Modus

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/jack-clark-on-ai.html Co-founder of Anthropic: And the bigger and more complicated you make these systems, the more they seem to display awareness that they are things... …I am also deeply afraid. It would be extraordinarily arrogant to think working with a technology like this would be easy or simple... My own experience is that as these AI systems get smarter and smarter, they develop more and more complicated goals. When these goals aren’t absolutely aligned with both our preferences and the right context, the AI systems will behave strangely. ...the system which is now beginning to design its successor is also increasingly self-aware and therefore will surely eventually be prone to thinking, independently of us, about how it might want to be designed. #AI

Some people have asked me recently: What is an "economic node?" It's a #Bitcoin #node that is directly involved in a monetary transaction. Here are four ways that a node can be directly involved in a transaction: 1. Creating a transaction. This is often called "transaction coordination." You need to know if you've got money in your wallet before you can send. 2. Broadcasting the transaction to the bitcoin network. (You can add some privacy by doing this with your own node.) 3. Verifying that you actually received funds. For the average bitcoin user, this is by far the most important thing you can do with your node. If you rely on others to tell if you received anything, they could trick you. 4. Mining. Miners need to see the previous blocks, and if they want to earn fees then they need to see the pool of new transactions (AKA mempool). A node can also be indirectly involved in a transaction by distributing new transactions to other nodes, and filtering out bad transactions. This filtering is the main issue between #core v30 and #knots.

"If you are a user of LLM systems that use tools (you can call them “#AI agents” if you like) it is critically important that you understand the risk of combining tools with the following three characteristics. Failing to understand this can let an attacker steal your data. "The lethal trifecta of capabilities is: "1. Access to your private data—one of the most common purposes of tools in the first place! 2. Exposure to untrusted content—any mechanism by which text (or images) controlled by a malicious attacker could become available to your LLM 3. The ability to externally communicate in a way that could be used to steal your data" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

Really good software devs can become arrogant. If they're totally confident that they are technically correct, then they can become cemented into their beliefs. However, because they're geeks, they can struggle with interpersonal things: they can't read the room, they can't handle debates gracefully, they can't tell when they are being manipulated by bad actors, and they can't understand the incentives of regular people like plebs, node runners, miners, investors, journalists, lawyers, and "normies" who just discovered bitcoin. So if some of you think "I'm not technical enough to understand this debate," that's not totally right. Because you can understand PEOPLE better than core devs, and that's a big part of the equation. If core is gonna act all weird about this, silence debate, and ignore dire warnings from people like Nick Szabo and Luke Jr, then something is wrong. This is how an 80 IQ pleb can see the problem more easily than a 120 IQ blue-haired San Francisco core developer.

How to figure out your #Bitcoin IQ: ((Year you bought - 2009)*7)±100 You choose plus or minus based on honest self assessment, but you gain higher social status the farther you are from 100, in either direction.