advice
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A friend a few years back to me said, “Conviction is the scarcest resource, not time.” It’s stuck with me, and I’ve developed a life philosophy around it. It’s easier for me to publish bullet notes than essays, so I’m gonna try to approach this in a map vs territory kind of way: I point at a map and say look, that’s the shape of that thing and here are some shapes that are not that thing, and hopefully it’s enough for you to fill in my point yourself.
advice
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A friend a few years back to me said, “Conviction is the scarcest resource, not time.” It’s stuck with me, and I’ve developed a life philosophy around it. I struggle to write about it (though it’s very easy for me to talk about it in a Q&A format). I’ve reorganized some discussion notes/text chats that help start putting pen to paper and hopefully leave some helpful nuggets.
This is Part 1 in a multiseries blog post about conviction.
recs
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Thought it would be fun to share useful things that I’ve bought for myself, as inspired by Andrew Connor, Alexey Guzey, and nudging from Vivek. Most other lists online are more comprehensive and I have taken many things from them. Most stuff is from Amazon (linked via short reflinks, but I still link to the cheapest version + only stuff I would have linked without that). I want to add software here soon as well.
recs
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It’s hard to find a curated list of shows that I or my friends would like. I’ve tried to get my shows from Netflix before, or my friends – even then, it’s hard to isolate why people like specific shows with only spoiler-free reviews. Personal recommendations are rare and treasured, and I wish there was a place that all my friends put their favorite shows up so I could steal from that list instead.
cryptozkquantum
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I think this post is a good middle ground between the oversimplified layman-oriented quantum news articles, and the hyper academic quantum computing papers that are hard for a cryptographer to parse. As the field rapidly evolves, things here may become outdated or wrong. Feel free to leave thoughts/comments/corrections on the hackmd draft of this post! An old version was previously also posted on zkresearch. Thanks to Aram Harrow, Krishanu Sankar, and Lev Stambler for comments and discussions – all errors are mine, not theirs.
recs
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These are just extracts of the most interesting thoughts from conversations I have, or articles I read, or things I languidly think about. Hopefully this can serve as a place to record my response to things to both re-evaluate later and invite public discussion on to correct my takeaways, so I’d love hearing any feedback or related ideas! Title inspired by the incredible rabbitholeathon. Usually phrased in the form of questions, as that’s a fairly simple way for readers to critically come to their own ideas as well.
cryptozk
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The lack of trustless integration with web2 is one of the leading reasons that blockchains feel siloed from the rest of the world – there’s currently no way of trustlessly interoperating with the exabytes of existing information online, built up over decades by millions of users, that plug into every system that we use every day. The resulting isolation of blockchains leads to fully contained apps and ecosystems: a great fit for defi or gaming, but a terrible fit for pro-social applications trying to weave themselves into our daily lives.
cryptozk
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Why do we want PLUMEs? The proliferation of advances in zkSNARK applications has created a useful new privacy primitive: a user can prove statements about their identity without revealing their full identity. If you can provide a zkSNARK demonstrating that you know the secret key for an account that is a leaf of the Merkle tree of Bored Ape owners, then you can prove that you own a Bored Ape without telling anyone who you are.
recs
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It’s hard to find a curated list of movies that I or my friends would like. I’ve tried to get my movies from the Cannes Film Festival winners, or the A24 trailers, or from the IMDb top movies, or from the Oscar nominees, or my friends – even then, it’s hard to isolate why people like specific movies and stick to spoiler-free reviews. Personal recommendations are rare and treasured, and I wish there was a place that all my friends put their favorite movies up so I could steal from that list instead.
crypto
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Intro to vickrey.xyz Thanks to an idea from @0xngmi, a team of @real_philogy, @outdoteth, and me recently prototyped the first maximally private Vickrey auctions on-chain [repo here] (also shoutout to @0x_Beans and @rauchp_ for some additional analysis and help). Unlike past implementations of Vickrey auctions on-chain, vickrey.xyz leverages uninitialized CREATE2 addresses to not only conceal the size of bids, but their existence (more precisely, their association). This is unlike existing implementations, which only hide the amount, but disclose the other bidders’ identities and their maximum possible bids.
recs
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I thought it would be cool to share some of the cool spots/hidden gems from all the countries I’ve visited. I try to select spots that are really unique, especially in their vibe, experience, or culture ‒ the farther it is from anything I’ve experienced before, the higher it’ll be on this list. I’ll also try to list the “best” versions of things I’ve tried, like food types or libraries. I usually care much less about historical significance or aesthetics, and there are plenty of lists for that already.