dogman144 (u/dogman144)

dogman144 commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

In recent months I changed views and shifted from the desilluioned "this is a casino" mindset that is described in this article to a "we need this now" one. An example in this article [1], the US can now unilateraly decide to prevent an individual anywhere in the world from having a functioning financial life and this because of the quasi (western) duopoly that is Visa and Mastercard. Nothing against the US in general, this is simply too much power to put in a single decisional entity, whatever/wherever it is. The "crypto" related systems now seem like a needed extra option to the current payment system (the same way cash is almost always an alternative to credit/debit card payment and vice versa)

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...

dogman144 · 9 days ago

Understanding crypto from this type of international context focused on these sorts of issues is where it indisputably makes much sense and is seeing indisputable adoption. Low and slow but end of the day to a very large and growing problem, bitcoin+ adoption or a mass civics readjustment in the US are the solutions. Which is more likely?

So it’s an inefficient tech with a mess of problems and uneven adoption but if you want to send $1-$1mm anywhere in the globe you can. That’s very powerful tech and the implications are about as important as anything else from cryptography hitting public adoption. And all of those have been consequential.. see 30 year fight about e2ee.

dogman144 commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

dogman144 · 9 days ago

If you work in cybersecurity, I’d table many views in this thread and just understand it’s the place to be to cut your teeth in fairly hard security problems and make money along the way. If 1980’s security culture seemed cool with a new BoF everyday and Bill Gates himself calling you a bad word for doing it, and toss in advanced threat actors, a sec career in crypto isn’t too far off of that. Of course company by company variations apply and the above could include explaining EDR to small teams with absurds amounts of funds tied to a private key in a .txt.

That said, much of the feedback in this thread applies to working in it imo, as the other side of keeping these companies and their treasuries not hacked and capitalized is it exposes you to a lot.

That said, I’ve done big tech too, and the nonsense in crypto just has a couple less rungs of management insulation than the rest of tech. The rest of tech lives with the consequences of asinine decisions over 4-5x quarters and in crypto you live with it month to month. Pick your poison on preferred version of nonsensical tech instability.

There’s a twitter comment that covers what I’ve come to think - natural state of crypto is just a more direct instantiation of what’s going on everywhere else, crypto just doesn’t hide it (sort of). Hard not to believe that with tech selling “trade in your IRA!” as if that’s not offering a beer to my 20 yr sober Uncle Bob, in terms of products that are cancerous for “the people.” So I see nothing in crypto that’s not reflected everywhere in tech and civics right now.

The crypto tech or integrations to pay attention to - btc, atomic swaps cross-chain, trading firms, whatever finserv is testing for payment and settlement infra. All of these have deep building, are functional and funded. Wouldn’t bet against it over a career.

dogman144 commented on Kenyan court declares law banning seed sharing unconstitutional apnews.com/article/kenya-... · Posted by u/thunderbong

dogman144 · 12 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.

dogman144 · 12 days ago

“ The usual Monsanto claim involves patent infringement by intentionally replanting patented seed”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases

Edit - Can’t reply again looks like but to the response below, yes many view this approach as effectively leading to enforcing what you state. Which is why it is so horribly underhanded to me, and seeing supporting narratives in hackernews was striking.

dogman144 commented on Kenyan court declares law banning seed sharing unconstitutional apnews.com/article/kenya-... · Posted by u/thunderbong

throwaway243123 · 12 days ago

How does that suing pass muster is any court of law?

dogman144 · 12 days ago

Good question

dogman144 commented on Kenyan court declares law banning seed sharing unconstitutional apnews.com/article/kenya-... · Posted by u/thunderbong

dekhn · 12 days ago

From what I've read, the articles about Monsanto suing innocent farmers is misleading.

dogman144 · 12 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.

dogman144 commented on Kenyan court declares law banning seed sharing unconstitutional apnews.com/article/kenya-... · Posted by u/thunderbong

estsauver · 12 days ago

Hybrid seeds are ~100 years old and are nearly universally adopted across developed agricultural markets. They’re as controversial as “you should probably use source control” is in programming. You may be confusing hybrid seeds with GMOs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed

To state once again, I don’t know much about this law or how the government believes it’s preventing counterfeit seed, but bad seed is a huge problem for farmers. I personally want farmers to be able to do whatever they want to with their farms!

dogman144 · 12 days ago

Universally adopted in part by very well known strong arm business practices from Big Ag vs farmers. This is a bad faith framing imo. Source - live in ag country

dogman144 commented on Kenyan court declares law banning seed sharing unconstitutional apnews.com/article/kenya-... · Posted by u/thunderbong

estsauver · 12 days ago

For some context on why the original law was introduced:

When you're making a seed that you want to make the best crop possible, the way to do that is to take two great lines of maize that share relatively little genetics, cross them at the last step, and enjoy the hybrid vigour that results. This is one of the most important practical advancements we have for getting good yields from crops: the yields are dramatically better for this seed then if you plant the seed kernels that are made by the hybrid. When you plant saved seed (which many poor people are forced to do through not being able to afford hybrid seeds) you get dramatically worse yields and often even doing things like using fertilizer doesn't make economic sense (https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/low-quality-low-ret... is frequently cited.)

However, to the naked eye, there's basically no distinction between a hybrid seed and stored seed. A lot of seed companies sell seeds that are coated to help protect the seeds from pests/blights, but seed counterfitters have learned how to copy this. To distinguish them, you either need to run genetic testing or plant them and wait a season. If you get scammed, the result can be devestating for a smallholder farmer's family.

I don't necessarily think community seed banks should be banned, but I think it's important context to know. There are people for whom they really need any seed, crops which are not served commercially well, and a whole bunch of other use cases I immediately understand for a community seed bank. But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest people. (I'll also just say I'm not up to date on this law, the court case, or how it's been applied in the country.)

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Apollo Agriculture and still serve on the board, which operates in Kenya and a few other countries trying to help smallholders get access to better agtech (which includes hybrid seeds and fertilizer and other high roi agricultural tools.)

dogman144 · 12 days ago

Haha very important disclaimer there, because reading your post sounds a lot like a person who works for big ag.

The other reason these laws exist is a long history by Big Ag (Monsanto, Cargill) doing the following, and has been done in the states for a while:

1) gmo/patented seeds in field on the left, community non-big ag seeds on the right field.

2) Cross-pollination occurs because we’re talking crops. Variations on this.

3) Monsanto sues Farmer John and Jane into the ground next season for stealing tech via the crops he’s growing.

Add in a little bit of fear (encryption backdoors for the children, laws to prevent dangerous counterfeit seeds!), and you have monopoly on farming run by big corps.

Also, US corps have a long history of POC’ing underhanded approaches in Africa.

What could be going on here!?

Edit - Man, rereading, “forced to plant [dangerous] saved seeds,” guess it’s Big Ag + tech startups now pushing this. Maybe… those farmers just want to control their “IP” (saved seeds) so they don’t have to buy them from a cartel of seed providers? This is such a well known problem in the states, is this marketing really working in Africa?

Final edit on the soapbox - other reason why this matters is genetic diversity. Crop blight is a thing. There is no way the natural “herd immunity” of a basket of seed variants in a community is outstripped in effectiveness by a growing monoculture of owned hybrid seeds that stay in front of the blights each season. Coffee rust already jumped the Atlantic from Africa to SA. Often feels like I’ve read this sci-fi novel already (there is a good one - Windup Girl).

dogman144 commented on Transparent leadership beats servant leadership entropicthoughts.com/tran... · Posted by u/ibobev

dogman144 · 13 days ago

Not a great post, I’d not follow it if interested in leading teams long term.

A Self-admitted self taught manager learns the good parts about servant leadership via self-learning (nice!) but figures that is all there is instead of - “this is interesting, this seems to work but have gaps, what is there to this?”

If the author did that, they’d discover a massive body of knowledge to include the specific problem they point out - you solve problems for your team, how do they start to solve their own problems?

Servant leadership works if paired with the following, tuned to the capabilities and maturities of the specific employee:

- servant leadership: resource your team, umbrella your team, let the smart people you hired do smart things, or turn so so employees into great ones by resourcing them to learn, getting them mentorship, and “sun is strong than cold wind” sort of thinking.

- Left/right limits and target outcome: consistently inform your team their duty, in exchange for all the above manager work that’s way past the least-effort bar, is to get comfortable solving problems within the bounds of what the solution does and does not need to look like. Force this issue always, and they start solving their own problems at growing speed, and you have a QA check as a manager via documenting those boundaries per project etc

- train your replacement: part serving your team is reaching there’s probably another sociopath on it who wants to lead teams, wants raw power, and so on. Enable that! Teach them how to lead teams in the above fashion. They’ll realize it works. You’ll train someone who can take over the remaining problem solving. This won’t hurt your own job either.

Put it all together you’ll get very loyal productive teams of employees who’ll respect you outside of work in your industry where it matters for networking purposes, and you can live with yourself after the laptop closes as you know you’re treating your fellow man/woman the right way while surving in crazy corporate environments.

In short, bad advice in that article. There’s a whole corpus to leadership beyond what the author figured out in the side and describes here ha.

Edit - ironically the author then argues for arguably similar as the above, but claims it’s something else of their own invention. Engineers should really grok how there are existing bodies of very useful knowledge for all the things that seem easily dismissible as gaps or weak points from tho social sciences. It’d save them a lot of time.

dogman144 commented on Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files alexschapiro.com/security... · Posted by u/bearsyankees

j45 · 14 days ago

You missed risk creation vs reward creation.

And then folks can gasp and faint like goats and pretend they didn’t know.

It reminds me of the time I met an IT manager who dint have an IT background. Outsourced hilarity ensued through sales people who were also non-technical.

dogman144 · 13 days ago

What am I missing? Risk acceptance is what you’re referring to - risk creation and reward creation.

Sec lead might have a pretty darn clear idea of an out of whack creation of risk v reward. CEO disagrees. Risk accept and move on.

When you’re technical and eventually realize there’s a business to survive behind the tech skills, this is the stuff you learn how to do.

People “will know” as you say because it’s all documented and professionally escalated.

dogman144 commented on Transparent leadership beats servant leadership entropicthoughts.com/tran... · Posted by u/ibobev

onion2k · 13 days ago

"Servant Leadership" is a term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977 book "Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness", which is very specifically about being a church leader. Many of the more generic ideas are applicable in any leadership scenario but if you read the book it's very clear that it was not designed with business leadership in mind. You shouldn't really expect it to apply to being a leader in a tech company.

dogman144 · 13 days ago

Servant leadership works just fine in business (as in a competitive non-church environment) as long you’re aware you you’re serving and who you’re working peer to peer with/against/whatever.

Another term for it somewhat is being a “players coach.”

End state is you will build loyal as heck teams with it, and if you want to take a very cynical business mindset, it produces with the least pain and suffering three very impotent outcomes - your team will produce output, they won’t hate you along the way, and your team will write you (well earned) manager perf reviews. A manager who has a loyal as heck team up and down the stack builds unique odds of corporate survival.

All it takes is a little EQ.