Open in app

Sign In

Write

Sign In

Jeffrey Ladish
Jeffrey Ladish

159 Followers

Home

About

Feb 3, 2020

Absent coordination, future technology will cause human extinction

Nick Bostrom, of the Future of Humanity Institute, uses an evocative metaphor to describe the future of humanity’s technological development: One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent possible ideas, discoveries, technological inventions. …

Existential Risk

7 min read

Absent coordination, future technology will cause human extinction
Absent coordination, future technology will cause human extinction
Existential Risk

7 min read


Dec 12, 2019

The Problem with San Francisco

Smoke chokes the city, the nearby forests are on fire, and towns are burning down as I sit here writing this. It is the fall of 2019 in San Francisco and something is clearly broken. …

San Francisco

6 min read

The Problem with San Francisco
The Problem with San Francisco
San Francisco

6 min read


Dec 14, 2018

Letting Go Without Giving Up

I wrote this for the 2018 bay area solstice celebration. A recording is available here. When I was growing up, I used to watch this documentary about Mount Saint Helens. It started the summer of 1980; for the first time in a hundred years, the mountain was waking up. Starting…

Nuclear Weapons

6 min read

Letting Go Without Giving Up
Letting Go Without Giving Up
Nuclear Weapons

6 min read


Published in Reserve

·Oct 26, 2018

Schelling Network Oracles are Vulnerable to Manipulation

Until cryptocurrency has gained significant traction, prices will be volatile and unpredictable. This hurts the ability for normal consumers to use crypto-assets as actual currencies. Plenty of speculators hold Bitcoin and Ether; very few use them to buy anything. A handful of projects aim to solve this problem by using…

Blockchain

6 min read

Schelling Network Oracles are Vulnerable to Manipulation
Schelling Network Oracles are Vulnerable to Manipulation
Blockchain

6 min read


Published in Reserve

·Jun 8, 2018

Smart contracts will make ransomware more profitable, part 2

Criminal smart contract construction and defense In the previous post I explained how smart contracts could make ransomware a lot more profitable and therefore a lot worse. However, the trustless key exchange model was oversimplified and has a fatal flaw. …

Blockchain

8 min read

Smart contracts will make ransomware more profitable, part 2
Smart contracts will make ransomware more profitable, part 2
Blockchain

8 min read


Published in Reserve

·Jun 4, 2018

Smart contracts will make ransomware more profitable, part 1

Blockchains are not a good fit for many problems, but they are great for solving problems of trust. In the real world, if you make a contract with someone and they break it, your only recourse is a lengthy and expensive time in court. With a smart contract, both parties…

Blockchain

8 min read

Smart contracts will make ransomware more profitable, part 1
Smart contracts will make ransomware more profitable, part 1
Blockchain

8 min read


Sep 30, 2016

Be like Stanislav Petrov

Stanislav Petrov may have saved the world when he refused to tell his superiors that five Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles were incoming from the United States. On 26 September 1983, thirty-three years and three days ago, Stanislav broke protocol and reported the detection as a false alarm, though he had no…

Nuclear

8 min read

Be like Stanislav Petrov
Be like Stanislav Petrov
Nuclear

8 min read


Sep 11, 2016

The world is better and worse than you think

If you read the news, then you are confronted with daily updates on wars, diseases, and celebrity gossip. It’s hard to get a sense of how humans on this planet are actually doing. Are things getting better for the average person? Are they getting worse? You may have encountered articles…

Nuclear Weapons

8 min read

The world is better and worse than you think
The world is better and worse than you think
Nuclear Weapons

8 min read


Jan 7, 2016

The Notable Lack of Disturbance in The Force Awakens

This post contains spoilers for the The Force Awakens, and possibly the future of humanity Take a moment to remember the saddest scene in The Force Awakens. Was it Kylo Ren kills Han Solo? When R2D2 wouldn’t wake up, a loyal droid grieving for its missing master? How about the…

Star Wars

4 min read

The Notable Lack of Disturbance in The Force Awakens
The Notable Lack of Disturbance in The Force Awakens
Star Wars

4 min read

Jeffrey Ladish

Jeffrey Ladish

159 Followers

Applying the security mindset to everything

Following
  • Rob Reid

    Rob Reid

  • Kendall McGinnis Avery

    Kendall McGinnis Avery

  • Paul Christiano

    Paul Christiano

  • Samo Burja

    Samo Burja

  • Yuri Deigin

    Yuri Deigin

Help

Status

Writers

Blog

Careers

Privacy

Terms

About

Text to speech