Rust is an incredible language. You can use it in embedded hardware, in web servers, or in video games or something and it feels the exact same everywhere. And you do that while keeping a good idea of what the machine's actually doing (as opposed to Go, TinyGo, or Python).
The memory safety is just a cherry on top. It's honestly incredible. It has its drawbacks of course, but so far the benefits seem to outweigh the costs in my opinion.
February 16, 2022As we see better UX in crypto, we’ll see more centralization. It happened to the web itself (you use Google, not web rings to find websites). It happened to email (you don’t run a mail server, you use a service). And I think we’ve been seeing it in crypto over the past few years.
This is evident with the growing usage of exchanges as daily wallets, node service providers growing in popularity (Infura, Quicknode), and nobody running their own nodes or dapp frontends. I’d hate for the idea of trustless, censorship resistant money to be lost.
You need to ask yourself: if a government wanted to take your crypto, would it be easy to do so? Do they just need to tell your exchange to lock your account? Just tell AWS to block your IP from some app? If the answer is yes, you may need to reconsider the threat model of cryptocurrencies. If they become too easy to attack, shut down, or steal, then these are just slow, energy-wasting databases that will try to beat today’s money but never will.
I’m optimistic this will get better, but it’s a risk that I don’t think gets enough attention.
January 2, 2022Imagine life-based PCs and phones. Instead of silicon there are biological cells. Don't have power? You probably forgot to feed your computer. Image an actual disease infecting your computer and causing it to run slowly or even die! Can we do updates via stem cells?December 2, 2021
I want all projects built on crypto to have a datasheet page on their websites. Using just this page, I should be able to know everything I need to know about anything you have on chain and be able to build ontop of it, much like a datasheet for electronics hardware.
/datasheet should tell me what contracts youve deployed, their addresses, which chains theyve been deployed to and when (by block hash and timestamp). It should tell me of all interfaces with those contracts and of any events they may emit. It should also link me to source code.
November 12, 2021Formal Verification is a science, Test-Driven Development is its engineering analogue.September 31, 2021
Monchy & Alexandra's voices complemented each other so well.September 2, 2021
I must say, a lot of US Federal Government websites are of incredible quality. People should use them as templates instead of the trendiest startup.August 31, 2021
Wait until people find out that the metaverse is just the Internet and all that's left is better interoperability, accessibility, and maybe more 3DAugust 30, 2021
Turns out running a decentralized and resilient community online (collectives, DAOs, etc) just requires git, email, and motivation. The only new thing that DAOs brought to the table is an easier way to economically motivate peopleAugust 20, 2021
Can’t wait to hear an HBCU band play Industry BabyAugust 2, 2021
You don't have to play clean against powers greater than you.July 32, 2021
I want more public benefit and socially responsible corporations to exist. I don't care if they can't hyperscale because of misalignments.July 23, 2021
If "cupboard" is pronounced "cubberd", then "clipboard" should be pronounced "clibberd".July 10, 2021
The EU is just a confederacy of the Roman Empire, and China's Belt and Road initiative is just the Silk Road. History never stops rhyming.June 22, 2021
I'm starting to dislike how discrete my CS program was. I'm learning nearby technical fields and everything is full of continuous math mixed with computing. Of course we've taken our fair share of math courses, but in retrospect I think we should've had courses that applied computing knowledge to those fields. Oh well 🤷♂️June 22, 2021
Posterity will think it's insane that we let random people take an easy test once in their entire life and be able to drive almost any car, in any condition, at any time. The dangers of incompetent people driving these several-ton machines careening at high speeds are so normal to us.May 7, 2021
I graduated! B.S in Computer Science, Howard UniversityMay 7, 2021
Much, and arguably most, of erosion of the American middle class can be attributed to the toxicity of corporate American culture and practices.April 22, 2021
If your AR or VR project is neither playable nor interactive, then it’s just a VFX project with extra work.April 16, 2021
SpaceX moving quickly, Bezos leaving Amazon to focus more on Blue Origin in a few months, NASA's Artemis missions, space programs coming out of the East, and so much more mean that this new era of space innovation is 100% happening now.March 32, 2021
In the wee hours of this morning, I updated this blog to the second version of the UI for
non-post pages. It's my first significant UI update to any type of page since I've started this custom blog in late 2019. I made this change not only for a more refreshing UI, but also to help welcome more forms of content, like videos! Here's to v2.0.
March 25, 2021This is the best birthday I've had in a long time. Here's to 22 years.March 24, 2021
Software engineers could learn a lot from conventional engineering branches. In practice, though, because in theory we already have similar workflows.March 19, 2021
I might start sticking close to game dev. It’s so interdisciplinary.February 20, 2021
Used a flame graph for the first time today. It felt like hard core engineering / debugging. I used it to debug a game I was making that started to jitter on each frame. The entire time I thought the physics stepping was slowing it down but turns out it was the rendering that was taking forever each frame. Thank God for profiling. Happy Valentine's Day!February 14, 2021
All roads in digital innovation eventually lead back to gaming.February 13, 2021
The interesting thing about web games is that you can make them such that you take advantage of the accessibility features that browsers already have.February 13, 2021
The move from centralized platforms to decentralized ones will never happen under normal conditions. It'll only happen in black swan events where people are frightened by the lack of control their current solutions gave them.
With this being said, the move from fiat currency and CBDCs will likely occur after a near failure of the financial system. And, the move of apps from mobile back to the web will occur when app store owners become to strict for companies to deal with.
January 29, 2021Call of Duty Black Ops 2 and Infinite Warfare told the future to the masses. I'm convinced.January 16, 2021
Bay Area tech types keep talking about leaving the Bay for Austin and Miami when the reality is that they’ll be colonizing every big city below the Mason-Dixon with enough time.
Lots of southern cities have been positioning themselves as some kind of “Silicon Valley of the South” for more than a decade now and would be happy finally to bring those types to their city. Austin and Miami are just the beginning.
I’ll even go so far as to say that Austin and Miami are first. Atlanta and Raleigh are next. Birmingham, Louisville, and Nashville or Memphis will follow.January 16, 2021
Negative partisanship works so well, because it's easier to make fun of the other side than it is to justify why you're on your side. As a result, political polarization increases.January 10, 2021
The next tech revolution will be tiny: biotech, nanotech, and future/smart materials. Of course we’ll see lots of digital tech innovation along the way, but I think the next explosion will be in those fields.January 8, 2021
I need to start writing and taking pics when I’m out enjoying experiences. I reject materialism to enhance my experiences with the world, but it’s hard to enjoy the experiences if I have to remember everything by myself. Pics and words will help me relive them.December 19, 2020
First
FireEye, then
SolarWinds, and now
the NNSA? Even some city governments were hit. These attacks are hitting incredibly hard and fast.
RelatedDecember 17, 2020I think we’re in the uncanny valley between not quantifying the value of a person’s time at all and having time being as easy to value as the dollar in your pocket. Being at one of the extremes feels more natural than the state we're in now.December 11, 2020
Once the US Military moves to its next gen standard issue rifle, I wonder what will happen to domestic AR-15 sales.November 26, 2020
I'm suspicious that the delayed/lasting effects of COVID-19 will make a lot of us say "I told you so" to non-believer's in the future.December 6, 2020
Learning signal processing makes me feel like an electrical engineer.November 26, 2020
Effective cryptography is the last ubiquitous weapon people have against authoritarianism today.October 28, 2020
When an innocent person has their life taken by the government, it concerns me when people justify their innocence by saying they're unarmed. I legally and responsibly carry my weapon, and exercising my right to do so shouldn't be a reason for me to lose my life.October 24, 2020
Balance is rarely constant. It's achieved through the continuous shift between all possible states.October 14, 2020
Thinking in pursuit of a quote yields a bad quote, ironically enough.September 3, 2020
Trying new experiences always brings some excitement.August 16, 2020
I find so much joy in challenging myself. It's addicting. Constantly pushing the frontier of knowledge and skill is so fulfilling, even if the original goal isn't achieved.August 16, 2020
The good thing about today's increased political polarization is that it's a result of increased consciousness of the current state of affairs. The bad thing is that the far right believes certain groups of people are the problem and the far left believes that the system is the problem.July 29, 2020
I wonder which countries wish they could export culture as well as Japan exports anime and manga.July 28, 2020
Is HAM radio the only alternative to the Internet for instant long distance communication?July 27, 2020
Twitter isn't good for my mental health and I don't know how long Mastodon will survive, so I decided to put some thoughts on here.July 26, 2020
TikTok does so well because of its huge middle class. They give a LOT of creators occasional tastes of virality so they keep creating content. The upper class is the verified crowd, who don't make content as high of quality as the middle class but reap all the benefits of TikTok's popularity. The lower class is the group that just consume the content but are still the backbone of TikTok's popularity (read: economy).July 26, 2020