AdamSpitz

2yo has developed a habit of pulling her own hair out, when stressed or bored or at this point just out of habit.

(She's been stressed pretty often lately - we've got 5wo twins, so she's getting much less attention than before. She's still generally happy, but with many frustrating or stressful moments sprinkled in.) (Of course we're doing what we can to try to give her quality attention and reduce her stress and so on.)

After just a few weeks of this, she's already got a big bald spot on one side. A few more weeks and she won't have much hair left. Not the end of the world, but it'd still be better to avoid that if possible.

Our current strategy for dealing with this involves saying "don

How do the Kindle devices' warm-illumination features compare to the Kindle iPhone app with dark mode and red-filters turned on?

Just to explain in a bit more detail: for nighttime reading, with my wife asleep in bed beside me, I use the Kindle app on my iPhone, with the iPhone's "Color Filters" Accessibility feature turned on (to make all the colors on the screen red-filtered). This means that the background is black and the text is red - there's very little light coming from the screen at all (I don't want my wife to be bothered by a bunch of light), and red light is better than white light for sleep hygiene.

Do any of the Kindle devices' warm-illumination features come anywhere close to

Does the DeFi world have some way for me to buy a token giving me exposure to a broad index of the mainstream stock market? (Something like an index fund or an ETF.)

That is, I'm not looking for something like the DeFi Pulse Index, which is a token that gives exposure to a big basket of crypto assets; I'm looking for a token that gives exposure to a big basket of ordinary stocks.

(The point is that this might be useful for the kind of person who still wants some of his assets to be in the form of ordinary stocks, but wants them to be tokens that he truly owns instead of entries in a bank's database.)

This seems like the kind of thing that Synthetix is aiming to do ("exposure to real-w

Our daughter (5 months old) has been sleeping in a "sidecar" crib immediately adjacent to our bed: we've removed the front wall of the crib, and the crib surface is flush with our bed surface, which is very convenient in the middle of the night so that my wife can easily pull baby close. (Our understanding is that this is a pretty common sleeping arrangement, especially in the AP world.)

What do we do about naps, now that baby is capable of locomoting?

She's not exactly crawling yet, but she's definitely capable of moving herself around (either by rolling or by smushing her face into the mattress and pushing with her legs). Leaving her alone in the three-wall crib isn't safe; she can and w

I've been very glad to see that Polygon has been developing all those other L2 projects (Hermez, Miden, Nightfall, Zero); I'm just fuzzy on whether there are plans to transition the Polygon PoS commit-chain over to being a proper L2 that publishes validity-proofs to Ethereum (using technology developed by Hermez or Miden or whatever), or whether it's going to remain as it is, or whether they're just going to encourage developers and users to migrate over to the more-secure L2s once they're ready, or what.

Does anyone have any insight into what the Polygon team's plans are for this, or a pointer to a post where they talk about it, or something?

(I don't mean this to be a Blockchain Holy War question! I'm asking a technical question, not a philosophical one.)

I keep hearing that Ethereum layer-1 is capable of doing something on the order of 13 transactions per second (give or take, depending on the complexity of the transaction). Why is that? Like, what exactly is so expensive about processing Ethereum transactions, such that a normal computer can only do 13 of them in a second?

I understand that L1 (rightly!) prioritizes decentralization, and that from now on apps should be built on L2s, and that L2s' TPS can be much much higher.

I understand that Ethereum L1 is meant to run on consumer hardware, for the sake of decentralization

Web3 social-media platforms have the potential to be much better - better for the world, and also just more-pleasant and more-interesting places to live - than our old web2 platforms.

I think that a bunch of the by-now-well-known standard themes of crypto/web3 - decentralization, censorship-resistance, openness, composability ("lego"), ownership (tokens) - might come together to produce something that can avoid the (also by-now-well-known) various types of awfulness than we see in web2 social-media (incentives for unhealthy types of content, lack of incentives for healthier types of content, polarization and echo chambers, etc.).

Putting together a bunch of ideas, here's a first draft of a

I don't think permissionless shared-spaces (like subreddits, or like all-of-Twitter - that is, shared spaces that may have moderation systems for kicking people out, but that are open by default) are going to be viable in web3.

A general theme of crypto/blockchains/web3 is mechanism design: creating systems that have good emergent behaviour when the individual players follow their own selfish incentives. We're learning more and more about how to create decentralized systems that can behave the way we want them to without being derailed by malicious actors. I think web3 social-media platforms will need to be more-explicitly designed along tho

I think web3 content-discovery has the potential to be better than web2 content-discovery, because tokens and prices have a "put your money where your mouth is" quality that upvotes don't have.

Content/creator tokens offer a way for early believers in a content item/creator can invest in it by buying up some of that content/creator's tokens. Well, just as in other kinds of markets, prices are information signals: the price of a token is useful information about the expected value of that creator or content item.

So what I'm imagining now is a system that watches all the tokenized web3

Lately I've been hearing a lot (mostly from Vitalik Buterin) about the idea of retroactive public-goods funding. That post (written by some combination of Optimism and Vitalik) is worth reading, but the basic idea is to reward people after the fact for doing work on public goods that turned out to have been valuable (because identifying valuable projects/creators is much easier in hindsight than in foresight).

That post points out that the entire venture-capital ecosystem for startup companies exists because of the possibility of an exit: startups (w

When we put mutually-hostile subpopulations (e.g. left-wing and right-wing people) together into a shared social-media space (like a subreddit, or like all of Twitter), they fling poop at each other for a while and then (if possible) split apart and form their own separate echo-chambers.

This seems like it's causing a massive amount of destruction in the world. (That is, it's not just a matter of "ugh, it's unpleasant to talk about anything controversial on Twitter"; social media is increasingly how we form our opinions and make sense of the world, and even how we form public policy. This is actually important.)

I like the idea of trying to decrease polarization by introducing some more

Whenever a new decentralized-social-media project pops up, one counterargument I keep seeing (e.g. here) is that people are going to clamor for the removal of illegal/sleazy content.

As far as I can tell, the pro-decentralization argument is something like:

• Like it or not, the technology exists; people can upload whatever they want to the Internet, and in particular we now have decentralized, permissionless data storages where the people providing the storage space don't even kn

One of the main promises of web3 is "open data", meaning something like: the data is published on permissionless, decentralized data storages (preferably with plenty of documentation on the data format, to help others easily parse it), rather than a database running on a proprietary server.

I think maybe there's another sense of "open data" that might be important: representing links between pieces of data (e.g. "this comment is in reply to that post") using a platform-agnostic/open-ended/extensible link format, rather than using links that are hardwired so that they can only point to o

Launching a new social-media network is a daunting task, because the web2 Big Tech incumbents are already established and we have to compete with their network effect.

Web3 has some advantages that might help us compete with that, though. One of them (which I think is already well-understood; I just want to mention it explicitly here) is that web3 makes it super-easy to make tokens representing ownership of the network, and to allow users of the network to own those tokens. Token upside is inversely proportional to network effect; the growth of the network can be accelerated by having an ever-growing army of user

Can we put together a list of decentralized, permissionless data storages that might be suitable for building social-media projects on top of?

Off the top of my head (and in alphabetical order):

• Arweave
• Filecoin
• IPFS
• Swarm

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of other options, though; I'd like to flesh out this list.

Obviously blockchains themselves can store data, but storage on (most?) blockchains is expensive, so the usual idea is that on-chain you only store a content-addressed link to a cheaper (but hopefully still reasonably-decentralized) storage. (e.g. Store the bulk of the