Notes from 13/10–20/10

AI

Facebook Has Been Quietly Open Sourcing Some Amazing Deep Learning Capabilities for PyTorch

Crypten for secure multiparty computation

Detectron2 for object detection

Captum for modular interoperability

Blockchain

Overview of EY Nightfall

The software achieves transactional privacy by leveraging zk-SNARKs using ZoKrates to hide the _to and _value arguments of a transfer function.

Article basically goes in depth about how basic token transfers can be shielded and made private.

Solidity Smart Contracts Walk-through Series Part-1

The basic idea around this series is to understand the technical flow and use -case based concepts around smart contracts written in Solidity. In this series we will go through three different use cases : “Property auction”, “Renting out Property ” & “Business partnership”.

It’s really smart contract examples here.

The Final Puzzle Piece to ETH’s Monetary Policy

Burning ETH for gas, paying the network itself.

Every day that Ethereum runs, BASEFEE will remove more and more ETH from the supply. The BASEFEE amount that Ethereum could have paid directly to validators, instead is being paid to ‘Future Ethereum’.

The ability to attack Ethereum 2.0 will be a function of how much ETH is available for purchase on the secondary markets. If there is high ETH supply on the market, then buying enough to attack Ethereum is less expensive. If there is low ETH supply on the secondary market, then the price is higher, and attacking Ethereum requires much more capital.

By adding to the scarcity of Ethereum today, Ethereum’s security tomorrow is secured.

EIP 1559 puts constant downwards pressure on the supply of ETH. When Ethereum brings in little revenue, there is little downwards pressure, but when Ethereum is a fully-fledged economy, moving trillions of USD-value each day, and has the throughput of 1024x shards, the burn-rate of ETH could become significant.

So i’m not sure if you’ll eventally run out of ETH?

Mastering Ethereum CTFs

MUST KEEP

Breaking Smart Contracts

THIS TOO

Life Optimisation

RICE Scoring Model for Prioritisation

This seems interesting… probably useful if we can already decide what is impactful

A Post Mortem on Growth Hacking

My gut reaction is that we’ve lost our damn minds if we think growth hacking is more important or compelling to research than product market fit. The generous interpretation would be that startup operators and founders understand product market fit much more than growth hacking, which leads to lower search interest in product market fit. That seems like a stretch so I’m not inclined to believe that interpretation.

• Running a process to get to Product Market Fit: if you don’t have a product that is valuable or necessary within a large and growing market, then nothing else matters.
• Positioning effectively within your market: it’s important to consider what type of market you’re in, who your target customer is, and how to position your product within that market to compel your target customer to engage with your product.
• Finding scaleable acquisition channels: assuming you establish Product Market Fit, you’ll want to open up the top of your funnel. I’ll provide practical guidance on how to identify new channels, test them, and scale them in a way that is economically efficient for your business. And, no, paid marketing isn’t the only solution.
• Designing the ideal organization structure: most startups suck at designing an org and most significantly underestimating the importance of thoughtful org design. I’ll lay out my approach to creating org charts that align the company with what matters most, allows for nimble staffing changes in the event the company needs to shift in response to new information, and that strikes the appropriate balance between optimizing products versus innovating to build new products.
• Knowing when to optimize versus innovate: growth can come from optimizing the existing products and services a company has, or from creating all new products and services that allows the company to deepen its relationship with existing customers or move into new market adjacencies. I’ll teach you how to decide which method to pursue and what balance to strike between the two. And how to reflect that in the organization you design as the company scales.
• Being great at building innovative products: I’m shocked at how many consumer startups don’t set themselves up to continuously innovate on product. Being great at product innovation involves designing a product development process that can be leaned on to reliably produce high quality products at a fast pace. I’ll describe a process I’ve designed and taught other companies to implement.
• Maintaining a pipeline of user/customer insights: in the words of Steve Blank, you have to “get out of the building” and continue to engage with your customer to discover rich insights which inform future innovation. I’ll write in detail about how to have productive customer conversations so you can do so within the walls of your own company.

Product

Google’s Most Interesting Hardware Announcements, Ranked

1. Router that is also a speaker
2. App that transcibes voice recordings
3. Better AirPods

Tools

Seaborn — Let’s make plotting fun

Seen this before by the way.

Pretty data viz in python

How To Animate Elements on Your Page as You Scroll

Always an interesting UI element.

Full codepen example here

Pre-mortems

How to conduct one

1. Get familiar with the plan
2. One person facilitates and gets the team to imagine that the plan has failed “peer into the future with a crystal ball and see that the plan has failed utterly”. Team also must be curated
3. Team writes down reasons why the plan might have failed
4. Go down the list and share
5. Discuss merits and implications of each item listed
6. Go into actions that could have avoided it

Why this is good”

1. reframe the problem to point out weaknesses
2. Cognitively diverse group let’s you identify a range of suggested reasons for the plan’s failure
3. psychological safety
4. group equality, each person must give a reason
5. sense of urgency