Here’s some background reading if you’re unfamiliar with this meme. I was going to write “new meme” but think by now it’s an idea that’s rather thoroughly entrenched in sufficiently large Twitter communities. Namely Crypto Twitter and Machine Learning Twitter, and by tech VCs that lurk both.

Keeping up with crypto twitter is somewhat of a necessity if you work in the industry. But it really does damage to one’s attention span. Not to blame my dwindling ability to concentrate on external factors, but I think it’s definitely been a primary contributor recently. …

Both sides of the political spectrum use data to justify their opinions. In general, people on the ‘Left’ tend to focus on variance and people on the ‘Right’ tend to focus on mean. Statistical distributions — at the very least — have both mean and variance. …

Someone in the API3 Telegram channel asked this question: I still don’t fully get why smart contracts need oracles, why is it that smart contracts are not able to query APIs the same way regular apps can? …

This is an introduction to one element of API3's technical design. The API3 solution to the API connectivity problem requires an ecosystem with a large number of first-party oracles. Airnode’s role in this is to make first-party oracles a reality. Airnode Airnode is an oracle node specifically engineered for API-provider operated…

This is a series of excerpts from an email exchange I had with Ayndryl, site admin and one of several contributors to Forgotten Languages. It’s a pretty fluid discussion that curvedly touches on: linguistics, computer programming languages, cognitive psychology, Turing machines, quantum mechanics, and philosophy [having the final word]. If…

This is a post summarizing this excellent research paper by Tim Roughgarden. I will give an overview of the EIP-1559 proposal, restate Roughgarden’s “Ten Key Takeaways”, and offer a bit of a high-level and intuitive explanation for the proofs/arguments in his paper. (You can also just skip to the conclusion.) Background: Transactions in Ethereum …

This is kind of a Part 2 to my post How Mesa DEX Works which I wrote on November 27th, three days before the API3 public token distribution. During the distribution — in fact, right at the beginning — a previously untapped exploit was used by an attacker to purchase…

In 2014, during my computer science masters, I had to write an 250-word “essay” for a scholarship application answering the question: “What do you think will be the future impact of data-driven computing on society?” I re-read my response recently and found it interesting in light of modern day contexts…