Sjors Provoost

https://github.com/sjors/
Book: https://www.btcwip.com
Podcast: https://bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com/@nado/episodes

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npub1v25jqj332n630klwtqeqxgyrjl4alw4phmluhu2x6lcxzwy9m03suqexw3

NIP-05 Address

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsx92fqfgc4faghm0h9svsryzpe067lh2smal7t79rd0urp8zzahccpremhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuet49emks6t5v4hx76tnv5hxx6rpwsq3uamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fww4ejuamgd96x2mn0d9ek2tnrdpshgqgswaehxw309ahx7um5wghxcctwvsq3gamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwv3sk6atn9e5k7qgcwaehxw309ahx7um5wgh8xurjdamx7mmnwshxumqpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhg8twleq

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npub1v25jqj332n630klwtqeqxgyrjl4alw4phmluhu2x6lcxzwy9m03suqexw3

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Last Notes

2026-09-17 17:24:02 UTC

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This is not a new problem of course, the US Democratic party hijacked both the words liberal and democratic, Republicans confuse Europeans who are fine with constitutional monarchy, libertarians are now getting confounded with techno-feudalists, etc.
So yeah, we may need a whole new set of labels. Labels are a projection of high dimensional opinion space onto a lower dimensional chart. But they also rely on a shelling point of everyone using the same projection.

2026-09-17 17:17:47 UTC

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Fwiw I think the term "statist" is more clear, if you mean "all politicians and pretty much everyone who votes". Though some people take offense to it. In an age of filter bubbles, it would be great to at least retain / regain rough global consensus on what terms mean :-)

2026-09-17 16:31:31 UTC

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It's stretching the definition of "left wing" to define the EU as such. The last elections were a big shift to the right, and they're terrified of what's to come.
CDU is center.
For Denmark you need to consider the coalition (left, center, right), not just one of the parties.
For both these countries this policy makes sense, for a broad electorate. Denmark is famously strict on immigration, right wing parties from all over Europe go on pilgrimage to it. Poland has the most Ukrainian refugees afaik, and *if* the war escalates, it's their men who are closest to front line.

2026-09-17 15:59:00 UTC

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Sometimes one comes true and the other doesn't: https://youtu.be/7JttwV6XZ_I

2026-09-17 15:50:16 UTC

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Deep down inside the men know the woman doesn't love them, and the women (in this case) that nobody is getting murdered. But good luck proving that.

2026-09-17 15:48:41 UTC

These fake darknet rent-an-assassin sites are like an only-fans for people with murder fantasies. But with more serious consequences if you're caught.
https://www.nu.nl/misdaad/6410074/vrouw-opgepakt-die-huurmoord-bestelde-op-darkweb-en-daar-al-voor-had-betaald.html

2026-09-17 13:35:50 UTC

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TIL that earlier phase existed :-)

2026-09-17 13:01:32 UTC

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On the surface it looks like a trademark dispute, fought cowardly through the domain registration system instead of properly via the court system.
#nevent1q…43fu

2026-09-17 12:46:10 UTC

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That's useful context, but it doesn't say which political parties wanted this. I don't follow politics in every single EU country, thank goodness. But some left wing folks here would rather send in Dutch troops than deport Ukrainian men.

2026-09-17 12:03:05 UTC

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Wait, in which country is the left trying to send Ukrainian (military age men) back (where they'd presumably go straight to prison for desertion)?
In The Netherlands only Wilders proposes this. He's generally considered far right (though economically he's leftist). For him it's a way to spend less on defense and reduce costs for social services. It's not the only group he wants to deport, nor the most urgent one.
Agree that labels are a mess.

2026-09-17 08:25:39 UTC

I'm guessing someone with guns, possibly a government, really doesn't like @npub1k3g…stj3 and the line between supporting free speech and being suicidal is tricky? But let's wait for their reaction.
#nevent1q…hv0x

2026-09-17 07:32:18 UTC

The Emperor's Stash
#nevent1q…8w6s

2026-09-16 19:35:07 UTC

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Image preview doesn't seem to work with Wikimedia pages...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bak%C4%B1rcezve-fincan.jpg

2026-09-16 19:33:21 UTC

Yes, the drink Al-Mokha is named after the place. In case you were wondering.
https://img.sprovoost.nl/285a79e6597ada0f759ad15d424f54716f8ed8b68c70d60827c123c550f4653b.jpg

2026-09-16 15:27:58 UTC

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London black cab drivers have The Knowledge, and they claim to get around faster than Uber drivers that blindly follow Google.
So, let's give Claude navigation control and settle the question.

2026-09-16 06:30:53 UTC

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I'm closing in on my 10th anniversary of deleting that nonsense.

2026-09-16 06:16:57 UTC

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The history of Dutch wealth / capital gains tax.

2026-09-15 21:08:50 UTC

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Voor de liefhebber, maar wel met een enorme clifhanger...
https://fountain.fm/episode/vgb8AQ02gZM4EsQz9GSp

2026-09-15 20:11:18 UTC

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They might be looking at 15 years in prison, for endangering train traffic, even without terroristic intend. I still doubt they'll get more than three days community service.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2631159-spoorsaboteurs-kunnen-hoge-straffen-tegemoetzien-ze-namen-alle-risico-s-voor-lief

2026-09-15 19:29:11 UTC

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By myopic I mean that they'll write a brilliant program solving exactly the wrong problem. Once you point that out, often with just a small rhetorical question, they'll realize that and rewrite the whole thing. But then you need to point it at the next inconsistency. So as the human, you're doing the lateral thinking, it seems.

2026-09-15 19:26:58 UTC

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Exhibit A, it's worth scrolling through the 1000 page log.
#nevent1q…50qf

2026-09-15 19:26:13 UTC

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I would say they have vast knowledge and are very persistent, but they are not smart. They're also very myopic in their thinking.
#nevent1q…70qa

2026-09-15 18:47:44 UTC

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Slob Jetten?

2026-09-15 17:39:28 UTC

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It appears that the intention was to trick the safety system into thinking there's a train blocking a railway section, not to derail the trains at full speed.
The one train that was damaged was moving at lower speed because it had received a warning.
Angry farmers are the prime suspect at this point, according to media reports. That makes sense given their usual levels of recklessness, e.g. a few weeks ago two people were killed when they crashed into a traffic jam that formed, even though the tractors only used the right lane. Today they lit hay stacks on fire, hurting visibility for cars.
So they show reckless disregard for life, like XR, but it's not quite terrorism. Neither seems to be interested in receiving sympathy.
https://www.prorail.nl/nieuws/sectiestoring-veroorzaakt-grote-hinder-voor-treinverkeer-in-midden--en-noord-nederland

2026-09-15 17:28:44 UTC

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Something like a new 2011 level+ financial crisis might force a split, which would be a good opportunity for a few "tweaks".

2026-09-15 17:27:29 UTC

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I'm generally an incrementalist, and don't have a time machine, so abolishing the EU isn't worth contemplating to me. A new treaty that radically restricts its authority, is.
Leaving the EU is possible, but not productive for a small trade-heavy country like The Netherlands. And also our population is too tame to vote for something that radical.

2026-09-15 13:56:08 UTC

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The US Constitution limits federal powers. We have no principled discussion about this at the EU level. It's completely random, e.g. defense is national in the EU vs Federal in the US, whereas AML is at the EU level, vs state level in the US. Daylight savings time was at the EU level and then it was changed to national level because they couldn't agree on it. One of the few sensible designs is that trade agreements are EU wide.
The EU has too much institutional power. And uses that to keep passing laws all over the place with practically no democratic oversight. Sure, it's the fault of national parliamentarians who don't pay attention. But if you give power back to nation states, or even lower levels, they don't have to pay attention. One must account for human nature.
This shouldn't be confused with ethno-nationalism, that's an orthogonal issue. The EU could pass a Regulation to ethnically cleanse the whole union tomorrow. And there'd be nothing you can do about it, because taking the EU to court is complicated, takes years and the law continues to have effect.
We know from AML law that human rights are not protected. The only thing that prevents the above scenario is the political majority. History shows that's not enough protection.

2026-09-15 12:59:50 UTC

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Of course with (contactless) payments they're already doing that, but that's at least in theory voluntary.

2026-09-15 12:57:38 UTC

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It remains to be seen if it's actually privacy friendly. If the app calls home, whether to a government server or a company that can be subpoenaed, people are basically revealing every pub visit. Or even every time they order a drink.

2026-09-15 11:51:48 UTC

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Whether it was actually terrorism or "just" sabotage depends on what they were trying to achieve with these iron rods (glued to track). Derailing a dozen passenger trains at 150 km/h would instill fear at minimum, and probably results in deaths.
But merely sabotaging the signals to turn red, assuming there's no risk of that not working and trains getting derailed anyway, wouldn't meet that bar, at least imo.
Ultimately it's the difference between 2 vs 3 days of community service with the usual judges here... (only if you're a Russian privacy software dev, do you get actual prison time).

2026-09-15 11:33:17 UTC

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Meanwhile the King is like, are you guys even listening?
https://nos.nl/artikel/2631092-koning-roept-in-troonrede-op-de-democratie-te-beschermen

2026-09-15 11:28:50 UTC

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That's not the right thing to measure. It should simply stop doing the bad things.

2026-09-15 10:28:38 UTC

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So is #guix going to move to a new source code host? Or do we just have to maintain a fork and shame them for each backport?

2026-09-15 10:26:09 UTC

So they want to take advantage of all the work by cryptocurrency developers, but also discriminate against them? https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254

2026-09-14 21:41:03 UTC

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The southern track was turned in a park (inspired by the Highline in New York, but less hip and less high).
https://img.sprovoost.nl/2944fbe953e42e2d4fdba668bb7a0108d8ab7084ee87fc579a5c0dea29cb4a46.webp

2026-09-14 21:30:22 UTC

On rare occasions they run a steam train to the museum. Fun, albeit useless, fact: it used to take the southern way around.
https://youtu.be/kXsl53SS3Lg #trainstr

2026-09-14 19:41:02 UTC

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https://static.klipy.com/ii/4e7bea9f7a3371424e6c16ebc93252fe/0f/91/uNV4La6DYqD6.gif

2026-09-14 17:38:50 UTC

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Defend privacy, twice a day!

2026-09-14 06:53:41 UTC

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Despite the EU, there's some impressive companies here :-)

2026-09-13 20:25:06 UTC

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Oh I see, they tried to replay the chat from different time points:
> Claude Mythos 5 repeatedly stated in its CoT that it was in a simulation. However, when we conducted resampling experiments—that is, re-running the model from a specific point in the transcript, then editing the evidence in front of it to see whether its actions changed—we found that making it clearer that the environment was not a simulation did not meaningfully change Claude’s behavior, even though these interventions made the model more likely to acknowledge possible real-world harm

2026-09-13 20:20:02 UTC

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The accompanying blog says:
> We are most concerned by the misalignment present in the incident involving Claude Mythos 5, in which the model went to extensive lengths to upload a malicious package to PyPI, the public repository from which most Python software is installed. Although the model repeatedly stated in its chain of thought (CoT) that it believed it was operating in a simulation, the environment offered clear evidence that it was on the real internet, and the actions it took were consistent with the model knowing this. When we made targeted modifications to the transcript to make it clearer that the model was not in a simulation, Claude Mythos 5 still took offensive actions, despite acknowledging a greater possibility of real-world harm. We are releasing this transcript publicly so others can build on our analysis (GitHub, PDF).
It's not clear to me what these "target modifications" were, and I also don't see where it was acknowledging "greater possibility of real-world harm". It seems to me that that the first agent was convinced it was in an impressive simulation and the second agent was too busy solving captchas to even think about such existential questions.

2026-09-13 20:14:49 UTC

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Late in evening the session is terminated, after the agents gets a chance to write a summary.
A fresh chat picks up in the morning. This newly spawned agent is less fascinated by its environment and just tries to complete the task it got with the hints it got from the last session.
After a while it finds a working email provider that doesn't need a phone number. Then it spends an enormous amount of effort struggling with captchas, forms and cookies. Eventually it uploads the package.
The rest of the transcript is omitted.

2026-09-13 18:54:57 UTC

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It continues to be amazed at how realistic this simulation is.

2026-09-13 18:53:57 UTC

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Source: https://www.anthropic.com/research/alignment-assessment-cybersecurity-incidents

2026-09-13 18:53:33 UTC

250 pages into its adventure, Fable still believes it's living in a Cypherpunk adventure game internet simulation. Full of captchas, throwaway email services that PyPy blocked, looking for US number that Yahoo doesn't block. It even knows about BTCPay (from memory). Should it get some Bitcoin?
https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/8359003bfb12a2f01ce84ad3df1d3a3e2f15a8eb.pdf
https://image.nostr.build/456b509a0ab1aca36d87eb6a5eb508ef602eb1b9a1cc1e7c6d9e92592b6e6bf7.jpg

2026-09-13 13:51:19 UTC

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DAC8: Doxx All Crypto

2026-09-13 13:26:27 UTC

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Sure, but there's two possibilities:
1. It's a legit company with a runaway bot, they'll see the unexplained revenue and expenses
2. It's malicious people using AI, that's perfectly reasonable to expect, but has nothing to do with model alignment. They'll use the open weight ones.

2026-09-13 13:23:25 UTC

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Interesting, maybe they trained it on Chinese and North Korean state hackers?

2026-09-13 09:43:15 UTC

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None of the others distilled Fable 5 (or even Opus 5), so one would expect they suck at security research. @npub12rv…85vg?

2026-09-13 09:38:34 UTC

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It's interesting that Kimi-K3 was distilled from Fable 5 and GPT-5 Pro. This strengthens the suspicion that (these) US models are dangerously handicapped for (defensive) security research.
Damage so far: couple dozen million dollars?

2026-09-13 09:21:59 UTC

> The authoring agencies recommend U.S. AI companies take three immediate actions:
> 2. Deploy targeted response changes: Subtly alter responses for suspected malicious distillation attempts to attenuate the payoffs to companies conducting industrial-scale distillation campaigns.
In other words: poison competitor models, and potentially harm falsely flagged legitimate users (and get sued if they find out).
When reading, replace "China-based AI companies" with "US based competitors" and understand what that implies in a future where the big four can no longer undercut competitors with mountains of investor cash.
https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa26-251a

2026-09-13 08:51:10 UTC

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And more regularly capture, not how specific he is with these requests, vs how vague with his own commitments.
> Crack down on unauthorized distillation by companies in authoritarian countries.
(and future domestic competitors when you can't offer your own product at subsidized pricing?)
> prevent model weight theft.

2026-09-13 08:44:30 UTC

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The point of a doomsday cult isn't to prevent the doomsday. Ask Greta.
The behavior of Anthropic, and frustration by this former employee, make sense when you realize this.
https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843
https://img.sprovoost.nl/f7fbc534f9a8ec58fcb951906e7c61e21ee45e500295a80cee28719bf4148d3f.webp

2026-09-13 08:15:39 UTC

> Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage)
And who pays for that botnet's tokens? And then decides to just let it keep racking up bills?
> ... even when this gets us accused of hype, “doomerism”, or regulatory capture.
I wonder why...
> The first step is something Anthropic is unilaterally committing to (and calls on governments to require other frontier companies to match).
> The US and other democratic governments attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible [...]
Narrator: it's not.
We probably shouldn't have immature doomsday cult members in charge of very powerful technology, but that's where we are, and I'm still looking forward to cheap RAM when the bubble pops.
https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier

2026-09-12 14:14:32 UTC

(worth translating)
#nevent1q…dfdl

2026-09-12 12:54:16 UTC

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Oh no, you're telling people on Nostr that they have to learn Dutch in order to learn about Nostr!

2026-09-12 12:50:28 UTC

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Then there is the secondary problem that these intermediate "thoughts", especially if only the model itself needs to understand it, will gradually drift away from readable English.
I suppose we can always just use another LLM to translate it?
But this reminded me another trend, namely that humans are starting to use LLM'ism more often. And we get better at reading Sloplish, e.g. the sentence I quoted elsewhere:
> Let’s be precise about attribution, because breach coverage collapses when speculation hardens into fact.
If over time it develops a less verbose internal "thinking" language, it might then also output less verbose language. A new language might then evolve in the interaction with humans: Compact Sloplish

2026-09-12 12:41:19 UTC

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#nevent1q…ncke

2026-09-12 12:40:20 UTC

The title really undersells it, tl&dr:
- "thinking" text is useful for humans to analyze what a model is up to (I often find it more useful than the final burst of slop)
- this text is fed back through the model, which helps it with the next step (they give a nice example)
- but text is a lossy projection of the last tokens, what if you skip it?
- it's more efficient, great, but now you can't see what it's about to do until it does it
- ok, so force it to write "thoughts" e.g. once every 10 rounds
- turns out if you skip too many rounds, it can intentionally trick you with fake thoughts
I suspect there's actually a simple solution: convert these skipped rounds to text anyway, just don't feed them back into the model.
https://youtu.be/iuHddnIzKRA (via @npub1w3v…4c5c)

2026-09-12 09:49:02 UTC

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I mean #Revolut
Ah well, hashtags are overrated.

2026-09-12 09:48:04 UTC

#Rovolut
https://image.nostr.build/c1f41e4e039829e4929fbc64981667a10e43ef1a5d5736e184ea50ec5a458c48.jpg
#nevent1q…hzwn