I make servers do things @openrouter , formerly @anchorage, @opensea, Dharma, @ripple. Thoughts here are my own.
Oakland, CA
Joined February 2008
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Bjoern retweeted
My boss's boss is like 42, never married, no kids. Earns $275-300K per year. Goes on a minimum of two international vacations a year w/ his girlfriend. 10+ days, all out.
Eats the best food, stays in top notch accomodations. Excursions, tours, nicest beaches, etc.
Great guy, I'm happy for him.
But what I've realized is that without kids, you end up chasing a lifestyle that has to continually be topped in order for you to be satisfied and find happiness.
What he and others like him don't understand is that when you have children, seeing THEM experience life's most basic things and watching their eyes light up at all the "firsts", brings greater pleasure and joy than any vacation or travel experience ever could.
Seeing THEM try blueberries for the first time is greater than dining at the best 5 star restaurant in Europe.
Seeing THEM learn how to walk is greater than walking the Great Wall of China or strolling along the most picturesque beach.
Watching THEM giggle uncontrollably at "peek-a-boo" tops any A-list comedian act.
Seeing THEIR excitement when building a fort out of cardboard boxes and making a door big enough for daddy is superior to staying at 5-star resorts.
Flying kites with THEM far outweighs excursions like parasailing or helicopter rides.
Seeing THEM perform a recital on stage for the first time is more rewarding than watching a Broadway show or top notch symphony orchestra.
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When you have children, all of a sudden you realize that life's greatest joys are not in the pursuit of things or pleasure or travel, but rather in the LOVE and bond you share with your very own image bearers.
Seeing the beauty and magnificence and wonder of life all over again for the first time through THEIR eyes and expressions gives you something the world simply cannot offer, nor even come close.
Bjoern retweeted
The problem with vibe-coding is that it opened the floodgates to a certain kind of person (myself included) who now pushes the idea that you can vibe-code an app in a few days and start printing life changing amounts of money.
It’s turning into the same fake and lame energy of the info-guru world where the lifestyle becomes the product by setting unrealistic expectations to lazy people who want to get rich quick.
In case I misled people: my belief is you can vibe-code an MVP. You can get interest, a waitlist, even early revenue. If the product is simple or you have basic engineering instincts, sometimes you really can build and scale something meaningful fast. It happens.
But most of the time building real software still takes months. It needs iteration, debugging, new features, and actual users so you can test and fix. Non-engineers often misunderstand that software is a living, breathing organism. It needs maintenance, it needs oxygen (distribution and growth), and none of that is instant or finitely required.
Anyone claiming you can fully automate marketing is lying. Anyone promising thousands of paying users overnight is selling an edge case. These outcomes happen, but they’re rare and treating them as the standard is how people end up disillusioned and angry.
A lot of the “software fell off” narrative comes from comparing today to the 2000s/2010s, when (I believe) companies were built with decades in mind. Too many founders now (again, myself included) fantasize about quick wealth instead of lasting impact, largely due to social media and very largely due to every VC jamming the Cursor, Lovable, etc narrative down our throats (see: the fastest company to 100M ARR charts).
I’m not saying you shouldn’t want to get rich, even quickly. That’s actually exactly what I want to do. I’m saying you may see more success by aiming to build something enduring because the opposite is a very unlikely-to-hit gamble where survivorship bias the only thing you see on your feed.
To be completely clear (and TLDR): for selfish reasons alone, you should want to build for long-term impact. Do not let social media convince you that you can no-code a $10M ARR SaaS or raising $50M at 22 and exiting in 2 years are normal.
Bjoern retweeted
It is worth an extra quarter of testing to have FOCIL in a delayed Glamsterdam. FOCIL should have been in Pectra. FOCIL should have been in Fusaka. We need to ship this and the stakeholder feedback was tremendously in favor.
FOCIL is not of mere theoretical benefit. Private order flow and sophisticated MEV makes block building inherently centralized. When Tornado Cash was OFAC sanctioned we saw these builders censor transactions. This is an attack Ethereum has already experienced and can fix.
Builders should not have the power to do this. Last time it was censoring Tornado Cash; what if next time it is forcing unfavorable liquidation? DeFi needs FOCIL.
Strong censorship 51% attacks become significantly less bad with FOCIL, allowing optimistic rollups to more comfortably reduce their fraud proof windows. Scaling needs FOCIL.
Some things in life are worth waiting for. Glamsterdam with FOCIL is one of those.
While this is difficult to appreciate from the outside, a major decision is at stake behind the Forkcast rankings published over the last week: Adding FOCIL to Glamsterdam or not. In my view, it would be a short-sighted decision to add FOCIL, either as a definite commitment and even more so as a conditional one (“we’ll add it to the scope and see if we can ship it”). Were no lessons learned from Pectra?
The headliner process was supposed to offer ACD a format to keep the fork scope manageable. It was already a process error to keep FOCIL in consideration after it was turned down as Glamsterdam’s CL headliner. Now ACD intends to add months of delay and a complex (even if well-understood) feature on top of ePBS, itself already a significantly complex change to the block construction pipeline.
This is not about the merits of FOCIL. People know well its importance and the necessity of a mechanism like FOCIL to ensure inclusion in a world of provers and high scale. Including FOCIL later is fine, and in my view FOCIL + 6 second slots for H* is a very attractive option, that we should be working towards as ePBS-only Glamsterdam approaches deployment.
Credible estimates give FOCIL + 6s slots H* a possible deployment in early 2027, while ePBS + FOCIL in Glamsterdam would possibly delay 6sec slots-only H* to the middle of 2027. This is at least 4 months of delay to ship the same package of things! This should tell you everything about the compounding testing and deployment complexity of ePBS + FOCIL. In addition, we do not get to enjoy the massive scaling benefits of ePBS + BALs until much later in 2026 too. This is an opportunity cost that is too often discounted.
The ability to plan and make forward commitments on future forks is increased if ACD is able to protect itself from append-only decisions while increasing its cadence of forks. The positive flywheel disappears if we fail to do this, and in my view this simply does not serve our values or the interests of our community over the long run.
More discussions are expected on this Thursday’s ACD.
Bjoern retweeted
Charlie Kirk was an example of what we need way more of (on both sides!!) in America; people who debate, analyze, think, and champion truth with logic, willing to sit down with anybody, especially those they disagree with.
Bjoern retweeted
Almost any of the entities on the list could now flip the 50/50 vote situation towards a higher gas limit. Who will it be?
Bjoern retweeted
This is CSPX - a Blackrock ETF on the S&P500. @BackedFi has worked many years to find the right legal setup to create a freely transferrable tokenized version of it (bCSPX). This is now available on your favourite DEX on Gnosis!
🚨 Big news for Gnosis Chain! 🚨
We're excited to announce the launch of the first liquidity pool for @BackedFi tokenised equities on @gnosischain. 🎉 This marks the start of the GIP-117 incentive programme, which will distribute $1M worth of GNO tokens. 🧵👇 Here's what you need to know:
Bjoern retweeted
TLDR: i have released a v0 of a full "Anonymous Gas Tickets" mvp on Holesky testnet :)
calling it: Stealth Gas Station
it's the newest add to my suite of free and open source eth accounts privacy related tools under the stealth.ereum banner
now let's go down the rabbit hole
Bjoern retweeted
One of the most insightful comments on social class in America that I’ve read. Haven’t stopped thinking about it
Bjoern retweeted
Hetzner is offering an S3-compatible object store (currently Beta), and the pricing is insane compared to AWS.
Storage: 4X cheaper — $4.9/TB-mo vs $21/TB-mo
Traffic: 50X cheaper — $51/TB vs $1/TB
And no request fees. AWS charges $0.4-$5/M requests.
docs.hetzner.com/storage/obj…
Bjoern retweeted
“This is terrible, low-paid work that we must ensure is done by human beings instead of machines, in perpetuity”
Bjoern retweeted
I don’t think crypto’s critics realize it’s a radical attempt at decoupling money and ownership from the state, a revolt on the order of overthrowing the divine right of kings (or in this case seigniorage).
Bjoern retweeted
For ~$9.6B of outside capital, SpaceX has launched a rocket into orbit over 320 times.
For $11B of taxpayer money, California built 1600ft of a concrete bridge.
Let that sink in.
