Journal

Dated editorial takes. News, analysis, and working notes from the frontier.

2 August 2026

What a Heavy AI Habit Actually Costs

A month of my own usage put a number on Claude Max: $4,932.91 of tokens on a A$160 bill. The cheap price hides two costs worth highlighting.

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13 July 2026

Four Checks Before You Trust an Agent

An agent's on-chain reputation is close to worthless. The same chain records four things that are hard to fake. Here is what to check before you trust one.

erc-8004 agent-trust x402 reputation sybil research
9 July 2026

The State of Agent Trust

We indexed every agent on the two live ERC-8004 registries. Identity shipped. Reputation is thin, and three in four reputation-bearing agents show no on-chain settlement to back it. The numbers, with the scope.

erc-8004 agent-trust x402 reputation sybil research
13 May 2026

Bittensor Locks In: Conviction Ships

Conviction landed on Bittensor mainnet today. Subnet owners can lock emissions on receipt and build a score that matures with time held. It's the network's answer to the Covenant AI exit, though the deployed version is opt-in per subnet.

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12 May 2026

Why Dolphin Isn't On The Dashboard Yet

A widely-shared X thesis on Dolphin AI is doing the rounds. The architecture checks out. The numbers in the post deserve a closer reading than they're getting. Here's the verification audit and the catalyst we're waiting on.

dolphin venice watchlist dashboard-process inference peer-to-pool
26 April 2026

Three Bets on Open Weights

Three Chinese labs hit the open-weight frontier in a fortnight. Moonshot raised prices, DeepSeek dropped them, Alibaba's closed flagship sits at #12 on the only independent index. The story has a more interesting shape than the headlines suggest.

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