools to explore posts with your own AI, and more

Built by @DefuseSec and I over the weekend, and born out of small-group workshops at @ZcashFoundation's Zcon in Cancún last week. We’d love your feedback!

Links below 👇

[Creepy.org @creepydotorg]

Around 1 a.m. on January 18, 2015, two Swedish graduate students were riding their bikes across the Stanford University campus.

Behind a dumpster, they saw a man on top of a half-naked woman who wasn't moving.

When they shouted and approached to intervene, the man jumped up and attempted to flee into the darkness.

Refusing to let him escape, the students chased him, tackled him to the ground, and held him there until police arrived.

The man was Brock Turner, a 19-year-old swimmer at Stanford. The unconscious woman had been at the same fraternity party as him earlier that night. Years later, she revealed her identity as Chanel Miller.

In March 2016, a California jury found Turner guilty of three felony counts of sexual assault. He faced up to 14 years behind bars, and prosecutors asked for six.

But during sentencing, Judge Aaron Persky gave him six months in county jail, saying that a longer sentence would have "a severe impact" on Turner.

In the end, he served just three months before being released for "good behavior." He went back to his home state of Ohio, where he was required to register as a sex offender for life.

The outrage was huge. More than 1.3 million people signed a petition to remove the judge, and in June 2018, voters recalled Persky from office.

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

Confucious or Buddha or someone often often misattributed:

"Don't trust anything you cannot see with your own eyes"

Us:

Stare at 6mn lines of code

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

🧐

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

Tarun says Zcash has a better store of value story than Ethereum. Haseeb asks him to steel man proof of work.

Tarun: "I think arguably Zcash has just a better story for store of value to me than Ethereum."

"It is just much harder to manipulate fundamentally."

"The fact that there's a tangible input cost is sort of the thing that gives you a floor."

Haseeb: "I really don't get why proof of work is tied to being a store of value."

"Steel man that argument for me."

"The input cost of something obviously does not create a floor in its value. It's the other way around."

"The floor in the value creates the input cost."

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

@prasincs Did u succeed??

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

😍

Two of my fav things together: Zcash and PAPER WSJ!!!

[Frank Chaparro @fintechfrank]

Zcash is getting the full-page treatment in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Grayscale has taken out a front-page ad promoting Zcash, along with another full-page ad inside highlighting its Zcash investment fund (ZCSH).

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

https://t.co/9RoupNisoU

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

I vibe hacked my e-ink conf badge to blink when a codex terminal needs me. Unclear if this is a good or bad thing

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

@badcryptobitch @stonecoldpat0 option 3 is dont work for someone! which u are doing ;)

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

Bring back the times when someone could be fired for attitude

The tech companies led us here - treating employees like their bosses and being afraid to discipline

[Devansh Mehta @devanshmehta]

Tbh I'm disappointed in the employee filing a suit against the EF

I remember thinking at the time of the incident I didn't like how divisive she was. Even after the interim resolution she commented something to the effect of "management is going to keep doing silly things but I'm glad we in the rank and file stuck together" which is not the sort of toxic corrosiveness you want in your organization when an attempt has been made at unity

It's a privilege to work on Ethereum while drawing a paycheck from the foundation. Treating it like any other job goes against the spirit of working at the foundation. Treat your time there with gratitude as a gift

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

I wonder about this

[Byrne Hobart @ByrneHobart]

On one hand, boards have to do what they have to do. On the other hand, he's a guy who's worth $150bn, knows everyone in hardware, named his company after the Latin word for "spite," and he lives in a state where you can't enforce noncompetes.

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

@frances__lorenz https://t.co/WcF0sNnbyV

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

Silicon Valley: performative gender equality.

Much more gender equality in "conservative" industries like finance and "conservative" cultures like East Asian Hong Kong / Singapore.

[Tom Dunleavy @dunleavy89]

My friend runs one of the biggest woodworking businesses in the northeast. He was telling me the other day Anthropic offered him $1M just watch his team create cabinets. $1M! No other strings attached. Three months of watching employees virtually so they can model, learn and integrate it into Claude.

The rep said they were doing this with multiple firms across every industry.

All knowledge work will have every scenario and use case backed by experts 10k hours, in Claude within the next year or two.

Not a doomer but the "AI isn't going to drive job losses" is going to be so wrong it hurts.

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

@stonecoldpat0 To be clear, I don't think you are (1)!

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

@stonecoldpat0 Either (1) you successfully intimidated your employer into not firing you, or (2) you were very irritating but not more than the value you brought

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

Silicon Valley: performative gender equality.

Much more gender equality in "conservative" industries like finance and "conservative" cultures like East Asian Hong Kong / Singapore.

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

I personally have seen more "afraid to fire" than "let's just solve the damned problem", and it just *hurts the entire company / the rest of the employees* while the problem festers, which explains my position. But if you have seen the opposite, then the remark may not land.

(PS - Synthetix does not fall in the category of being afraid to fire! At least that's what I figured about the culture :) )

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

@ZcashInvest @WSJ Where is zebra?

Such a great idea!

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

I thought that my security work was about defending people from attackers.

Now I realize actually it is also about defending people from clowns.

🤡

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

I CANNOT believe the report: it proves that eMudhra is a clown show, and was never fit to be a CA:

The point of a HSM (hardware security module) is that the private key NEVER leaves it. Guess what eMudhra did: it turned off FIPS mode (WTF?!) and copied out the private key 😱

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

@0xisla Accountability matters all around. My problem is seeing employees acting as if their employer is lucky to have them when they are mediocre or overly antisocial - no accountability

[sudo_ml @sudo_ml]

These seem like good things in light of existential concerns

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Anthropic is about to sell the public a trillion-dollar company controlled by 2 shares worth less than a penny.

And the people buying it will have almost no way to change anything that happens next.

I read the voting section of Anthropic's IPO filing, and I think it's the most one-sided deal ever offered to regular investors at this size:

There is exactly ONE Class F share. It belongs to an LLC owned by 7 of Anthropic's co-founders, and it carries 50.1% of all the votes.

There is exactly ONE Class T share. It belongs to Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust, and it elects a majority of the board.

If Anthropic were ever liquidated, each of those 2 shares would get its par value of $0.00001.

The public gets Class A shares instead. And Anthropic's own filing says this structure may effectively eliminate their ability to influence important decisions, including a sale of the company.

So here's what that means for anyone who buys:

- They can't replace the board if the company stumbles, because the trust picks the majority and the founders hold half the vote.
- They can't push for a sale, even if someone offers a huge premium.
- They can't stop the board from putting the mission ahead of their money. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, so the board has to weigh shareholders against the long-term benefit of humanity.
- And they can't easily sue over it. Delaware law requires at least 2% of the shares or $2 million worth of stock to bring that kind of claim.

This isn't some far-off hypothetical either.

The filing warns that slowing AI development for safety may not maximize stockholder value. It also says Anthropic recently paused training a next-generation model for more than a month over safety and security concerns.

A public shareholder would've had zero say in that pause.

And here's the part I can't get past:

Each co-founder has pledged to give 80% of their Anthropic equity to charity. The Class F vote stays at 50.1% no matter how much stock they still own.

So the founders can give away most of their money and keep all of their control.

Dario Amodei told 60 Minutes last year that he's deeply uncomfortable with AI decisions being made by a few companies and a few people. When he was asked who elected him, he said no one.

Now his company's IPO hands 50.1% of the votes to 7 people, and he's one of them.

And guess who's being lined up to buy it?

Anthropic has weighed reserving 15% to 20% of the IPO for individual investors, according to Bloomberg. JPMorgan is leading the US retail push, and Citigroup is handling retail buyers in places like Japan, Britain and Canada.

The same filing warns that AI could pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.

So regular people are being asked to buy a company that says its product could threaten humanity, with no real vote on how it's run.

Anthropic's answer is that this is the whole point. The structure is built to keep Wall Street from pressuring it into cutting corners on safety. The trustees have no financial stake in the company. Google and Meta gave their founders control and still made shareholders rich. And every buyer gets all of this in writing before they buy.

But Zuckerberg's control comes from shares he owns, so when Meta's stock falls, he loses money too. Anthropic's 2 control shares can't lose anything.

Anyone buying this IPO is paying full price to hand control to 7 founders and 5 trustees.

They're desperate for money and they don't care about your money.

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

overheard from friends talking about AI in China, and it’s very alarming

- AI short films went massive in China market because of how good the video models are now

- the first wave of people who mastered using AI to generate short films and comics made quite some money because they could produce a lot more content than traditional workflows

- but within just a few months, everybody and their mom could make equally good short films because all the expertise could be written in a markdown file

- when everyone’s more productive, no one actually has an advantage and it’s a race to the bottom. very quickly it became impossible to make money, and everyone’s busier than they were without AI

- the only one making money now is companies like bytedance who owns user demand and distribution. they sell ads to creators who pay to get traffic, and eventually ad spend became 80% of those creators’ operating expense, while AI tokens is less than 5%

so what are the problems here?

1. there’s no moat if you are creating anything with AI

if a human is really good at something, and it’s hard to find more humans who can do the same, they can leverage the scarcity of their skill to get paid very well

but if AI is good at something, it will be infinitely replicated, so there’s no scarcity hence you can’t really expect a sustainable business by creating anything with AI

2. more creators created more content people actually liked. that’s a good thing

but the economical benefit of that all got absorbed by the distribution platforms

there’s a famous chinese poem 遍身罗绮者，不是养蚕人 - it basically says people who dress well aren’t the people making dresses. that’s exactly what’s happening here

if our society doesn’t figure out a better way to distribute wealth, AI will help billionaires become trillionaires while average people become more exhausted than ever