#this ideo edit is like. not good but i wanted to make something for the movie lol

[antigonenikk]

Birdy (1984) - Expecting to Fly by Buffalo Springfield

[clawedcosplay]

Helping Positions Avaliable for #TidesofHetalia

International Jobs

•Graphic artists

A. Designing merchandise to raise money B. Creating graphics to advertise, plus drawing things to use as graphics in the video editing

•Social media managers A. Manage a tumblr, Facebook, and maybe Instagram or something???

•Video A. Tying together the clips to music and adding special effects B. 3d??? If you have this skill it would be awesome

• Thumbnail and story team A. I want this video to tell some sort of a story! This is going to be just like thumbnails for animation projects

•Choreographers A. Dance choreography B. Fake combat choreography C. Any sort of specialized equipment dance

•Formal letter writing team A. If you're good at writing letters, grants, and essays, then you can join this team and write letters to businesses asking for their donations and help!

•Prop makers (this can be done anywhere as long as you are willing to ship what you make) A. Weapons making B. Prosthetic making

•Wig/Cosplay making/prepping (same as above, you must be able to ship) A. Designing and shading/highlighting wigs

• Management team A. Coordinating posts with letters and shipping props. Basically supervisors

• Donation management A. Researching which non-profits are best to use B. Working with them to manage and track donations C. Manage the money we raise from selling merchandise

Local jobs (must be able to reach southern Maryland once maybe two times)

•Cosplayers (this is the only job where we will turn people down for repeats, etc. Also, you will likely have to make it here the most, second to maybe the camera team. Send a picture of your costume to us if you have one!) A. Of course, countries that WERE pirates B. If you want to get creative and do something else though go ahead (ie. China or Russia)! C. Also mermaids and other mythical or fun things that go with the theme!

•Makeup artists A. FTM/MTF and other stage makeup B. OR special effects, body paint, and prosthetics (especially for a possible UV scene and a mermaids!!!)

•Wig artists A. Anyone who can style a wig and help Cosplayers get them on, and attach them well so they don't fall off. This isn't designing the wig, just getting it on and making it look good.

•Dance/combat/musicians (can also be Cosplayers) A. If you have any sort of special skills, can dance well or take a martial arts class or can play an instrument. You can do this and another job! It's just important for me to know. If we have a fire dancer or a color guard pro we need to work it into the story

•Video and photography team A. Exactly what it sounds like; recording and taking photos. Having your own camera isn't necessary but if you do have one let us know!

•Historian A. literally you just run around and keep track of what happens and how and send it to the social media managers

Each of these jobs is a great opportunity for you to grow your experience and get resume pieces in your field! I will personally write you a letter of recommendation and answer phone calls from potential jobs or colleges telling how much you did to help us.

Message/submit to me with what job you want to do and I will add you to the Discord Chat I set up!!!

If there are any other skills you think you can use let me know in the message! Think you can do multiple jobs? That's no problem either! Just let me know!

[evanvanness]

Annotated edition of May 3 Week in Ethereum News

As it is wont to do, the newsletter buried the lede: ProgPoW is indefinitely shelved.

I think it’s been relatively clear since last time that ProgPoW wasn’t going to happen.  The leads of the two largest clients are against it personally, plus it’s quite clear that there isn’t anything close to community consensus. If anything, at the moment the majority of the community opposes it.  Greg Colvin bringing it up again last week unfortunately made it harder to do in the case where we do actually need it, ie an ASIC manufacturer has a 10x breakthrough but is only selling the machines privately to control 50%+ of the network.

I’d say it’s unclear whether ACD continues to be a thing.  To me it feels like an experiment which was worth trying but has become calcified, which needs a complete refresh in terms of both process and non-technical people involved.  But inertia is also a very strong force.  To overcome that, Ethereum should have a strong culture of continuously sunsetting things if they are not working.

One amusing thing to me has been the idea that ProgPoW is an AMD/Nvidia conspiracy.  Given that ETH price declining in 2018 absolutely destroyed their earnings and share price, those two should have been conspiring! Yet if they were, then they did an exceptionally bad job at it.  Instead everyone I know got the impression that the GPU manufacturers were indifferent.  There are some competing interests for them of course - the anger of their traditional gaming market, plus AI/neural net researchers - but it still surprises me how they did not get involved at all.

Despite the noise, Ethereum governance works!  I remember polling everyone I talked to at EthDenver2019 about whether they supported ProgPoW and (at the time I was pro-ProgPoW; I’d say my position is much more complicated now) being disappointed at how everyone I talked to was against it. 

I’m very glad we don’t have on-chain governance where a few exchanges/whales could collude to push things through.  Because of that, I’d say on-chain governance will drastically limit the market cap of any basechain’s native token.

Eth1

Latest core devs call. Tim Beiko’s notes. Updates on EIPs for eth2 curve, EVM subroutines. ProgPoW shelved due to clear lack of consensus. Discussion of migrating to binary trie

Analysis of EIP-2315 simple EVM subroutines

DHT+SkipGraph for chain and state data retrieval

Notes from the fee market change call

Vitalik’s EIP1559 fee market change FAQ

There’s a risk of being repetitive, but much of the eth1 work does not lend itself to high-level summaries.  Folks are discussing the technical details of EVM improvements (eg, subroutines), as well as getting clients to be stateless (eg the DHT and Skipgraph link).   And we’re also talking through EIP1559 in light of Dan Finlay’s escalator algo alternative proposal.  

One development not mentioned is that Martin Swende has come around to Alexey’s gas/oil proposal instead of his previous approach of penalties for trie misses.

Eth2

Latest what’s new in Eth2

Schlesi multi-client testnet launched with Lighthouse and (slightly updated) Prysmatic clients. Then Nimbus joined Schlesi a few days later.

Bitfly has a Schlesi explorer

Nimbus client update – up to date, joining Schlesi testnet, RFP for security audits, and benchmarking Nimbus on a 2018 midrange phone

Update from ConsenSys’s TXRX team: prkl network monitoring tool, verifiable precompiles, cross-shard tx simulator, fork choice testing, discv5 sim, and work on turning off proof of work.

A step-by-step guide on joining Prysmatic’s Topaz testnet for Windows10 and MacOS

ConsenSys’s high-level eth2 FAQ

I don’t really do corrections in the newsletter, because once you send an email, you can’t easily clarify your language without sending another email.

But, if you click the “Nimbus joined Schlesi,” then it appears to me that Nimbus is receiving the blocks and following the chain, but not proposing/attesting/etc. I probably should have been more clear when I said “joined.”

Layer2

Channels funding channels: how state channels reduce latency and onchain transactions

This series feels to me like a “yes, state channels are almost here now, let’s get ready to reconsider how to use them.”   Productionizing any new technology isn’t easy, and finding the uses that best fit the tradeoffs is not trivial.  Seems like this is that series.

This newsletter is made possible by Chainlink

Decentralized oracles are a key capability enabling smart contracts to reach their full potential. Come work with the leading team providing oracles for Ethereum. Join us to help build the next generation of smart contracts in roles including Software Engineering, Developer Evangelism, DevOps, Product Management, and more.

I’m very excited that Week in Ethereum News will continue for the next year due to Chainlink, Celer, Trail of Bits, and 0x.

Stuff for developers

buidler v1.3 – test time-based cases in Buidler EVM, works with TheGraph

Waffle’s plan for making testing better with v3

Testing with Python and Brownie

Typechain v2 – Typescript bindings. truffle v5 support, natspec

Solidity docgen v0.5 – documentation generation for Solidity project

Running async/await scripts in Remix IDE

Austin Griffith’s scaffold-eth, a toolkit to prototype and win hackathons

A linked hashmap in Solidity

How to add proxy Ethereum addresses to BigQuery

Authereum’s batched transactions API for interest rate arbs

discv5 feasibility study for Status

Tutorial to testing on mainnet fork with Ganache, Jest and Uniswap

Etheroll security issue: hacker monitoring for onchain forks and then uses that info to frontrun transactions. Novel (to me!) hack

Dragonfly releases an oracles tracker

Synthetix CTO Justin Moses on 10 things they did to improve their Ethereum development experience. tldr: Buidler, Slither, TheGraph, and Tenderly.

It feels like a very undercommented trend how most devs now tell me that their stack is Buidler + Waffle + ethers, and increasingly Typescript as well.  Of course, dev tool stacks are perpetually in flux, but this seems to be the stack du jour.  

This isn’t new either.  After writing the paragraph above, I remembered that Connext’s Rahul had written something about a similar stack 3 months ago.  I go back and check Rahul’s recommendation: Buidler + Waffle + Ethers + typescript.   If this was a chatbox, I would put a rofl emoji, but in prose this seems less appropriate.  

Ecosystem

Contribute to the TornadoCash trusted setup ceremony. It takes about 5 secs of clicking and requires you to leave the browser tab open a few minutes.

Multisigs controlling multisigs: Avsa’s vision for a usable web3

Renew your ENS names or you will lose them. Names start to expire May 4th

Forgive me the clickbait - you actually have 90 days grace period if your domain expired, but I don’t want anyone to miss this if their domain has expired.

If you haven’t contributed to Tornado’s trusted setup ceremony, I recommend that you do.  Assuming that the software works correctly, you can ensure that Tornado becomes trustless for you by participating!   It literally takes just a few seconds to start, and then you leave your browser tab open for about 3 minutes.  You can even contribute multiple times.

Enterprise

Hyperledger Besu v1.4.4, added priv_getLogs, added Splunk integration

Governance, DAOs, and standards

Governance processes for Maker and Compound add WBTC to Maker and USDT to Compound. TBTC also proposed for Maker

Maker’s MIPs ratification vote is live

MetaClan: DAOs for in-game coordination

ERC2611: Geotimeline Contact Tracing Data Standard

Last call: ERC1363 Payable Token

Last call: EIP1193 Eth provider Javascript API

ERC 2612: permit, 712-signed approvals

EIP2357: Total difficulty in block header

Lots of blowback to Maker adding WBTC.  I very much understand the criticism, but to me it looks like Maker is taking reasonable measures, given the current situation where DAI is trading a little rich on the peg.  It’s true that permissioned assets have some risk, but this is literally why MKR is supposed to have value: because those MKR holders make good decisions.

Now perhaps you don’t like that model, and that also makes sense, designing for stablecoins is a large solution space.  But this has always been the Maker vision.  And I say this as someone who does not hold any MKR, and never has (though you’re welcome to give me some!).

Application layer

DeFiZap and DeFiSnap merged to be ZapperFi: now track and trade your DeFi together

Gnosis Safe apps: interact with apps straight from the Gnosis Safe interface

dforce/lendfme plan post-hack: user airdrop, dSAFU insurance fund, large bug bounty

OpenBazaar now supports Eth

A rough proposal for a GasToken forward

Everest: a project registry from TheGraph and MetaCartel

I know I have said this before, but the ebb and flow between sections is fascinating to me.  The stuff for devs section was full this week, but the app layer was a little light.  Maybe I just missed stuff.

Arbitrary “how much of this section is DeFi” count: 3/6

Tokens/Business/Regulation

UMA did an Initial Uniswap Offering, and there was a 5-10x spike

It appears Telegram will have to return $1.2 billion to investors

Ideo’s Simple Agreement for Future Governance for DeFi

Auditing the 10k top Eth addresses: ETH is better distributed than BTC and a bunch of other interesting claims

I again note that US federal regulators continue to bailout Silicon Valley investors from the worst deals that Silicon Valley did in late 2017/early 2018.  

I’d say it’s inevitable that we’re going to see some folks copy UMA.  Watch for it.

Adam Cochran’s onchain activity of top 10k addresses is very interesting.  Definitely some undersupported claims in there, but certainly worth a read.  This is the second time he wrote a 100+ tweetstorm and then compiled it to a blog post.  Personally I prefer viewing it as a blog post.

General

EtherScan Connect: an alpha for mapping addresses with a leaderboard

a16z raises $515m crypto fund

Vitalik’s review of Gitcoin grants round 5

SuperMarlin: no trusted setup with DARK polynomial commitment

“alpha for mapping addresses with a leaderboard“ is another thing I could have said more eloquently.   It’s an interesting attempt by Etherscan to give something to their community, though of course it comes with risks.

There’s something amusing about a16z announcing a new fund, mentioning Bitcoin, and then mostly talking about the stuff that’s being built on Ethereum, without actually mentioning Ethereum.   People like to talk about being contrarian investors.  Wanna know how buying ETH is somehow still a contrarian play in crypto right now?  It’s right there.

zk continues to just explode.  It almost seems like plug and play, where people are pulling out the parts of different schemes that they like and putting in others, depending on the tradeoffs you want around trusted setups, verifier time, prover cost, etc.

Housekeeping

First issue post-ConsenSys. As a reminder, this newsletter is and has always been 100% owned by me.

Did you get forwarded this newsletter?  Sign up to receive it weekly

Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-3-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

May 6-20 – Gitcoin’s virtual hackthon

May 8-9 – Ethereal Summit (NYC)

May 22-31 – Ethereum Madrid public health virtual hackathon

May 29-June 16 – SOSHackathon

June 17 – EthBarcelona R&D workshop

[tilacreativejourney]

TIL: What is Design Thinking?

EDIT 12/28/17: I’ve since (in the last 24 hours) come across this video by Pentagram principal Natasha Jen titled ‘Design Thinking is Bullshit’. I thought it would be interesting to share this other perspective and it’s made me realize I should be including multiple perspectives like this in each post.

She re-defines design thinking as “Design thinking packages a designer’s way of working for a non-designer audience by codifying their processes inta a prescriptive, step-by-step approach to creative problem solving - claiming that it can be applied by anyone to any problem.”

She also describes criticism as being a huge missing component of the design thinking process, the evaluation of whether something is good or not. 

Check it out if you have the time, she has a very interesting perspective.

https://www.pentagram.com/about/natasha-jen#video-design-thinking-is-bullshit

Original Post: I’ve come across the notion of design thinking many times in the last couple of years or so, as I’ve been learning more about Product Development and innovation in my 9-5 job, so this is not a terribly new concept for me. But I did realize that I’ve never really spent a chunk of time focused on what it really means.

Though the concept of design thinking is not necessarily new, it was not known in this specific context until it was brought to the mainstream by David Kelley, the founder of IDEO. An engineer originally, he ended up at Stanford for a master’s program in Product Design. A year after graduation, in 1978, he founded David Kelley Designs with a classmate and at the same time began teaching in the Stanford Product Design Program. He then went on to found Onset Ventures, a venture capital firm, in 1984. Around the same time, he also co-founded Edge Innovations, a special effects company. It wasn’t until 1991 that David Kelley Designs merged with three other design firms to form IDEO in Palo Alto, where he was the CEO until 2000. In 2004, he helped create Stanford’s d.school.

It wasn’t until the 1980′s that Kelley realized the importance of stepping back in order to be able to forge ahead, as it pertains to innovation. He found that most companies skipped the important beginning steps of ideation, what he later would term “Empathy” and “Define”. These are the steps where the end user is clearly defined, observed and interviewed to clearly understand the specific problem which needs to be solved. The problem can only be defined once this initial data is retrieved and analyzed, and needs to be done before any ideation can happen.

These companies were basically ideating on problems they had thought the end user was facing. In reality, the end user was never truly asked if this was a real problem at all. Just taking the time to talk to your target customer (end user) and understand what they actually want to see in a new or existing product or service is the most crucial part of innovation. Otherwise, how do you know all the work you are about to put into the Ideation, Prototype and Test phases are what will ultimately solve the problem? And how do you even know your identified problem is what your end user is really facing?

Below outlines the basics of each step in the Design Thinking process. As part of my own learning process, I’ve included a graphic representation below as well (not my best work, but I’m still learning).

Empathize: This is step 1, where you need to get out and talk with your end user. Understand what they like and don’t like about your product or service. If you are creating a new product or service, figure out how they feel about your competitors and what you can do to make a better version. Gather as much data as you can at this stage.

Define: Take back all of the data you gathered and start to physically post it somewhere, whether on post-it notes around your work space or on a white board, anywhere you can. This is an important part of the process and will allow you to step back and start to find patterns in the data. Start grouping items by related categories. You will likely find many problems which need solving, so this is where you also will identify the most critical problem to work on first. Ideate: Knowing what you know now, start brainstorming possible solutions to your identified problem. This also should be done using a white board or post-it notes on a wall. The idea here is to throw up as much info as possible, quantity over quality. Identify the best possible solutions and plan out how you will prototype these out.  Prototype: Now comes my favorite part. This is where you take the ideas you have of possible solutions to your identified problem, and make something. This could be a physical product, app, software, whatever you are designing towards. This should be quick, that is why it’s called rapid prototyping. The idea is to get something made quickly with the functionality of the solution to your problem. This does not need to be pretty but it needs to work.  Test: Once the prototype is complete, get this back into the hands of your end user for real world feedback. Gather as much information as possible about what worked, what they liked and didn’t like, and what they would like to see changed in the the next prototype. The goal is to come away with tangible information on how you can make this better in round 2. 

Once testing is complete and you know what to do to improve the next round, it’s time to go back to the prototyping stage and build your next iteration to then re-test. This should be completed as many times as needed to end up with a product or service that satisfies the needs of the end user. 

I tried to keep this pretty short and digestible as I hope to for all of my posts. I hate reading a ton of information to only find I took away a couple key points. Feedback is much appreciated!

Resources I used in writing this: IBM Think Academy How it works: Design Thinking TEDxTalk Pawel Zebrowski Design Thinking TEDxTalk Deana McDonagh Design Thinking TEDxTalk Guido Stompff Innovation and Design Thinking

For further reading on Design Thinking: d.school Reading List Peer Insight 10 Books on Design Thinking Books that Shaped Made by Many’s Design Thinking Kaleidoscope’s 7 Favorite Design Thinking Books

[theconservativebrief]

Essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household in Michigan by parents who, at one point, believed the apocalypse was imminent. In fact, the family stored up so much nonperishable food in the event of the end of the world that they ended up subsisting for months on “colorless suppers of dried meat and powdered mashed potatoes,” refusing to admit their error.

O’Gieblyn writes about her upbringing, and the influence of religion in her life, in the 15 essays that comprise her debut essay collection, Interior States, which comes out this week. Diverse in subject — in one essay, she writes about the way critics of Alcoholics Anonymous are uncomfortable with its spiritual character; in another, she analyzes a theme park devoted to biblical creationism — the writings are consistently, exquisitely thought-provoking. In all, the collection of essays is at once challenging and lyrical, and portrays a nuanced, complicated look at faith, secularism, and evangelical culture in 2018.

While O’Gieblyn writes, frequently and movingly, of losing her faith in adulthood, her criticisms of evangelical culture and Christianity are filled not with polemic but with yearning: a spiritual and moral hunger for what Christianity could and should have been, and the “missed opportunities” for faith in a capitalist, secular age.

I spoke with O’Gieblyn about American evangelicalism, her own faith, and her process. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Tara Isabella Burton

In a lot of your essays, you talk about different elements of what you call your “deconversion” experience, out of a quite extreme form of evangelical Christianity. Can you tell me a bit more about your faith journey?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

I was raised in a fundamentalist home in Michigan. I was homeschooled until 10th grade. And when I was 18, I went to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, which is a very small, very old, conservative Christian college founded by Dwight L. Moody in the 19th century. And it was while I was there — while I was studying theology and really getting in depth into the Bible for the first time in a way that I hadn’t as a child — that I started contending with a lot of problems. Particularly the theology surrounding hell, predestination, the problem of evil, that I didn’t really think about in any depth until I was at that school.

I was also driven by the cultural problems within Christianity — a lot of the hypocrisy in that culture, the way that women were regarded. So I ended up leaving Moody after two years of a four-year program, and spent many years still struggling. I didn’t call myself an “atheist” when I left. It wasn’t a clean break. But writing was one of the ways that helped me make sense of these questions and forge a new identity. All of my essays are in different ways trying to make sense of that experience.

Tara Isabella Burton

Something I find really striking about your work is that while you absolutely do criticize much of the faith tradition you come from, you’re also similarly critical of a secular world (and media) that fails to understand that faith tradition. Throughout your essays, you reserve harsh words for magazine articles that refer, say, to the idea that the Western world “stopped believing in hell” sometime around the European Enlightenment, or scholars who refer to Satan as an “antiquarian relic of a superstitious age,” as biblical scholar Elaine Pagels did. What does the secular world get wrong about evangelicalism and fundamentalism?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

I think the thing they get wrong most often is that it’s a very simplistic worldview and that it depends upon wishful thinking and faith. Faith is obviously a big part of Christianity, and a lot of believers do defer to that, no question. But the type of Christianity I grew up in was a very intricate worldview that depended upon rational principles, that functioned within that world sort of separate from secular rationality. So you know we were taught apologetics as children. We were taught to defend our faith, to use Scripture as evidence to respond to these common attacks on Christianity.

When I was at Moody Bible Institute, the intellectual culture there was very intense and academically rigorous, even though we were studying the Bible from a literalist point of view. We weren’t studying liberal theologians. It was a very insular world. But we read the Bible with a kind of attention and depth that I think would be familiar to academics. It’s hard to explain that to a secular audience because a lot of the things we were studying in depth sound insane to a secular audience. We’re talking about how to prove that the Earth was actually created in six days based on all of these theologically arcane methods. But it did function within its own insular world as a system of rational thought.

Tara Isabella Burton

That makes a lot of sense within the paradigm of your work, which treats religion and the ideas behind it extremely seriously, and with depth, even when you’re criticizing it. And at times, you still see the value in it. In your essay on the differing ways hell has been treated in contemporary Christianity, for example, you talk about how there is a potential within the narrative of hell to find “a sober counternarrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue.” What elements of your religious upbringing would you like to see preserved, and why?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

When I was writing many of these essays, my biggest criticism of the church is that it didn’t provide an antidote to capitalism. And it could have! I grew up in the 1990s during the megachurch era. There was still this idea that they could compete with secular youth culture. I have an essay in here, for example, about the phenomenon of Christian music, and how a lot of Christian artists in the 1990s were trying to compete with bands, which were on MTV, to compete with whatever was popular and add a Christian “twist” and sell whatever was popular. It leads to an inauthenticity.

There was a missed opportunity to offer an alternative to this culture of consumerism, of capitalism, that a lot of us were already disillusioned with, and the church was doing the exact same thing. It wasn’t providing an escape. It was marrying the culture.

I talk about this in my piece on hell. In the 2000s, people stopped talking about hell to appeal to a larger audience. Pastors started running churches like a business. They did market research and found that hell made people uncomfortable. People didn’t want to hear about hell, or how they were sinners. But the gospel message doesn’t really work if there’s no stakes, nothing to be saved from. And I think there was a missed opportunity to reinterpret hell — as a metaphor for evil, for these difficult experiences that people go through, like addiction or war.

Tara Isabella Burton

Let’s home in on that a little bit more. In Interior States, you talk a lot about the evangelicalism of the late ’90s and early 2000s. In the past few decades, how have you seen that world change? Where has evangelicalism gone in America?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

It’s become much stranger, I think, than it was even when I was a Christian. It’s interesting watching the movement evolve now, as an outsider. With the Trump presidency, and the overwhelming amount of white evangelicals who voted for him — that was an incredible disillusionment for me. The narrative of when I grew up at school during the Bush years was, “He’s one of us; he’s a good man.”

And then to see the church do a total 180 and support someone like Trump, who is not a Christian, who is an adulterer, who totally goes against all their values — it makes it clear that [Christian politics] were about cultural dominance, Christian nationalism, patriarchy, white supremacy. I think the Trump presidency sort of revealed the extent to which maybe Christian politics were always about those issues.

And there’s been a rift, too, within evangelicalism. I think a lot of Christians, particularly younger evangelicals, have become really disillusioned with that label, or are calling themselves “ex-evangelicals” or gravitating toward mainline Protestant denominations that are more concerned with things like social justice.

Penguin Random House

Tara Isabella Burton

Let’s talk a little bit more about your own work and your process. In your essay “On Subtlety,” you talk about how your experience of faith informs your writing on a narrative as well as content level. You talk about how a kind of sense of meaningfulness pervading the world, and a compact of trust between a narrator and a reader that mirrors that between God and creation, made you more prone to writing “subtle” pieces, where you trust the reader to get it. Can you expound further on how your faith tradition informs your writing as well as your subject matter?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

I actually started off as a fiction writer. And one of the criticisms I always got in workshop with my work was that I wasn’t being explicit enough — that I was forcing the reader to make connections that I should have been making as a writer. And I’ve gotten criticism even as a nonfiction writer. It started to seem like it was larger than a craft problem — like it was actually a problem with the way I looked at the world.

When I was growing up in the church, there was this whole narrative of “you have to pay attention. God can speak to you in mysterious ways.” And you have to be careful in calling attention to those connections. Christians were always looking for signs, like, “God is speaking to me through the words of a popular song.”

There’s also this interpretative vigilance that we were taught as children. We were taught that the secular world was kind of this unified ideology that was trying to dupe us, and we had to deconstruct these messages and be vigilant guarding ourselves against it. And I think that was a useful education in a lot of ways, because it taught me critical thinking.

Also, there’s a way in which that idea of religious mystery is something that has informed my writing. I do sometimes think of writing as a very mystical process. A lot of writers do. Sometimes you don’t understand the way your subconscious works — the way the ideas rise to the surface. It can feel like a religious experience at times.

Original Source -> How Christianity can be an “alternative” to consumerism

via The Conservative Brief

[a-h-arts]

No earth shattering disclosures, but still very interesting You can't but help be interested in an inside look at Ideo. However, the author doesn't disclose any earth shattering ideas or proprietary practices of the firm. There's the obligatory kudos from from the likes of (smash everything that's standing) Tom Peters. Go to Amazon

Good Read, but Maybe Not Ideal for the Kindle As a new Kindle owner, I get excited whenever I run across a Kindle version of a book I have been wanting to read. When I saw that this was available, I ordered it immediately, and began reading. This is especially timely for me, because my company has put together several "innovation teams" whose purpose is to review and recommend and implement changes to many aspects of the corporation. I was hoping to get a few ideas that I could pass along to the rest of my team. Go to Amazon

A New Perspective The Art of Innovation was a great read for me. I bought this book purely so I would have something to read on the commuter rail while on my way to my new internship. Without reading any prior reviews of the book, I just expected it to be about the process that a designer goes through when designing a new product. It caught me off guard when the book had a lot more to offer to a young designer. Go to Amazon

An Excellent Read I purchased this book after I watched Charlie Rose interview Tom Kelly on PBS. Because of some of the issues Mr. Kelly talked about, I decided to purchase the book. I must say that I am glad I did. I am still reading the book-almost done. I enjoy the simplicity of the stories and ideas raised in it. This book has no gimmicks to its approach. It is practical, honest in dealing with difficult projects, and clear in its explanation. Above all, I find it very engaging without boring one with unnecessary details. Go to Amazon

A bird's eye view of IDEO innovation engine Nice read that gives a good bird's eye view of how IDEO operate. Must of it lend itself to the company's culture. A good next edition to this book would be what aspects can be adopted to small startups since the environment and resources available would not be as big as IDEO. Go to Amazon

Great content Loved the book and its key insights on innovation and development of creativity. Highly recommend for those thinking about designing for innovation Go to Amazon

Well written and widely applicable advice A great collection of innovation strategies that can be applied by anyone working in any field. Presented in a fun, readable fashion, the author pulls you through example after example illustrating the points he's making. Short chapters and shorter subsections make it an easy book to pick up and read a few pages of at a time. If you're serious about wanting to learn how to form an innovative organization, this should be the first book you pick up. Go to Amazon

How to create an innovative culture Better than talking about methodologies or recipes to be innovative, this book shows how to create an in notice culture at a company independent of the industry. I loved it and strongly recommend it to anyone interested in innovation. Go to Amazon

Five Stars Four Stars Four Stars Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars Book usefulness and delivery time Four Stars I originally purchased this book as a required reading for ...

[manage-management]

No earth shattering disclosures, but still very interesting You can't but help be interested in an inside look at Ideo. However, the author doesn't disclose any earth shattering ideas or proprietary practices of the firm. There's the obligatory kudos from from the likes of (smash everything that's standing) Tom Peters. Go to Amazon

Good Read, but Maybe Not Ideal for the Kindle As a new Kindle owner, I get excited whenever I run across a Kindle version of a book I have been wanting to read. When I saw that this was available, I ordered it immediately, and began reading. This is especially timely for me, because my company has put together several "innovation teams" whose purpose is to review and recommend and implement changes to many aspects of the corporation. I was hoping to get a few ideas that I could pass along to the rest of my team. Go to Amazon

A New Perspective The Art of Innovation was a great read for me. I bought this book purely so I would have something to read on the commuter rail while on my way to my new internship. Without reading any prior reviews of the book, I just expected it to be about the process that a designer goes through when designing a new product. It caught me off guard when the book had a lot more to offer to a young designer. Go to Amazon

An Excellent Read I purchased this book after I watched Charlie Rose interview Tom Kelly on PBS. Because of some of the issues Mr. Kelly talked about, I decided to purchase the book. I must say that I am glad I did. I am still reading the book-almost done. I enjoy the simplicity of the stories and ideas raised in it. This book has no gimmicks to its approach. It is practical, honest in dealing with difficult projects, and clear in its explanation. Above all, I find it very engaging without boring one with unnecessary details. Go to Amazon

A bird's eye view of IDEO innovation engine Nice read that gives a good bird's eye view of how IDEO operate. Must of it lend itself to the company's culture. A good next edition to this book would be what aspects can be adopted to small startups since the environment and resources available would not be as big as IDEO. Go to Amazon

Great content Loved the book and its key insights on innovation and development of creativity. Highly recommend for those thinking about designing for innovation Go to Amazon

Well written and widely applicable advice A great collection of innovation strategies that can be applied by anyone working in any field. Presented in a fun, readable fashion, the author pulls you through example after example illustrating the points he's making. Short chapters and shorter subsections make it an easy book to pick up and read a few pages of at a time. If you're serious about wanting to learn how to form an innovative organization, this should be the first book you pick up. Go to Amazon

How to create an innovative culture Better than talking about methodologies or recipes to be innovative, this book shows how to create an in notice culture at a company independent of the industry. I loved it and strongly recommend it to anyone interested in innovation. Go to Amazon

Five Stars Four Stars Four Stars Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars Book usefulness and delivery time Four Stars I originally purchased this book as a required reading for ...

[raystart]

One House, Two Opinionated Designers, and the Joy of Collaboration

Ettore Sottsass was one of the most influential designers of the 20th century and David Kelley founded the design firm that ushered us into the 21st. But more than an ocean and a generation separates these two creative iconoclasts: Kelley is an unpretentious engineer from blue-collar Ohio who enjoys nothing more than a good tuna melt. Sottsass was the epitome of the Italian designer—mercurial, oracular, and slightly mischievous. Sottsass never knew what to make of Americans who eat fish out of cans (and then put cheese on it). Yet they remained the best of friends.

So in 2001, Kelley, flush with the success of his design firm, IDEO, asked Sottsass to build him a house in the horsey foothills above Silicon Valley, and Sottsass agreed. What followed was an elaborate courtship as the 80-something Italian architect and the 50-something American client, each of whom casts a long shadow across contemporary design, circled and sparred, thrust and parried, and together created an extraordinary house.

    The friendship between Kelley and Sottsass goes back a couple of decades to the glory days of Silicon Valley when “disruption” was not the only thing on everyone’s minds and interesting people were naturally gravitating toward each other. Kelley had just founded what was then David Kelley Design, and a mutual friend—Was it Steve Jobs?  Was it the art collector Johnny Pigozzi?— suggested that he seek out the legendary architect who had just jolted Milan’s fashionable design world with the opening of Memphis.  

Each was, in his own way, a bit of a renegade: Kelley had barreled out of Carnegie Mellon University with an electrical engineering degree and visions of rewiring the world. After six months spent at Boeing designing the circuitry for the “Lavatory Occupied” sign on the 747 he decided that this was not for him, and migrated toward the Valley just as the digital revolution was confronting designers with an endless wave of unprecedented challenges.  First he formed the Intergalactic Destruction Company; then Hovey-Kelley Design; then David Kelley Design, and finally IDEO. Sottsass, meanwhile, had just reinvented himself for the umpteenth time: The Memphis collection—with its bizarre collection of furniture objects crafted out of rare Brazilian hardwoods overlaid with cheap American formica, chrome tubing, and a red lightbulb—was only the latest provocation. At the opening of the Memphis showroom in 1981 one of Italy’s most revered furniture designers was heard to whisper, “You see? This lot has fucked us up for the next twenty years.”

As opposites attract, they were drawn to each other by a kind of mutual fascination. Sottsass lectured Kelley about the importance of metaphor while his muse, Barbara Radice, curled up on a sofa translating Sanskrit poetry. Kelley, not to be outdone, presented Sottsass with a package of Jiffy-Pop, which the architect spent days cleaning off the ceiling of his apartment in the Via Pontaccio. They liked each other, they respected each other, they complemented each other, but most of all, each got what the other was about without yielding one inch.

    Once they even decided to go into business together, launching a venture—Enorme—that would have been fatal to any normal friendship. The first product was a telephone: Sottsass designed a pure objet, accented with hints of Mondrian, Rietveldt and de Stijl, while Kelley’s firm handled the engineering. The Enorme telephone, with its logo of a gigantic Sumo wrestler, was instantly acquired by museum curators around the world—and by nobody else. From opposite sides of the Atlantic the partners watched in dismay as it passed from design to art, which is to say, became magnificently useless.

The friendship flourished, however, even as the partnership collapsed, and both began to think about what came next. Sottsass returned to architecture and to his newly-formed firm of Sottsass Associati. Riding the wave of Silicon Valley innovation, IDEO grew steadily to become certainly the largest and arguably the most influential design consultancy in history.  In time Kelley decided to move out of his loft in downtown Palo Alto and build himself a house. He did not spend a lot of time looking for an architect. 

Sottsass had already done some building in the United States—most notably a house in Ridgway, Colorado (1987-89) for the art collector Daniel Wolf and his wife, the celebrated sculptor-designer Maya Lin. But neither architect nor client had reckoned with the perversities of Silicon Valley, whose culture of technological adventurism is matched only by its hidebound architectural conservatism.  After endless applications, negotiations, inspections, and outright threats, the village elders of Woodside yielded, plans were approved, permits issued, contractors contracted, and the project got underway.

Ettore Sottsass, who believed that he understood David Kelley better than Kelley understood himself, did not begin by asking his client how many bathrooms he wanted. He asked him about his point of view on love, on food, on politics. Design, after all, is not about marrying form and functionality. It is, as he once reflected, “a way of discussing life.” Kelley tried to be helpful: He and his wife created a detailed process book of their daily life; they rented a helicopter and supplied aerial photographs of the building site; he shuttled back-and-forth to Milan, and fired off thousands of faxes. His confidence in Sottsass was great, and his requirements few: The only thing he specified was plenty of space to showcase his stuff.

    David Kelley had, after all, spent twenty years at the forward edge of design, and a fair amount of stuff had come his way: a canary-yellow Ducati that he parked in his living room; a coin-operated mechanical horse (“Sandy”) spirited away from outside of a grocery store; a 1948 Wurlitzer jukebox; an old bathroom scale that gives you honest weight and your fortune for a nickel; a shoebox containing the world’s first commercial mouse (which IDEO designed for Apple); a Braille edition of Playboy, complete with a pointillist bas-relief centerfold.

Sottsass told him to get rid of it. All of it. A house is for interrogating the present, he insisted, not memorializing the past. It is a space for meditating, for conjuring, for plotting against one’s enemies, and for writing a poem. It is not a machine for living in, as the Modernists had claimed, much less a warehouse of machines for living with. And so they circled one another, warily, tentatively, like a pair of giant Sumo wrestlers.

In The Art of War, the 4th century military strategist Sun Tzu argued that the most decisive victory is one in which your opponent believes that he has won. So it is with the house, which manages to express the intellectual vision of both architect and client.  In contrast to the sprawling trophy houses built for the princelings of the Silicon Valley dotconomy, the Kelley residence is not precious, lavishly-appointed, or large.  It takes the form, rather, of a spatial meditation on what is distinctive about California, and that proves to be the landscape.

      The result is a house consisting of five inside rooms with five outside “rooms”—courtyards, patios, play areas—negatively defined by the articulations of the building itself and blurred together on a single grade. Seen from the hillside above, there is absolutely no focal point, axis, or grid. Seen from a distance, it looks more like a village of little buildings than a house, with each room governed by a different architectural idiom: shingles on one, wood siding on another, brick on a third; there is a room with a flat roof, a room with a pitched roof, and a room with a barrel vault; a child’s room resembles a stylized playhouse—much as a child might have drawn it. 

The interior, likewise, bears the marks not of compromise but of a series of negotiated solutions.  Kelley’s approach to furniture is that of a hard-wired engineer:  (1) go to the store; (2) look at what they’ve got; (3) choose one. Sottsass takes a different approach: articulate a vision, then do what is necessary to make it happen. Kelley wanted smart-looking “Italian” chairs around the kitchen table. Sottsass refused: “No,” he thundered! “You want stupid American chairs,” and the solution was for Kelley to select a domestic icon—the ubiquitous, ladder-backed “schoolteacher’s chair” from which Mrs. Wormwood might have presided over the third grade. Kelley said he wanted a large open space for entertaining, but Sottsass forbade it because large rooms violate the human scale.  The solution is to break up the expansive living room-dining room-kitchen space with a forest of mysterious six-foot towers—“inscrutable Japanese boxes that make you wonder what’s in them”—that articulate the space without interrupting it.

    But on one account Sottsass prevailed: The collection of industrial detritus that is Kelley’s pride and joy has been exiled to his office, relegated to his garage, given to his friends, and consigned to the landfill. In their place stands a collection of Sottsass’ own ceramics, the architect’s secret first love but in their very uselessness an affront to the practical engineer: I have always imagined them, Sottsass once wrote, as “catalysts of perception,” emblems of a cosmos that is “neither measurable nor predictable nor controllable.” Ceramics are “older than the Bible, older than all the poems ever written, older than goats and cats, older than metals, older than houses.”

Older, even, than houses.

  ***

This essay was originally conceived as the Kelley-Sottsass house was being completed in 2001. Ettore Sottsass died in 2007 at the age of ninety, and David Kelley has recently moved onto the campus of Stanford University, where he is a professor. The house is now on the market.

[pianosheetmusicblr]

Adele

Adele Piano Sheet Music With Lyrics Here:

      Things You Might Not Know About Adele:

Consider what you would like the music to attain. Also concerning whether music can influence behavior I want to relate my private experience. At times it may seemed there is no standard; proper new music out there. There is a lot of new karaoke music to pick from. The song implicitly talks about how one attempts to escape from a busted relationship. Some songs aren’t fucking good enough,” she states. Her lyrics most likely don’t hurt, either.

In case you are wanting to the way to write to celebrities, then I’m certain to have already chosen who you’d like to write to. The actresses are amazing because you can understand precisely what they feel away from their expressions. It’s possible for you to vote for a different singer if you didn’t enjoy both of these two below.

Turn on any radio station on the planet and you will likely hear Adele. By just about any measure, Adele stands among the most prosperous entertainers alive. Adele asks the tiny guy on the monitor.

Adele has become very popular on MySpace. It is well-known that Adele isn’t interested in brand endorsements. Mostly, Adele is a prospect for Jane to clearly show her teaching abilities and her compassion. Adele is my favored singer and I’m a terrific admirer of her. To put it differently, Adele does not would like to turn into a brand. Adele brings plenty of knowledge and talent to the workplace. Yet Adele, of all folks, is a person who bids fair to remain true to herself.

The Awful Side of Adele

You’re not likely to obtain these on StubHub or TicketMaster. Just be certain your one of the few who receives a ticket. Tickets are offered through her site. You’re only like your next record. The title ought to be a dead giveaway this song isn’t a ballad or a story song. It seems that she’s now employing a stage name of Marina Kaye! Some think they’re the maximum music honor.

What Has to be Done About Adele

Most parents are unable to actually identify their kid has a difficulty till they realise that the youngster isn’t learning to talk easily. If your son or daughter has dyspraxia the Speech Pathologist is able to help you understand the conditions and the way they relate to your little one. Suffering mothers may have such sudden thoughts and feel very distressed. By 1965, 1 sister took over the business and chose to expand. Apparently the true Spice Girls were delighted.

You won’t have the ability to do away with me,” she declared. When you’re so utterly moved by something which you know you are going to not ever be the exact same again. You may see that they’re praising her so much, she’s overwhelmed. It’s tough to trust, but it’s true. It ought to be deeply uncool. It’s quite easy to sing. It is not just something which happens to other men and women.

The thing right now is Adele. It was really a substantial portion of my life as soon as the complete Girl Power thing happened. It’s satisfying to witness good individuals finally receiving their due, which doesn’t necessarily happen in real existence. My career’s not my lifestyle,” she states.

Adele and Adele – The Perfect Combination

Ideo-motor dyspraxia is every time a motor program can’t be executed (or carried out) properly, although the person does possess the notion of what should be accomplished. There’s likewise an acoustic edition. It is necessary for an adaptation to remember who’s telling the story, and the way it impacts the narrative.

Start making it a tradition of listening to radio or turning on an audio channel more frequently, then you’re likely to locate a good deal of new selections to pick from. The other truth may be typical statement. The emotion within her voice makes her songs quite easy to listen. In the U.S., it is named America’s Got Talent. Particularly when it’s authentic talent, terrific songwriting and a distinctive package. Best pop operation of the year was Someone just Like You. Therefore the noise in my existence just stopped.

Richard told her that she couldn’t utilize Camille to compensate for the simple fact they never had children. Soon Francis began to preach. Movie watchers who prefer artsy and foreign films will prefer this movie. Frank’s lesson on the best way to earn a pie needs to have made a strong impression on Henry. With lots of of work you’re able to housetrain some monkeys. It is an actual gangster thing, but I think that it’s really beautiful.

The post Adele appeared first on Piano Sheet Music.

from Piano Sheet Music http://pianosheetmusic.online/adele/

[evanvanness]

Annotated edition, Week in Ethereum News, Jan 19, 2020

This is the 6th of 6 annotated editions that I promised myself to do.  

Like last week, it’s an opportunity to shill my Gitcoin grant page.  Right now a 1 DAI (you can give ETH or any token) has an insane matching.  Where else can you get a 150x return on a buck?

There’s about 24 hours left at the time this was published.  

I shared on Twitter the graph of my subscriber count for the last 90 days:

The newsletter has gotten big enough to the point where the subscriber churn is enough to force negative days.  It used to be that the day I sent the email, I’d get 90% of my new subs for the week from posting on Reddit.  Now Reddit is saturated, and the number only goes up because of the long tail of word of mouth - which seems to be mostly seeded by the RTs of people who make the weekly most clicked as I post it to Twitter.

It’s clear that I’ve mostly bumped up against the ceiling of people who are willing to subscribe to a tech-heavy Eth newsletter.   Perhaps there are other marketing channels, but seems unlikely to find people who want a newsletter, even if they are Eth devs.

This annotated version is an attempt to test whether writing for a larger audience would succeed.  I think to some degree it has, but I also haven’t done a great job of contextualizing, nor adding narratives.  Still working on it.

Eth1

Notes from the latest eth1 research call. How to get to binary tries.

Guillaume Ballet argues for WASM precompiles for better eth1 to prepare for eth2

StarkWare mainnet tests find that a much bigger block size does not affect uncle rate and argues that a further decrease in gas for transaction data would be warranted

Guide to running Geth/Parity node or eth2 Prysm/Lighthouse testnet on Raspberry Pi4

Nethermind v1.4.8

Eth1 is moving toward a stateless model like Eth2 will have.  This will help make Eth1 easier to seamlessly port into eth2 when phase 1 is live.

In the meantime, people are figuring out what makes sense.  Is it WASM precompiles?  Will client devs agree to it? 

StarkWare wants to reduce the gas cost again, which would make rollup even cheaper and provide more transaction scalability. 

Eth2

The incentives for good behavior and whistleblowing in Eth2 staking

Danny Ryan’s quick Eth2 update – updated docs explaining the spec currently under audit

Options for eth1 to eth2 bridges and phase1 fee market

Simulation environment for eth2 economics

Ryuya Nakamura proposes the subjective finality gadget

Lighthouse client update – 40x speedup in fork choice, 4x database speedup, faster BLS

Prysmatic client update – testnet with mainnet config

A guide to staking on Prysmatic’s testnet

How to build the Nimbus client on Android

Evaluating Eth2 staking pool options

If you’re going to read one post this week in full, the “incentives for good behavior” is probably the one.  This isn’t new info, but it’s nicely packaged up and with the spec under audit, this is very likely to be the final info.  This answers many of the questions that people come to Reddit and ask.

Danny Ryan’s quick updates are also packed full of info.   

the spec is out for audit.  the documentation all got overhauled to explain the decisions -- ie, things needed for an audit -- with the expectation of a post-audit spec in early March.  Obviously we hope for minimal changes and then set a plan for lunch.

There’s been lots of talk about how long we need to run testnets for, but i think it’s quite clear that anything more than a month or so of testnets is overkill.  We’ve had various testnets for months, the testnets will get increasingly multi-client, including from genesis.  Phase 0 is going to be in production but not doing anything in production - a bit like the original release of Frontier in July 2015.

We should push to launch soon.  Problems can be hardforked away and the expectations should be very similar to the launch of Frontier.

Layer2

Plasma Group -> Optimism, raises round from Paradigm/ideo for optimistic rollups

Auctioning transaction ordering rights to re-align miner incentives

A writeup of Interstate Network’s optimistic rollup

Plasma Group changed their name to Optimism and raised a round.  It’s hardly a secret that layer2 has been a frustration in Bitcoin/Ethereum for years, with no solution reaching critical mass, and sidechains simply trading off decentralization/trustlessness.   Plasma Group decided to go for rollup instead of Plasma, due to the relative ease of doing fully EVM through optimistic rollup.  Respect to Paradigm for having conviction and leading the round, as well as IDEO.  

The auctioning of ordering rights is part of their solution.

Also cool is Interstate Network, who is building something similar.  I’m unclear why they decided to launch with a writeup on Gitcoin grants, but it is worthy of supporting.

Stuff for developers

Truffle v5.1.9, now Istanbul compatible.

Truffle’s experimental console.log

New features in Embark v5

SolUI: generate IPFS UIs for your Solidity code. akin to oneclickdapp.com

BokkyPooBah’s Red-Black binary search tree library and DateTime library updated to Solidity v0.6

Overhauled OpenZeppelin docs

Exploring commit/reveal schemes

Using the MythX plugin with Remix

Training materials for Slither, Echidna, and Manticore from Trail of Bits

Soon you’ll need to pay for EthGasStation’s API

As of Feb 15, you’ll need a key for Etherscan’s API

Hard to miss the “time to get a key” for the API trend.  But to be fair, it makes sense to require keys.  It’s not surprising that providing it for free is not a business model.

Ecosystem

Gavin Andresen loves Tornado.Cash and published some thoughts on making a wallet on top of Tornado Cash

MarketingDAO is open for proposals

Almonit.eth.link launches, a search engine for ENS + IPFS dweb

Build token pop-up economies with the BurnerFactory

Tornado.cash is such a huge thing for our ecosystem that I feel no problem highlighting it forever.   The complete lack of privacy isn’t 100% solved, but if you care about your privacy, Tornado Cash is super easy to use.  I’ve said it before, but participating in Tornado is a public good -- you’re increasing the anonymity set.

The dweb using ENS and IPFS is interesting, worth watching to see how it evolves, though currently it only has 100 sites.

I hope to see more pop-up economies happen.  It’s a great way to onboard people and give a better glimpse of the future than making people wait an hour for transactions to confirm.  

Enterprise

EEA testnet launch running Whiteblock’s Genesis testing platform

Plugin APIs in Hyperledger Besu

Privacy and blockchains primer aimed at enterprise

A massive list of corporations building on Ethereum

Sacramento Kings using Treum supply chain tracking to authenticate player equipment

Neat to see the Kings experimenting with new tech, even if in small ways.

Meanwhile that list of building on Ethereum has 700+ RTs at the moment.  Goes to the MarketingDAO above - there are many ETH holders who feel like Ethereum is undermarketed.

Governance and standards

EIP2464: eth/65 transaction annoucements and retrievals

ERC2462: interface standard for EVM networks

ERC2470: Singleton Factory

bZxDAO: proposed 3 branch structure to decentralize bZx

Application layer

Livepeer upgrades to Streamflow release – GPU miners can transcode video with negligible loss of hashpower so video transcoding gets cheaper

Molecule is live on mainnet with a bonding curve for a clinical trial for Psilocybin microdoses

Liquidators: the secret whales helping DeFi function. Good walkthrough of DeFi network keepers.

Curve: a uniswap-like exchange for stablecoins, currently USDC<>DAI

New Golem release has Concent on mainnet, new usage marketplace, and Task API on testnet

Gitcoin as social network

rTrees. Plant trees with your rDai

In typical Livepeer fashion, they didn’t hype up their release very much, but I think Streamflow could end up being very big. They think they can get the price point down for transcoders to being cheaper than centralized transcoders.  How? Because GPU miners want to make more money and GPU miners can add a few transcoding streams with negligible loss of hashpower.  This will become even more crucial when ETH moves to proof of stake, and miners will need to get more out of their hardware.

Lots of people loved rTrees.  As a guy who has done all the CFA exams, I have had the time value of money drilled into me too much to ever think of anything as “no loss” but people love the concept.

Psychedelic microdosing and tech has become a thing.  Tim Ferriss led fundraising a Johns Hopkins psychedelic research center, it will be interesting to see if Molecule becomes a hit in the tech community outside crypto.

Tokens/Business/Regulation

The case for a trillion dollar ETH market cap

Continuous Securities Offering handbook

The SEC does not like IEOs

Former CFTC Chair Giancarlo and Accenture to push for a blockchain USD

Tokenizing yourself (selling your time/service via token) was all the rage this week, kicked off by Peter Pan. Here’s a guide to tokenizing yourself

Avastars: generative digital art from NFTs

Speaking of the Eth community wanting more marketing, the trillion dollar market cap piece was the most clicked this week.

If you haven’t checked out Continuous Securities, it’s a neat idea.  

The tokenizing yourself trend is easy to laugh at or dismiss, but they’re some small experiments that are worth watching.

General

Chris Dixon: Inside-out vs outside-in tech adoption

baby snark: Andrew Miller’s tutorial on implementation and soundness proof of a simple SNARK

Blake3 hash function

Justin Drake explains polynomial commitments

New bounty (3000 USD) for improving cryptanalysis on the Legendre PR

Mona El Isa’s a day in the life for asset management in 2030. We need more web3 science fiction

SciFi and zero knowledge (”moon math” as it occasionally gets called) section.  

SciFi shows us the future, and zero knowledge solutions increasingly aren’t just the future, but also the present.

Full Week in Ethereum News post