12 entries tagged notes. All writing.
SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 Six Dollars a Net, Forever, Versus One Fixed Bet A bed net costs about $6 and lasts three years, which makes malaria prevention a subscription with 600 million subscribers and no end date. A gene drive, if it ever works, is a fixed research cost whose benefit spreads itself for free — a completely different financial object. Global malaria funding in 2024 was $3.9 billion against a $9.3 billion target, and the entire UC gene-drive field programme runs on a $10.2 million grant. Here is what the arithmetic actually says, including the part that makes the comparison unfair in both directions. SEPTEMBER 11, 2026 We Killed Twenty-Five Trading Strategies to Keep Three Since June I have been building automated trading strategies with an AI coding assistant — about forty of them, on one small brokerage account. Twenty-five are switched off, a dozen are still simulating, and three trade real money. Every trading blog publishes its winners; here is the graveyard, with the cause of death written on each stone, because the reasons turned out to be the interesting part — and because the three survivors are only worth believing if you have seen what it took to get down to three. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 He Drew It at 120 Degrees. They Built It at 90. Robert Propst designed the cubicle to give office workers a screen they controlled. He lived to watch companies turn it into a box, and called the result "monolithic insanity." The strange part is that nothing was added to his design to ruin it — the panels were only turned, from an open 120-degree screen into a closed 90-degree cell. Six decades later the walls are gone again, the desk is unassigned, and attendance is mandatory. The thing being spent has been the same the whole time. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 A Jar Is Not a Vault: Reading My Friend's Lightning Wallet Before I Recommend It A friend of mine spent six months building a self-custodial Lightning wallet that runs in a browser, and he'd be the first to tell you it has no audit. I trust him — which is exactly why I shouldn't ask you to trust it on my say-so. So I read the code, checked the served binary against the published hashes, and worked out what the trust model really is. Along the way, the thing every Lightning wallet review should say and mostly doesn't: what a Lightning wallet is for, and what it is not. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 Six Million Tokens in Eleven Minutes Some friends and I have been arguing about whether it will ever seem normal to spend six million tokens in eleven minutes to make a blog post — and whether a world where the well-off can run AI flat out leaves everyone else with the crumbs. So I priced the tokens, traced where the price is going, and went back to the last time a machine cost more than a house. The number that matters isn't the token count. It's which of two prices you're paying, and who is paying for the free one. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 Six Billion Dollars Against Seventy-Four, and Yields Went Up Anyway The Treasury tripled its next bond buyback to $6 billion, and long-term interest rates rose on the news instead of falling. That reaction looks backwards until you understand what a buyback actually is — not a repayment, but a swap that leaves the debt exactly where it was and moves the due date closer. Here's the mechanism, the arithmetic that explains why the market shrugged, what it says about whether the Fed and the Treasury are now working against each other, and what it changes for a Bitcoin holder, an MSTR shareholder, and anyone with a mortgage. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 The Phishing Email Really Was From Trezor On September 9th roughly 347,000 people got an email from help@trezor.io warning them about a chip flaw in their wallet and pointing them somewhere to check it. It was a phishing attack — and it came from Trezor's real domain, passed every authentication check a mail server performs, and borrowed its cover story from two vulnerabilities that are genuinely real. This is Trezor's second breach in a month and its third this year, and not one of them touched the device. SEPTEMBER 9, 2026 "Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins" Just Grew a Second Half Alby disclosed a critical flaw in Alby Hub, its self-hosted Lightning node software, that could let an attacker who reaches an exposed control panel send your bitcoin out from under you. The twist worth sitting with is the timeline — the fix shipped over a year before the warning did — and what that gap actually tells self-custody Bitcoiners about the setting they should have checked already. SEPTEMBER 9, 2026 "Coded and Audited by AI," and the Longer Story Underneath That Sentence A beta Bitcoin wallet's own README says, in one sentence, that it was coded and audited by frontier AI models. Taken alone that sentence would worry me. Taken alongside the actual security document and the actual changelog, it turns out to be shorthand for something more specific, more human, and more interesting than the sentence lets on. SEPTEMBER 8, 2026 Older Than the United Nations, and Never Asked to Join Three institutions get lumped together in casual conversation, and they have three genuinely different jobs, three different owners, and three different relationships to the United Nations — one of them predates the UN entirely and was never made to join it. Here's what the BIS actually regulates, what the IMF actually lends and prices, and where a Special Drawing Right actually comes from. SEPTEMBER 6, 2026 Nearly Four Thousand Bitcoin, and Why I Uninstalled Aqua A federation that was supposed to hold every L-BTC one-to-one in real bitcoin just watched roughly four thousand bitcoin walk out the door in a single afternoon. The working theory is an inflation bug in Liquid's confidential transactions, and the functionaries signed the withdrawal anyway — because from where they sat, it looked completely normal. AUGUST 4, 2026 A Twenty-Five-Minute Window, and Why I Split the Key A firmware bug sat undetected for five years, then drained over a hundred million dollars from Coldcard wallets in one week. Why I have never trusted a single device with all of mine, and what my Bitkey actually does.