Posts

Its the economy, stupid. We have transitioned from the attention economy of humans to the service economy of agents, or the agent economy. Much like the evolution of digital economies from Second Life and the World of Warcraft, we have arrived at yet another sign post of economic transformation. With the leap of commerce transacting in a completely digital world, the pivot has been made from human actors in these digital worlds to autonomous agents. Agent actors are the new attention target. The social media wars of attention that developed through the 2010’s, once the internet was compelling enough to attract human eyes for more than technical interest, have passed to agent interests. Less so for human eyes, to agent needs. Autonomous agents, as of the date of writing, now account for more internet traffic than human. The commerce of old is giving way to the commerce of the new, and the transactions taking place are going to continue to be autonomous systems. The landscape is not very interesting now, but it has begun, and will just continue to solidify into faster, more voluminous transactions among machines. ...

The threat to your data in the age of AI. TL;DR: If you are not a spy, criminal, or journalist, the steps in the Defensive Measures section are enough to protect your data in the age of agents. As the web develops, the personal protections a user should be prudent to take keep shifting. They have to evolve with the technology, and the most recent shift is agents. Which leaves the question this post tries to frame and answer: what is accessing my data, how do I limit my exposure, and what protections are practically available for the motivated netizen? ...

Pinning with Pinata and old busted NextJS APIs Photo by Sebdunedin from Midjourney Integrating NextJS Pages Router with Pinata Well, it has certainly been some time since this ole place has been updated. Probably because a company was paying me to not write blog posts about quirky software problems, and I couldn’t write blog posts about their tech stack. Anywho, this blog post is about the nightmare of integrating the Pinata pinning APIs with NextJS Pages Router APIs. ...

AWS Cloundfront to s3 Photo by Amos from Stockphotos Setting up a static website with s3 This post, yet again, serves as a message in a bottle for a future self who ever needs to set up a static website on s3, in 2023…because all the documentation changes every year and you never know what will work today. So this obviously will not work tomorrow. But it works today. Problem: serve a static website in s3 For this endeavour I thought it would be somewhat approachable to setup a static website in an s3 bucket. I heard you could do it, I have seen it advertised, so I assumed it would be easy enough. Aaaand, it isn’t, surprise, surpise, thank you AWS. ...

DeFi means Democratizing Finance Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash Post DeFi summer, we are apparently in DeFi autumn(?), which suggests we are heading into DeFi winter? Or perhaps we went from DeFi summer to DeFi winter, and skiped the fall. Or is the fall so percipitous that we just end up immediately in winter? Decentralized Finance DeFi, a blending word created from contracting decentrailized finance had quite the run in the summer of 2020. It was the coming of age of DeFi, a concept that had been known before 2020, but solidified during that year. finematics has a nice summary of the events. The summer of 2020 defined DeFi as a force in the blockchain world. ...

Crypto Crashing…Again Photo by Conor Samuel on Unsplash Could be the name of a song, but alas it is just crypto being crypto. This time with moar flare than usual…or just the same ole same ole thang. from @needacoin on twitter. ...

Lucky number 777 Photo by Samuel Branch on Unsplash Working with the OpenZeppelin ERC777 contract This is a quick post about working with the ERC777 smart contract implementation from Open Zeppelin. The other token contract implemenations from Open Zeppelin are somewhat straight forward to work with, namely the ERC20 and ERC721 contracts, however, the ERC777 contract implementation takes a bit of love before it can be deployed and played with. What’s the problem The ERC20 and ERC721 contracts can be deployed without any fuss, as they only depend on their import statements. Which if available will result in a deployable contract. However, because the ERC777 standard interacts with the ERC1820 Regsitry contract, an ERC777 contract will revert when deployed if a Registry is not available on the network. If you are working on a local network, then your contract will fail to deploy (and you will spend a couple hours trying to figure out why a vanilla contract won’t deploy). The following is a manual approach to get an ERC777 working on a local test network. Note, that the ERC1820 Registry contract is available on most major testnets, so if working with one of those, you should not have these issues. ...

Markets be nickel-and-dimin' Photo by Siarhei Palishchuk on Unsplash The LME cancels trades for a third time It has been a bit since this space has been updated, but a lot has happened! Today is a little offering for posterity, as this event will most likely be swept up in the dust bin of history, and only available as a footnote in a book. But it is a rather important development, IMHO, for blockchain tech and DeFi. The long and short of it is that Russian invaded the Ukraine on February 24th 2022. This threw the commodities world upside down, resulting in the price of nickel spiking from approximately $25,825 per tonne on February 23rd to over $100,000 per tonne on March 9th. This wasn’t the only commodity to spike as a result of the uncertainty in the geopolitical landscape, however, this move broke the London Metal Exchange (LME). ...

The State of the Crypto Union DeFi, NFTs, and Derivatives, oh my! In an effort to remember how to update this blog, and to keep this area somewhat active, it is perhpas a good idea to reflect on the current crypto space as the middle of 2021 approaches. Sell in May and go away doesn’t seem to be the case this year as, checks the price charts, Ethereum is posting a new ATH and Bitcoin is bouncing back from oblivion. 2020 was the shitshow of the century as the world devolved into the coronavirus pandemic, which we are still reeling from socially, fanancially, politically, and unfortunately from India’s perspective, the pandemic continues. ...

Own The Internet’ Hackathon: Post Mortem Following the Sia and Namebase hackathon via gitcoin I recieved a runner up prize of 250 HNS and this pretty fun shirt, but handybot also got used in production for a bit in the HandshakeTalk telegram chat group, which was great to see. The following is a recap of the use of the bot and some lessons for using telegram bots in a production environment. ...