Vitalik Buterin

@vitalik.eth

73 Following

366196 Followers

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Vitalik Buterin

One of my favorite posts from @robinhanson: "Spaceship Earth Explores Culture Space" https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/spaceship-earth-in-culture-spacehtml By inventing, trying out, and having competitions between different cultures, we're doing something that's every bit as meaningful as space exploration.

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Vitalik Buterin

One way to look at the possible effects of deepfakes in politics is to look at "shallow fakes" that have been possible for a long time. For example, this screenshot purporting to be a "you're free to say whatever nasty stuff you want" whitelist for twitter. I actually have no idea if this is real or fake, but there definitely are some people who are treating it as real, imo without sufficient evidence. And yet, the effects of things like this are pretty bounded. This feels like a plausible outcome for deepfakes in politics. The smart people know not to trust a politician's statements without confirmation on official channels, and less smart people get tricked, as they do today with shallow fakes. If something fake goes viral, Community Notes can help on the margin in making it clear that it's fake. Most normies don't actually look at this stuff in real time, and so the effect ends up not too bad. This is the strongest case for not being too worried. The place where I am *more* worried about deepfakes is...

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Vitalik Buterin

I am noticing that the most successful new ideologies of the past decade are very object-level (prescriptions on specific issues) and quite little meta-level (social processes for making decisions on object-level issues). Examples: * Abstract libertarianism feels much weaker than 10 years ago. But issue-specific versions of it are quite successful: YIMBY (housing), the crypto space * e/acc (it's about all technology in theory, but ends up being about AI in practice) * The largest cluster in effective altruism morphed from being meta-level ("think harder to making sure your donations are going where they can do the most good!") to object level (AI safety, with a little bit of animal welfare and global public health) * Longevity movement Maybe network states and Glen and Audrey's Plurality movement are two exceptions - but in general the above feels like a strong pattern. Any ideas why this meta level -> object level shift seems to be taking place?

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Vitalik Buterin

Exploring circle STARKs https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/23/circlestarks.html Thank you to @StarkwareLtd friends for the kind support in understanding these concepts! See also my implementation at https://github.com/ethereum/research/tree/master/circlestark

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Vitalik Buterin

Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is "pro-crypto" https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/17/procrypto.html

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Vitalik Buterin

My hot take re "too much investment in infra": there's too much investment in *some kinds of infra* and not enough in others, and what's actually going on is, people want to invest in "the casino" but still feel good about themselves, so they invest in the subset of infra that gets spillover profits from the casino.

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Vitalik Buterin

Motte: the universe was created and is sometimes intervened in by an agentic entity ("god", "simulator"...) Bailey: the Christian Bible has unique insight into the inner workings of that agentic entity Two different claims (really, three different claims) https://x.com/jd_pressman/status/1812889834589212974

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Vitalik Buterin

Plane be like... Me be like... We really need to clean up our indoor air, but until then thank you @zhouliang_mask!

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Vitalik Buterin

I'm starting to feel like the most viable path out of the misuse of "ZK" is to just use the word "proof" to refer to a validity proof where you don't care about revealing the full information. And just favor "rollup" over "ZK rollup", and "EVM proof / prover / proving" over "ZK-EVM", where practical.

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Vitalik Buterin

https://fc-polls.vercel.app/polls/f2b3765d-cea1-4189-84d5-7af425716c7d

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Vitalik Buterin

Protip: you can come in to Brussels through Amsterdam. Passport control line in AMS is negligible (at least at 5AM, though I'm sure it's not too bad at other times either), and it's only a 2h train ride straight from the AMS airport to Brussels.

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Vitalik Buterin

Airvalent CO2 monitors. https://airvalent.com/ Exciting to see how small these are getting, similar size to apple airpods case. Looking forward to seeing this tech ~1-3 versions from now, where air quality monitoring can just be part of a smartwatch.

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Vitalik Buterin

Poseidon is a super elegant hash function, part 2: Even an optimized STARK arithmetization can fit into a single screenshot

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Vitalik Buterin

In regular programming, zero is false and anything else is true. In ZK cryptography, zero is true and anything else is false.

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Vitalik Buterin

Epochs and slots all the way down: ways to give Ethereum users faster transaction confirmation times https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/06/30/epochslot.html

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Vitalik Buterin

https://x.com/DellAnnaLuca/status/1806036301009011054 Seeing so much hate for this diagram that would have been accepted as common wisdom 5 years ago makes me sad, and makes me somewhat more scared for the future of the world. I hope we can snap out of this mode of thinking soon.

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Vitalik Buterin

In multiple European cities now I see taxis being allowed to use the bus lane (while of course regular cars are not). What's the policy justification for this?

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Vitalik Buterin

Interesting thread on UK vs France from the other app. I am curious, do locals of either country agree? https://x.com/bswud/status/1804899087197564950

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Vitalik Buterin

On the other app: "Look, here's a really impressive AI dog" "Nonono that's just a really impressive AI video deepfake of an AI dog"

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Vitalik Buterin

To me, the most underrated counterargument to the Pascal's Wager is that it ignores that your actions can have consequences on either side of zero. Once you take that into account, many things move from "seeming no-brainer" to "totally undecidable omg what the heck do I do"

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