A blockchain that uses neither hashing nor stake for security. (And not authority.) I will post here when done. Although, I will do so with some trepidation, because I know how much antipathy there is here for blockchains.

I wrote a short story based on a similar scenario. (Caveat, I did it with AI help, but my ideas and many iterations and me doing final editing to get it the way I want).

https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...

Without wishing to be unkind, this reads a lot more as 'one-shot with AI' than 'many iterations'; if you truly did that much editing, you didn't put it where it showed.

You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.

Yeah, I think the AI probably shows. But in fact it is the result of many iterations.

But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.

But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.

Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.

The reason I did it the way I did is that I believe that Fable writes better prose than I do. I could write it so that people would be less likely to think it's written by AI, but I wouldn't think it's as good.

So, I'm happy with it as-is; I think the ideas are good and deserve to be out there. I think it just needs a context where people will be more forgiving about AI prose because they are interested enough in the ideas that are conveyed.

But of course, the challenge with creating such a context is that one person with an AI could spew out 1,000 crap stories a day and submit them all...

What does the short story have to do with the scenario exactly? Seems completely unrelated.

And OMG, you need to edit the AI slop way way more. This is unreadable.

It involves one life, drawn at random, from human history. I can't imagine how you could miss that if you read it.

But I am realizing that AI writing is so offensive to many people that if they get that vibe, they just won't read it, and therefore won't have any idea what is being attempted. Maybe there could be a context where that wouldn't be the case, but HN is probably not it.

I read it all, and the central theme seemed to be more about collecting random thoughts/memories rather than "lives", with a final twist about the apocalypse or something like that.

You really need to stretch quite a bit to find similarities between this post and this short story.

And since you incorrectly assumed that I didn't read it, I'll give you more unsolicited feedback. Yes the writing is horrendous, but the idea itself is not novel or thought provoking. The general idea has been done many times in the classics like Dick, Asimov, Chiang and others. And the twist at the end ("Oh my god! They couldn't see things in the future because there is no future!!!!!") is immediately predictable when they can't get samples in the future.

That being said, keep writing and enjoying yourself but 1) try to dial down on the AI assist, it really makes for a poor experience for the reader, 2) don't get on your high horse when someone points it out.

Not bad! Did you ever read Stephen King’s short autobiographical story on how he sold his first few stories? He had to be persistent as could be, just years of writing and submitting to publishers and getting rejected. It is a good read.

I must admit that with both ChatGPT and Claude experiencing issues, I wonder if we're under attack from China. Doesn't seem likely, but...

Deeply unsatifying, and 100% true at the same time.

I had cancer, it came back twice in 5 years, but now I'm 10 years out from the last time and my odds are good. Just mentioning it, in case it's helpful to hear a positive anecdote.

Sending my hopes for your recovery. You're right that new research is yielding fruit, but I don't have to tell you that.

I'm doing work with fairly complicated cryptographic algorithms and math. I'm finding Fable 5 to be a significant stop better than Opus 4.8, but that Opus occasionally comes up with something small but nontrivial that Fable missed. (The reverse is true much more often.)

That's the delta in our use cases then, I suppose. I'm not doing anything super novel. DevOps work, web application development — things that typically do not stump the agent(s) when given time to iterate.

Yeah, I've learned that it's only worth deploying Fable for the most challenging problems. For a while, my Fable workflow was looking like ths:

Me: Hey Fable, I've got this massive, theoretically challenging, totally novel, ill-defined cutting-edge problem that I'd like you to solve.

Fable: < Doesn't merely solve the problem -- utterly obliterates it. Nukes it from orbit. Does a robust one-shot that takes several hours to complete. >

Me: Holy smokes, that was amazing!!!! But the formatting could use some simple refinements. Could you change the margins and maybe add a drop-cap at the start of each section in the user docs?

Fable: < Commences another multi-hour nuclear exchange with the code >

Me: WT?!?!

(The moral of this story is that bringing a nuke to a knife-fight is only occasionally the best strategy. And in more practical terms: Fable is amazing -- but only for certain classes of problems, and even if it were free there's a lot I probably wouldn't use it for.

"The final major downside is having to switch apps out of navigation to control music then switch back". That's no longer true for CarPlay. It now has a mode where you see Maps and Music at the same time.

The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released.

I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."

Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.

I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.

The butterfly keys were around five years before they changed them. Which may have been related to the lawsuit about them?

I also vaguely recall issues with their magsafe connectors and lawyers.

Hardware timelines are long. I doubt they could have switched in less than three years regardless.

People tend to ascribe to Apple only the Jobs years. That Apple might have reset after he came back. The truth is far from that. The people in the company were great, they just needed a massive amount of refocus. Apple has people who have been there decades and have had to reverse incredibly stupid decisions.

For what it's worth:

I had an idea for a special reminder app I wanted for myself. It's complicated enough that it comes to 9,000+ lines of code. I wanted to write it using the C++ UI library wxWidgets, because I like that wxWidgets uses native widgets, and is cross-platform, and that it's easy to make an app look nice. And that it doesn't use tons of memory.

There's a wxPython library, but I didn't want my UI to be limited due to whatever gaps may exist in that wrapper.

So I had AI write it in C++. Took about a day for me to get it done. It's perfectly solid. It did hit a couple of memory errors when I first used it, but I could give the AI MacOS crash report and the AI fixed the bugs easily, with no other involvement from me. (I compiled in a debug-friendly mode; no downside to that because it was just for me and was plenty fast enough.)

25 years or so ago, I was a fairly good C++ programmer. Haven't touched it since. And that includes this application, which was completely AI-written.

Do we really have to shoehorn AI into every single thread? It's really getting tiring.

I get that effect while walking, but also from multi-hour highway (not local) driving when the road isn't crowded. Somehow, having my body do something that takes only a slight amount of continuous awareness, but not zero, seems to enable me to escape mental ruts more easily. For me, it allows for deeper concentration in the creative realm than I can have while sitting.

Friedrich Nietzsche: "Only thoughts reached by walking have value."

David Gelernter describes a theory of consciousness and creativity that explains why this works in his book “The Muse in the Machine”. I recommend it to everyone.