This proposal introduces the concept of an optimistic pool as a co-processor to Ethereum mainnet. It explains that an optimistic pool is a universal contract that offloads computations off-chain and validates them more efficiently on-chain, similar to roll-ups but without holding user tokens. The article mentions existing examples of co-processors being developed, such as WAX and Axiom. The optimistic pool being discussed is funded by Nouns DAO and aims to provide a low-cost solution for checking zk-proofs in a private voting system. This write-up provides an overview of how the optimistic pool works, covering claim kinds, blesser priority queue mechanics, and the blesser payout mechanism. It also suggests potential applications for the optimistic pool, such as private voting, Tornado Cash contracts, smart contract wallets, and optimistic aggregation of signatures.
Osmosis, a decentralized exchange built on the Cosmos network, has received community approval to deploy supercharged liquidity pools. This upgrade allows liquidity providers to concentrate their assets and earn more rewards based on actual usage. The proposal received over 96% of the community's votes. The first supercharged pool will involve the DAI/OSMO assets. The migration of existing pools and the creation of new pools will follow a governance process until all curve pools on Osmosis are migrated. Whitelisted assets, including OSMO, USDC, and DAI, will be initially available for permissionless pool creation. The v16 upgrade is scheduled for late June.
This blog from Vitalik discusses the importance of considering L1 + cross-L2 support, wallet security, and privacy as necessary features of the ecosystem stack. It focuses on the technical aspects of enabling easier reading between different layers of the chain and proposes various proof schemes, including Merkle proofs, ZK-SNARKs, special-purpose KZG proofs, and Verkle tree proofs. The article also emphasizes the need to optimize cross-chain proofs, minimize latency, and preserve privacy in the wallet ecosystem.
Fragmented liquidity is a condition in the DeFi market where liquidity is dispersed among various trading platforms instead of being concentrated in one pool. This can create challenges in finding sufficient liquidity, executing trades at desired prices, and ensuring efficient trading across different protocols. To address this, 1inch, a liquidity aggregator, combines liquidity from multiple exchanges and protocols to provide users with optimal prices and efficient transactions. By aggregating liquidity and splitting trades across different pools, DEX aggregators minimize slippage and maximize price efficiency.
Nike and Fortnite have collaborated on an in-game experience titled "Airphoria" in Fortnite's Creative Mode, allowing players to participate in a sneaker hunt within the game. While the experience does not directly involve NFTs, it does incorporate crypto elements. Users who connect their Epic Games and .Swoosh accounts and purchase non-NFT apparel items in Fortnite can unlock achievements on the .Swoosh platform.
Polygon has proposed an upgrade to its main chain to make it compatible with ZK tech, an upgrade that would transform the Polygon POS into a zkEVM validium, maintaining EVM compatibility. The change would also enhance security, eliminate reorganizations, speed up transactions, and scale the blockchain. This upgrade is being considered as part of Polygon 2.0, a rebranding initiative that will include various announcements about the blockchain, token, and governance.
Deutsche Bank is seeking regulatory approval from Germany's BaFin to provide a custody service for digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, expanding its digital asset income stream.
Alex Obadia, co-founder of Flashbots, has announced his departure from the company, citing the need for personal and organizational growth and warning of potential centralization threats to the system.
Mastercard has filed a trademark application for a suite of blockchain and cryptocurrency-related technologies. According to these filings, the company plans to create an API to streamline blockchain transactions and crypto trading, bolstering its growing presence in the sector.
A fraudulent app named "Trezor Wallet Suite" has surfaced on the Apple App Store, potentially endangering users' funds by asking for their seed phrases.
When you’re fighting against all odds to get your product to market, compliance might not seem like the most important issue. But you can’t afford to ignore it, either. There’s a way to achieve continuous SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA compliance
The folks at a16z are always coming up with great content and this one is a great read on what we’re seeing as the trends around architectures for LLM applications. It’s posts like this that show the potential business opportunities around AI and how we are only just scratching the surface of what’s to come.
Jason Fried of 37signals talks about what it means to not have a roadmap and why promising things you end up not delivering can be really bad for the company, team, and customers.
Hiring and managing a CFO can be tricky and getting it wrong is way more costly than a bad marketing, sales, or engineering hire. Some solid nuggets in here around being an early stage CFO.
Ever insightful, Jason drops some science around worrying trends in customer success. I too miss the days of when customer success was about … a customer’s success.
When markets are struggling, increasing the option exercise window can be helpful for employees that move on. However, there can be tax risks involved so tread carefully here.
The quality of decisions, such as hiring, investing, or strategizing, largely depends on the quality of the options you have to choose from, rather than the choice itself.
The age old question of if you should switch to AI from crypto. The real magic will be regulatory clarity for blockchain + AI - that will be the big winner.
As a programmer, you use hash functions every day. They're used in databases to optimize queries, in data structures to make things faster, and in security to keep data safe. Almost every interaction you have with technology will involve hash functions in one way or another. This article is a visual guide to hash functions. It starts by looking at a simple hash function, then teaches how to test if a hash function is good or not, and finally looks at a real-world use for hash functions: the hash map.
One of Spotify’s key competitive advantages is their personalization. This article describes how Spotify continues to improve their personalization platform through a scalable experimentation platform that can serve over 250+ tests annually on the home surface alone. The goal of the platform is to experiment with velocity and quality. In the article, Spotify engineers describe the 5 tools they used to achieve these two goals.
SvelteKit is a framework for building apps using Svelte. This article shows you how to build a server-side rendered SvelteKit application and deploy it to Netlify step-by-step. SvelteKit streamlines things by handling the complexity of the server and client on its own, allowing you to focus squarely on developing the app. There’s no need to maintain two applications or do a tightrope walk sharing data between the two. The tutorial builds out a job board as an example application.
Making difficult technical decisions is something that all engineers have to do. However, there are ways to make sure the decision made is the right one, such as writing a doc of all options and acting as the end-user. An important aspect to assess is how reversible a decision is, as an irreversible decision can be much more costly down the line.
This HBR article poses two critical questions for entrepreneurs considering starting generative AI companies: Can you compete on increasingly commoditized foundational models or should you differentiate on an application that leverages these models? The author suggests that while starting such a company may seem easy, the ease of entry could also mean increased competition.
undb is a private, unified, self-hosted no-code database. It’s built with SvelteKit, Vite, Tailwind, and Nest.js. undb comes with various features, such as being lightweight and developer friendly. It also provides support for OpenAPI, webhooks, real-time subscriptions, and more.
Language Models provides Python building blocks to explore large language models on any computer with 512MB of RAM. This package is designed to be as simple as possible for learners and educators exploring how large language models intersect with modern software development. The interfaces to this package are all simple functions using standard types. It hides the complexity of large language models from view while providing free local inference using light-weight, open models. All included models are free for educational use, no API keys are required, and all inference is performed locally by default.
It used to be that Big Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Apple led the way when it came to workplace advantages. However, recently these companies have dialed back on many on-site perks and, more importantly, have called workers back to the office. The return-to-office mandate has been met with resistance by those who prefer to work from home. In order to compete, smaller tech companies have since picked up the mantle of remote work, making them more attractive to many tech workers.
This blog post provides eight tactics to improve the free trial experience for users, with the aim of increasing conversion rates. These tactics include techniques for discouraging day-one cancellations, offering incentives or penalties, offering temporary discounts post-trial, and optimizing trial length. The post also offers advice for proper user onboarding, keeping users engaged, and improving product value. The author emphasizes that long-term success lies in continually enhancing the product's value proposition.
"Streamberry" from the sixth season of "Black Mirror" may be coming to life. Netflix has launched Streamberry.tv, an exact replica of the fictional platform, featuring characters from the show. It also launched youareawful.com for users to upload their own photos to become the subject of a Streamberry show. The creation of these sites follows the viral success of the first episode of the season, which satirically depicted Netflix. Users are warned that their uploaded photos may end up on a billboard and they must consent to Netflix's use of their image for its marketing campaign.
This article takes a look at 5 libraries that can positively impact your React development experience by addressing some common pain points like data fetching, styling, accessibility, and state management.
In this prompt guide for GitHub Copilot, two GitHub developer advocates share examples and best practices for communicating your desired results to the AI pair programmer.
Tesla's Giga Laboratory retail concept appears to be a showcase of its manufacturing capacity. There are now 1,000 Tesla retail and service locations, more than double the number from three years ago. The announcement about the Giga Laboratory invites customers to come to the store to meet up with friends and experience the magic of building a car in 45 seconds. Pictures of the new store are available in the article.
A ransomware group that claimed responsibility for a hack on Reddit's systems earlier this year is demanding money and policy changes. BlackCat claims to have stolen 80GB of data from Reddit. It wants a $4.5 million payout and for Reddit to roll back its planned API pricing changes in exchange for the data. The attack occurred in February. Reddit says that the hackers hadn't accessed private user data.
Solar wind is not very well understood despite its importance. Its immense strength has, up until now, made it nearly impossible for spacecraft to determine where it is generated. NASA's Parker Solar Probe was recently able to image the region where solar wind originates. It found that solar wind starts close to the surface and then gushes through holes in the Sun's corona before being ejected into space. The discovery could help humans predict when solar wind will head towards Earth and enable us to protect sensitive equipment.
_Temnothorax nylanderi_ ants that contract _Anomotaenia brevis_ tapeworms end up living up to over three times longer than their peers. Uninfected ants end up pampering the infected ants' and do their chores for them. The infected ants barely have to leave their nests. The tapeworms appear to pump antioxidants and other proteins into their hosts. Their goal is to eventually be eaten by a bird, so that might be why they keep infected ants young and plump.
VineJS is a form data validation library for Node.js that can be used to validate HTTP request bodies in the backend. It is one of the fastest validation libraries in the Node.js ecosystem. VineJS provides both runtime and static type safety, first-class support for defining custom error messages and formatting errors, and an extensive suite of over 50 validation rules and 12 schema types.
Elasticsearch gives you tons of health and performance data, but making sense of it all isn’t easy. Use this cheatsheet to find the key metrics to monitor
Google will eventually kill its services if it can't find a way to directly monetize them with ads at a scale of billions. The company is paid for advertising rather than for its products. Google's recent shutdown of Google Domains, a $180 million/year business servicing 10 million domains, is an example of this. People using Google products and services outside of the ad space should prepare a backup plan as the company is one major reorganization or promoted executive away from shutting them down.
A Tesla hacker has uncovered a unique feature in Tesla's Full Self-Driving Beta software named 'Elon Mode'. Elon Mode switches the vehicle from using steering wheel 'nags' to a more advanced driver monitoring method that uses the internal camera to watch the driver and ensure they are not distracted. It is unclear when the hidden mode will be publicly accessible. A video showing Elon Mode in action is available in the article.
Tech companies have essentially established a threshold for the maximum improvement of AI products as their early release will lead to model collapse, an effect where irreversible defects are created in models due to being trained on model-generated content - something that will happen once LLMs contribute to much of the content found online.
Apple has been trying to trademark images of apples in Switzerland since 2017, with the Swiss Institute of Intellectual Property partially awarding Apple's request in 2022.
The European Parliament approved new rules earlier this week that stipulate that all portable batteries used in devices such as smartphones, tablets, and cameras must have easily removable and replaceable batteries.