Notes from 24/2–3/3/19

It’s a new month. 1/4 of the year has passed. Time to put that into some perspective

Nietzsche and the Cynics

Later in The Gay Science, Nietzsche clarifies what is at issue. By ‘God is dead’, we should understand that ‘belief in the Christian God has become unworthy of belief’: the time has come for human beings to live truthfully, in accordance with their situation. The neo-Cynic affront lies not in the debasement of long-lost metaphysical certainties, but in a fresh insistence that destruction of the old basis for morality raises urgent consequences about how to live now… Nietzsche’s philosophy looks to a future that will be free, ‘gay’, ‘momentous’, as far as possible self-determining and nondialectical; it resists and resents the poisoning, ‘nausea’-inducing hold of past ways of thinking.

Using cynicism as a method to critically examine societal norms. Examinig from it’s origins to its applications

“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche

Alright I’ve never managed to finish the book properly, mostly ended up skimming through it. So my memory of it is quite sketchy other than a few moments that really stood out.

This article helped to dissect who exactly this Zarathustra was and what he intended to do for humanity. First by pointing out the reality of our current beliefs and then suggesting that we overcome this. I still can’t seem to understand why this was such a seminal work in the history of philosophy though. Perhaps I would need to find a way to juxtapose this with past works, or that I am benefitting from his philosophy to the point where I take what he is saying for granted already.

China: emergence of a trade Leviathan

Absolutely amazing graphics done right

How To Give A Mind-Blowing Compliment

The narrower the compliment, the more meaningful it is to the recipient.

Adding specificity to your narrow comment enhances its meaning.

If someone is passionate about a subject, skill or pursuit, a compliment that ties into that passion will be well received.

I am mostly wondering where sincerity lies in the article. So this is why compliments feel vacuous? Maybe people subconsciously follow this too closely.

US Military Files Patent for Room-Temperature Superconductor

Time for ‘almost lossless storage’ of energy. Superconductors do not lose any energy during the transmission process.

4 Stages of Understanding Love

Probably written for some sort of personal catharsis. Love culminates in the ultimate ‘mature love’ which is about celebrating life. In this case, I think that using ‘love’ to describe the earlier stages would be an utter misnomer. It seems that to truly appreciate love, one must first lose it. Then subsequent attempts would be some sort of subconscious experiment, possibly to make up for past mistakes until one finds equilibrium.

THE POWER TO SEIZE OPPORTUNITY BEFORE IT KNOCKS

So the title sounds really grand but it’s basically some sort of advertisement on Accenture’s offerings.

Overview of applications:

1. Intelligent customer engagement — virtual agents, converationsl interactions, digital experiment at scale
2. Intelligent revenue growth — customer segmentation across multiple channels and targeted marketing
3. Intelligent health care — targeted patient services and treatment options, improving the patient experience
4. Intelligent supply chain — open and transparent supply chain allowing for dispute resolution and optimisation at each stage
5. Intelligent financial crime detection — detect criminal patterns and triaging of cases to follow AML and KYC regulation

Is Being VC Backed Startup Really Compatible with Open Source Business Models?

One thing we have consistently witnessed over the past few years is that far too many startups use open source strategy prematurely as a quick way to get traction in order to raise money from VCs — and later try to capture enterprise customers with hugely expensive enterprise offerings that make the cheaper alternatives of big cloud vendors more attractive?

It’s left solely as an open question, highlight the different incentives VCs look for compared to an open source organisation.

24 Lessons From Warren Buffett’s Annual Letters To Shareholders

Buffett enforces an individualized system of compensation that rewards managers for their personal actions — even if that means, counterintuitively, rewarding managers of individual units when the wider business doesn’t do well.

Fair work for fair reward. Your work should stand on its own.

Buffett realized that companies with relatively few tangible assets and “combined intangibles of lasting value” ultimately do best in an inflationary environment, because they have less costs to cover and higher rates of return on their existing capital.

Great experiences with a company make it market-proof

“The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow,” he writes “But rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.”

Companies must be able to defend and secure competitive advantages

When Coca-Cola first started, it was turning something relatively cheap to produce — syrup — into a branded product. Over 100+ years, that brand has grown to encompass a broad range of human emotions and aspirations.

“‘Buy commodities, sell brands has long been a formula for business success. It has produced enormous and sustained profits for Coca-Cola since 1886,” he wrote in his 2011 letter.

Capitalism in a nutshell it seems

Warren Buffett’s hiring strategy, as he explains it, is relatively simple: find people who love what they do and have no need for money, and then give them the most enjoyable job they could possibly have. Never force them into a meeting, or a phone call, or even a conversation — just let them work. It is to this strategy that Buffett credits much of the success of both Berkshire and its many companies.

“There are managers to whom I have not talked in the last year, while there is one with whom I talk almost daily,” he adds.

Do what you love or don’t do it at all. But of course there’s so many caveats to that.

A Guide to Changing Someone Else’s Beliefs

This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s much easier to influence people who are already close to you. This is in part because their brains are already primed for the right chemical reaction.

“People want to give back to those who’ve given to them,” Cialdini says. “That’s the principle of reciprocity.”

Instead, make them feel listened to. Pay attention to your friends and coworkers, and give gifts that are simple but meaningful.

The perception of scarcity becomes a more powerful incentive for people to get on board with your ideas “if you can make the case that unless we move now, the benefits of this cause or approach will be lost to us,”

But one of the best strategies for changing someone’s beliefs is also the simplest: We’re far more easily influenced by people we like or have things in common with.

Trust+Empathy

Blockchain

Craig Wright Claims to Be Satoshi in Critical Response to CFTC on Ethereum

What even.

A Libertarian Response to Vlad Zamfir’s “New Crypto Legal System”

#1: Don’t break the protocol.

#2: Keep crypto law legal.

#3: Do not implement changes to the blockchain protocol unless the changes are required for the purpose of technical maintenance.

Replace it with

Crypto Law is responsible for managing disputes in blockchain governance, and making sure that they are resolved via legal processes that don’t break the protocol.

Essentially subsuming the priorities of the crypto ecosystem to the world’s legal system.

Vlad’s current approach might persuade people who already dislike libertarianism that Non-Intervention is bad, but crypto-libertarians won’t find it convincing.

A more plausible way to convince crypto-libertarians to abandon Non-Intervention is to show that governance of decentralized systems is different enough from governance of centralized systems that using essentially the same approach for both doesn’t make sense.

One obvious difference is that crypto governance is decentralized (at least in some cases), and forking makes exit much easier in crypto systems than in traditional systems. Ease of exit means there’s plausibly less motivation to limit the decision making power of crypto systems. I’ve written about this here.

Personally I do not have too much exposure to the expected effects of any particular political philosophy, only recently gleaning it from a module taken last term. However I’ve found that in crypto it’s more than just a technology. It’s about potentially reshaping the world and thus these arguments do hold some weight.

Experiments With Liberal Radicalism

1. Crowdfund individual donations towards open source projects.

2. ‘Match’ or ‘top-off’ the contributions of individuals from government, grant, or private philanthropy funding

This, matched with Gitcoin grants is described as the ideal open source funding model.

I find this oddly similar to the workface scheme in Singapore where the government matches the wages produced by low-wage workers to supplement their income. Ultimately, isn’t the principle here about accountability?

BCH-based Decentralised Autonomous Corporations: An overview of a small part of Bitcoin’s future

So in a way, the Autonomous Agents work on the behalf of human agents to make decisions together.

All of this dependson the security of oracles and the information they provide, otherwise it’s a completely insular system. Also it’s so dependent on accurate information that if you corrupt it’s sources you can essentially take control of it.

Won’t this become like robo-traders on steroids?

The 20 Blockchain Projects With the Most Developer Activity on Github

Somehow I’ve heard of all of these projects before except Neufund. Probably when I did landscape surveys this wasn’t up yet/not announced. Neufund is a platform for issuing security tokens. I think with the added regulatory certainty, such a start-up might thrive in the near future…

What is Baidu Blockchain Engine (BBE)?

Feels and look like a marketing thing for one of those permissioned blockchain EOS-like things.

Oh goodnes the blockchain paper is in mandarin.

The paper also proposed the idea of commercializing the Baidu cloud blockchain blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform in addition to six applications based on the Super Chain; Totem, Baidu Association (Huixie), Encyclopedia Online, Treasure Box, Hubert, and Degree Universe.

Baidu Totem is an image right management system or what can be preferably termed as content copyright while Huixie is an education certification platform where Al will create the curriculum vitae (CV) of users. Duyuzhou which is also known as Degree Universe is a space journey game app. The Chest Encyclopedia also known as Baidu Baike is China’s equivalent to Wikipedia and will help in the area of information traceability. The application in May adopted the use of blockchain in tracking amendments to its articles.

Looks like they’re going for a platform play.

Blockchain-ethereum

Why You Should Buidl on MythX API

Infura for smart contract security. API revenue sharing on a subscription system.

Look out for public beta luanch in March.

Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: Does Anyone Care?

I rarely put papers here. This is relevant because it was featured in Maurelian’s smart contract newsletter.

Papers that do surveys of vulnerabilities tend to be published every few months these days. It’s nice to see how several new tools have been featured.

In this paper, we surveyed the 21,270 vulnerable contracts reported by five recent academic projects. We proposed a Datalog-based formulation for performing analysis over EVM execution traces and used it to analyze a total of more than 16 million transactions executed by these contracts. We found that at most 504 out of 21,270 contracts have been subjected to exploits. This corresponds to at most 9,094 ETH (1 million USD), or only 0.30% of the 3 million ETH (350 million USD) claimed to be at risk. While we are certainly not implying that smart contract vulnerability research is without merit, our results suggest that the potential impact of vulnerable code had been greatly exaggerated. These results are likely to be controversial, yet, we are reluctant to over-claim as far as the underlying reasons. We hypothesize that the reasons for these vast differences are multifold: lack of appetite for exploitation, the sheer difficulty of executing some exploits, fear of attribution, other more attractive exploitation options, etc. From what we can find by analyzing the blockchain, a majority of Ether is held by only a small number of contracts. Further, the vulnerabilities reported on these contracts are either false positives or not applicable in practice, making exploitation significantly less attractive

Though this is a really spicy conclusion. I wonder what this means for the sheer amount of smart contract security start ups that exist out there. I was never convinced that merely building a single tool might work as a business model. Not to say that many of these tools were intended to be startups, quite a few of the tools surveyed in this paper were by researchers.

Chronicle of an Attack Foretold

Oh goodness I was hoping to take a look at it before it was solved.. but here is the answer key now!

Basically it’s Dilligence’s way to demonstrate how CREATE2 has opened up a new vulnerability. Now that’s just a creative/community-centric way to achieve thought leadership.

Two parts:

1. take control of contract
2. drain the funds — now this is the interesting part. The attacker took control of the contract and edited the functions so that nobody else could take it back. And now they had to wait for the CREATE2 opcode to come online with the Constantinople hard fork in order to drain the contract.

Development

5 GitHub tips for new coders

1. Change out of the default editor, Vim
2. Change your dotfiles for greater clarity on what branch you’re on
3. Install Hub
4. Practice merge conflicts
5. Make a Github Page

Was hoping for something where people could dive in quickly to use Github but this seems to be more of an optimisation toolkit on how to use Github better.

Life Optimisation

Feel Busy and Distracted? Here’s How to Take Control

Surprised to see this was from ‘artofmanliness’. Anyway, this article fits well with what i’m learning in Decision Theory.

1. Remove Distracting Apps — keeping you away from them
2. Log Out and Change Passwords on your computer — so you do not simply auto log in to your distractions
3. Pick a ‘highlight’ of the day as a priority and serve as a reward mechanism for your focus

Either way, time is precious. Setting up barriers to use them unwisely is always good.

OKRs, Explained with “Star Wars”

OKRs are goals that you set based on your manager’s goals. Focus on the HOW it happens.

Set a metric that reflects the goal in practice.

Star Wars Memes never die

8 Timeless Skills to Learn Now in Under 8 Hours to Change your Life Forever

Learning to learn

Writing

Public speaking

Meditation

Forming good habits

Negotiation

Mathematical thinking

Coordination and flexibility

I like how the author put out some key resources that he used to help him pick up these skills. Also there is a constant emphasis on deliberate practice that was a key contributor to successfully picking it up.

How to Achieve 10x Results in 2019 Using This Simple Strategy

Similar to, “don’t do it if it’s not a hell yes” kind of philosophy. Set worthwhile tasks and pursue with vigour.

These Sweaty At-Home Cardio Workouts Require Zero Equipment

here’s the recommended workouts:

1. air squats
2. lunges
3. mountain climbers (oomph these hurt)
4. forearm plank (these two but mostly your elbows)
5. walking plank
6. high knees (if you wanna kill your neighbour’s ears)
7. alternating jump lunge (if you REALLY want to kill your neighbour’s ears)
8. squat thrust
9. push up to knee touch
10. quadruped hold to shoulder tip

Don’t lead by example

This is the first in a series on strong technical leadership. Being a strong tech lead is very different from being a strong engineer. Let’s start by dispelling a common leadership myth: that you should “lead by example.”

Okay that cleared up my initial confusion

“Leading by example” doesn’t work. Setting a good example is necessary, but isn’t sufficient for strong technical leadership. Acting like a tech lead means setting clear expectations and embracing direct communication… but don’t let the role go to your head: you’re a member of a team not the boss of the team.

So the story goes that the author started by doing everything himself and ended up crowding out his team’s effort. Alright turns out the post is about clear communication about expectations.