Disnocen

Cryptographer Engineer at Blockstream

Intro

This is my website. It is simply updated through a google docs file!

I also have a previous, sparingly used blog here, but I may not really believe everything I say there. Consider this website the most updated one.

My X account: sparingly used, maybe I should tweet more. You can write me on telegram to start a convo

Through Ctrl +f you get the full experience of searching a website!

2026-08-07

 the better the tool at your disposal, the more important it is that you are comfortable with them. There are no better tools. There are the tools that are good for you, and despite whatever everybody is saying on X or Reddit or whatever forum you go to, the best tools are the tools that make you faster, more effective, and respect you (whatever your definition of respect is, which is different). Free software maxis think respect means you can investigate the code, while other people may say that respect is something that actually works.

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Even if you can do everything you want, that doesn't mean that everything has the same priority. You can fix your smart vacuum cleaner so it doesn't phone home anymore. You can fix your old devices so they come back to life, and then you don't know what to do with them. You can create a new Bitcoin node from an old Samsung that you had, and you do your own job at the same time, but that doesn't mean this is actually smart. You have to have your own priorities.

The higher the possibility, the higher the opportunity cost of working from the frame buffer and having all applications be able to work without Wayland or the X server. That does not have the same potential as actually fixing the bridge between Liquid and Bitcoin or fixing consensus between drones for another fan system. The fact that you have Deepseek 0731, which is literally free on the opeccode, doesn't mean that you have to test all your ideas at once because you are the bottleneck.

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Too much scrolling and to few writing mwill make Jake a dull boy. That's for sure

Man there are a lot of things changing. Like the way we do research and coding. And that is obvious but still hard to always rem error that there is no value in creating the firstdraft anymore. You CONSTRAIN THE SEARCH SPACE and prompt the LLM to do that.

Constrain the search space

Constrain the search space

Its not simply prompting that vibe coding

It's a shift in perspective. Write like you are constraining the search space. This is why you want to tybe harness to do what YOU want. So your solution is better. Mediocre people want the LLM to make decisions. I don't. It must do what I want. The more planning the better for both of us. Need to contrain more

Its the new study method. You constrain and you see if you know your topic. Sometimes you have gaps. Lenght of the prompt is a good proxy

2026-08-06

If AI becomes too cheap to meter, our homes will be the biggest target of attacks. Remote attacks I mean. There is no reason to have any IoT device, you “smart” vacuum cleaner included. They don’t work well, and now they are a big target.

https://x.com/tszzl/status/2085193063157383558 (interestingly enough he’s mentioning eth keys, not btc keys?)

Imagine a computer, leveragin the cleaner, and planting something in you home pc. 1year pass, you attache your hardware wallet, unlock it and PUFF your funds are gone: there was a daemon you did not know about

OOPS

It is like that, protect your computers at all costs. Let’s just consider everything on the internet as compromised already. And those things attaching to the internet are compromised as well. How would you protect your keys?

The best hardware wallet is a pc with no wifi and bitcoin core for real:

2026-08-05

I have  slow computer an i need a faster one

Deepseek 0731 is making my old devices new again, making things I neve had the time to do. My old samsung phone is now an electrum node. A bad tablet is now…

I like this ability. I like those device as they are “hackable”. Couldn’t do this with my iphone i guess. No abd or similar, and you can’t make apps for that.

Yet deepseek is not letting me break my jade. It refuses to do that. Heh

2026-08-04

Opencode is awesome

Is codex good or is the model?

We need harness benchmarks

Nvim is fantastic too

Like the real IDE. With LazyVim it just works. Sure it's bloated or whatever the cool kids say nowadays. Then they use VScode. Still it works, it's fast and has everything

Even rust language server works awesomely, better than VScode from a keyword and UX stand point

Constraining the search space and choose tradeoffs

I love programming and creating sketches. I love to see things happening. LLMs are awesome for it. Just never let them create something human-readable. That is so wrong it will make you lose faith in the whole AI thing

LLMs are for coding, and basic search engines. Some kind of knowledge tourism, that’s it. You can not use them to make decisions, real brainstorming etc. you either know what you talk about, or you’ll get confused. Google Docs, pieces of paper or some kind of e-ink tablet to write are the tools for thinking. You need to know your tradeoffs (kyt). You explore the new field, can’t ask LLMs for “summaries”

Did you really read what an LLM produces in plain english? Have you tried to read something well written like The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon? I am not an expert, but the latter seems to me real writing.

2026-08-03v2

Gpt 5.6. Sol works very well I must say. Working on consensus right now, simulating basic BFT in case of network problems + byzantine behaviour. Fun weekend project I must say.

Just never let the LLM plan, really. It’s not good. Too much details and too little thinking/overview and understanding of consequences at the same time.

I wonder now if my job is just being a good planner. Writing code is obsolete. Fortunately I am a researcher by training, but can I be an expert in all parts of a project?

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Codex is my sysadmin now. Moved me from dwm to hyprland in minutes, and everything works. Created a repo for my dotfiles and it works there too. All that while working. A couple of tmux sessions had everything done for me. Controlled from the phone, of course.

image of bad posture

It helps on a lot of things, and I use it at like 10% of their potential. It feels like re-learning how to use my Linux PC from scratch.

I have been very bearish on LLM last months, mostly for a combination of bad models, bad use on my part and the fact that LLMs simply can not write. I fell for the “knowledge base” thing and produced documents writing meaning less things. Man, you have to really guard that llm, you know? You leave it alone writing a 10 pages “research paper” and you find it sprouting “scaffolding” and “security boundary”  and |invariant” all over the place.

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Today another AI-based problem with a piece of Bitcoin infrastructure, after the ColdCard debacle

2026-08-03

First entry

Wow! Unexpectedly the thing is working! What a wonderful thing!

It also has autoupdate. I can not believe how easy it was

So easy to update. Never thought about that easiness

The difficulty is in having a VPS now it seems