Lifelong student. Practical idealist. Founder of BlockTower. Board of Strobe VC.
Antarctica
Joined March 2017
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Ari Paul retweeted
We’re like one hack away from me finally being able to get my medical records easily
Fairly soon we’ll likely be recording (almost) all conversations by default. Listening devices everywhere makes it happen passively, and then we’ll want the benefits of automated note taking and follow up by our AI assistants.
How does this change life and society? I think it will be pretty dramatic. Consider arguments (both personal and professional) in the context of an instantly searchable history of every prior convo.
Related - we’ll likely get an extensive bio of someone upon first meeting them (whether via smart glasses or something else.) And this bio isn’t just a resume, it could include their spiciest social media posts if you wanted. How does that change social gatherings? You bump into someone at a rave or sporting event and can see…anything relevant from their public history.
The mayor of Nice describing the reality below. We’re being told these are “students” protesting government funding…the attackers say otherwise.
My first job out of college was as an options market maker at SIG. I have a CFA, MBA, and I traded the first ever Bitcoin VAR swap. I’ve been a net loser in equity options over my lifetime, and that was without any blowups or big mistakes. Better to just avoid them (rare exceptions.) Buy good assets and hold them until A. You find much better assets or B. Those original assets are clearly overvalued.
Leopold Aschenbrenner might genuinely be the unluckiest motherfucker alive.
After getting absolutely destroyed in July and being forced to liquidate much of his AI portfolio, he reportedly came back swinging in early September, buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of options premium.
Look at how those stocks have performed since September 8:
$CRWV: -37.4%
$SKHY: -25.8%
$SNDK: -23.8%
$DRAM: -22.9%
$BE: -18.1%
$INTC: -9.4%
$AMD: +9.1%
Six out of seven are underwater, with an average decline of roughly 18.6%.
And remember, we're talking about someone who reportedly rebuilt exposure through leveraged options, not just common shares.
Imagine surviving a massive forced liquidation, watching your favorite stocks recover, deciding it's finally safe to get back in, and then getting hit by ANOTHER brutal selloff barely a month later.
The worst part about options is that you can be absolutely right about the long-term AI infrastructure thesis and still lose a fortune because your timing was wrong.
I genuinely feel for the guy.
The market has absolutely no mercy.
It’s a bizarre world where El Sayed’s sister is being accused by his campaign of spreading racist Islamophobic info about her own family.
BREAKING: Abdul El-Sayed's campaign is responding to @FoxNews after unearthed social media posts from El Sayed's sister in 2012 appear to show her saying her family has been involved with and supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood. I asked the campaign if they deny the posts are in fact from his sister, and what comment they have given that El-Sayed just told Meet the Press over the weekend that nobody in his family has any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. This is what they told me.
“Abdul is a dad and a doctor. He has spent his entire career working to keep Michiganders healthy and safe. Independent fact checkers have repeatedly debunked Mike’s lies, but their campaign continues to use bad faith attacks on Abdul's faith and family. Mike wants to distract from Trump’s agenda that is terrorizing Michigan families at the pump and at the grocery store."
- El-Sayed campaign spokesperson Roxie Richner.
On background, the campaign says that claims El Sayed and his family are part of the Muslim Brotherhood have been debunked as "racist" and "untrue".
It’s very very hard to be “private.” Shielded crypto txs just one small part of the puzzle. Moving money anonymously, is imo, beyond the capability of most of us today. For “small fish” we used to have privacy through obscurity. But automated tooling potentially eliminates that and can de-anonymize most txs.
Ledger theft, day two. Since yesterday the thief has pushed ether through Tornado Cash three times, and each time on into Zcash's shielded pool. We followed every lot out the far side. Here is how, step by step.
1. THE SAME BUILD, THREE TIMES
An ether wallet pays a fresh splitter. The splitter pays four fresh wallets. The four drop it into Tornado Cash's 100, 10 and 1 ETH pools. Minutes, every time.
Run 1, yesterday 15:17: 1,254 ETH. Run 2, today 09:42: 1,291 ETH. Run 3, today 11:56: 450 ETH from 0xfa4EaBB840A33C156E600311433AE261CBfCb0e2, in the pools by 12:15.
2. OUT OF TORNADO CASH
The mixer breaks the link between a deposit and a withdrawal. We do not need the link. Our tooling fingerprints the withdrawal transactions themselves: how each one is constructed, who constructs it, and when.
Yesterday's 65 withdrawals (1,084 ETH) and today's 96 (1,726 ETH) all carry the same signature. The six other withdrawals from those pools in today's windows do not. Run 3 came out from 12:18 into 0x0d697aa182801566d87adc86e68e95fd3b2f5f82 (213 ETH) and 0x676b16cc18542f37d202a1a79ac05463395496a4 (122 ETH), and 195 ETH of it was inside a cross-chain swap service by 12:38. Forty-two minutes, end to end.
3. INTO ZCASH, AND OUT AGAIN
The swap service turns the ether into shielded ZEC, where sender, amount and recipient vanish. But the service's own shielding of each lot is public, and from it we derive a value signature for that lot's exit, then scan every transparent exit from the pool. 108 of 108 exits across both days match their lot to the zatoshi. Not one other exit from the pool does.
First lot today: in at 10:18:18, out at 11:06:16 in block 3512847 (8d26a9b095d4d28373527f7a6eb81a3be7f906d1e2190960c0512ff64f369418 and 738c6d1261e79766e4dd16bdbd38dced91b8e3a86ce41dcda83eda1f19208fbf), straight into a ZEC to USDC order.
Today so far: 20 lots ordered (2,379 ZEC, $2.9m), 14 out, 5 inside the pool, 1 still settling. Every exit feeds a ZEC to USDC order paying two wallets born at 11:11, 22 of the 28 paid by 12:43:
0x816D5Ee17DB1495d1409F135b98FF3edc5F3cDf8: 940,561 USDC
0xBA736A4b616e79867B6d586293966b552883f3F3: 852,258 USDC
1.79m USDC, unspent. @Circle can freeze it.
(1/2) 🧵⤵️
Sharing my mental and physical health journey and learnings on neurodivergence. My guess is this applies to many of you.
15 months ago I exited BlockTower and was beyond burnt out. I was anxious, depressed, and felt like I had the body and mind of a 70 year old. I spent the next year on the “basics.” Sleep, exercise, nutrition, minimizing screen time, connecting with close friends and family. That helped a lot, but I still struggled with a couple bad habits and felt far from being capable of tackling anything ambitious.
The neurodivergence angle - a few years ago, I got assessed for autism and ADHD but definitively and clearly had neither (at least according to current tests, literature, and psychiatrists.)
In the last month I connected with a couple new doctors including a brilliant neuroscientist that opened my eyes to various patterns.
Almost all the literature and studies on these topics come from “average people.” High functioning people are largely absent from the literature because we don’t volunteer for medical studies and often “cope” so well that we go undiagnosed.
I’m fairly certain now that I have some form of ADHD (and am somewhere lightly on the autism spectrum), very different from anything I’ve ever read about.
My own pattern - hopping from rabbit hole to rabbit hole, a constantly working mind that’s only silenced by intense flow state like rock climbing, procrastination as my biggest (and almost sole) source of anxiety, and gravitating towards nicotine and THC with no desire for any other substances. Apparently this is an archetype for high functioning ADHD, and reflects a weak dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex that controls “executive function” in the brain.
Buddhist style meditation and any type of arduous deep focus strengthens this part of the brain. Doom scrolling and staring at financial charts all day weakens it.
I’m exploring a range of remediations - technological, nutritional, psychological, and already seeing benefits. Closer to the start of this journey than the end. Will share more soon with things that worked for me.
The follow-up:
Following up on this. Turns out I have light AuDHD, which was incredibly helpful to learn. That came after testing clearly negative for everything and seeing multiple psychiatrists. That diagnosis came from a mix of my own research + Claude and has since been confirmed by a neuroscientists and psychiatrist. It gave me a new lens on challenges I was facing. For example, it reframed “depression” as mostly “autistic burnout” for me, which requires a different remedy; (activity for depression, genuine rest for burnout). That diagnosis also led me to other things, like a diagnosis of light hypermobility. Neurodivergence is still poorly understood, but it’s foundationally connected with overactive immune system (specifically MAST cells, histamine sensitivity), and stomach issues in many. For myself, I just have light seasonal allergies, a slight histamine sensitivity, and light hypermobility (double jointed elbows, hypermobile spine in spots.) Main take away from this journey is to keep digging and use LLMs for self-diagnosis (and then verify with the right experts.)
The diagnosis was helpful to me, because I’ve long experienced the inherent contradictions and “back and forth” between the adhd and autism pulls. I didn’t know how to describe or model it, and so just thought of myself as someone with inconsistent energy and a weakness for procrastination at times. The diagnosis let me reframe that as different nervous system states, and quickly yielded specific “hacks.” For example, if I’m procrastinating on something now, I’ll often “speed task” it, or in some other way gamify it to “trick” my adhd brain into tackling it immediately.
It also helped me understand why some activities were surprisingly draining for me. “Masking” is exhausting.
I think I’m 90% recovered from burnout after about 21 months into “retirement.” That was a combination of:
“Touching grass” - lots of time in nature and ideally in flow state via hiking or climbing or meditating.
Connecting with friends and family - spent a lot of time with family and my ~10 closest friends, quality time on what matters. Love and friendship. Looked for ways to help others.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation: did 2 rounds of this, each time it cut my anxiety by 35% (sustained), and cut 5 years of brain fog each time.
Supplements and peptides: taking “Wolverine stack” and a bunch of supplements now, but noticed very little from any of it. With wolverine stack i recover from workouts a little faster. No affect on mood or burnout from any of it. But my blood test results were solid at the start; worth getting a blood test, if you’re low on something, could be an easy fix.
Following up on this. Turns out I have light AuDHD, which was incredibly helpful to learn. That came after testing clearly negative for everything and seeing multiple psychiatrists. That diagnosis came from a mix of my own research + Claude and has since been confirmed by a neuroscientists and psychiatrist. It gave me a new lens on challenges I was facing. For example, it reframed “depression” as mostly “autistic burnout” for me, which requires a different remedy; (activity for depression, genuine rest for burnout). That diagnosis also led me to other things, like a diagnosis of light hypermobility. Neurodivergence is still poorly understood, but it’s foundationally connected with overactive immune system (specifically MAST cells, histamine sensitivity), and stomach issues in many. For myself, I just have light seasonal allergies, a slight histamine sensitivity, and light hypermobility (double jointed elbows, hypermobile spine in spots.) Main take away from this journey is to keep digging and use LLMs for self-diagnosis (and then verify with the right experts.)
The diagnosis was helpful to me, because I’ve long experienced the inherent contradictions and “back and forth” between the adhd and autism pulls. I didn’t know how to describe or model it, and so just thought of myself as someone with inconsistent energy and a weakness for procrastination at times. The diagnosis let me reframe that as different nervous system states, and quickly yielded specific “hacks.” For example, if I’m procrastinating on something now, I’ll often “speed task” it, or in some other way gamify it to “trick” my adhd brain into tackling it immediately.
It also helped me understand why some activities were surprisingly draining for me. “Masking” is exhausting.
I think I’m 90% recovered from burnout after about 21 months into “retirement.” That was a combination of:
“Touching grass” - lots of time in nature and ideally in flow state via hiking or climbing or meditating.
Connecting with friends and family - spent a lot of time with family and my ~10 closest friends, quality time on what matters. Love and friendship. Looked for ways to help others.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation: did 2 rounds of this, each time it cut my anxiety by 35% (sustained), and cut 5 years of brain fog each time.
Supplements and peptides: taking “Wolverine stack” and a bunch of supplements now, but noticed very little from any of it. With wolverine stack i recover from workouts a little faster. No affect on mood or burnout from any of it. But my blood test results were solid at the start; worth getting a blood test, if you’re low on something, could be an easy fix.
Sharing my mental and physical health journey and learnings on neurodivergence. My guess is this applies to many of you.
15 months ago I exited BlockTower and was beyond burnt out. I was anxious, depressed, and felt like I had the body and mind of a 70 year old. I spent the next year on the “basics.” Sleep, exercise, nutrition, minimizing screen time, connecting with close friends and family. That helped a lot, but I still struggled with a couple bad habits and felt far from being capable of tackling anything ambitious.
The neurodivergence angle - a few years ago, I got assessed for autism and ADHD but definitively and clearly had neither (at least according to current tests, literature, and psychiatrists.)
In the last month I connected with a couple new doctors including a brilliant neuroscientist that opened my eyes to various patterns.
Almost all the literature and studies on these topics come from “average people.” High functioning people are largely absent from the literature because we don’t volunteer for medical studies and often “cope” so well that we go undiagnosed.
I’m fairly certain now that I have some form of ADHD (and am somewhere lightly on the autism spectrum), very different from anything I’ve ever read about.
My own pattern - hopping from rabbit hole to rabbit hole, a constantly working mind that’s only silenced by intense flow state like rock climbing, procrastination as my biggest (and almost sole) source of anxiety, and gravitating towards nicotine and THC with no desire for any other substances. Apparently this is an archetype for high functioning ADHD, and reflects a weak dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex that controls “executive function” in the brain.
Buddhist style meditation and any type of arduous deep focus strengthens this part of the brain. Doom scrolling and staring at financial charts all day weakens it.
I’m exploring a range of remediations - technological, nutritional, psychological, and already seeing benefits. Closer to the start of this journey than the end. Will share more soon with things that worked for me.
Ari Paul retweeted
Q: How are so many people passionately convinced there's a genocide in Gaza, even though it's logically & statistically impossible?
A: Since Oct 8, 2023, international news outlets have pumped out 690,000 stories about Israel containing genocide language. But there's more... 🧵
Nearing the security rubicon. The world isn’t ready to deal with this.
Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test.
48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video.
It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The 48% figure and "video Turing test" claim are from Tavus's own study of 54 one-minute calls, not independently verified or using a standard protocol. Griffin-Lite leads NVIDIA's VideoFDB benchmark on their public leaderboard.
cellcog.ai/blog/tavus-gri…
research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/proj…
tech-ish.com/2026/10/02/tav…
The legal systems of the world (all of them) were built for a very different era. They’ve long been failing at “diffuse harms at a distance”, like assessing accountability for pollution that probabilistically caused cancer deaths 1000 miles away.
Now I’m seeing a lot of chatter around the legal system and OpenAI and Anthropic’s possibly criminal hacks of companies and governments. Some are arguing existing laws work fine and just need to be enforced. I don’t think so. Laws related to hacking were already vague and capriciously enforced. One big problem is intent - any law or regulation that mentions intent gets murky with AI. We’ve already seen this with trading algos - they’re functionally able to front run and manipulate markets with legal impunity, since “market manipulation” and most “trading crimes” requires intent, and algos and AI don’t have intent (or at least that’s a relatively new and untested question.)
So we’re currently in a world where there’s a lot of stuff that’s criminal for you to do…but legal for you to ask an algo or LLM to do it, as long as your instruction is vague enough and a prosecutor can’t prove you knew ahead of time exactly what would result from your request.
Another angle is the failure of ex poste enforcement when harms get big enough. Punishing suicide bombers is obviously useless. Similarly, it doesn’t do the world any good to punish someone after they nuke and kill and 100m people. Those harms are too great to just punish after the fact. And there are too many people alive who will happily risk life in prison or the death penalty to kill 100m of their enemies, or to steal $100b.
An AI hack can potentially steal from or majorly harm 1 billion people instantly. Relying on a court to maybe remediate that years later doesn’t works.
IMO, this will be a huge multi decade undertaking to create new legal primitives suitable for the modern world. It’ll be a painful transition.
With all the concerns of AI doom, we can’t forget about the real risks facing America. Furries. youtu.be/4Be3KSZup-8?is=yEak…
Satirical proposals to make data centers more appealing to the right and left:
For MAGA - tell them we’ll use data centers as prisons for migrants and run them Matrix style, burning Somali brain cells instead of diesel. Rename them “Trump centers”, install a Roman architectural facade and paint them gold. Alternatively, paint them in camo and hang truck nuts off the power lines connecting it.
For the woke left - tell them the Data Centers will only serve agents that identify as people of color or non-binary. Promise the data centers will only use gluten free water, and artisanal motherboards crafted from recycled alpaca wool.
For every query, the LLM will pause for 90 seconds to show a land acknowledgment detailing the indigenous history of the specific server that processed the data.
Just need to get neuralink to Matrix level of renting out human brains and we could make a single construction serve both purposes: data center + housing in one. Tenants are the servers. 🙃
