Top crypto stories of week 15, 2023
Mon 10 to Sun 16 April 2023
The 14 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 10 to Sun 16 April 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: warpcast.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Nouns.Stream is live on goerli, let the streaming begin (nouns.stream)
- ethOS V2.0 is live! (twitter.com)
- List of Grants Programs (blockworks.co)
- Kiwistand is live (warpcast.com)
- Only 11h left to submit Purple props (prop.house)
- Matt Galligan, Co-Founder @ XMTP shares project's backstory on Web3 Talks #44 (warpcast.com)
- Moment of Zen Podcast E18, Markets, NFTs, Disinformation (youtube.com)
Dan and Erik discuss how to pick markets, why NFTs matter, and disinformation in Moment of Zen episode 18. The episode timestamps also cover crypto in a bear market, social media fragmentation, the biggest U.S. problems, and how to fix the Fentanyl program. The show notes list topics but do not state the hosts' conclusions. Secureframe and MarketerHire are listed as sponsors, and Erik's new podcast, Upstream, is promoted.
- Peak LLM (ihavemanythoughts.substack.com)
The author argues that LLMs may be approaching a "peak LLM," where the quality of their outputs declines because web content increasingly targets them. Prompt injection is cited as one route: hidden text in an article can redirect an LLM summary, with a test that inserted a French translation request and a Renault Clio advertisement. The author also argues that content written to bias future training data could degrade models, using a insecure PHP snippet and misinformation as examples. The author says filtering the web for such content would be costly and that LLM-based detection is unreliable, and suggests smaller models trained on trusted data as a possible option.
- Fast Software, the Best Software (craigmod.com)
The author argues that speed is one of the most valuable qualities in software, and that slowness makes tools harder to trust and use. They cite nvALT, Sublime Text, and Figma as fast tools they rely on or admire, while describing Photoshop, Lightroom, Google Maps, and Ulysses as slowing down over time. The author says Google Maps' slowness led them to reinstall Apple Maps, and that Affinity Photo was chosen mainly for its speed. Slowness is presented as a sign of possible deeper engineering problems, while fast software allows users to stay in flow.
- Bitcoin Days Destroyed (en.bitcoin.it)
Bitcoin Days Destroyed is a metric intended to measure Bitcoin's transaction volume, calculated by multiplying the number of bitcoins in a transaction by the number of days since those coins were last spent. The article gives an example: 100 BTC received a week ago and then spent yields 700 bitcoin days destroyed, even if the coins are split across several addresses and the total transaction volume is much larger. It also notes that a bounty was awarded for a script to compute the metric for transactions in a block, and that the Abe block chain browser computes the statistic in real time.
- Contract Library by Dedaub (library.dedaub.com)
- Booking.com De-Stresser (alexcharlton.co)
The author argues that Booking.com uses persuasion tactics such as false scarcity and urgency messages that create stress and reduce trust, and that the practice is spreading across e-commerce. To test this, the author built a Chrome extension that hides 35 class names of such messages across three pages and rewrites some remaining wording in a calmer tone. The extension includes a filtering setting from 0 to 4 that controls how many "x rooms left" notices appear, which the author notes depends on personal preference.
- Syntax highlighting on the web (joelgustafson.com)
Joel Gustafson argues that tree-sitter-style parsing can give web pages fast, pure-JavaScript syntax highlighting, and he demonstrates this with a React module built on Lezer. He explains that IDE highlighting has traditionally relied on mode-based regex grammars such as VS Code's TexMate grammars, which are hard to write and maintain, while tree-sitter, released in 2018, uses AST-like grammars. Web highlighting can assume well-formed source and needs only a single rendering pass, and tree-sitter via WASM is hard to use with server-side rendering. Lezer, a standalone zero-dependency parser generator by Marijn Haverbeke, is used in his react-lezer-highlighter package, which he published on NPM, with the core code being about 100 lines.
- Patch Wallets (app.patchwallet.com)
Patch Wallets is an experimental account abstraction wallet product that lets users use a Twitter, email, phone, or GitHub identity as a crypto wallet. According to the page, users can accept tokens and NFTs sent to their social handle and withdraw them to an external crypto wallet at any time. The page also offers a social airdrop feature that lets senders distribute tokens to followers, friends, and fans using their social handles, and describes Patch Wallet as a protocol that lets customers use their socials as crypto wallets. The page warns that the app is used at the user's own risk.
