Ok half these people appear lost. These are My People™
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Crypto is evil twin of ML. The math gets deep fast. In ML if you poke a bit, they never get past matrix multiplication. They just do tons of them. The obscurity of ML comes from the quality of sheer quantity. In crypto, understanding Riemann hypothesis is apparently table stakes.
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You know it’s a weird crowd when a slide like this brings down the house. From roadmap discussion at the end of the R&D workshop.
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Struck by another weird evil twin resonance between ML and crypto. The industry roadmap challenges sound roughly similar. If you replace “GPU” with “Bitcoin”, “PoW” with “Cuda”, and “PoS” with “dataflow architecture” many of the conversations rhyme uncannily.
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Skipped a very tempting dinner invite (celebration dinner of the team that did the merge at an interesting sounding place an hour away). Besides feeling unworthy of the unearned honor, going from no-sleep red-eye from LA to a full-day workshop has wiped me out.
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But I can share with you this picture of an excellent room service broccoli crudite salad along with a premium mediocre pizza. Now gotta work a bit more on my slides for tomorrow before crashing.
gn
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Gm, at the #DevConBogota opening session. If anyone wants to find me, I’m towards the back a dozen rows behind the second doors, on the right of the aisle as you face the stage.
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I’m in the brave and noble minority still masking 😇😷
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After some fun song and dance and merge victory lap led by and an ethereum folk singer (??), doing a talk about the merge
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“Know enough to connect the dots, contribute enough to gain the respect of contributors” … process for “project managing” merge-like efforts in future.
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Aya Miyaguchi EF exec director talking on subtraction and infinite games. Via negativa Taleb idea but for org evolution philosophy. Path fork: empire vs infinite garden.
Next talk: Summoning the Spirit of the Dankshard
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I’m up soon, at 12:30, so gotta go get mic’ed up.
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Room cleared after spoke to the overflowing 3000 person room, and I’m up right after the break. This is the biggest stress test of my audience pulling abilities. I’m aiming for a 0.01 vitalik or 300. My biggest competition is lunch 😆
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Thanks all who came to my talk. Had a great lunch meeting with a bunch of EF people and then met up with for a bit. Now at a loose end wandering the Agora. Considering wandering all floors and scouting swag pickings. Dunno if I have capacity for more talks today.
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Meetup tomorrow at 5:30. RSVP here.
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Replying to @vgr
I’m organizing a little Twitter meetup with @vgr at the end of DevCon tomorrow! Come through to talk about the ideas from his keynote: par.tf/EZR3
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I’m also mostly free for the rest of the conference except for a couple of meetings and a few talks I don’t want to miss, so if you see me bumming around the agora today or at the Hilton, feel free to flag me down to chat.
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Jeez I’ve aged since the last time I was on a stage
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Okay, calling it a night. Was great to catch up with my mathematician friend from UMich days , who is one of the few ambidextrous ML+crypto people I know (who can also geek out over relativity, time etc). Did not expect we’d meet in Bogota 🤔
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Did a bunch of meetings today and didn’t go to any talks or sessions after mine, but tomorrow, plan is to do take in a few. Should be more relaxed now my part is done (advantage of speaking early in an event is a) you get to relax after and b) a lot of people now recognize you)
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Reflections on Day 1: This is one of the hardest-to-read crowds I’ve been in, in a good way. Unlike trad conferences, I can’t quickly sort and cluster the attendees into a handful of obvious “types.” This is more a primordial social soup than a mature social milieu with types.
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But I’ve had enough primordial social soup for the day so it’s room service again. I’m in a funny situation here… I’m new to the scene, but enough people know me that I probably *could* pack my calendar, but I’m not on any critical path here, so there’s nothing I *must* do
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There’s also a ton of things to go to here even if you know nobody and don’t want to make the effort. Lots of side events with free food. The general vibe here is social discovery in teams. Maybe 10% true isolates, 40% people who’ve come with 1-2 team members, 40% deep scene.
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It would be fascinating to map the social graph of devcon. I think it would be a small-world graph, but with some small worlds (like the EF team running it) that are first among equals. Very appropriate for a milieu associated with a decentralized technology.
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I did randomly drop into a couple of talks for like 10 min each today beyond the opening general audience talks, and damn the difficulty scales really fast. Every talk seems deep in the technical weeds of some esoteric topic silo that’s 80% different from the next one.
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Beyond basic protocol level, this is not a tech “stack” in the traditional sense, and I suspect people from one small world will at best understand the innards of 1-2 adjacent ones. 3 hops away from your small world/well, it’s basically alien talk beyond basic shared elements.
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Actually what it reminds me of is math, in terms of field structure. Except for a few people like Grothendieck who supposedly built mansions with vast swathes of math, most mathematicians can’t understand anything the mathematician in the next room does.
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Above the basic “protocol” of say sophomore college STEM math (say calculus, stats, perhaps a bit of topology, real/complex analysis), it’s a Babel situation
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Won’t tweet the obscenely large sandwich I had for dinner. Ordered fries too not realizing it came with chips. To my credit I only ate half. But I will share picture of this 75% chocolate bar that I’m eating a bit off for dessert. Came with hotel room. Speaker perk I’m guessing?
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Verdict: good chocolate. If you’ve never been an invited speaker at a nicer conference, be aware that there’s often a nice goodie bag waiting at the hotel. Conference I spoke at a few times in Chicago came with a nice cab of popcorn, jellybeans etc.
Tomorrow I must swag hunt.
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gn wagmi etc
If you’re around, come to the meetup tomorrow if you can (linked up thread), or just say hello if you see me.
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Day 2, gm
What hath the day in store today? Well, for starters, getting breakfast with in a bit, so that should be fun.
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After fun breakfast chat, now catching back half of this panel on “notable security incidents since devcon V”
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I think this the first time seeing in the flesh after years of vaguely crossing paths online.
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Now talking flash loan attacks. Panelist is helpfully ELI5ing it before getting into it.
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Panelist arguing that flash attacks are more in MEV bucket (miner extractable value) than hacks/security exploits. So software working as intended rather than bugs. Just in very inefficient markets.
Though I’d argue algorithmic stablecoins are theoretically suspect too
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Third time I’m hearing this analogy between crypto dev and more safety-first tech fields like aerospace and nuclear. I bring it up whenever I can to exploit my aerospace cred 😎
This field needs an introduction to Perrow’s normal accidents theories
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Interesting distinction: DeFi is new classes of attacks, NFTs/consumer retail is simple, old attacks from 10y ago deployed against new classes of users. Commoditization curve of attacks?
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