Top crypto stories of week 26, 2023
Mon 26 June to Sun 2 July 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 26 June to Sun 2 July 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: youtu.be, paulgraham.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Show KN: A year of building Pincaster (paragraph.xyz)
Carlos Matallín, a software engineer and solo builder, marks one year of building Pincaster, a discovery platform that lets Farcaster users save, share and explore topics. He describes Farcaster as a protocol for "sufficiently decentralized" social networks built by former Coinbase employees Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, and says the Farcaster community is mostly made up of builders. He writes that Farcaster is an expensive hobby, noting his monthly infrastructure bill exceeds $8, and cites developer frustrations including breaking changes to attachment and embeds fields that were not updated in the documentation.
- New PG Essay: How to Do Great Work (paulgraham.com)
Paul Graham's essay "How to Do Great Work" presents a recipe for doing great work: choose a field you have aptitude for and deep interest in, learn enough to reach its frontier, notice gaps, and explore the promising ones. He argues that interest drives the hard work required, and that the best strategy is usually not to plan too much but to pursue whatever seems most interesting at each stage, which he calls "staying upwind." He notes that the right choice often comes from working, since people can't know what most kinds of work are like without doing them. He also advises making yourself a target for luck by trying many things, reading widely and asking many questions.
- Fast (patrickcollison.com)
Physical infrastructure projects before 1970 appear disproportionately among rapidly completed ambitious works, such as the Pentagon, built in 491 days, and the question is why. Marc Dunkelman investigated why Penn Station renovation efforts have repeatedly failed, while Philip Howard's foreword claims that US bureaucratic constraints changed in the 1960s. Ed Glaeser, reviewing Lynne Sagalyn's book on Ground Zero, notes that the Port Authority built the George Washington Bridge in 49 months in 1931. Mancur Olson argued that stable societies grow less dynamic over time, and Francis Fukuyama argued that interest groups have made the US a "vetocracy."
- How to hold people's attention (wyzowl.com)
- @vitalik eats kiwi w/ the skin on (warpcast.com)
- Redefining the Nomenclature of Web3 Custody (medium.com)
Silence Laboratories proposes a framework for classifying digital asset custody by user empowerment rather than by the loose labels wallets use today, such as self-custodial or non-custodial. The article divides custody into self-custody, shared custody and delegated custody, and argues that the degree of empowerment should decide where a design sits on that spectrum. It says self-custody includes localized wallets, where keys are stored on the device, such as MetaMask and Trust Wallet, and distributed wallets, where key shares are never combined, such as MPC-based designs. Shared custody, popularized by Zengo and Coinbase, splits key shares between users and enterprises, while delegated custody covers centralized exchanges, with FTX cited as an example of the risks.
- Vitalik Buterin discusses the Zuzalu experiment (youtu.be)
Bankless released an interview with Vitalik Buterin about the two-month Zuzalu experiment, the first of eight episodes in a series on new technologies. According to the video description, the discussion covers the concept of Zuzalu, why it was structured the way it was, and its role in curating communities. Topics named include Zupass, zero-knowledge infrastructure, ZuPoll, and Stamps. Timestamped sections also cover Zuzalu culture, its future, and what it means to be a Zuzalian.
- The human-readable web3 block explorer (onceupon.gg)
- Minimum Viable Community (youtube.com)
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham (paulgraham.com)
Paul Graham argues that programmers and other makers dislike meetings because they run on a different schedule from managers: makers need blocks of at least half a day, while managers schedule in one-hour slots. He says a single meeting can break a maker's afternoon into pieces too small for hard work, and can also dampen their willingness to start ambitious projects in the morning. Graham describes Y Combinator as operating on the maker's schedule while most investors use the manager's schedule, and says it handles founder meetings through clustered office hours at the end of the day. He says the speculative meetings common among managers are costly for makers, and asks that managers understand that cost.
- Why work on crypto & why working on AI is unethical (zefram.xyz)
Crypto is presented as worth working on because it is one technology that strengthens individuals more than governments, while AI is argued to push governments toward totalitarianism. Technological advances tend to boost state power through the advantages of scale and monopolies on knowledge, while the rule of law and popular accountability advance over decades or centuries. AI is said to make everything legible to the state, since smartphones and loose privacy laws already let some organization track people's locations, activities and online behavior. The excerpt breaks off before fully developing its case for crypto.
- The arc of finance bends towards efficiency (freeport.app)
- Apple removes Nostr client Damus from the app store over tipping feature (twitter.com)
- Moderation in a public commons (blueskyweb.xyz)
Bluesky states that its goal is to make social media a shared public commons in which communities can own and govern themselves, rather than being locked into one company's control. The company published three moderation and safety proposals on GitHub covering user lists and reply controls, moderator services for small communities, and hashtags, and it asked for feedback there. It also described its updated Community Guidelines for the Bluesky servers, which prohibit threats of violence, repeated harassment and promotion of hate, and said it would publish them the following week.
- The most evil building in Europe (youtu.be)
- Channels (warpcast.notion.site)
- Dev Spotlight: Interview with Greg Skriloff (youtu.be)
- The Long Tail (archive.is)
- Artificially intelligent: chatbots, grifters, and the new, new ignorance (theindex.media)
- Figma’s new AI capabilities will 10x designers (figma.com)
Figma has acquired Diagram, the AI design startup founded by Jordan Singer, who previously built "Designer," a Figma plugin that used GPT-3 to generate design ideas from a prompt. The article says Figma has been focused on AI for some time, has built a machine learning team, and has seen its community build nearly 100 AI-powered plugins using its open API. It outlines plans to use AI across discovery, design and development, and says AI will lower the floor and raise the ceiling for design work.