Shorebirds are beginning to migrate South for the winter. Along with ducks, shorebirds are my favorite bird photography subjects. Here are a couple photos from this year’s migration here in the Seattle area:
Disclaimer: I’m not a crypto expert. Please feel free to correct me in the comments.
Proof of work describes how new cryptocurrency coins are created, how cryptocurrency transactions are validated, and it determines how quickly new cryto coins are created. For this article, we’ll discuss proof of work in terms of bitcoin, however there are many other proof of work cryptocurrencies.
At a high level, to generate, or “discover”, new bitcoins, computers do puzzles that generate hashes. Hashes are long strings of characters, like this “81019284c2f9615e20a6825c…”. Once a computer running the bitcoin software has successfully generated a hash, called “mining”, the hash is checked to see if it happens to be a valid bitcoin. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it isn’t.
The work done to create the new hash also has the important side-effect of validating transactions on the blockchain. In addition to potentially generating a new block, miners are paid transaction fees to validate transactions. At some point all 21 million bitcoins will have been mined and no more will be created. At that point, transaction fees will be the sole incentive for miners to continue validating transactions.
To modulate the speed of coin creation, the difficulty of the work that’s necessary to mine a bitcoin block automatically gets adjusted to be more difficult when miners generate hashes faster. Conversely, the work is adjusted to be easier if the overall rate of coin creation decreases. For example, the difficulty decreased recently when China banned bitcoin mining and lots of mining computers went offline.
So when you generate a new bitcoin, you’re “proving” that you did the work to create it. This is what allows bitcoin to be decentralized–anyone can create one if they do the work, no one can create one without doing the work.
Some people consider the energy used to create new bitcoins to be wasteful. I won’t try to argue for that one way or another, but because of this, many other types of cryptocurrencies use other types of proofs to create new coins. The most popular alternative to proof of work is what Ethereum 2 uses, which is called proof of stake.
Proof of stake also describes how some new crypto currency is created. The main benefit is that it uses significantly less energy.
For proof of stake to work, an initial quantity of the cryptocurrency has to be somehow distributed to a lot of people first. This process, which we’ll call bootstrapping, can happen in any number of ways. For example, the cryptocurrency can be given away or, in the case of Ethereum, it can be mined using proof of work for several years, then switched to proof of stake later.
In some proof of stake cryptocurrencies, no new coins are created in the future. Proof of stake is only used to validate transactions being added to the blockchain. I’ll explain how that works shortly.
Once the cryptocurrency has become proof of stake, if the currency does create new coin, they’re generated without the requirement to generate hashes by solving puzzles. The newly created coins are instead given to everyone who already holds some of the cryptocurrency as long as they’ve “staked” the currency.
To stake the currency, you have to lock it so it can’t be spent or transferred for a specified period of time. Then, when new coins created, anyone who has staked coins will automatically get more coins in an amount proportional to the amount they have staked.
For example: If Bob stakes 10 blogcoins, a fake proof of stake currency, and Maria stakes 20 blogcoins Bob will get 1 new blogcoin and Maria will get 2. In the end, neither is richer or poorer relative to each other than they were before. They just have a larger number of coins.
If neither Bob or Maria gain anything, why create new coins at all? It’s mostly to increase the total number of coins. If you want to sell 20 people a slice of a really big pizza that’s only sliced in 10 pieces, you’d need to cut each slice in half first to “create” 20 slices. You’re not generating more pizza out of thin air, you’re just making it possible to distribute the existing pizza to more people.1
The other function of staking is, as mentioned above, to verify transactions. When you stake your blogcoins, you’re saying “I’m going to validate this block of transactions in exchange for a fee. If I falsely validate it, I understand that the blogcoins I’ve staked will be taken from me. If I validate it correctly, in addition to not losing my staked coins, I’ll get a small reward for doing the validation.” Staking is a way to incentivize good behavior.
Just like energy use is the downside of proof of work, proof of stake’s downside is that it’s less proven in the real world and, as such, potentially less secure. It also could be that it staking results in less liquidity since the incentives to keep your coins staked is very high.
So, that’s a high level summary of why proof of work and proof of stake are different. There’s much more to be said on the subject, but for now, I’ll leave it at that.
1 Because of the way staked coins are distributed, it isn’t inflationary in the same way as a fiat currency like the US Dollar. When new dollars are created they’re not distributed proportionally to everyone who already has dollars. The recipients of the new dollars are the winners, and everyone else loses because the dollars they’ve saved decrease in value.
This grebe’s nest wasn’t too far from the shore of a small pond in Seattle. To get a clear view of it, I had to slide out on a log that was mostly submerged in the mud. I sat still on the far end of the log for about half an hour, long enough for the birds to become accustomed to me. Once I could tell that my presence wasn’t going to bother them, I slowly scooted close enough to get a photo with a 600mm lens.
The grebes seemed to pass their entire day doing the same thing. One of the parents would stay on or near the nest with the chicks while the other left to search for fish. Every 5 or 10 minutes, when the fishing parent came back with a meal, the chicks would get super excited while they were fed. Then, after a quick 10 or 15 second visit, the parent would go back to fishing and the chicks back to waiting for the cycle to begin again.
Can Artificial Intelligence truly be creative? It’s starting to seem like it. Some of the recent GPT-3 demos feel like they’ve moved beyond being derivative and into the realm of actual creativity. Marcus du Sautoy wrote The Creativity Code to explore the question and its existential implications. He calls the test of whether an AI is creative “The Lovelace Test” in reference to the Turing Test and in homage to Ada Lovelace. Check out Michael Harris’ review of the book here.
Languages that compile to Javascript seem to be here to stay. I spent a lot of time in the past writing Coffeescript, but if I were to do it again, I’d probably start with either Elm, here’s a recent write up on it, or Imba. Both make web programs less error prone and ostensibly more fun to write.
No-code platforms and languages are also still going strong. I’m very skeptical about these because in the past they’ve almost never seemed to amount to much and always fizzled out after not too long leaving their users to start over writing code. Even so, some of the more promising ones I’ve come across are Bubble as a general purpose no-code environment, Judo for mobile apps, and Retool for internal tools. Whether they can surpass their predecessors remains to be seen.
Edward de Bono, the famous creative thinker and the man who coined the term “lateral thinking” recently passed away. Here’s a great obit with many of his life’s achievements.
It’s no secret that China has been tough on its own tech companies recently. Why? Here’s an article by Noah Smith arguing that rather than focusing on distracting social media and shopping, China is instead concerned with doing real things in the world. An interesting and very plausible take.
Instead of simply letting local governments throw resources at whatever they think will produce rapid growth (the strategy in the 90s and early 00s), China’s top leaders are now trying to direct the country’s industrial mix toward what they think will serve the nation as a whole.
Recently, here in the Pacific Northwest, a plant was newly discovered to be carnivorous. The western false asphodel captures bugs on its sticky stem rather than in its leaves. Hopefully I’ll find one of these plants out yonder some day.
And, to finish it off, here’s a picture of what’s universally considered by everyone to be The Best Duck on the planet. The Bufflehead.
This is raw outline of Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay’s fantastic book on how to have tough conversations that potentially change minds.
Focus first on instilling doubt rather than changing beliefs.
As you may have seen, there’s a new photo sharing app called Glass. You pay $5/mo or $30-$50 dollars a year to use the app. it has no ads, no tracking, and no mysterious algorithms. It’s a great looking app and has a lot of hype that was generated by some vood0o-genius marketing.
In a sense, the mood around Glass feels the same as Clubhouse a few months ago. Given Clubhouse’s spiral, that’s an ominous comparison to make, and I’m only making it because photo sharing apps are very hard to bootstrap. Especially paid apps.
Photo sharing apps are very hard to bootstrap. Especially paid apps.
Instagram works because it successfully caters to two groups:
To make a photo sharing community sustainable, any app that wants to compete with Instagram needs to successfully attract people from both groups.
If an app’s community is missing users from the casual consumer group and only has the photography pros, it ends up being a bunch of people who mostly only engage with other people’s photos because they’re either hoping for reciprocal engagement or they’re trying to get ideas for how to make their own photography more competitive. In short, without casual consumers, engagement solely from other photography pros will not be genuine, it will only be comparative and competitive.2
Without casual consumers, engagement solely from other photography pros will not be genuine, it will only be comparative and competitive.
On the other hand, if the community is missing people from the photography pro group, for starters, it won’t truly be a photography app. It may be another social network, and that’s fine, but here we’re specifically talking about photography apps. More importantly, it won’t work as a paid app. There are simply too many free alternatives. The model of paying for privacy and fair feeds with no algorithms has sadly failed over and over.
So, what’s to be done? What’s the alchemical concoction that will compete with Incumbentgram without sacrificing the privacy of its users and integrity of its founders?
To succeed, Glass needs to be free and attractive to casual consumers while offering features compelling enough for photography pros to pay for. It’s a hard balance to strike and no one does it well right now. Flickr is probably the closest, but they seem to have given up on being anything other than a niche community for photographers.
Casual consumers almost certainly won’t pay $50/year for Glass when they can use Instagram for free.
If I was a product manager at Glass, I’d focus on attracting users in the casual consumer group. I’d make their experience viewing, discovering, and sharing of photos excellent and free. Glass currently has no #hashtags or categories of any type and has no location based discovery features. Finding photography that appeals to your tastes is currently much too difficult.
I’d also focus on providing an experience for photography pros that’s good enough to pay for. An experience that showcases their work beautifully (luckily, Glass already does this) and gives them tools to successfully promote themselves to the niche audiences that are looking for the type of content they provide.
It’s tough to do that without going the Instagram way where pros have to either pay for views or blindly struggle to reverse-engineer the ever-changing algorithm but I think it can be done.
Glass doesn’t need to offer premium placement or algorithmically controlled feeds. Instead it can offer photography pros paid tools to enable them to compete among each other for the views of casual consumers in a free-market type environment. Not everyone will win all the time, but if pros sense that the competitive environment is fair and unbiased, the community will grow and pros will be willing to pay for it.
I don’t know if that’s what Glass is going for. Maybe they have a different vision or different goals and would find all this silly and completely missing the point. My response to that would be that in order for the business to be sustainable, this is The Way.
I hope Glass succeeds, but from what I’ve seen so far, I feel they need to make some changes to stay relevant and competitive. Today photography pros are joining Glass because with Instagram’s shift to video, they’re feeling the pressure to find what’s next. But this endless loop of competitive self-promotion can only last so long before good photographers realize that they can’t build a truly engaged audience on Glass.
1 You may be tempted to disagree with this simplistic dichotomy, but the fact is, high level photography is a commercial endeavor. Good photographs are expensive and time consuming to make. There will always be people (like me) who just want to share their photos and not make any money, but with the amount of time and equipment photographers have invested into gear and travel, good photographers are almost always promoting something.
2 This is, in some ways, where Flickr is now. There are some genuine communities on Flickr, but for the most part, it’s primarily populated by people who think of themselves as “photographers,” with very few photography aficionados. It’s closed and stagnant.
Sometimes when the right circumstances evolve or are intentionally created, an environment is where creativity can run free appears. I don’t know if there’s a name for this already, but I call these special times and places “creative cauldrons.” Here are a few of them along with some very brief descriptions:
In the 1960’s Steward Brand, Andrew Weil, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), Timothy Leary, Huston Smith defined psychedelic culture (for good and ill) for the next 50+ years. Read more about it in Don Lattin’s book The Harvard Psychedelic Club.
Painters Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, Egan Schiele. Writer Arthur Schnitzler. Sigmund Freud. Read more in The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel.
A relatively small town with a population of about 100 thousand was the starting place for a disproportionate number of of great and influential rappers. Among them, MC Ren, N.W.A., YG, Coolio, Eazy-E, Dr Dre, Ice Cube, Tyga, Kendrick Lamar.
The movie Midnight in Paris does a great job of imagining the vibe: Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway, Juan Belmont, and Gertrude Stein.
John Warnock, Alan Kay, Jim Clark, Ed Catmull. These computer science luminaries all came from an environment that specifically catered to fostering innovation.
As described in Evolution of Desire, a book by Cynthia Haven about René Girard, this English department, through the intentionality of Albert Cook, attracted critic Leslie Fiedler, playwright Lionel Abel (whom Sartre called the most intelligent man in NYC), novelists John Barth and Raymond Federman, posts Robert Creely and Robert Has, and of course René Girard himself.
This is one of my favorite image of a Short-Eared Owl that I’ve captured. I love the background, the grasses perfectly sweeping over to frame the owl. I love the wedge shape of the bird, its intense gaze.
This image reminds me of long, early mornings spent sitting quietly on a log, surrounded by tall grasses, looking out over the Puget Sound and waiting for these beautiful creatures to arise from hidden perches and began their utterly silent flights over the fields.
Short-eared owls are one of my most awaited treats of winter in the Pacific Northwest.
I am very ignorant about what I am. I marvel at the assurance and confidence people have of themselves—while there is hardly anything I know for sure and that I could guarantee being able to do. I do not possess a checklist of my abilities; I learn about them only after they have done their job.
No matter how many times I go over my own writings, rather than please me they disappoint and irritate me. I always have an idea in my mind, a fuzzy image, of a far better expression than the one I used, but, like in a dream, I can neither grasp nor develop it.
I know how neither please, delight, nor titillate the best tale in the world dries up in my hands and drones on. I know only how to talk seriously. I am quite devoid of that facility, which I see in several of my acquaintances, to chat away with every newcomer, keep an audience on the edge of its seats, or engage a prince on all outs of topics without boring him.
From Essays, as quoted in The Art of Solitude by Stephen Batchelor
Montaigne is a great example of how someone who isn’t a natural storyteller, isn’t a born self-promoter, or a raging extrovert can, through careful introspection and honest self-appraisal, resonate with so many people for so long.
I find that in most of my writing I studiously avoid including “me” and instead write about “stuff” I’m interested in. Maybe revisiting Montaigne will change that.
When you don’t know what to do…
Organize your best ideas and present them to your manager or leader and let them choose from your list of 2 or 3 proposed solutions or suggest one of their own.
If you don’t have any good ideas, before you complain or ask for help, use whatever resources you have to get some ideas or at least next steps. If you can’t figure anything out, have a concise list of steps you’ve already taken ready to go before you ask for help.
Your manager will almost certainly notice and appreciate this and, when it comes time for choosing a leader, they’ll remember who always comes to them with answers.