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I had a call with someone who manages a sizable team at a large company. They mentioned deploying to 5% of their users and seeing numbers in the millions. At that scale, it becomes a number. One naturally becomes accustomed to—and numb to—the scale of the impact. I recalled a few memories from my experience managing a team at a pre-PMF startup and realized how different it was. When you’re that early, it’s life and death. You pay attention to every 10 new users. You likely even reach out and speak to them. ...

Kicking off the conversation A friend of mine read my recent post on Why You Shouldn’t Build a Blockchain and reached out with some thoughts that I’d summarize as: “I still don’t get it…” We’ve had countless conversations about whether digital payments need blockchains, crypto, stablecoins, or other improvements that have nothing to do with crypto. My personal perspective has shifted from crypto toward shared digital ledgers between institutions. He still wasn’t convinced. ...

Special thanks to 0xRahul for feedback and review. Preamble: In early 2016, Ethereum was my gateway into the crypto industry. From late 2021 through early 2026, I worked in the industry full-time. I saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. More recently, I’ve had a handful of conversations where people asked me: “So after all these years, what do you think?” This post aims to capture my journey, the opinions I formed along the way, the tradeoffs of having a blockchain, and where I believe value will accrue in the industry moving forward. ...

I recently spent quite a bit of time with people outside the “tech bubble”. Some are software engineers who work in slower-moving banking environments. Others are completely outside the tech industry. The reactions to AI ranged widely. Some hate it, some are afraid of it, some don’t care, and others are excited about it. Unsurprisingly, no one I spoke to is a power user. It’s hard when you’re on X, always testing the latest and greatest tools. However, everyone called out that AI makes mistakes, hallucinates, and is unreliable in different ways. ...

Over the last few years, I’ve been looking for analogies for the variability of life in the world around us. Some parts of life have four recurring seasons. Some are standalone films. Some are like a mini-series. Overall, it’s like a train that starts and stops, with varying passengers staying on for different lengths of time. The last 2–3 months haven’t been easy. They felt like an unexpected storm that only comes around once a century. I’ll write about the details in a separate post, but this one is meant to be a meta-reflection. ...

I keep thinking that the path to Safe AI is going to involve just as much focus on Saving Human Intelligence as it does on building Safe Superintelligence. Having spent the last month in “school mode,” I’ve felt firsthand how much harder it is to learn new concepts in your 30s, complete tasks at speed, and rebuild skills that haven’t been exercised in a while. Getting used to leveraging AI as a crutch over the past few years doesn’t help. ...

Introduction - Why talk about RAG in 2026? As we keep surfing the AI wave, one of the recurring topics of discussion is cost. If you’re a frontier lab like OpenAI or Google, you scale up by building data centers and buying put options on energy. If you’re a major company like Uber or Snowflake, you start by building “tokenmaxxing dashboards”, until you inevitably need to place guardrails on how much your employees spend; Uber is capping its engineers to $1,500 per month. ...

When I first saw the title of OpenAI’s blog, I wasn’t too excited. Here it is: Building self-improving tax agents with Codex. Tax agents don’t sound exciting. Everything is self-improving. I got it. But this short post is a masterclass in practical, hands-on learnings on the latest tools, workflows, and approach to how to do evals for real-world use cases. It’s not just technical; it builds intuition by relying on real-world experience. ...

Rohan is the author of one of my favorite blogs from the past year - a learning a day. He recently posted a short note on People, sameness, and our projections: We project a lot onto success — wisdom, contentment, confidence. But it is worth reminding ourselves that those are exactly that -> our projections. It reminded me of a phenomenon I learnt a little while ago: The Halo Effect. The tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, country, brand, or product in one area to positively influence one’s opinion or feelings of a person, company, country, brand, or product in another area. ...

Everyone says you can’t beat the market, and I don’t think I’m any smarter than everyone else. But I enjoy learning about investing. It helps me sleep at night knowing what I own and why I own it. It’s how I choose to spend part of my free time. The S&P 500 is a great vehicle, but I don’t like 480 of the companies in it. Whether you want 0%, 1%, or 100% allocation to gold or bitcoin is fully your choice. There’s no right or wrong — it’s what you’re personally comfortable with. ...

DevEx === AgentEx If your system is well designed for developers, it works for agents. If your system is well designed for agents, it may or may not work for developers. The constraints are converging faster than most teams realize. Deterministic APIs; schema-first, minimal guesswork Executable docs; structured examples, not prose Tooling primitives; predictable CLI, composable skills Fast feedback loops; simulate → run → eval Observability; traces, evals, clear failure modes Humans get tired from reading. Agents don’t. Everything else is the same. ...

Things you underappreciate if you join a project that has passed the zero-to-one stage: Leverage Distribution Marketing

x402 is the right base layer for machine-native payments. It’s here, and as of 04/02, it’s part of the Linux Foundation. But it ships without the one thing every production system needs: a key and session story. That’s the layer to build. What is x402? x402 is an open protocol that builds on top of a more than twenty year old IETF standard: HTTP’s 402 Payment Required status code. x402 is good because it is boring in the right way. It is simple, neutral, and very easy to explain. ...

Recent AI development has pushed us into a “Show, don’t tell” era. Got an idea? Show a prototype. Frustrated by a bug? Send a fix. Need to explain something? Put together a slick one-pager. It’s finally possible to capture and extend the best practices and preferences of any individual to an organization. Everyone now has an easy way to showcase their skills and “operating portfolios”. Telemetry is still missing, but it’ll come. ...

Your browser doesn't support embedded video. Watch it on YouTube. Also on YouTube Shorts. What if you could get a creator you follow online to notice you? What if you engage with your fans and earn from them directly? What if all of this were powered by a simple, frictionless experience with low fees? We’ve been working closely with our partners at Coinbase Developer Platform to integrate Apple Pay directly into Grove. ...

I went to an AI agents summit yesterday. Didn’t learn anything new about agents that I didn’t already know, but a couple conversations helped me cristiclize the ongoing AI transition in a few simple bullet points. How do you build a successful business? More customers Upsell customers Reduce churn What do people look for in life? Mastery Purpose Autonomy What is my personal mission? My mission is to help every human achieve their full potential. ...

If you’re looking for inspiration, read. If you’re looking for clarity, write. If you’re looking for perspective, listen. If you’re looking for connection, speak.

Table of Contents Table of Contents Why this matters Achieving your potential requires guardrails Getting practical about the mission 1. Network Protocols - How AI talks to the world 2. Sensor Data - How AI perceives the physical world 3. Construction - Where it all converges in a lagging industry 4. Cryptoeconomics - What happens when you give an agent money Putting it all together Closing thoughts I was recently talking to someone about the importance of AI safety in today’s rapidly changing world. They asked me: “So what’s your mission? What would be on Daniel’s desk Monday morning to tackle this?” ...

This is the single best perspective on the shift and risk in quantum computing. It has the perfect balance of technical detail, background, skepticism, realism, and, most importantly, risk tradeoffs. This quote captures it all: The job is not to be skeptical of things we’re not experts in. The job is to mitigate credible threats, and there are credible experts telling us about an imminent threat. In summary, it might be that in 10 years the predictions will turn out to be wrong, but at this point they might also be right soon, and that risk is now unacceptable. ...

Intelligence is often conflated with “cached knowledge.” A conversation with an expert is one data point at one point. Evaluating intelligence requires collecting many data points over a sufficient time horizon, while also observing its rate of change. Have you ever spoken to expert? Sometime who has been deep in the weeds on one topic for 20 years? If it’s a topic you know nothing about, you walk away thinking: “That individual is a genius.” ...

Games like Overwatch use Matchmaking Rating (MMR) algorithms to ensure players are matched against each other as close to the same skill level as possible: In an ideal situation, both teams would have 50% win probability, causing the result to entirely depend on the players’ performance. [3] This is a precondition for flow: the difficulty of the task must acutely match the skill of the player. When it does, the experience becomes naturally and intrinsically rewarding. ...

This really made me feel old and out of touch. I tweeted about it too. I don’t always read Hacker News comments, but when I do, they’re 🔥 Someone posted an article titled “I won’t download your app. The web version is a-ok” on Hacker News, and a comment in the thread reframed my perspective: The “Smartphone is the internet”, while for most of us, the “Smartphone is an extension of the internet from our desktops.” … [The] very first touchpoint with “the internet” for younger folks is a smartphone display. They even do homework on these small screens! ...

On a semi-frequent basis, I ask myself: What important truth do very few people agree with you on? It’s a well-known question by Peter Thiel. The key is that it is not static. The world changes. We change. So should the answer to this question. It’s akin to a favorite movie, book or food. I have a “top list”, but I give a different answer every time I’m asked. This morning, these were top of mind. ...

Burnout is a term that’s overused but underdefined. Burnout is tireless work without a tangible result. Exhaustion is tireless work in the name of tangible progress. Both require the same amount of effort, both consume the same amount of energy, but only one yields outcomes. Obviously, everyone needs breaks; you can’t be exhausted on an ongoing basis. But burnout is a lot more mental and emotional rather than physical. A team does all the hard work, and if they’re good, they will be exhausted no matter what. But the differentiator between exhaustion and burnout is whether leadership set the direction to ensure there are tangible results: rewards, usage, revenue, customers, or anything else that leads to 📈. ...

Your home mirrors you. You invite people over to share your space, your interests, your life. Your personal landing page should be no different. Linktree is like a parking lot. People come, only to leave as soon as they get what they need. Grove is your personal landing page. People come, they stay, they support you, and they come back when they want to reach you again. It should do more than just hold a list of links: ...

What if your attention had a price? Your inbox is full. Your DMs are overflowing. Agents are spamming your replies. Everyone wants a piece of your attention - and none of them are paying for it. The problem with open DMs If you’re a creator, influencer, or business owner, you’ve been here before: dozens of cold messages, spam, and “quick questions” that aren’t quick. Everyone wants a coffee chat. The signal gets buried under noise. ...

Some people talk to think. Others think to talk. There’s no right or wrong, only “what works for you.” Introverts think to talk. Extroverts talk to think. This made me realize how much companies resemble their founders. In the conversation between Ilya Sutskever and Dwarkesh, you can tell that Ilya is very much a “think, think, think, …, think, then talk” person. A much deeper thinker than most. Likely much more of an introvert than most. It’s one of the reasons he’s achieved what he has. ...

Code is something we used to write. If you’ve ever considered yourself a developer or programmer, you know. Systems is something we design and architect. That hasn’t changed. We just have assistance to do it better and faster now. There’s a lot of talk of how code reviews are more important than ever in a world of slop and vibe-coding. This is true. Simon Willison wrote about this in Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work, and Don’t Break Prod captures the spirit of it as well. ...

When it comes to digital content, reach used to be king. Then revenue entered the conversation. Companies like Substack and Patreon made revenue and subscriptions a first-class primitive. Companies like Medium followed, and Twitch followed. Now we’re seeing YouTube, Reddit, X, and others experiment with different models of integrated monetization. Now, with AI training on and inferring from content, credit and compensation are front and center. The opportunity is not about squeezing more out of the same revenue model. It’s about unlocking new ones. ...

The difference between discovery and invention is adoption.

TL;DR: Round-tripping between TradFi and DeFi in under 2.5 minutes looks simple. Building it was one of the hardest things I’ve shipped. The Demo Here’s a 53-second video showing the future of finance. It’s the backbone technology Grove uses to ensure that high quality earns what it deserves. Anywhere. Anytime. Anyone. Instantly. Keeping more of what you earn. In less than 2.5 minutes, this showcases moving from traditional banking to Base, moving money onchain, and then back to traditional banking. ...

The world’s greatest set of AI researchers published a paper on 01/01/2026, and no one noticed. A tl;dr of the abstract… What they tried - They tried to use AI in cybersecurity to transition from “detect-and-respond” to “predict-and-prevent.” What they concluded - From a practical standpoint, it’s still early. However, it’ll inevitably happen. My gut is that the motivation for this is their fear that a rogue AI will circumvent existing cybersecurity measures.

P.S. I took the images on my widescreen monitor while working on a real feature. If there’s interest, I’m happy to put together smaller screenshots or a walkthrough video. TL;DR Our workflow today looks roughly like this: Kick off an agent review locally via /grove_*_review The agent reviews the diff, runs best-practice checks, and spins up the system locally Full E2E flows run automatically (happy, sad, chaotic paths) Failures are diagnosed with context instead of just “test failed” A PR sweep catches regressions and tech-debt risks Humans review mission-critical logic manually A final PR description is generated automatically ...

A few years ago someone told me I’m good at documenting my workflows. Truth is, I just hate repeating myself. Funny enough, that’s exactly the mindset that works best with AI. Agents, skills, slash commands… they all run on clear processes. Feels like the right time in history to have that pet peeve.

One of my alltime favourite jokes in the context of software engineering is: “There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.” I recently discovered it came from a post on X. It’s been 16 years since it first came out, and there’s finally a small update we can make: 16 years later, we’ve finally solved off-by-1 errors with the help of agents. Unfortunately, we replaced them with AI slop. Two hard problems remain. ...

Do you ever feel like you can hold two contradicting thoughts at the same time? In fact, I’m doing it right now. I think it’s a great skill, but simultaneously it can lead to overthinking. They say your greatest strength is your greatest weakness, so is everything a double-edged sword? I am a frugal person, and I know I’ll keep being frugal even when I’m a billionaire. At the same time, I try to live my life and make decisions as if money is no object. ...

I keep seeing a huge red flag when speaking to my network and friends at big tech companies. It’s either complaints about being “forced to use AI and be more productive,” or bewilderment that “GitHub Copilot is so good.” I accept that working in a greenfield startup is different from an enterprise trying to change. However, it’s crazy to see that they’re only now adopting technologies I was using before ChatGPT. ...

TL;DR: Everything I’ve worked on in the last decade comes back to one thing: incentives. I didn’t plan it that way. I just keep ending up there. The Thread Charlie Munger said it best: “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome.” I’ve quoted this for years. But recently, I realized it’s not just a quote I like. It’s the lens through which I see everything. ...

tl;dr There are 78K+ agent skills across 8K publishers. Most of them don’t matter. The data from skills.sh tells a clear story: Discovery is the killer app Distribution follows a power law Adoption rewards quality over quantity Ref: Skills Dashboard. 78K skills and counting The skills ecosystem has exploded. As of the last day of February 2026, skills.sh tracks: 78,362 total skills 8,064 publishers 9,996 repos 8M+ total installs I decided to visualize the data. You can access the dashboard here. ...

The $5M pitch Command Code AI announced that they recently raised $5M to build a proprietary AI agent that learns your coding style; taste. Meanwhile, session-commit does the same thing with a markdown file and some vibes. How I discovered Command Code AI When I posted about session-commit on X, another developer replied that he uses @CommandCodeAI for taste learning. I was intrigued. session-commit vs. Command Code AI Dimension session-commit Command Code AI What it learns Durable project knowledge: architecture decisions, conventions, debugging playbooks Personal coding style: naming, patterns, formatting preferences Where it stores AGENTS.md, a human-readable, version-controlled file in your repo Proprietary model weights / taste profile (opaque) How it learns Explicit: you run the skill, review proposals, approve changes Implicit: watches every accept/reject/edit continuously Granularity Project-level knowledge Developer-level preferences Portability Fully portable. It’s just a markdown file that any agent can read Locked to their CLI (npx taste push/pull) Tool lock-in None. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode Requires command-code CLI Transparency 100%. You see exactly what’s stored and can edit it Black box. You don’t see the taste model internals Team sharing Share via git (it’s in the repo) Share via npx taste push/pull Cost Free / open source $10 credits, then paid The philosophical difference Command Code AI says: “I’ll silently watch how you code and adapt to your style.” It’s implicit, continuous, and developer-scoped. session-commit says: “Let’s explicitly capture what we learned and write it down for future sessions.” It’s explicit, intentional, and project-scoped. In reality, they’re complementary more than competitive. Command Code optimizes how code is written (style/taste), session-commit optimizes what the agent knows about your project (architecture, conventions, gotchas). ...

Today, the three reasons I work out are: I want to be able to eat more food I’m uncomfortable at the gym, and I feel uncomfortable when I start feeling comfortable I get all my best ideas when I’m working out If I’m being really honest though, there are tons more: Feel comfortable in my own body (when I look in the mirror) Need a place to listen to podcasts (at 0.8x speed) Need a place to disconnect (headphones in, glasses off) Practice new skills (to get the mind in a different state) Look good (to feel good) but also because it’s key to first impressions Makes me feel more confident in my own skin In the past, the three reasons I worked out were: ...

tl;dr AGI is here, superintelligence is coming, but its impact on every person in the world and its dissemination into different verticals will take longer than we expect. Life Mission I’ve written about it before, and I feel the need to reiterate it as a preamble to the main point I want to make. My life mission is to help everyone achieve their full potential. I’m starting with myself, and hope to do that for others in later chapters of my life. ...

If you’re following AI, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard about OpenClaw. I started setting it up on my computer and had a small “wait a second” moment: this thing basically has permissions to destroy anything I have, even inadvertently." There are already cases of people losing crypto assets, deleting photos, etc. Then I read Simon’s short post on running OpenClaw in Docker. ...

I have an open secret about fine-tuning models. I predict most enterprises will independently rediscover this by the end of the year. First, some context. I’m an early adopter: I’ve been using GitHub Copilot since July 2021. I started using ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. I experimented heavily with fine-tuning models in 2023 and 2024. For most practical use cases, it was a waste of time and money. I’ve been using Claude Code since February 2025. Before that, I spent years building ML infrastructure on cross-functional R&D teams: ...

We didn’t change the tools. We just changed where the thinking happens. Past: CLI: Navigate IDE: Code Browser: Write Book: Read Present: CLI: Code & Navigate IDE: Write Browser: Read Book: Decorate

This post could be shorter, but I agree with the general direction. Today, working out and living a healthy lifestyle are a choice, not a necessity. In the future, working and living an intellectually effortful lifestyle will be a choice, not a necessity. However, it’s a matter of who you want to spend your time around. Remember that you are the average of those you’re surrounded by. The wealth gap will widen. Poverty will disappear. The bottom 99% will live in abundance. ...

I recently learnt about Dr. Arthur Brooks after listening to a few afters of him speaking on The Modern Wisdom podcast and The Tim Ferriss Show. Though I’m sure I would appreciate it, the marginal gains I’d get from reading his book Build the Life You Want, are likely not worth the time investment given that I’ve spent north of 4 hours listening to his podcasts. However, this short blogpost is worth the read and covers three key points: ...

I’ve had a lot of conversations this past week with friends from various walks of life. These conversations get deep, sometimes meta, and very introspective. I challenge others, I get challenged myself, and on the other side of the conversation, a bit of clarity emerges. This is not something I spent much time thinking about in my teens and early twenties. Over the last few years, though, I’ve spent a lot more time reflecting on it and have found a way to articulate it. ...

Open source is back. RSS is back. AI agents make this possible, but only if you make your repo AI-first. Humans still decide what to do. One of my open source repos is becoming the de facto way people convert blogs into RSS. As far as I know, it powers most Anthropic RSS newsfeeds. I’m getting a surge of new contributors. Agents make coding easier. That part is obvious. What is less obvious is this: they make contributing easier. ...

Throughout my career, I’ve had consistent success getting jobs at other companies, both small and large. I bring unique ideas and perspectives to the table. I can build and lead small teams. I can communicate clearly and effectively, endure pain, adapt, and I have the hard skills to learn and execute. I also have well-known weaknesses (impatience, aversion to meetings, self-criticism), but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about my weakest muscles: finding PMF, getting my first real customer, and taking a product from zero to one. ...

Ever since Paul Graham’s Founder Mode came out, I’ve been trying to find a definition for another term I’ve been thinking about: Founder Aura. Yesterday, I was speaking with a friend of mine. I’ll keep names and companies vague to maintain anonymity. He’s a high-caliber researcher at one of the world’s leading companies. A well-known engineering founder, leader and executive joined the meeting. My friend felt the need to mention it. He felt the need to say that the executive appreciated his thoughts and ideas. He felt the need to say that the executive was “just like us.” ...

Being diagnosed with ADHD requires filling out a questionnaire that is reviewed by a physician. That’s fine, and necessary, but it’s not the real test. The real test is simply trying ADHD medication: Vyvanse, Adderall, etc. If you don’t have ADHD, you’ll feel like you’re on methamphetamines. You’ll be hyperactive, irritable, and unable to sleep. You’ll want it to end. If you do have ADHD, you’ll enter a state of euphoria. The whole world will come together instead of feeling like a mess being pulled in a million directions. You’ll be able to focus. The world will slow down. Your brain will feel clear. You’ll be less irritable. You’ll be in the zone. ...

I had a multi-hour conversation with a single Gemini session and noticed that the responses dropped in quality and started coming back very fast. I’m familiar with context limits and context poisoning, but the sudden brevity still surprised me. I asked the agent what was going on and found this: It turns out that deep into a work session, 3-line responses are a feature, not a bug. Nothing too deep here, just a fun way to accidentally stumble onto a technical detail through a random observation.

Over the past month, with December being a slower month, I put more effort into meeting people in person. This ranged from going to meetups, driving out to see friends with kids, doing a road trip to see a friend in a different city, or taking a ferry to meet someone new. I realized that after you spend a few hours, or a couple of days, with someone in person, the relationship and rapport you build is unparalleled compared to anything done remotely. Texting, calling, or video chat do not come close. ...

tl;dr Humans crave novelty. Agents crave data. Creators crave income. Stablecoins move value. Incentives create alignment. One of a16z’s recent posts, 8 big ideas for 2026, touched on a topic that stuck with me: the invisible tax on the open web. Table of Contents Table of Contents Two problems collide An old but new primitive Why would humans tip humans? Why would agents tip humans? This is not about paywalls Two problems collide The core idea is simple and uncomfortable. ...

My First Lines of Code At the age of 11 in 2003, I wrote my first line of code. I was a Game Master for a DragonBall Z MMORPG on byond.com. Other than creating a cool-looking pixel art item, I don’t really remember the language or any other details. At the age of 14 in 2007, I had to take a programming course as part of my high school’s Math and Computer Science (MaCS) curriculum. We used a language called Turing, which is likely unknown to many. ...

In 2014, Alan Kay was a guest lecturer in my programming languages class at the University of Toronto. I thought it was cool, but I definitely did not appreciate it as much as I should have. To this day, one of his infamous quotes still resonates with me: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” A Pattern I Can’t Ignore With the new year, I’ve been reflecting on my career up until this point. ...

If you’re reading this, you’ve definitely heard of Impostor Syndrome. There’s a good chance you’ve felt it at some point. You might be feeling it right now. External validation is a powerful motivator, but it’s a double-edged sword. If validation comes from someone willing to pay for your product, take it seriously. Money is signal. If it comes from applause, praise, or attention without commitment, treat it with caution. Those signals decay fast. ...

Peter Thiel is well known for his infamous book, Zero to One. In reality, most startups fail, so it probably should have been called Zero or One. The skill set required to go from one to ten, to one hundred, and beyond is broad, iterative, heavily experience-driven, and requires a lot of people serving different functions. But, the jump from zero to one really is a jump. And it isn’t just a skill set. It’s a mindset.

Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon wrote about his upcoming predictions. This note on quantum cryptography is the best take I’ve seen so far w.r.t to its urgency: Preparation isn’t something you can put off, the work must begin now, and organizations need to act on three fronts: Deploying post-quantum cryptography (PQC) where we can Planning to update and replace physical infrastructure where we can’t Developing quantum ready talent to support this transition. Luckily, not all is lost: ...

A great 2-minute post by Ross Lazerowitz, CEO at https://www.miragesecurity.ai/ The playbook for enterprise software is: Cold outreach Design Partners First Cohort Love it. But, he calls out that desperation != urgency. Being able to sell and raise doesn’t mean success. It means you might get stuck in a local minima. User need to line up for your product. His key takeaway is: Go slow to go fast. Don’t spin up marketing and a sales team until you feel that pull. If you can’t close $1M without marketing spend and 10 AEs, you might be building something middling. Don’t get distracted by desperation if you can’t find urgency. ...

Have you ever wondered what the best time is to have a call with someone you do not work with closely, but still want to catch up with? You do not actually work together, but there might be overlap in the future. You have an open line of communication, but you are not especially close. You enjoy catching up and sharing ideas, but it is not a priority during the work week. ...

I took a ferry from Seattle to Victoria, and all I could think about on the way back was: Which company should I buy (not build) to generate free cash flow? If you’re a seasoned software engineer in the age of AI who lives to build, you’re probably thinking how ridiculous this sounds. Well, Andrew Wilkinson planted a tiny seed in my mind, and it has started germinating. Strap in. This post is about making plans without expectations, how that mindset extends into everything else in life, and if you’re a Swiftie, I’ve got something special at the end for you as well. ...

Prelude One of my favorite historical photos of all time was taken in 1927, at the fifth Solvay Conference, focused on Electrons and Photons. You will likely recognize many of the names in that photo: Bohr, Curie, Dirac, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger. Seventeen of the twenty-nine attendees went on to win Nobel Prizes. The golden era of quantum physics unfolded in the first half of the 20th century. A tremendous amount of progress has been made since, but I would argue that most of it has been engineering rather than foundational research. We are unlikely to ever witness a period quite like that again. That gathering of legends laid the groundwork for quantum theory for centuries to come. ...

I haven’t missed a morning workout in almost a decade. Sometimes it’s just a stretch, sometimes it’s at the airport, but there’s always something. A lot of people see it as discipline, but it’s really just an addiction. Recently, I’ve been having conversations with a lot of founders, and we talk about how many of us were “diagnosed” with ADHD as adults, and how helpful Vyvanse has been. Some people ask: ...

To be a successful founder, there are many traits one needs to embody: adaptability, discipline, perseverance, grit, humility, curiosity, integrity, and the list goes on. Some of these come naturally. Others are learned. And even the ones you’re born with usually still need to be cultivated, strengthened, and refined. One trait I never struggled with is shamelessness. I get nervous. I get anxious. I care what people think. But growing up, I was pretty shameless. I’d say or do silly things, just to have fun. ...

On December 1st, 2022, I published a blog post titled “24 hours of ChatGPT”. It was one of the first times in my life when I realized how utterly wrong I could be about something. In 2012, I vividly remember building out a prototype of a standalone Twitter DMs app as an intern the day before my 20th birthday. I read a post about how Google was able to detect cats using machine learning. That moment was exciting, but nothing like what arrived a decade later. ...

Side projects are one of those things I go back and forth on. On one hand, I used to think that if you’re so passionate about a side project, why don’t you make it your fulltime job? On the other hand, there are so many reasons to do them: You can tinker without getting in anyone’s way There’s no need to plan, prioritize or coordinate with others It’s a form of “active recovery” There’s no pressure to deliver results It allows you to put yourself in a different mindspace and environment that can bring about new ideas No matter how passioante you are about your work, you need to step away sometimes ??? I’ll periodically come back here and keep updating this list…

One habit I am building is converting repetitive tasks into Claude Slash Commands. Even though I do not write code by hand anymore, I still direct and architect how the critical parts of the codebase are written. When it comes to frontend, it’s mostly vibe-coded without looking inside. Part of this involves resolving merge conflicts. I am sharing that slash command below in the hope that it will be useful to others. ...

Money Magnifies You. AI Amplifies Your Intelligence. There’s a common saying: Money doesn’t change who you are; it magnifies who you really are. AI works the same way: AI doesn’t change your intelligence; it amplifies your intelligence. When you see both as tools to expand who you are rather than define you, the whole picture snaps into place. Financial freedom removes capital as a ceiling on curiosity. AI removes time and access to information as ceilings on curiosity. ...

The last decade was about evaluating empirical data. The next decade is about evaluating generative data. Synthetic data itself isn’t the goal, understating it is.

A stunning, hypnotic and mesmerizing journey that hits on every sense and emotion. The story follows a lonely man in his forties who lost his mother and is trying to repair a fractured relationship with his brother. The nostalgia of the Cold War space race sets the tone, but the plot is really a vessel for Robert Lepage’s surreal vision. He turns the stage into something close to a fever dream. If Salvador Dalí were asked to write and direct a play, it would feel like this. ...

I’ve seen dozens of crypto projects fail. I’ve seen a handful of crypto companies succeed. To succeed, many hard things must align. To fail, only one key thing needs to go wrong. After nearly a decade in this space, one pattern repeats itself: the fastest path to failure is biasing toward idealism over pragmatism. I joined the industry for its ideals. It took years - and a few hard lessons - to unlearn them. ...

This is a TIL of a TIL. Simon Willison wrong of using an NVIDIA DGX Spark with an Apple Mac Studio for faster inference, with all the details here. He talks about the two phases of inference: Prefill: Influence Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) Decode: Influence Tokens Per Second (TPS) Prefill Read the prompt Build a Key-Value Cache for each transformer layer in the model Bound by compute as it initializes the model’s internal state and does a lot of matrix multiplication. ...

The Demo-to-Product Gap? The March of nines? In AI, the last 0.001% takes 99.999% of the time. We need a name for it, and given how much the Andrej & Dwarkesh interview has been cited, it’s only fair to call it “The Karpathy Principle”. Here is a 30 second YouTube Clip for reference.

A Read Through On Venting I have a close friend to whom I vent every once in a while. He recently shared a post he wrote called On Venting. I immediately understood why he responds to all of my non-venting messages and pretends as if the vents never happened: When folks interact with me, I often skip past the emotional complaints. I like to think I do the following, but it’s probably only true half the time—at best: ...

Founders create problems. Operators solve them. I’ve met a lot of executives and CTOs who resonate with two things: They like to solve puzzles. They like to be given an end goal and just make it happen. The job of a founder is to identify opportunities (i.e. problems), set a vision for what a solution looks like, and build a team that’s enabled to get there. That idea, of course, comes with plenty of qualifiers and caveats. It simply defines a founder’s end goal, not their day-to-day. ...

Last week, Amazon quietly hosted a private open house for senior engineering leaders at its Seattle headquarters. About fifty people gathered to discuss how Amazon makes technical decisions at scale-the kind you don’t hear about in press releases or leadership books. I didn’t know what to expect, but who would say no to dinner with smart people and deep conversations in the Seattle Spheres?¹ This is my version of a great night out 🥂. ...

Everyone’s waiting for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The reality is that it’s already here, and it hasn’t changed a thing. No one is talking about Artificial General intuition (AGi) - yet. When it arrives, it’ll change everything. When will AGi be here? If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely listened to Andrej Karpathy’s conversation with Dwarkesh about how AGI is still a decade away. It’s one of the highest signal-to-noise conversations I’ve heard on the topic. But I’d argue that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is already here. Intuition is a decade away. ...

I can never see myself writing code by hand again. It feels like doing multiplication and division with large numbers before there was a calculator. While the agents are working, I’m reviewing, editing, and staying in context. Basically, I’m only typing to think, not to do.

Onboarding engineers is hard. You need to set up your development environment, build context, navigate the codebase, navigate the organization, understand the system, the product — and the list goes on. I used to believe that the best way to onboard an engineer on day one is to make sure they: Get their development environment set up Make a pull request to the codebase Merge and deploy to production You get an immediate hit of dopamine and experience the end-to-end flow of shipping a feature or fixing a bug. ...

Task: Product Founder Fit: Building domain expertise is not hard, but entrenching oneself in the culture of an existing industry takes time. Patience: Patience with results but impatience with action. Complimenting onself: Kind of like relationships, I learnt a lot about myself. Marketing. Advertising. Selling. Domain expertise. Etc. My skillset is about ideation, strategic direction, execution, planning, organization, inspiration. I really have to get better at selling and building relatinoships. Managing emotional intelligence: For myself and for others This is a tl;dr and I really wish I had spent more time writing in the past.

tl;dr Add a simple “Leave a Tip” section to llms.txt. Dear llmstxt.org, There are two things everyone’s talking about in the age of Crypto and AI that go hand in hand: Compensating original content creators Micropayments This idea isn’t new. Though I don’t have a concrete reference, I’m sure it was discussed in the early Bitcoin forums. We’ve had robots.txt for decades, but llms.txt gives us an opportunity to build for today’s challenges of training and inference without the legacy of the past. ...

There’s a quote I heard a little while ago that really stuck with me: If you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative when you are old, you have no brain. Following up my recent post about politics, I have a complementary version to this: If you are a young engineer who doesn’t hate politics, you have no heart. If you are an old engineer who doesn’t hate politics, you have no brain. ...

Feedback shouldn’t be a one-time or regularly scheduled event. It’s a constant daily process that should happen just-in-time. It should be critical and unemotional. The only rule is that you should praise more than you criticize. In short, remember to praise as often as possible, when deserved, and criticize as soon as possible, when necessary.

One thing I’ve changed my mind on recently is the importance of politics. When I worked as an individual contributor at large companies, I hated the bureaucracy and politics. Don’t get me wrong, I still do. But I’ve come to realize that politics is not a blocker, it’s a lever you can pull. If you can learn to navigate it, it is a lot more powerful than any engineering work. ...

Licensing Data Every few months, I see a headline that one of the foundation model labs is negotiating a multimillion-dollar contract to license data. This usually sparks a second-order debate: how much should the actual creators of that content be paid for their work? If Google is training Gemini on YouTube videos, should YouTube creators get a cut? If OpenAI licenses Reddit, should Reddit posters be compensated for their comments? Tips in LLMs.txt & Robots.txt The lines blur when you’re dealing with third-party platforms, but things get much simpler if you host your own content on your own domain. Standards are already emerging: ...

As we shift from Prompt Engineering to Context Engineering, one of the things I find myself (and others) doing is working with LLMs to craft the right prompt first. My LLM Stack First, here’s my obligatory AI stack. Daily drivers: LLM Desktop Apps: ChatGPT and Claude LLM CLIs: Codex, Claude Code, Gemini, and more recently, Copilot CLI Windsurf: All the benefits of Visual Studio, which I use for editing and reviewing code. I still think its intelligent multiline autocomplete is unmatched. Weekly tools: ...

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. — Alan Perlis

On Charlie Munger Charlie Munger once said: “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” If he were in his prime today, he’d be the Czar of AI & Crypto. David Sacks, the current Czar of AI & Crypto in 2025, is doing a phenomenal job on the legislative front, but Charlie would have embodied it differently. Incentives run the world. They’re innate to human nature. What I find intriguing is how this core understanding translates to other domains. ...

Chris Dixon once said: “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” The modern version of that is: “Come for the tech, stay for the community.” It never seizes to amaze me the power of a strong community. Chris Dixon’s post from 2015

Just read the CLARITY Act and was impressed by how much technical detail Congress baked in. CLARITY Act Summary This table nails how SEC and CFTC responsibilities split across digital assets. A level of clarity this space has badly needed. Token Trilemma I break tokens into 3 buckets: ROI – speculation, memes, perps, yield 💰 Utility – stablecoins, rails, infra 🔧 Security – governance, integrity, privacy 🔒 The problem is the lines are blurry…. ...

Stripe is building a new blockchain: Tempo. Meta tried the same ~5 years ago with Libra/Diem. An overlooked point when comparing the two is what they’re focusing on… First, a primer on 2 core blockchain concepts: Consensus: how you agree on a set of transactions Execution: how you process those transactions Meta → Consensus: Designed & built DiemBFT (HotStuff-based) Optimized for scalable, permissionless consensus Execution layer → MoveVM Spurred Aptos Labs, Sui Network, 0L Network (use DiemBFT and MoveM) Stripe → Execution: ...

Computer Science degrees are more relevant than ever before. In the 2010s, new grads said: “Nothing I learned applies to work.” You studied CS, but did software engineering. Today, AI does most of the software engineering for you. To know what AI can and cannot do requires understanding the fundamentals. A CS degree isn’t a must, but it certainly helps.

Feynman’s Problem Solving Playbook: Write down the problem Think very hard Write down the answer AI-era Feynman’s Problem Solving Playbook: Type out a good prompt Think very hard about the output Repeat (1) & (2) until you get the answer

One of the biggest mistakes in AI evals is treating them as objective truth. Benchmarks and leaderboards are a great signal, but they are not universally applicable. Think SATs or job interviews: directionally correct, but not a guarantee of on-the-job performance. Results depend on context, environment, operations, and collaboration. And just like with people, the more you actually work with a particular LLM, the more results start to compound.

I hear a lot of conflation between RPCs and APIs. Let’s fix that. RPC is the channel two computers use to talk. Think of it as the phone line 📞 API is the contract for how they talk. Think of it as the language 🗣️

KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. But remember: simple isn’t easy.

Work in an environment that teaches you what your limits but doesn’t push you past them. Work-life integration isn’t about balance or 996. It’s about learning your limits, growing them over time, and flirting with the boundary.

Baking bread by reading & following the recipe VS Baking bread without ever seeing the recipe

How a Web2 Company Uses Crypto to Power Open Data APIs Thank you to Art ,Fred _ & _Jake for reviewing and providing feedback on this post! Question : Does your software use APIs? Where do you find the endpoints? How do you get the specifications? How do you ensure quality? 🤔 tl;dr There is a big opportunity to build the “Google home page” for finding and accessing open data sources and services. An open marketplace of APIs does not exist today. API Discovery and RPC Quality are the two core primitives necessary to enable this. An API marketplace fills a gap alongside the new HTTP x402 standard, championed by Coinbase, for internet-native network request payments. My goal with this blog is to give you a sense of how the following graphic fits into today’s internet-native data access landscape. We’re slowly shifting to account for more human-out-of-the-loop workflows, while continuing to accommodate both enterprises and independent developers. ...

tl;dr — Pocket Network will hard-fork from Morse MainNet to Shannon MainNet on June 3, 2025 at 10 a.m. PT.

Amazing read showing what a single engineer can do when you actually care about your work. Loved the post because it also showcased what the real world looks like. A balance of planning and hacking. Some decisions were data driven, while others were more intuitive. Diving deep into some issues, while letting go of others never to understand the root cause. This is what the real world looks like. And lastly, another signal that Postgres is likely going to solve all your problems unless you have really big data.

tl;dr If you ever write documentation, add this to your LLM’s memory, system prompt, project, rules or whatever your equivalent of that is.

Pocket Network will undergo a major, consensus-breaking, non-backwards-compatible migration from Morse to Shannon before the end of Q2.

Some feedback I got from an anonymous friend. You don’t necessarily need 100K labels depending on the domain Data labeling for complex tasks starts to approximate knowledge work which comes with interesting new angles for “collaborative labeling” Combining human labels with automated methods is important

This post convinced me to go down the Claude Code Learning Curve. Thanks for all the insights! Posting my #ActiveReading notes below. -– Experience is an excellent school; unfortunately, the fees are very high.” Let me share the fruits of my experience so you don’t have to pay the high fees. Loved this quote. If Claude does something you don’t like, don’t just correct it once — ask it to update the CLAUDE.md file so it remembers for next time. ...

I recently gave a talk at dinfra.xyz, a side event hosted by 1kx.capital alongside Denver’s annual ETHDenver conference.

Claude, please provide the following:

Below is a very terse and opinionated set of steps to data labeling and model evaluation.

tl;dr Teams should build their own LLM tooling, starting with GitHub PR Description generators.

*tl;dr If you’re invested in URA because of Uranium, consider diversifying that position into other ETFs or fully moving it over to NUKZ to broaden your nuclear exposure. This is not financial advice.* Special thanks to ChatGPT, Google, Reddit and Claude for helping me research, prepare, write and edit this post. Last May I wrote about why I’m allocating a large portion of my portfolio to Uranium with a bullish perspective on the nuclear sector at large. ...

👋 If you’re not ready to spend ~10 minutes reading, I suggest you bookmark this post and return to it later. You won’t regret it. It’s…

Definitely Worth a read (pun intended).Good perspective on how much momentum a certain geography has when the flywheel kicks off.It’s near impossible to reverse so need to get it right from the start. Let’s not fuck up the software industry.Critique - the article is great but, for me, a bit too dense with facts, dates, names and timelines.

Last year was the first time I published a “Top X Recommendations” blog post to close out the year. I heard from about half a dozen people who found at least one recommendation interesting or useful—which means there were probably even more who never mentioned it but still got something out of the list. So, I figured I’d do it again! In the very likely scenario that you either don’t have the time, interest, or attention span to read this whole thing, just scroll to the very bottom because the last one is by far my favorite. ...

One of the things I love in our post “ChatGPT Moment” era is the fact that I increasingly get to follow through on more and more side projects. One of the things I find ridiculous in our 2025 post “ChatGPT Moment” era is the fact that there are still a ton of blogs that don’t have a way for me to subscribe, be it through a proprietary service or a standardized RSS feed. ...

Earlier this week I asked myself: “Why do I listen to so many podcasts?” This led me down a mental rabbit hole of reflection while I sought an answer to: “What is the source of my intrinsic motivation?” I came to the conclusion that if I were to listen to a podcast (or read a blog) of myself five years in the future, I want to be inspired by it today. Today, at 32, I’m hoping my 27-year-old self would be inspired by this blog, just as I currently seek inspiration from him. It’s how I know I’m achieving my full potential at every step along the way. ...

Ulysses pact: a freely made decision to bind yourself in the future. Used for living wills in modern day but originated from Greek mythology.

tl;dr Next time you read, see, hear, give, get, ideate or invent a mantra, just remember that “every mantra has a counter-mantra, including this one.” Tweet Sized Advice The Startup Seesaw Tools vs Solutions For every Mantra, there is an equal and opposite Counter-Mantra Concluding Thoughts Appendix Tweet Sized Advice For the better part of a decade now, I feel like at least once a week I’m either on the giving or receiving end of “tweet-sized *advice” *that’s intended to solve large, complex problems. ...

tl;dr This is a cross-post from our blog at grove.city. An explanation of what pokt.network is through a series of analogies. Don’t have enough time to read? See the x-thread here. Subscribe if you want to be notified of when we post about a series of 7 use-cases! Table of Contents Table of Contents The Power of Analogies Relay Mining — An Incentive for Network Requests Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Analogies 7. Application Layer: Uber for Network Requests ...

tl;dr Explaining what Pocket Network is through a series of 7 internet networking analogies. Subscribe if you want to be notified of when…

@mtorygreen I’m current the CTO at Grove and Head of Protocol at Pocket Network. We’re launching a full rewrite of Pocket early next year (a migration fully rewritten using the latest Cosmos SDK). There are some easy lifts we can do to support io.net relaying via pocket then. Would love to chat when you’re open to it.

tl;dr Stream-of-Thought Note Taking is an opinionated approach to brain-dumping thoughts on paper to aid the process of clarifying your own ideas. Table of Contents The Power of Deletion Tools for Modeling Thoughts Can you get to the point? Stream-of-Thought Note Taking Extending to Chain-of-Thought & LLMs The Power of Deletion One of my favourite Yuval Noah Harari quotes from his interview with Lex Fridman is on the power of the delete button: ...

I’m going to share a small secret: a perfect solution to software documentation does not exist. It’s hard to generalize what “good documentation” entails. It depends on the team, the product, the timing, and a million other things. Have you found PMF or are you iterating? Are you a small tight-knit team or are you scaling? Is your team remote, in-office or hybrid? Is open source and external collaboration a key component of your value proposition? I’ll stop here before it gets boring… ...

tl;dr People come for the long-term vision but stay for the short-term gains. Success is measured only by how good your NGU algorithm is: Number Go Up. A vaporware product with good marketing can go the distance until it memes into existence. There is a lot of cynicism and politics behind open doors. Intelligent and authentic leaders are critical in upkeeping community optimism. It’s still early. Table of Contents The Vent The Ugly The Fuel The Bad The Analogy The Liquidity The Good The Reasons I’m Still Around ...

Enable Gateways by streamlining access to a decentralized supply network 🌿

Inspired by Simon Willison’s How I make annotated Presentations, I figured I’d annotate a presentation I did at ethcc.io in July 2024. He says it best: Even with that quality of presentation, I don’t think a video on its own is enough. My most recent talk was 40 minutes long—I’d love people to watch it, but I myself watch very few 40m long YouTube videos each year I might also create a Twitter thread similar to what @_tessr did for her talk on optimism if anyone requests it. ...

Thank you for going through the pain (and documenting it) so we don’t have to!

This is part of a series called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r). I summarize 5 key concepts that would have helped me learn, relearn, or refresh my knowledge of a topic or paper. Today, I’m reviewing a paper I contributed to myself so I added a personal forward :) The real value prop of a permissionless inference network 1 Reference 5 Points Point 1: POKT Network ...

I’ve been using ChatGPT since the first day it launched, have gone to dozens of AI events over the last couple of years, and feel like I finally have to say quite part out loud: *vibe checks*** are how 99% of LLM “evals” are done in practice today**. Quantitative benchmarks, evaluations, and verification are critical to the 1% tail-end, but a vibe check is the good enough solution. This is what most LLM developers and day-to-day but are afraid to admit due to the lack of rigour. ...

tl;dr Artificial Intelligence (AI) computing requires substantial energy, increasing the urgency for sustainable, scalable, and modular energy solutions. Major tech companies are actively adopting and investing in new ways to tap into nuclear power sources. The spot price for Uranium doubled over the past year due to a supply-demand imbalance, as current uranium supplies struggle to meet the demand from nuclear reactors. I argue that the current market presents a good entry point for diversifying into the uranium sector. Macroeconomic tailwinds could suggest a strong outperformance over the next decade at the cost of short-term volatility. I outline my thought process for choosing as a vehicle to do so. ...

The Road to a Personal Computer In the mid-90s, my family got their first computer. I vividly remember the Windows 95 logo loading up on the screen as I booted a computer up for the first time. Later that day, two things happened: I visited lego.com for about 5-10 minutes. I remember asking why there’s a limit to how long I could spend on the web 😅 I loaded up a floppy disk with Doom II. This experience scarred me from playing first-person shooters for almost a decade 😓 ...

This is a post in a series of articles I’m writing called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r), where I summarize a list of 5 concepts that would have helped me start learning or re-learning a certain topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. Edit: Thank you to Kautuk (founder of Stackr ) for reviewing this post. Micro-rollups (MRUs) are the answer to “a blockchain is too slow and expensive” for my use case, but “I still want some eventual Web3 security guarantees” in progressively porting a Web2 app to Web3. ...

Special thanks to Gabi, Mike, Art, Adz & ChatGPT for the discussion and feedback. tl;dr Self-hosting is not a long-term solution since users just want to pay for whatever is cheaper, faster and easier to use. Infrastructure companies in both AI and Web3 are in a race to the bottom in a commodity market. Excelling as both a hardware operator and gateway company is increasingly untenable in open-core ecosystems. Table of Contents Introduction Web3 vs AI Gateway ...

Whenever I get really excited about something, I tend to tell all my friends about it. This could range from a book or movie to an activity or something I bought. I can find a good handful of people who can attest that sometimes it gets excessive. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been slowly turning olshansky.info into the one place to find and search through my resources, but there is still a lot of work ahead, and I expect it to be a lifelong endeavour. ...

Snap! Smile! Turn around! Look here! On a sunny day, with a breath of fresh air, I took a short walk, on an off-day winter holiday, Witnessing families, both large and small, capturing memories on a casual stroll. These snapshots may sync to the cloud, or begin to traverse, Soaring about, sometimes emerging to the Metaverse, But without a digital frame, they often linger, forgotten, out and about. If the photo stands out, it’ll likely be aired, But if not all are in frame, it may fade out, uncared. ...

Edit: 08/04/2024 - These instructions are applicable if you have one of the newer versions of Chrome installed. Chrome changed a lot of things recently so the settings from the first “Use Apps, Not Tabs” are no longer applicable. The final result gives lets me easily “cmd + tab” between all the different AI platforms out there. There are now two different ways to go about it. 1. Install “…” Option Available I wanted to install meta.ai as a separate application. After clicking “⋮” → “Save and Share” → “Install Meta AI”, things were flawlessly out of the box. ...

If you’ve visited X in the last 24 hours, seen OpenAI’s Blog, or simply opened up Google, you’ve probably heard that the board of OpenAI has fired its CEO, Sam Altman. There are already dozens of articles online covering the topic, including Ars Technica, The Information, Wired, The Verge, CNN and many others. I got a flurry of messages yesterday afternoon simply letting me know of this fact (my favourite one below). After a day of more information coming in, I figured I’d share my thoughts because I believe it may be a signal that AGI is closer than we think. I’m simultaneously excited and don’t know what to expect. ...

This is a post in a series of articles I’m writing called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r), where I summarize a list of 5 concepts that would have helped me start learning or re-learning a certain topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. I recently came by this one reference on the nuances between an individual, their insurance plan and a drug company from an article titled *“Is My Drug Copay Coupon a Form of Charity — Or a Bribe?”. *I thought it was important enough to be summarized in 5 points below. ...

This is a cross-post of the original article posted here and announced here a couple of weeks ago. Some of the tables and diagrams that are presented as screenshots can be viewed in more detail in the markdown GitHub gist here. tl;dr The Pocket Network core protocol team has decided to implement the first version of the next iteration of the protocol (Shannon Upgrade) as a “micro-rollup” using Rollkit with Celestia as a Data Availability (DA) layer. ...

I generally reserve my substack for blogging and writing down some of my ideas and reflections. However, on my personal site (olshansky.info), I also rate and capture my thoughts and reviews of books I’ve read or movies/tv I’ve watched. These are usually rougher and not as edited (I apologize in advance), but I wanted to do a one-time cross-post here so it is more discoverable in the future. In this one, I share my review of Barbie and The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. ...

The Exposition: Roll Camera on Your Average Movie Watcher Not much different from your typical consumer, I’ve been a fan of films and TV shows since I was a kid. The genres have changed and my viewing frequency has dropped, but the essence remains. Once streaming became available, I never got into the habit of binging shows with the exception of a few cases (cough Lost cough); if I really like a show, I try to prolong that experience for as long as possible. About a decade ago, I realized that I was investing so many hours consuming the hard work and passion of others, so it seemed fair to spend a few minutes leaving a public rating or review. That’s when Olshansky’s Rotten Tomatoes account was born 🍅. ...

OpenAI published an article today on the importance of Governance of Superintelligence. I wouldn’t be surprised if at least half the readers, like myself, went straight to ChatGPT to ask for its ideas on governing itself. I pasted the entire article but cropped it out for the purpose of this postThe tl;dr is that we should hopefully figure it out within the next decade, but international tensions are the biggest risks we need to account for. ...

I recently had the fortune of stumbling upon a transcript from a 1986 seminar by Richard Hamming at the Bell Communications Research Colloquium titled “You and Your Research.” If you’re ever looking for inspiration, this is it. A key point Hamming emphasizes is that when reading, it’s not the quantity but the quality that matters: “you read, it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts.” To showcase active reading, you can find my Proof of Active Reading here or at ipfs://bafybeifoz5tkbdd2v5bzxfuyvokuchnpoqthl63gwcuoadmmz3c7t5kfve. ...

GPT4 Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in recent years, thanks in part to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, the success of these models depends not only on the quantity of human labels but also on their quality. This blog post discusses the importance of high-quality labels in LLMs and proposes a blockchain-based solution to incentivize better labelling. tl;dr Data Quality » Data Quantity for fine-tuning a foundation model. ...

Life’s like a sauna session, Some things, like breath and thought, With the right approach, you can control, Your body’s tears and heart’s onslaught, Cannot be fought, so just embrace, For they’re beyond control

“You’ll never use most of the things you learn in College.” - Olshansky circa 2014 There was a time when I thought that most of what I learnt in College was pointless since it didn’t apply to my day-to-day work. However, as time passes, I increasingly reflect on how fortunate I was to be exposed to so many concepts across various fields. Most importantly, it teaches you to think, learn and work, but I’ll save the details for another post. ...

*This is a fun open idea for Ethereum’s KZG Ceremony: using your Apple Watch’s ECG as a source of entropy to participate in Ethereum’s KZG ceremony. I got a response when I first proposed it to the Ethereum foundation in December. Still, it does have some open-ended problems and requires a non-trivial amount of implementation effort. If you find it interesting and have the time to implement it, I’d love to see it come to fruition! * ...

This post was rejected by Seeking Alpha Editors so am sharing it here instead. Summary Disney’s strong brand can be trusted in uncertain macro-economic times COVID and Iger’s leave of absence was a transient hurdle Disney has hopped over Disney Plus keeps growing, and Disney Parks are returning Bob Iger is coming back to a strong & supportive team Disney shares are at a long-term low with relatively solid financials ...

tl;dr Configure your router to disable IPv6 and use a 2.4 GHz WiFi band if you’re running into the same issue.

Special thanks to Arthur Sabintsev for the feedback and review of this post. Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. - Bill Gates You have to live it to understand it, and this statement can only come from experience. The one thing Bill forgot to mention is how much will change in the span of 12 months within each of those 10 years. ...

It has barely been a day since ChatGPT launched, and I woke up to a timeline of different use cases that made it clear what the rest of this decade is going to look like: 🔑 to being a software engineer in the 2010s: knowing how to Google. 🔑 to being a software engineer in the 2020s: knowing how to GPT. — Daniel Olshansky (@olshansky) Dec 1, 2022 Until auto-tagging #ChatGPT is an option, or someone writes a script that scrapes Twitter’s firehose for GPT screenshots, here are just a few use cases I found today that blew my mind. ...

Great article! Just wanted to provide my own tl;dr below ▪ MPT Ingredients : Merkle Tree + Prefix Tree + Custom Modification ▪ MPT Nodes : Leaf nodes + branch nodes + extension nodes ▪ State root : 256 bit hash of root ▪ Geth KV Store : levelDB ▪ Parity KV Store : rocksDB ▪ Tries : 1. Transaction Trie - mapping from transction hash → raw transactions 2. Transaction Reciept Trie - mapping from transaction hash → transaction execution Metadata ...

A friend of mine recently asked me this question: My immediate reaction was: “How do I respond? People have literally written books about this.” I asked him to clarify with a few more details so I could direct my response accordingly. Thanks for reading Olshansky’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a lot clearer and more actionable. Rather than adding to the noise and writing a whole book about it, as a Tim Feris fan, I figured I’d create The 4-Week Project Checklist: Length: The architecture doc we’ll prepare should be 1-3 pages and no more. ...

Generate with the keywords “a binary tree of jellyfish, digital art, drawing, vibrant” by labs.openai.com This is a post in a series of articles I’m writing called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r), where I summarize a list of 5 concepts that would have helped me start learning or re-learning a certain topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. ...

5P;1R — Celestia (LazyLedger) White Paper This is a post in a series of articles I’m writing called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r), where I summarize a list of bullet points that would have helped me start learning or re-learning a certain topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. Celestia decouples transaction consensus and execution by splitting the responsibilities between Celestia (i.e. the core network) and other blockchains (i.e. clients/applications) built on top of it like so: • Celestia: transaction ordering &availability • Client: transaction validation & execution The Data Availability Problem (a guarantee to clients that block data is available) leverages erasure encoding andprobabilistic random sampling to balance the tradeoff between network bandwidth costs and data availability guarantees. Specifically, if a message is extended to n shares , and more than ᵏ⁄ₙ shares are witheld by an adversarial block producer, a client sampling a single missed share can assume, with high confidence, that the block is unavailable. Client nodes (i.e. blockchains/applications) can be implemented using any language on top of any execution environment and are responsible for managing their own state transition business logic by querying storage, while Celestia is responsible for preventing DoS attacks by collecting fees from each included transaction. Using 2D Reed-Solomon erasure encoding and assuming a block of size N , the bandwidth complexity of verifying block availability is either: • O(N) — the whole block plus a single Merkle root are downloaded for a 100% data availability guarantee. **• O( √ N+log(√ N)) **— a single row or a single column plus 2√(N) Merkle roots need to be downloaded for a sub-maximal guarantee. For example , with a code rate of ¼ and 4096 shares , only 0.4% of the block (15 shares) need to be downloaded to achieve 99% confidence that the block is available. This means that increasing the block size and network throughput can be securely achieved by increasing the number of nodes that make sampling requests for block shares. The Celestia network uses a namespaced and ordered Merkle Tree with a 1:1 relationship between applications and namespace IDs, enabling applications to query for transactions associated only with their namespace ID. The hash of each non-leaf node is left||right where left is leftMinNs||leftMaxNs||hash(x) and right is rightMinNs||rightMaxNs||hash(x) , meaning that the node value can be used to determine the range of namespaces the subtree holds messages for. There’s no better reference than the original white paper: LazyLedger: A Distributed Data Availability Ledger With Client-Side Smart Contracts, but personally, I’d use my annotated version of the available at ipfs://bafybeibbxdsdzf5v7jdm7ak5opdtw3vf35nb37wldkyokwbhmvdzflwsry or s3.olshansky.info/CelestiaWhitePaperReviewSmall.pdf. ...

Tl;dr I’m incredibly excited to announce that I’m now leading Pocket’s V1 Protocol R&D team! This post gives a glimpse into the exhilarating 🎢 during my first six months at Pocket and the community behind this 🚀 shaping the future of Web3. A bit of background A little over six months ago, I published about my life-changing trip to Mexico on the Day of the Dead, which is basically half a decade in crypto years. Since then, the only constant in my life has been change, and I’m fortunate enough that almost all of it, though not always easy, still gets me excited and motivated to get out of bed every morning. ...

5P;1R — Ethereum’s Modified Merkle Patricia Trie This is the second of a series of articles I’m trying out called “ 5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r) where I summarize a list of bullet points that would have helped me start learning a new topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. You can find the first one here: 5P;1R — Bitcoin’s Elliptic Curve Cryptography. ...

5P;1R — Bitcoin’s Elliptic Curve Cryptography This is the first of a potential series of articles I want to call “ 5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r) where I summarize a list of bullet points that would have helped me start learning a new topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. This is an Elliptic Curve : y^2 = x^3 + ax + b; see the continuous function Image 1. Elliptic Curve Cryptography is defined over a Finite Field (very large prime) p along with a Generator Point((x,y) coordinate) G like so : y^2 ≡ (x^3 + ax + b) mod p ; see the scatter plot Image 2. Bitcoin uses a secp256k1 , which is an Elliptic Curve with carefully selected parameters to achieve certain security guarantees: • a=0 • b = 7 • p = 2^256 - 2^32 - 2^9 - 2^8 - 2^7 - 2^6 - 2^4 - 1 • G = 04 79BE667E F9DCBBAC 55A06295 CE870B07 029BFCDB 2DCE28D9 59F2815B 16F81798 483ADA77 26A3C465 5DA4FBFC 0E1108A8 FD17B448 A6855419 9C47D08F FB10D4B8 A public key P (a point on the curve) is just a private key pk(a random integer) multiplied by the Generator Point ( the pre-selected point on the curve): P = pk * G. The Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarim Problem makes it hard to find the integer pk when you know (x,y) coordinates of P and G fitting the equation in (2) using the parameters in (3) or some other elliptic curve. If I only had to recommend one resource out of all the references I looked through, it would be: https://cryptobook.nakov.com/asymmetric-key-ciphers/elliptic-curve-cryptography-ecc#the-generator-point-in-ecc ...

I put together a small sequence diagram using mermaid to help visualize this.

Could you split this into two PRs, please? Could you please approve this so I can merge it in? Why are you implementing XXX using A rather than B? NIT: extra space In the context of code reviews, I’ve found myself on both the giving and receiving end of these types of comments more than once. I must say that the following tweet still rings true today: Having worked on production systems at large companies, internal systems at mid-size companies and most recently joining a small and agile team, I increasingly realize that the purpose of code reviews depends on the stage and size of both the team and project. For example, for a mature, production-grade, critical system at a large established company: ...

Reading this statement made me think why fiction, in the form of films, TV, books, games, plays and more have such a big place in our…

Tl;dr I am incredibly excited to announce that I’m joining pokt.network today as a full-time Protocol Specialist! This post documents my realization of how I want to devote my time to shape and build out the future of Web3. A bit of background Without diving into my life-long story, I spent most of my adolescence growing up in Toronto. I love the city and where it’s headed, but I’ll save that discussion for another post. ...

Experience vs Theory: Lake Tahoe Edition I remember thinking I had the foundation to tackle any problem that came my way around the time that I was graduating from College. Having studied a lot of theory in school, I believed that anything could be done by applying the concepts I had learned. With every year that goes by in the workforce, the number of things I find to learn and get better at far outpaces those I actually get to. This makes me both excited and scared of how I’ll feel in another 10 years. ...

When I read the title, I was thinking the article would discuss how everyone uses and interacts with it through centralized services;. This is true as both a user (etherscan.io, opensea.io) or a developer (infura.io). I agree with Nate’s comment that ethereum contracts are indeed public and immutable. Whether an individual chooses to sync a node, inspect the code and understand what functions are public and which can be run only by the contract owner to modify state, it is up to them. ...

On the most recent episode of The Investor’s Podcast Mastermind Discussion, one of the big topics of discussion were cash alternatives.

For lack of a better word, 2020 has been very interesting for financial markets. Volatility hit all-time highs, some fortunes were wiped…

tl;dr You can find the source code for a bare-bones dockerized python HTTP server with hot reloading using fastapi on this Github page.

Joint Probability Matrices — An ‘Extension of the Confusion Matrix’ for Continuous Variables

I agree that your reply almost warrants an article of it’s own :) To be honest, the fact that Embed.ly works with multi-file gists when you specify the file name, it really makes me wonder what (and why) medium is doing on the backend? The proxy provider solution seems viable but a bit of an overkill IMO if it’s possible to avoid. It’d be great if Medium Engineering could look at this, and ideally, even avoid the preprocessing step that’s making things complicated. 🤞that they respond.

You can try out all of the code in this article yourself using this Google Colaboratory notebook. If you’ve ever tried to debug and optimize your python application, it’s likely that you stumbled upon Python Profiles to understand where most of the execution time is being spent. You enable the profiler at the beginning of a code segment you’re interested in profiling with pr.enable(), and call pr.create_stats() at the end. View code on GitHub Gist ...

One of my favorite features of elixir is being able to start a shell that loads the entire context of my project: $ iex -S mix It provides easy access to all of the project’s modules so you could easily iterate on your code by compiling it directly from within the shell. You have the option to recompile the whole project or just a single module: # single module $ r MyModulesNameSpace.MyModule # whole project $ recompile The other great thing about elixir is how easy it is to run unit tests: ...

This is a great article and a great exploration. Your pros and cons list sums everything up, but I’m was curious you’d every leverage this Postgres features for a system you use for work that has to be maintable in the long-term?

Note: This is a repost of a blog published in early 2018.

“Map data is only available to an app that is running on a device physically inside the location where the map was built. We check both coarse (WiFi or GPS) location and using precise visual feature and sensor data to match whether you are in the physical location.” If I stand outside the door of someone who is running the app inside, wouldn’t I be able to get a sparse map cloud of their house?

Fees are a metric worth looking into but I would say that the story they tell is more of how sustainable the network is as opposed to the adoption rate by the general public. They’re actually growing at a much higher rate than I had expected! I think this is healthy given how BTC will probably be a settlement network and lightning networks will be used for everything else. I agree with you regarding spam attacks and other one-off events. ...

It’s difficult to objectively quantify Bitcoin’s adoption rate since there are too many factors to consider. Should it be the number of people holding Bitcoin? Bitcoin’s market cap? The number of brokerages with support for Bitcoin futures? The number of businesses accepting it as form of payment? A very different story can be told depending on the angle from which you look at it. Bitcoin’s market cap As a potential store of value, Bitcoin’s market cap needs to be sufficiently high for institutions and central banks to take it seriously. Governments must add some regulation around it so it has legitimacy, and a large enough portion of the general population must agree that it has inherent value. To agree that it has value, Bitcoin is very dependent on network effects such as those described by Metcalfe’s Law. ...

I think it’s worth noting that in order to use await, the function directly enclosing the test code must be marked as async. Helpful resource: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42299594/await-is-a-reserved-word-error-inside-async-function.

I’m having some trouble with the truffle console. When I type “Vo” and click tab, it autocompletes to Voting as expecting. When I type “Voting.d” and click tab, it redeploys all the contracts rather than autocompleting to “Voting.deployed” as expected. Mahesh Murthy, could you confirm whether this is the expected behaviour or is it potentially some sort of weird configuration on my end?

One of the major selling points of cryptocurrencies is that everything is decentralized and trust no longer lies in single a third party. However, the trust didn’t simply dissipate, it got distributed to participants of the network. In my opinion, the incentive structure built into cryptoeconomics is one of its most overlooked benefits. The fundamental idea can be summarized as follows: no one wants to lose money, and everyone wants to maximize the profit they receive for the work that they do. ...

This post was originally written as a follow up email to this tweet where one of the hosts of The Investor’s Podcast ran a poll regarding people’s thoughts on Bitcoin. — — — — — — — — — — To provide a fair comparison between Ethereum and Bitcoin I will start by defining the basics, and expand on how each of them can be used without drilling down too deep into the technical details ...

I like the price ceiling and floor approach but see two issues with it. If we’re selling a DAO token with equal voting rights, and a majority is required to make some decision, then someone could come in and purchase the equivalent of the token’s market cap + ε. They would then be able to make an authoritative decision. If they choose to sell the tokens after the decision had been made, they’d have effectively paid (market cap + ε -num_tokens_purchase * price_floor) to make that decision. From the point of view of an investor, being paid by the beneficiaries is great for a company like Apple that pays dividends. However, if the company/beneficiary can make better use of their income by reinvesting it rather than paying it out to the token/share holders, then price appreciate of the token/share is how that value gets realized. Amazon is a great example of this. In the safe token model, the role of price appreciation would be determined by the sale administrator rather than market forces, which seems kind of odd…

While a correction is currently taking place, and it’s impossible to foresee what will happen over the coming months, my opinion is that the realm of possibilities with blockchain technology is still in it’s infancy. I don’t think we’ll see real stability until it’s adopted by mainstream organizations, which could very well take at least ten years. By then, the market cap of all cryptocurrencies, in my opinion, will far exceed a trillion dollars.

Balaji S. Srinivasan One of the projects you omitted that I think is very noteworthy is Aragon. It’s built on top of ethereum and helps you manage a company (token issuance, vesting schedules, etc…) without all the intermediaries.

One of the biggest disappoints I experienced after purchasing my Google Home is discovering that it cannot function as a Bluetooth speaker. As a Mac & iPhone user, most of my use cases were pretty well supported. I could talk to Google Home to play the news, podcasts or music. I could also manually cast a Chrome tab or use an application such as Spotify that has native Google Cast support. There were a couple use cases though where the Google Home and iPhone didn’t play so well. ...

Reading this felt like watching a Pixar movie: the humbling protagonist with a dream, embarking on a long journey, training really hard insert montage here, with both highs and lows, making new friends and connections along the way, ultimately culminating in a happy but slightly different than expected ending. You should legitimately consider selling the rights to your story. You said your goal was to tell a story through dance, and in a way you managed to do it by writing this piece. Your passion for the art and the candidness of your words took me on a wilder emotional rollercoaster than I had originally expected. ...

Personally, I think we’re entering an era where acquisitions will be more common than IPOs. The bubble is not bursting, but it’s not growing at the same rate as it used to, and there’s not much more air to fill it. VC money is drying up, and seeing how most startups still can’t turn a profit but have valuable IP, an acquisition is a good out for shareholders and investors. ...

Are recent trends in company IPOs signaling an imminent recession? Commodities are tanking, the fed is still contemplating an increase in interest rates, and several countries are either in or on the verge of entering a recession. Over the past 7 years, a lot of cash has been injected into the US economy through quantitative easing, accompanied by very little inflation. All factors considered it’s difficult to determine where the economy is headed in the near future. Is the bull still raging? Is the US economy on the brink of another recession? Will the bear slowly creep up and take over? ...

Great piece! My takeaway was that as long all your needs are met, money just acts as insurance. Nothing changes when you get home / auto / health insurance unless an unlikely situation arises, in which case it really could prove useful.

I couldn’t agree more. Having grown up in a reform Jewish household, I always enjoyed the holidays and just having a reason to get together as a community and celebrate. Arguably, you don’t need a reason to celebrate, but tradition kind of served as a calendar that everybody worked their schedules around. However, I think that religion itself is an outdated concept in a modern society. Like you said, religion serves to provide a strict set of rules to live by. This was very important and necessary in the early days of human civilization when no prior rules existed, but that is no longer the case. We now have a central government, laws, order (more or less), and those who still abide by rules from centuries ago hinder themselves from reaching their full potential.

A walk from the subway station — inspired by The Hunger Games Prior to my senior year in College, I made my way through the Hunger Games Trilogy. I read all three books back-to-back in a relatively short period of time. Having spent so much time in Suzanne Collins’ world and writing, I felt as if her writing style had rubbed off on me at the time. On my first day of my senior year in College, I felt an overwhelming sensation to write something as I exited the subway. It took approximately 7 minutes to walk from the subway to the building where most of my classes were held, during which I wrote the piece below. The content is utter nonsense, but I think it really captures writing style and essence of the hunger games in some way. ...

Canadian Real Estate or American Stock? tl;dr Investing in the S&P 500 is more profitable than buying a condo in Toronto with a 25% downpayment and renting it out while still paying for rent in San Francisco over a 10 year term.. Everyone I’ve ever met can agree on one simple fact: it’s important to save money. However, it is well known that letting money sit around in a checking or savings account is pretty close to wasting it. Most interest rates offered nowadays don’t even account for inflation, so you find yourself in a use it or lose it type of situation. Luckily, there are plenty of investment opportunities all around us. Some people opt to invest in real estate, others like to invest in a select thoroughly researched companies, and the rest just put everything in index tracking funds. While investing in individual stocks can be a lot of fun, it requires more effort and continuous maintenance. I decided to investigate and compare a couple of the more passive investment opportunities: real estate and index funds. ...

Bill Nye vs Ken Ham: neither or both? Reaching a dead end while trying to discover the origin of life I just finished watching Bill Nye vs Ken Ham’s debate of creationism versus evolution and the origin of the earth. The debate was both entertaining and educational, but really bothered me because I felt that every single argument reached a dead end where the two academics chose to agree to disagree. ...