Although I did not anticipate I would be doing this, at Recurse I have been doing a deep dive into the rust programming language.   I have been coding the cryptopals solutions in rust, and I am exponentially faster. What took me 6 hours last week now takes me 1 hour.  I am still doing many things the unrusticrutian way, but I am slowly refactoring.

There is a great community of Rust programmers and enthusiasts at Recurse and it is really helping improve my code (and code readability – thanks for the linting tips y’all). I am using this for Solidity linting, because my nvim inter makes me do all the work manually!

I have been looking around for an open source Rust project to contribute to.  I was thinking of tower, which is a web and networking framework.  But yesterday. J at Recurse, who has been really helpful in all things Rust, posted a blog post and a link to Dalek, a cryptolibrary.  The blog post is a fantastic meditation on drop and memory management and how to understand libraries and contribute to a codebase.  I also got this great suggestion for rust debugging. I am now looking for a good rust unit testing lib – any suggestions?

I sort of have this feeling that crypto and cryptographic work is to today what the web was to the 90s (and 00s).  But I also had a feeling that facebook was a fad, so I should probably not be trusted.  In any case, I am loving my blockchain work, cryptopals and algorithms reviews so much I think I am going to work on this library, or maybe a rust library for signal.

PrayerCoin is moving along, every day I look at it and spend an hour meditating on what I need to add.  I have expanded the ecosystem with Ritual and Liturgy Contracts.  I am adding functionality whereby you can donate a cryptokitties to a prayer and make a ritual. Donate is the wrong word – the word is at the tip of my tongue and I cannot get it.

I had a great short discussion with Noah about games and blockchain.  All the logic for blockchain games are around pips not the board.  The cryptokitty has all the logic and then we bring it to the game space.  This is different from say the magic circle of Huizinga.  The circle is everywhere and no where. It has infinite circumference and zero area like a Sierpinski Carpet. These games are more like world building than traditional games.  Why is it a game?  My definition would be that the rules structure the game and the magic circle, rather than a board or physical location of a magic circle.

But if the power is in the pips and not the board what does this mean for game design?

 

Today I fired up aws and set up an IPv6 machine to access the heap at Recurse.  I was assisted in the anaconda in stall by Mari’s blog post.  I have to fix the tunneling so that the Jupyter notebook works.  I think this would be a perfect terraform project –  and I’ve put it on the docket for Thursday.

I continued to add some functions to the PrayerCoin contract. Ben and I played around with 0x Relays, launched RCCC (recurse center coin) on Ropsten, and generated a some wallets, per truffle requirements, with mnemonics.   We are almost ready to trade RCCC on the 0x Relay.  I am a rebuilding my dapp deployment to create a framework for automating  react/truffle dapp creation. I sort of have an idea of something like glitch for dapps. But I am not going to let this distract me from the prayer coin.  HOWEVER, if I can create tools to help build prayer coin, or help people build PrayerCoin dapps – all the better.

I made some progress with my Transduction music app, after breaking and then fixing the Mastodon integration.  Integration with Euterpea has been slow going. I am finally making it to the exercises portion of The Haskell School of Music.  I had some difficulties getting the examples in the book working but when I discovered the examples github repo, everything ran much more smoothly.

Amy and I brainstomed about webrings, an early web phenomena when people linked their sites together as sort of a discovery tool.  Is there any role for a webring today? Most curation is done by automation and tagging. There is something interesting about someone creating a home grown ‘webring’. What is the content that will be strung together today? Probably not websites.  I am curious to see what Amy creates.

A group of people are going to pair program this weekend on pwnable.  This looks super cool but I have zero time to devote to it. I went through the first lecture on consistent hashing from Tim Roughgarden.  I remember first starting to use hashtables and it was like a secret super power.  Consistent hashing is this times a lot.