Surprise AMA 04/02/2023

Opens April 2nd 2023 with Tamara Hassan, President of IO, noting CIP 1694 is shaping up with community workshops and a finalizing July workshop in Edinburgh.

Node version A is under construction with an eight-month backlog worked through by Sergey and Vitali, heading to pre-prod as the foundation for testing 1694 as a DRep.

Announces tiger teams led by new VP of Delivery Billy Ballet triaging long-standing complaints like DB Sync, the node-to-node interface, and accelerating tiered pricing.

Hydra reached mainnet and the first thing people drew with it was a penis, every pixel a transaction.

Shows the Roxiva, a 5,000-dollar medical audio-visual entrainment device that simulates DMT and LSD-like states through flashing light, which he and Tamara tested for anxiety.

Audio-visual entrainment has long been studied in cognitive neuroscience, with two modes for anti-anxiety performance and for therapy, and an on-off switch unlike chemicals.

He sent the Roxiva research to his Wyoming clinic to study EEG and cognitive scoring before, during, and after, but does not recommend using it yet without understanding its safety.

Compares it to FDA-approved transcranial magnetic stimulation with a one-third curative rate and the MDMA and psilocybin trials under Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, and says he will attend the MAPS conference in Denver where Roxiva has a booth.

On the Lex Fridman interviews with Sam Altman and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who refused to steelman, says Altman means well now but OpenAI is transitioning to something more dangerous and no longer open.

Supports the CEO letter to pause AI, preferring Emad Mostaque of Stability AI's slow, deliberate, country-level-dataset approach over Altman's.

He has advocated slowing down to speed up, that OpenAI should open-source in degrees, and that it is dishonest for a not-for-profit funded by Elon to become a commercial entity that is not open.

Recalls Eric Schmidt at the Milken Institute saying large language models will define the decade, and cites a paper showing GPT can train GPT with no new model, enabling recursive exponential improvement.

GPT-4 is a good junior programmer, GPT-5 an exceptional entry-level one, and GPT-6 superhuman across every language, creating a Centaur effect that boosts human productivity exponentially.

His construction company explores sustainable materials, replacing Portland cement with geopolymers discovered by someone studying how the pyramids poured their blocks.

Using GPT-4 with his EA to build a 26-item table of environmentally friendly building materials like magnesium oxide drywall and AirCrete in 20 minutes, then Ask Wonder for deeper reports, doing Gartner-level research in a week.

In medicine he wants to anonymize and monetize EHR data, including genomic and chronic-care data, using Midnight technology with a BAT-style query model.

His bioluminescent-plant venture explores engineering deep fibrous root systems that absorb carbon like bamboo, generating carbon credits worth tracking on-chain.

A robust supply-chain system is needed to know where every genetically modified plant is and whether it is alive, fraud-free and auditable for both supply chain and carbon credits, an endeavor for 2025 to 2027.

IoT nano-sensors the size of a grain of rice could make plants NFC-enabled for drone auditing, and that Cardano is not ready for IoT but will explore it by decade's end.

The sensible blockchain component comes down to transparency, trust brokering, auditability, and timestamping, and that he wants triple-entry accounting with real-time auditing for his roughly 14 sets of books like Samsung.

Compares medical data to banking opening up via open banking, asks who to approach first given HIPAA, and argues data has economic agency and should not be given away for free.

Medical data aggregates among EHR monopolies like Athena, Epic, and open Vista plus a long tail, and that once integrated liberating it is a checkbox, but coding and migration remain hard.

EHRs make migration hard on purpose, taking months to move thousands of patients, obstructing the data mining needed for public-health policy questions.

Datasets are not interoperable between companies, and like ISO financial standards for open banking it takes 10 to 20 years, recommending Nebula as a private DNA service.

Cardano is inspired by VeChain, a supply-chain cryptocurrency with an active community, not copying it.

Has Tamara tell her background: a political scientist who worked in government one day before being told she worked too hard, then acting in films like Boyhood and Tree of Life, then audio engineering.

Continues that Tamara helped build an architecture firm in Qatar, went to law school, got into crypto early buying her first Bitcoin at an ATM, and met Charles in Toronto before Ethereum launched.

Tamara is President of IO, having started as culture officer then HR director then chief of staff, with all executives reporting to her and her reporting to Charles, freeing him for six companies.

IO's hub-and-spoke Orbit model of spinning out subsidiaries that inherit parent DNA, some wholly owned, some joint ventures like the bioluminescent-plant venture with Colossal.

Corporate governance requires incentivizing companies to work together rather than imposing, and that Tamara loves building companies more than being a lawyer.

Stephen Wolfram emailed about ChatGPT and his 112-page booklet, and that IO is exploring ChatGPT plus Marlowe as a skunkworks by Omer, its first professional GPT foray.

Views Wolfram as a much better Chainlink, the granddaddy of oracles with computable information, so combined with ChatGPT's interpretation layer and decentralized access it becomes the oracle layer for the multi-chain.

A great Wolfram blockchain group they have done an NFT drop with, calling it the right intersection point for an oracle pending timing.

Dismisses a Craig Wright feud as manufactured crypto-media drama, since Wright calls everyone a scammer and sues everyone, so there is no productive engagement.

Lists what they built, including Marlowe, Ouroboros, NIPoPoWs, Mithril, useful proof of work, 170-plus papers, formal methods, and a custom network stack unaffected by a recent peer-to-peer hack, so you can dislike the tokenomics but not deny the science.

The Edinburgh Decentralization Index lab is fully independent of IO with its own leadership and works on academic cycles, expecting the first measurement of Bitcoin out by summer.

Wants a standards body like ANSI, ISO, or NIST to adopt the EDI, which they discussed with NIST in 2022, since measuring decentralization matters for the security-versus-commodity debate.

The EDI likely uses Aggelos's eight indices for good decentralized governance to measure a blockchain's decentralization in real time, and that it is a non-directed grant so IO cannot influence it.

IO is hiring community managers and especially a senior Dev Relations lead, and that the MBO and Cardano Foundation also have community roles.

Teases next-level secret products and says he would love to launch an IOG ambassadors program in the future.

Liked the Citigroup report projecting a multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem by 2030, good on blockchain and CBDCs but weak on crypto, which is what you say in those circles.

It would be the greatest honor to go on the Ron Paul Report, and Tamara adds she worked for Ron Paul, calling him the best boss and the anti-politician.

The Midnight team is arriving for a workshop, including CEO Eran, the head of cryptography, and CTO Alberto, and that Midnight has identity, regulated, and blockchain ecosystems.

Tamara teaches audio engineering and moved back to London Ontario, recommending Fanshawe College.

There may be case support for Plutus since the semantics were written in K, that Plutus V2 could have K semantics via Grigore, but that it will likely be a dependently typed language.

Defends the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics against a troll, noting Carnegie Mellon, director Jeremy Avigad, and multiple formal-math PhDs are qualified across philosophy, computer science, and math.

In car banter says his family only owns GMCs by his father's rule, likes Lexus, and notes Toyota optimized the assembly line via the kanban Toyota Production System.

Extended UTXO beats the accounts model on parallelism, concurrency, and off-chain processing, since accounts is a global variable while UTXO lets you track only your shard, making on-chain and off-chain isomorphic.

Extended UTXO was designed to shard and go parallel, that emulating accounts naively caused the one-transaction-per-block Alonzo problem since resolved, and that you think in transactions-per-transaction not TPS.

Demos extendedutxo.org showing live Cardano blocks where one transaction contains scripts, NFTs, and ADA movements, impossible in the accounts model, and notes Ergo experimented with 5,000 outputs.

Roll-ups bundle those outputs into a single script for enormous scale, and that accounts are simpler to develop but UTXO is functional programming, hand-in-glove for Hydra and side chains.

Describes three scaling directions, horizontal via input endorsers, vertical via efficiency, and off-chain via side chains, and notes Cardano reached a functional model in half Ethereum's time.

The right Hydra question is not TPS but how to use it as middleware to do expensive work off-chain and batch it back with fewer on-chain resources, describing Hydra as a state channel and a dapp.

The Understanding Cardano book will get better every year as the ecosystem's bible.

He would go on the Lex Fridman podcast again, recalling the last five-hour session with no bathroom break, and praising Lex's emotional intelligence and both-sides presentation.

Argues there is no energy crisis since coal reserves hold over a thousand years, and modern coal with fly-ash sequestration into geopolymer concrete cuts concrete carbon 90 percent by replacing Portland cement.

Geothermal and hydro abundance enables carbon air capture to offset coal, and that next-gen EGS geothermal, natural gas, desert solar, tidal, and biofuel all produce huge energy, making it a policy problem not an energy problem.

Cites real fusion progress with laser fusion at the National Ignition Facility reaching ignition, plus ITER in France and German accelerators, forecasting a 2030s-to-2050s energy revolution alongside meltdown-proof fourth-gen nuclear.

Excess energy does not transform what it means to be human, unlike the four horsemen of nanotech, synthetic biology, quantum computing, and AI which fundamentally change humanity's environment and species.

Describes a-tune, a communication technique for empathy and understanding to reduce workplace toxicity, but says a nanotech empathy implant would surpass any technique or a lifetime studying John Gottman.

Synthetic biology, nanotech, and AI give new senses and higher-order thinking, imagining living a full lifetime in 23 minutes like Captain Picard in The Inner Light or experiencing another person's life to build empathy.

References Elon Musk on the meaning of life and 42 from Hitchhiker's Guide, saying these technologies will expand the questions humans even know to ask, which is why they are so life-changing.

People feel existential crises now that AI has changed the game, with Lex interviewing one AI figure after another, and that Daniel Schmachtenberger has an interesting perspective.

People are scared and may not want children, that social media already changed how people think, and that these technologies could build a Dyson Sphere and transform what it means to be human.

Cites a paper hybridizing human skin cells with octopus camouflage cells to change color like an LCD, saying people will do this and it will make race meaningless.

A-tune concepts of awareness, turning toward bids, and empathy are early-21st-century thinking, but most people still run 19th or 20th-century software, causing toxic relationships.

The wisdom gap broadens as technology grows exponentially, referencing the book Life 3.0 on that gap, and dismisses over-unity free-energy devices as conspiracy since every one hides a battery and none will submit to an independent lab.

Confirms hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake from the Minotaur paper is actively developed and will be implemented maybe in 2024.

In banter says he likes light cigars like Romeo y Julieta and the Hemingway line, and Hibiki and Harmony Japanese whiskey.

Off-chain is secured by cryptography and signatures done off-chain then submitted, and that pasta curves are cool.

The New Balance partnership concluded, a pilot shipping the Tangem card in a Conway Leonard shoe with an analytics framework, which he wanted to expand but crypto fell apart.

The Trump indictment came from a NYC prosecutor taking a case the FEC and federal government passed on, upgrading a misdemeanor to a felony past the statute of limitations before a heavily Democratic grand jury.

Argues the weak 34-count case makes Trump look politically persecuted, making him more likely to win the nomination and presidency, so it is counterproductive, and that the prosecutor does it to bolster a political career.

Arresting a former president running for re-election under the opposition party is a banana-republic move, and that there has never been equal justice, citing Obama's drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki with no court.

Warns every future president will now be indicted when the opposition holds power, and notes the same construction was tried against John Edwards by the same prosecutor Jack Smith, who failed.

You can dislike Trump and still oppose using the judicial branch to persecute him and legitimize his conspiracies, comparing him to the Simpsons just-don't-look billboard powered by attention.

Highlights prosecutorial misconduct where 54 percent of NYC felonies are downgraded to misdemeanors in catch-and-release while resurrecting a 2016 case, a huge waste of resources.

The worst fate for a narcissist like Trump is irrelevance, so stop paying attention, and asks whether Bush was tried for Iraq, Biden for the Afghanistan drone strike, or the US for the Nord Stream pipeline.

Warns that if Trump regains power there will be an unprecedented purge weaponizing the FBI and DOJ against the left, that setting this precedent risks a civil war, and that FTX donations and BLM riots are stones better left unturned.

Predicts Trump will be acquitted since the case is weak, which is why war-crimes prosecutor Jack Smith was assigned to make the federal case rock-solid, while Tamara clarifies he is not a Trump supporter but arguing process consistency.

Has Tamara close that Cardano stands for integrity, consistency, respect, and open debate, and that Charles's views are not everyone's in the company.

Introduces Dream Lodge, a mugwort blend said to give vivid dreams, bookending the AMA which opened with the Roxiva.

The world is a magical place and the bigger evil is that the way things operate blinds you to that magic, which kids see with fresh eyes through the default mode network.

Closes that IOG's core mission, as Cardano becomes one branch, is to unlock the magic of the world, thanking the community for teaching him so much and advising not to sweat the small stuff.