Day: January 18, 2019

Olympic champion Germany edges Canada 3-2 on late goal in women's soccer frien

Weekly Goals

Uncategorized

This past week I was able to accomplish some of my goals – a web deployment of an NFT, and did not accomplish another goal – a toy project related to conscious computation, keep up to date with Fast AI. I added and maintained some other goals related to education rather than production: work through cryptokitties, work through cryptopals, learn terraform. And I did add and achieve some goals related to community: continue my weekly blockchain working group (although only Amy attended),  started a weekly conference workshop – to workshop conference or meetup talks, and I started pair programming with Ben on OpenZeppelin deep dives.

A blockchain reading group started for Thurs at 10. This week was a deep dive into ethereum, but some fellow recursers posted links to bitcoin tutorials  and of course the original bitcoin paper.  Ben here at recurse is building his own blockchain from the bitcoin white paper.  I think it would be cool to have a cryptozombies for actual blockchain creation.

Last week my goal for week 3 was a deep dive into webpack and deployment. If I end up building the prayer coin in rust then I will then I will not do a deep dive into webpack.

This week my goals are  – I would like to reduce this to 5 things, because this is a lot. But we will see what I can get done.

  1. To release a medium article / tutorial on created a react web dapp based on my unpaid labor coin.  I would like to extend eventually beyond ReactJS and look at Rust (Tower) and perhaps Haskell.
  2. Work on UI beautification and continue building out the features of prayer coin. Instead of a deep dive into webpack, build the ui in Rust and maybe take  a look at some of the 0x utilities that Sarah posted on zulip.
  3. Deploy one toy open source project related to conscious computation. Ideas include finishing the virtual  prayer wheel, a musical integration with mastadon, or a python module that creates prayers from a corpus of prayers, or analyzes the structure of prayers.
  4. Contribute to a rust open source project – probably Tower
  5. Continue with the educational and community projects.
  6. This week is the RC hackathon. I may try and work with Tenor on his suite of mesh network deployment of build tools. Or Maybe an RC coin – not sure what that would be used for.

 

Unpaid Labor Coin – A New Hope

Uncategorized

Today I finished up the webclient  to allow people to create and view Unpaid Labor Coin. It uses IPFS and rinkeby. I used this fantastic rinkeby tutorial to get up and running. I did not realize that I had to run a local node.  My goal is to move it over to heroku this weekend and release a medium tutorial.

My biggest takeaway was that it is pretty easy to add access to a smart contract (e.g., token) interactions to a web app. All you need to do is bring in the ABI (application binary interface) for the token into a variable in the webapp and call the functions on that variable.  It makes me think that I could deploy prayer coin in Rust!  But one thing to remember when you edit and redeploy your contract in testing use reset “truffle migrate –network development –reset –compile-all”. Otherwise your ABI will have more cruft than necessary associated with old contracts.

This use of smart contract also made me think of other methods of interoperability such as shaders (interop between the GPU and the CPU) and web assembly (wasm – formata for a virtual machine that can be a target for compiled languages to run in multilple environments.  There seems to be a glitchy area – it is hard to debug these items beyond looking at the byte code. I wonder what a more elegant solution would be? Perhaps when machine learning AI write our software it will not be an issue.

There were a bunch of fantastic presentations tonight at RC. One person deployed an npm library that customizes node init, another person when through the steps involved in optimizing a compiler and how to view the Assembly code. A third person went through his creation of a cheering bot using mastendon, which I was completely unfamiliar with although now I am going to use to for my music transduction bot. Some other presentations included music visualization, open whisper system, and chrome extensions, and an attempt to read 100 papers in 7 hours.  I cant play with all these technologies, but it is inspiring and educational to see what everyone is working on.

I continued with cryptozombies, took the day off from cryptopals, and decided to try to do as similar exercise with traditional algorithms. I find that spending 30 min a day working on these exercises are very worthwhile. It is something I definitely want to continue when I leave RC.

I had two events scheduled, a how to present at conferences event:  We are going to meet every week and individuals will propose and workshop possible event or conference presentations AND my weekly crypto hacking workshop. Only Amy came that one – thanks AMY! It was fun we set up ganache with metamask.  I am becoming a pro at basic ethereum blockchain setup.

This wraps up another official week at RC. I am making progress on my project but I am also thinking about what ancillary open source projects and open source tooling I can release as part of my over all prayer wheel project and the larger project of conscious computation.  I am thinking about what I can contribute to and what sort of meta learning goals I can use to frame my weeks beyond technical milestones and deliverables.