There was a cryptocurrency wallet hack the other day which has so far gone unremarked here because the popcorn is stale and we all pivoted to AI. And yet there are dozens of voices of bagholders crying out in pain wanting to be heard. This is their story.

For some reason the best explanation comes from a boring company that makes point of sale credit card readers https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-reseed-in-coldcard-firmware

COLDCARD firmware contains an RNG integration error that causes ngu.random to use MicroPython’s deterministic Yasmarang fallback instead of the STM32 hardware RNG.

Oh hey they got the most important thing not to get wrong wrong in the regulation free money settlement layer of the future.

The bug? Well in one file they wrote #define MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG 0, and a library they depended on had this code:

# ifndef MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG
# error "get a HW TRNG plz"
# endif

This should have caused a build failure, but since MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, to zero, it did not and instead continued down an insecure codepath.

As a C++ programmer this isn’t an unheard of sort of mistake to make in the moment. Many libraries use undefined for preprocessor variables, but there are some people who also use zero.

But it’s less excusable to not catch it when this is literally the most important thing to get right in a bitcoin wallet. Did they not trace the code path when writing the code? Did they have no integration tests or unit tests for RNG seed quality? Poor RNG seeding has come up a ton in literature, so is the sort of thing people writing cryptographic code should check for…

We’ll have to addend that old saying: “don’t roll your own crypto unless the other person’s crypto is from a blockchain developer in which case you’re probably better off rolling your own after all.”

I personally don’t want to sneer at the bagholders too much here. It’s 2026 and at this point it just feels kinda sad. But I’ll end this comment with this glowing review:

I thought I was secure because Cold Card was always praised as one of the best and most secure wallets. It’s open source, so anyone can verify.

“It’s open source, so anyone can verify” – unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.

On land, cooling and water are among a site’s largest costs.

Oh gosh that sounds… uhmm not too bad actually? I wonder what the largest costs are at sea with a floating nuclear reactor in salt water and tugged around by large ships.

It sure is a zany coincidence that all the major American AI companies have come out either for or against open weight AI models with grand ethical and/or patriotic concerns all at the same time isn’t it?

Most recently our pal Zuck! https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-ai-future-is-for-everyone-a0c24e20

I’m just imagining a WSJ reader reading this and thinking “what the heck is this man talking about”. At some point you need a little structure or text to balance out the subtext.

As the post was removed: It was a chart of what rape percentage various situations were according to some internet survey.

I advise not reading it but here it is: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G41gJkzW4AA6ThU.jpg?name=orig

Coincidentally, the second proposal in favor of conditional LLM use in Debian verily reads as generated to me. :)

Bingo

I used AI tools to improve my initial draft, and (7.) was actually suggested by an AI tool.

OpenAI: “Sorry about accidentally hacking you teehee. It was because of how good we are at computer security :3”

https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/

Maybe they should start applying some of that superhuman box-escaping AI to their own sandbox designs because if your sandbox escape is a bug in a “package registry cache proxy” you might be doing it wrong.

Apparently it’s cheaper to foist the job of waking passengers up on 911 than to hire an employee to do it. Good ol’ privatize the gains / socialize the losses!

Oh no every day sneerclub teaches me about a new guy.

So he’s basically arguing that the Borg did nothing wrong (note: the Borg do not actually exist, note #2: the Borg are space fascists).

Worthy Successor: A posthuman intelligence so capable and morally valuable that you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) determine the future path of life itself.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this idea in rationalist circles: that is bad / wrong / irrational to be biased in favor of humans and or humans to succeed in particular. Often the idea is taken as obviously true, but I cannot understand it at all.

Like I don’t care if you can make a computer “better” than me or less sad than me or less likely to eat an innocent shrimp than me. I am not that computer-- if it’s a choice between me and them I’m fighting on team me. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make one’s space in the universe or to “selfishly” want self-actualization or to want humans to thrive.

One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism

full AI communism

At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. “A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.

Listen I’m all for hating on the Chinese government, but it’s more enjoyable to hate on them for real reasons rather than whatever this is.

Second mistake: I was relatively imprecise, writing, as I usually do, for a fairly high-context audience that was inclined to give me grace rather than pick apart every word

Oh no the lesson he took away from his tweet is that he didn’t use enough words.

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Heartwarming 🥰.

Wow this website is cursed: https://detrans.ai/en

Conversion Therapy as a Service.

“Don’t worry guys it’s only the present that we failed to predict, not the future!”

You can, if you want, design a utopian society to your specifications. Once the Von Neumann probes reach your property, they’ll build it for you. You can set the initial conditions and let them grow, reflect, and flourish on their own

Good news once I got back to earth e-bay still exists and my Nintendo stocks had appreciated enough to buy another distant galaxy! However three billion years of cyro-sleep has warped my personality so now I will rule my galaxy with an iron fist as a space queen. Space law only says:

1. No torture or slavery
2. Space property rights

So I shall not rule through torture or slavery, but through fear and only giving my enemies property rights to individual cells on my prison planet!

That said, note that with superintelligent assistance, other people will probably be able to eventually figure out what you did, and judge you for it.

“Oh no I feel so judged” I say as I use my property rights to tell those other losers not to send radio-waves or subspace comms into my galaxy.

(Wait this is supposed to be the good ending?)

I lost all my space lottery chances and ended up buying a cheap galaxy off of e-bay but when I finally woke up after a billion years of cryo-sleep it turns out that that the AI probe sent to my section of space made a space-treaty with the local aliens so now I have to turn around and fly home but by the time I get back to earth the sun will be halfway on it’s way to exploding which is kind of a bummer.

On the bright side generative AI in translations makes for fantastic motivation to actually learn a language.

I’d expect to find these sort of studies in the UN or UK reports that recommend banning “conversion therapy” for gender identity.

Imagine writing so many words about transgender healthcare while being this oblivious to how politicized the UK policy documents are.

Anyway after making it to the end that was a lot of words to say he couldn’t find any evidence for the position he wanted to be true holy smokes. His weird hang up on “crystallized” gender identity is bizarre. He seems to be hoping that there are people toying with changing gender and it’s not too late to “save” them via conversion therapy before it’s too late. We

Why do these people always want to give trans people the wrong hormones? It keeps coming up.

I think this is particularly important for the hormonal treatment of dysphoria in adolescents, where the evidence for gender-affirming care seems mixed. […] Given all this, I was shocked that when I ran GPT Deep Research I wasn’t able to find a single study that would evaluate the use of birth-sex-affirming hormones to decrease dysphoria.

The “evidence” he has provided up to this point:

1. A snippet from a Chat-GPT transcript. We can’t see what Util prompted, but the output from Chat-GPT starts with “You’re right.”
2. Two reddit comments about doubling down on (cis) gender roles. One of which uses the cursed words “nofap” and “autogynophilic”
3. A case study from Poland about someone who (possibly?) wasn’t transgender but had schizophrenic symptoms that mimicked it. The case study ends by saying WPATH guidelines would have handled things appropriately.
4. A tweet from a woman who mentions getting mild dysphoria after taking hormonal birth control.

Quite the nerve holding actual science to an impossible standard while his position is just vibes. None of his(?) evidence even mentions taking cross-gender hormones. If anything the tweet is weak evidence against his position.

I think this probably deserves a top level post but I’m lazy so dumping it here: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost

Midjourney is aiming towards making a fancy new ultrasound device! They have a trailer with unsettling sci-fi music and visuals!

Are they starting with clinical trials? Does it actually work yet? Haha no of course not they’re gonna make a “research spa” in San Francisco.

The blog post is full of weird phrasing and details that makes it impossible to take seriously:

When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.

Our spa will have hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and cozy rooms with pools of golden light which softly scan your body. It should be a place you love going, whether it’s by yourself, or with friends. It should be available 24/7.

The comments would also be wrong about / grossly over-simplifying American libel law. So whatever imaginary legal system they’re thinking of is even stranger.

(I know approximately nothing about libel law which makes me an expert compared to the “confused American” commenter who apparently thinks it’s impossible to use the internet for libel)

Wait why would they expect it to leak? (assuming that mentioning it isn’t just some marketing stunt, which it probably is)