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19 tagged essays
crypto/2026-07-24
Back to the Bearer AssetFILE 00127K

Back to the Bearer Asset

I did not lose faith in open AI, open science, or decentralized infrastructure. I lost faith in the assumption that every important coordination problem deserves an investable token. That was the economic reckoning. Then five mornings at Stratford added the political one: every registered claim has an owner, the owner takes sides in an emergency, and the strongest monetary-economics argument of the decade — Alden's — quietly assumes the emergency never comes. This is the essay the authoritarianism series kept promising: what a bearer asset is actually for.

01 / 27K / 9 minread
technology/2026-07-14
Human, All Too HumanFILE 00233K

Human, All Too Human

A chain promising decentralized machine intelligence now runs on the most human mechanism ever invented: capital, delegation, founder influence, validator politics, and control over who receives emissions. At least some of the builders are sincere. The work is at least sometimes genuine. The architecture asks the powerful to surrender what the architecture lets them keep.

02 / 33K / 11 minread
ai/2026-02-24
The EnclosureFILE 00644K

The Enclosure

In September 2025, Anthropic settled a $1.5 billion lawsuit for pirating seven million books. In January 2026, music publishers sued them for $3 billion over 20,000 torrented songs. In February, Anthropic accused DeepSeek of 'industrial-scale distillation.' The pattern is older than the internet. It is older than copyright itself.

06 / 44K / 15 minread
ai/2026-02-03
Who Teaches the Machine: How Grail is Decentralizing the Most Consequential Phase of AI DevelopmentFILE 00729K

Who Teaches the Machine: How Grail is Decentralizing the Most Consequential Phase of AI Development

Pre-training gives AI knowledge. Post-training teaches it judgment: what to refuse, how to reason, what to value. This is the phase where alignment happens, and while decentralized efforts existed, weight sync over public internet made them impractically slow. This week, a research paper from Grail demonstrated that the bandwidth barrier keeping RL post-training centralized was 99% redundant, an artifact of how we were moving data rather than a physical constraint. The implications extend far beyond compression ratios.

07 / 29K / 10 minread
ai/2026-01-12
The Internet is the Datacenter: How Templar is Building the Final Form of Decentralized AI TrainingFILE 00829K

The Internet is the Datacenter: How Templar is Building the Final Form of Decentralized AI Training

For eighty years, the most powerful technologies have required concentration: co-located machines in fortress datacenters, tightly controlled by those who could afford the infrastructure. This week's research breakthrough from Templar marks something different, a technical path toward intelligence as genuinely distributed public infrastructure, where your home GPU can train frontier models alongside Google's datacenters.

08 / 29K / 10 minread
ai/2025-10-21
AI and the War MachineFILE 00938K

AI and the War Machine

Dario Amodei's October 2025 statement on 'American AI Leadership' strips away any remaining pretense that centralized AI development serves universal human welfare. Instead, it reveals the naked truth: AI monopolies are aligning with military-industrial interests and nationalist agendas.

09 / 38K / 13 minread
ai/2025-02-02
DeepSeek and the Open AI Movement: Ushering in a Collaborative FutureFILE 0195K

DeepSeek and the Open AI Movement: Ushering in a Collaborative Future

In an era defined by technological rivalries and corporate secrecy, a disruptive force is reshaping artificial intelligence. Last week's emergence of DeepSeek—a Chinese AI model matching the capabilities of leading proprietary systems—represents more than just another milestone in AI development. It heralds a renaissance in open-source collaboration that could fundamentally transform how humanity approaches technological innovation.

19 / 5K / 2 minread