It’s been a very eventful 2024 for the HonorCode project and on-chain reputation more generally, and 2025 looking even brighter with efforts like Deep Funding picking up. This year-in-review thread is a reference for the main milestones and posts so far:

This is the future humanity is going to experience, the colonization of Mars.

There will be a first 100 colonists. Then robotic constructor robots. Digging habitats, purifying water, refining materials, doming cities, seeding lichen.

There will be environmental protests against et overwhelmed by economic interests. Booming corporate mining towns and independent free cities connected by high speed vacuum tube rail. Advanced gene therapies achieving longevity escape velocity.

It's crazy but it's all going to happen, its now inevitable. The greatest infrastructure buildout in history will compete to industrialize the high frontier of space and enable a genuine Martian colonization program. And it will occur at the same time as humanity masters its own biology.

There are people alive today who will live to see a breathable atmosphere on Mars.

If only the dirt wasn't poisonous

Thread: how I think about the growth of AI capabilities and what it means for us as they keep getting stronger.

I think the right model for comparing humans and AI is not any single dimension like intelligence or aggregate performance on economic tasks. Rather, I view both having a whole range of capabilities. This includes both physical (eg. doing things with our hands, walking) and mental (eg. strategic thinking, mental math, emotional intelligence).

For most of human history, machines have only exceeded us in very few areas, eg. a strong early example is water and windmills. So we can look at the situation in 1500 like this:

But here we get to the thing that will confound looking at human and machine as separate units: the possibility of deeper and deeper integration between human and machine.

This is the strand of technology that includes: computers being able to work much more symbiotically with us, picking up on all kinds of conscious and sub-conscious signals we release as an interface, brain-computer interfaces, computer-assisted telepathy that helps multiple people better understand each other and work together. The ultimate end is erasing the binary divide between human and machine and opening up any position on that spectrum. On one end, you sitting at a laptop terminal; on the other end, mind uploading, and also everything in between.

The hope is that deeply integrated human + machine will outperform separated human + machine, and that this will remain the case all the way up to the technological ceiling.

This is the best "far-future AI outcome that I actually like" that I can come up with:

* We preserve global political and economic pluralism (no single company or government dominates) all the way up to the technological ceiling.
* We humans each get the ability to either take technological upgrades to ourselves, and explore the universe at a level competitive with "pure" machines, or stay as we are, and get some ability to act in the world through having a bot listen to our instructions.
* Most of Earth will probably become a highly-regulated nature preserve where anyone can continue living the kind of life they have now (without the pains and annoyances; most challenge will be healthy "good challenge"), and if you want to do more crazy things, you go to space.

Make no mistake - this is a ride through a narrow corridor. Things could go off the rails in one of several different ways: AI-on-its-own could get too powerful relative to the alternatives; one country or one company could gain decisive advantage and decide to lock it in permanently, powerful technological ways of destroying each other could cause incalculable harm, or the human + machine integration approach itself ends up preserving not enough of our humanity, and so it ends up being "just another way to make powerful bots".

For these reasons, I wish that we can ride through the narrow corridor at 60 kph and not 200 kph, which is why I feel warmly toward "slowdown" / "pause" proposals (including "give us a chance to hit the brakes" ideas like mutually assured compute destruction (as in AI 2040, also previously Dan Hendrycks, and others)).

My ideal world is actually one where (i) open weights wins, and (ii) Dean Ball turns out to be completely right that open weights is decelerationist because it deters capex in frontier models [though it will enable more capex in peripherals and applications], because then we get slowdown without any of the downsides of doing it through heavier-handed political means.

But also I don't think we should count on the world to naturally give us "convenient" laws of economics and physics. We do have some degree of agency over the laws of politics, plenty of ways to change incentives without putting a king in charge, and we should exercise that.

Machines still are not self-directed: they require humans to ask the question or provide some input, and they (sometimes radically) transform what we give them. They won't be capable of carrying on civlztn until they have an independent source of choice. Probably not til quantum.

Mr. Mamdani, SHUT DOWN THIS #CANTILEVER.

This week saw an announcement that NYC is searching for a #BQE Czar to oversee the troubled stacked section near Brooklyn Heights. If this project goes forward with the aim of fixing it in place, it will fail horribly.

The easiest option is to simply close that stretch for safety reasons--we've also seen how quickly weak structures can buckle. Traffic will adapt. If the Feds want to pay to rebuild their interstate, then let's talk. But Brooklyners should have the final say over what goes there.

See Off-Ramp NYC (offramp.nyc) for more details.

Not only game theory, bigger problem is economics.

But doesn't have to be quantum mechanics, complex adaptive systems show that even if you have a classical deterministic system you end up with unpredictable outcomes.

Ah, but the chaotic dynamics in such systems is how fundamental indeterminacy at the human level emerges by scaling up from infinitesimal quantum gyrations! So it's uncertainty all the way down (and up).

I can't believe ENS, of all things, has turned into another heist and grift. Is nothing sacred? The reasons given--DAOs are dysfunctional, etc.--are all true in general but pretty much irrelevant in this case as DAO simply controls treasury and has funded Labs with whatever it wants. It's just purely a money grab and after this, there will be zero accountability of the team to anyone as that is how lawyers set up these ridiculous "foundations". As I always warned, the "constitutions" sound good but are unenforceable as they don't give any tokenholders or anyone else any right to sue if they are arguably violated. The crypto "space" or "industry" is completely lost and it's really so depressing.

It's yet another reminder that the app-token model is a dead end: centralized, misaligned incentives, over-financialized. And those of us who proposed non-tradeable alternatives were laughed out of the room. This is the result.

Most Americans still believe they live in a democracy. In reality, political power follows concentrated wealth. That's the dictatorship of capital: profits are privatized, crises are socialized, and the system is beginning to fray at the seams. #WakeUp #ClassStruggle

They also believe they live in a free market, while ignoring how Main St has to pay tribute to Wall St, which is artificially back-stopped and inflated assets via debt. A corporate socialist banking system transfer from poor to rich. And yet we're supposed to fear the reverse...

If I wanted to destroy a city as fast as possible, I’d freeze the rent

> Discourages new investment

> Encourages housing overconsumption. A single lucky individual can now afford a 2 or 3 bedroom, others get shafted.

> Landlords are incentivized to turn rental units into condos

> Disinvestment & deterioration of rental units

A terrible policy, and in 2026 we already know this

Rent-stabilized units are a minority of apartments in NYC and mostly held by long-time residents. Lots of new high-end market-rate bldgs going up, and you can see that every day. Problem is inflated capital creates nimbyism and drives up cost for new supply.

You may be curious about where we've been lately, and the long answer is...we've been cooking something big! Shorter answer, is watching the NY #Knicks kickin' ass.

This account doesn't cover sports much, but watching Brunson and Co's miraculous win raises a point about honor...

The fact that this championship lifted the spirits and brought an entire city together simply compounds the significance of the stunning result. Past critics have been forced to confront their misreading of what it takes to win at the highest level.

Nobody exemplifies Knicks honor more than the King of NY himself, Jalen Brunson. The realization that the lead player gave up millions of $$$ to assemble a winning team has upended the world of sports. True honor is rare.

Congrats all and Let's Go #knicks2026champs !

The fact that the championship raised the spirit and comradery across an entire city only compounds the significance of the event. Longtime critics were forced to confront their misreading of what it takes to win at the highest level.

During this saga, nobody exemplifies Knicks Honor greater than the man himself, Jalen Brunson. The unheard of sacrifice of millions of $$$ (gasp!) to put together a team of champions has upended the world of sport. True Honor, it seems, is rare.

Congrats all and Let's Go Knicks!

Every country on the planet is desperate to replicate the success of Silicon Valley

Every politician in California campaigns on taxing Silicon Valley to death

Once you destroy something it doesn't just come back somewhere else

It's gone forever.

Always entertaining to hear capitalists raise the tax alarm while also ignoring how corporate socialist transfers from USGov/Fed to Wall St/SV destroy the story that it's the "free market baby"