Alex Van de Sande’s wandering about
Taking back control of my own writing.
This year I've transformed all my favorite projects, the Triangle of Everything and the Hexagonal Earth into full websites of their own, and did this new personal website. Over the last decades I've written lots of places on the web: Wordpress, Posterous, Flickr, Tumblr, Medium, Mirror, Paragraph and some contributions to other people's websites. In the past few years I've (re)bought my own domain (finally) and decided to start posting only to an address I owned. The past week I went one step further, and asked my agent to scour the web for my past writings and bring them all as markdown files I own. It was remarkable, it found old archived posts in addresses I had completely forgotten,…
Bend 2 is live!
Victor is a brilliant engineer. He built formal verification for the EF 7 years before leadership started talking about it as a priority. He pivoted the company to "symbolic AI" way before AI could solve Millennium Problems and vibe coding was a word. He was so focused on parallel computing he coded a computer from scratch. You should try bend. If you're also a developer and love terminals, you should follow the official site and install the script. But for everyone else I build this site, to help you give your AI superpowers. Check the demos and paste the prompt! So what is it? You've heard about AI solving Erdos Problems every day. How do they do it? They can do it because math has been…
Reform DAO governance by delegating 5M ENS tokens
I want to share some ideas on how to reform DAO voting. These is a framework for discussing delegation of DAO votes and I welcome feedback. TLDR: The DAO holds over 50% of the voting power. These tokens were intended to be distributed for wider governance but were never done because of their economic value. This proposal discusses how we can delegate them (instead of distributing). The problem Here are three graphs that can summarize the issues this proposal wants to address: ENS Governance is clearly in a crisis. Currently, one delegate has enough quorum to not only execute any proposal, but also to outvote the next 50 other delegates. The issue didn’t start when these new votes were…
We built what we thought the world needed
We built what we thought the world needed, not what it wanted. That’s why we failed. We wanted organizations that would live in the cloud and only follow hard rules. We built a property ledger that could be used by anyone to manage anything. We wanted an open backend for an open internet. We built a way for people to invest directly into anything. The world wanted penny stocks and ape pictures. They wanted quick money and cassinos that were open 24/7. The other day I was reading the docs to invest in a promising startup and realized my money was going to a fund, structured like an spv, who owned shares in a cayman corp, who had a deal with a Delaware llc who was three levels away from the…
A defense of Tetrahedron Maps
This very unsphere shape can actually be a great globe
I have a small obsession about constant area hexagonal map. Maps can serve many purposes, but the ones I am mostly interested in education, their ability to show the world in a way that you can figure out new connections just by looking at them. Hexagonal maps have a strong association with board Games (and Video Games), and I believe it is because games, like maps, are an attempt at creating an idealized model of a piece of the world, a scenario in which from far away, a complex system looks simpler. As if you knew the basic rules, then you could figure out how the game plays out. I wanted to give an upgraded new map for the Impossible Map I've made last year, and so I started working on…
Analysis of Ranked Choice voting in 5.19 (Governance Distribution Pilot)
The DAO has voted and it has approved EP5.19 with the project having being set as a budget of 30k. Since I am a big governance geek and I have been vocal about my issues with Ranked Choice voting and its alternatives I’d like to analyze the resulting data. Before, I’d like to clarify that this is a debate on how different voting methods lead to different result and not a complaint about the result itself. I would have been writing this regardless of the outcome. In fact the choice I voted as my first choice did not win and there is no way of analyzing the data that it would’ve won. First, probably the best graphical analysis of the vote can be seen on…
Gosper World - a novel world map made of hexagonal-like fractals (or, how I made Matt Parker’s Impossible Ball)
This is a blog format of the presentation given at the Bridges Conference of Mathematics and Art 2024 in Richmond. The original paper the presentation is based on can be found on the Bridges Website. You can also download the poster and print it in large format. Is it possible to wrap a sphere using ONLY hexagons? This is the question that started me in this journey and the one we will be exploring. The answer has some surprising implications, from the big to the fun. In the bigger side, for instance, Uber stores almost all of its geographical information on ride and traffic data using hexagons around the earth. It argues that doing it facilitates computing approximate radius and distance…
The Triangle of Everything
"We’ve basically got it all worked out, except for small stuff, big stuff, hot stuff, cold stuff, fast stuff, heavy stuff, dark stuff, turbulence, and the concept of time.” - Zach Weinersmith Physicists often talk about the goal of finding a “Theory of Everything” that would connect all the current areas of knowledges. How does relativity work in the very small scale? How does quantum mechanics behaves in very hot temperatures? Our knowledge of how stars explode seems completely separate from the engineering of buildings, which is a completely separate field of knowledge on how particles decay and form atoms, which seems like a separate science from the origin of time. However nature seldom…
ENS Governance Distribution Program
The core of the ENS DAO is to ensure the long term viability of the ENS protocol and the Metagov Stewards believe that governance would be healthier if we had a wider set of responsible actors participating more actively on it. The goal with this program is the following: Combat voter apathy. Reaching the required quorum of 1M ENS votes for an executable proposal has become harder. We believe this happens because of governance fatigue, where large delegates often get tired of monthly voting. Thus rewarding responsible delegates as well as having new ones should help. Increase decentralization of power responsibly. Right now the current distribution means that 6 top delegates could agree to…
On a unified Policy for Refunding Accidental ENS Transfers
Every so often someone will accidentally send ENS tokens to the ENS contract. Luckily, the token contract does have a feature that allows the DAO to sweep these back and we have refunded them, sometimes en masse or sometimes manually. I’d like to discuss different approaches for how to handle this in the future. Since the cutoff date of December 6, 2021, when EP3 amended the airdrop to include accidental returned funds, there have been 21 accidental transactions to a total of 16 different accounts. As far as I could tell only one has been refunded manually from the Metagov Safe. Here’s a summarized table: From total ENS sent 0xbb370213…5aCF6472F 200.567159 0x59e58E2C…C34afee4A 124.194015 *…
EP4.9 Voting Reports
I think it’s a good idea to share my reasoning too, so I will also do it. On Voting Strategy The voting system is an approval voting. The reason we did not pick something like Range, Star or Ranked Choice voting is mostly because these are not yet supported on Snapshot (Snapshot does allow Ranked choice, but then you must rank ALL candidates, which doesn’t really work with such large amounts of candidates). That does mean that as a voter with a lot of weight I need to think more strategically. On approval voting, approving all candidates simply pushes the baseline up and results in the same as not having voted at all, and it means that if you “approve” on candidates that are already ahead…
Visualization of Money Flows between DAO Wallets
Since we are right now discussing the DAO’s new request of funds to the working groups I think it would be a good opportunity to analyze how the DAO has spent it’s money so far. First of all, how much money has the DAO received so far? Money In There are multiple ways to tell this story, measuring value in ether, or dollars, at the current time or then. The method I will be using will be to account only for USDC, ETH (and WETH) transfers and measure them at the day of the transfer. Almost 100 million dollars. That’s taking all the ether and USDC transactions coming into the address wallet.ensdao.eth at the time of their transfer. That of course doesn’t tell the whole story: it ignores all…
Gosperaedron: a new polyhedral for mapping purposes
While it typically falls outside my primary areas of research in crypto usability, I've recently found myself exploring a different rabbit hole. My journey began with an attempt to improve upon Uber’s H3 system, involved a phase of laser printing numerous paper rhombic dodecahedrons, and finally culminated in a novel map projection. This map not only enhances the aesthetic appeal of Buckminster Fuller’s “Dymaxion" model of a continental Earth, but also integrates a more organic, fractal-based round border. The problem with maps Beyond their practical applications, maps serve as a representation of our perception of the world. Even before Mercator introduced his infamous map projection, a…
Brazil's Digital Real
SEC, Anticrypto Army, while the US is waging war against crypto, Brazil Central Bank attended Ethereal Rio to show off their plan to put the Real on chain.| It's not China's CDBC, but rather a model I predict that will be copied all over the western world. First, a context: Brazil is fast to adopt new technologies. Everyone already has phones, social media accounts and WhatsApp. Also, Brazil is already a pioneer with digital payments, being the second largest market of digital transactions behind India. Pix, launched in 2020 was adopted much faster than digital payment platforms anywhere else in the world. You can go anywhere with just the phone and assume it will be accepted, even with…
Condorcet voting explained from a Graphic Designer's point of view
On a recent post I’ve written critically of Instant Run-off voting, mainly criticizing it for being too complex to visualize the full state of the vote and that’s unintuitive to figure out the winner without tallying up all the votes in your head. I’ve also given a few examples in which the vote result could change drastically by a few voters changing their strategies as well as an example that in a typical race where the most popular candidates were extreme opposites, then the moderate candidates in the middle would be squeezed out. Hard to predict, hard to understand and prone to surprising results: those are the opposite qualities you want from a voting system. Often the rebuttal is…
The failures of Instant Run-off voting from a Designer's perspective
Democracy is the heart of modern civilization, elections are the heart of democracy, and a voting system is at the heart of elections. While we can’t blame all modern illnesses on a improper vote counting algorithm, a failed one certainly ripples back its problem on all society. Luckily this isn’t just an academic argument anymore, with more countries and states experimenting with systems beyond First Past the Post and Two Round Systems. Unfortunately, many of those are now migrating to Instant run Off voting, which has so many flaws that it can spoil the whole movement for better voting. Much has been written on the failures of “ First Past the Post ” (the american presidency system) and…
The Man in the Hole
Over the weekend, the loneliest man in the world has been found dead inside his home. He lived the last 30 years of his life under surveillance in a 80km wide, government enforced, exclusion zone, created specifically around him. This is the true story of the Man in the Hole. This is not, of course, a story of some super powered dangerous hermit living in a fancy prison. There are terrible crimes, but he was the victim of. The Man of the Hole was the last survivor or a tribe whose existence we were only made aware after they were all murdered. In 1986, after multiple reports of genocide of uncontacted tribes, Santos, a representative of the Brazilian "National Indian Foundation" (FUNAI),…
Updates to ENS Controller. Should we do Bulk Commits/reveals?
On the latest ENS Small Grants round, one of the winner was Alexnetto.eth work building a referral feature for the RegistrarController. The basic referral is implemented and during the process he even found some errors on the tests in the current ENS contracts GitHub. The goal is to enable third party wallet integrations or name registry apps that have a business model built in, thanks to the referral fees (a percent which is reduced from the fee and controlled by the DAO). You can read more about that progress here. I’d like to talk about the next steps in the improvements we are building. You can read a more detailed specification of the next features here, but the main two goals are to…
ENS Affiliate Marketing - Affiliate Program
Ressurrecting this debate because I think it’s a great idea and I see no issues with that. Below is a graph of all revenue for the DAO since the beginning of the year. In terms of registrations ENS is having the best week of the past two years, and in fact it’s the second highest revenue (after august 2020). But in 2020 most of the revenue was coming from premium names, in sheer number of registrations, the current trend dwarves everything else by a LOT. This can be traced back directly to the people behind 10k club. I honestly don’t think if we had paid a million dollars for an ad agency, they could come up with such strategy (in fact, if an ad agency came with me with the idea to get…
Proposal to use ENS to verify NFT collections in avatars
From talking to people, it’s clear the ENS avatar is a very popular feature of the ENS names. It helps communicate that the name represents a profile, and it’s quite popular with NFT holders that want to showcase their favorite ones. Some NFT holders have asked for us to add some sort of “verified” badge on the avatar, to prove that the image truly belongs to a “verified collection”. I see this as troublesome as it adds centralization end points (the authors of the “verified” collection lists) and it doesn’t fully solve the issue. You can, after all, clone existing NFT and have a “true NFT” that has any image you want. Also, it would requiring having some sort of “non verified” badge for…
A map of all ENS contracts
This is a work in progress and continuation of an earlier thread about threat assessments. ENS is made of many contracts and this is an attempt to clarify. It’s also has been a great understanding path for me to get more acquainted with all the governance changes. But most importantly it answers the question: what is the worst that can happen with my names? Let’s start at the ENS Registry itself. This is the most important contract, the root of where ownership exists, you can even notice this by the care that was taken in choosing an address with lots of 0s. This makes it harder to spoof and creates tiny gas savings. It’s the contract deployed on all chains including for testing. It’s a…
Decentralization and governance
ENS aims to be both a decentralized domain and identity system and as such needs to be built to be censorship resistant and neutral. But to get there it needs an including community of builders in which all are welcome. That path is neither easy nor without its own conflicts. Long before Brantly joined ENS, there had been multiple other contributors, many of them queer, at least two were Trans. I only knew that the same way I found out about Brantly’s own deeply held beliefs: casual conversations over dinner in conferences around the world. As it should be: people’s work only judged by their own merit, independent of the contributors religion, skin tone, gender or country of origin. I think…
It’s time for social media interoperability
Social media is too important to be owned by a few private companies — or governments
Social media is already an integral part of our society, but it’s also ripping us apart. Unfortunately, both the diagnostic on what’s wrong and the solutions on how to fix them are increasingly divided into tribal lines, as are all the other issues that social media debates. Some “solutions” on the table might even worsen the problem by solidifying monopolies and giving them police powers. This essay proposes to sidestep the issue by separating social media itself — the act of citizens forming communities to share ideas — from social media companies, by allowing a common interoperable standard in which messages generated on one app could be transported and read in any other application,…
UX Audit: Status
The Dreaded Triple Bar – or when design is outside your control
Status.im is one of the earliest projects on the space and the first to focus on a mobile browser. It starts with a–brilliantly correct–assumption that browsers in mobile are not about being smaller versions of their desktop companions but should be all about messaging. As a messaging app is also far ahead of the competition, being a rare example of an open-source, end to end encrypted, fully anonymous message app. I would say it’s one of the best-designed Ethereum focused wallets out there right now. Still, here’s how a typical Dapp looks in Status: Ok, this is an exaggeration, a composite of many nasty popups, tabs, and other anti-patterns I found while navigating. Here are two real-world…
Out of Gas: We’re Shutting Down UniLogin
UniLogin is out of gas. Not necessarily out of money, but the current Ethereum gas market, the rise of DeFi, and new browser standards have changed the game significantly enough that we don’t see a way forward with the project. UniLogin started two years ago with a vision for a Universal Login standard for Ethereum, a way to onboard new users to Ethereum directly from the browser, using smart accounts and abstracting away all the gas. While the idea was very well received by the community ( we packed the second largest stage at Devcon 2018), we made some bets on a few assumptions that turned out to be untrue. Incorrect Assumption #1: Browsers could be counted to store low value secrets A…
A security audit of Mist
In 2016-17 the Ethereum Foundation hired @cure53berlin for a security Audit of Mist. The process was eye opening and contributed to the discontinuation of the project. The report was never publicized but it might still be valuable for builders today. Mist was a brainchild of Gavin and Jeff but I took the lead of it when I joined the foundation in 2014. We had grand plans for it being the realization of all web3 technologies we were building and it was planned as the main software release of Metropolis However the first 2 years I worked on Ethereum we were mostly focused on the Wallet app, so it started being released as a beta in 2016 and we started a security audit at the same time. The…
UX Audit: Dark Forest Game
And in general more about how I approach the UX work While I’ve been an ethereum evangelist for the past 6 years (it feels so weird to type this!) I have never tried selling people on the idea of buying any coin., because while I am a believer (and hodler) of many assets, and an avid user of DEFI in general, I’ve been always more excited about other non-financial promises of blockchain general computing. Among them, blockchain games, to the extent I said this back when “games” in ethereum were either casinos or cryptokitties: What I want from blockchain games:1) be a good game first2) explore what makes blockchain unique3) design around the limitations4) persistent always on world 5)…
UX Audit: MetaMask Main Navigation
a UX audit about rethinking metamask menus
Making software—especially on the blockchain—that is both powerful and usable is very hard, I know. And sometimes we plan a lot of our UI but new features get added, some changes are done in the implementation and while we have ideas on how to improve that, they get pushed to our long backlog. So this isn’t intended as anything but praise at what the great work the team at MetaMask has been doing. I hope this analysis could be useful and due to the great utility MetaMask has on my life at the moment, I’d like to share it. So let’s talk about specifically this little bit on the app: Arguably, the most important piece of real estate of the app is the header and menu and it contains the…
Random Brazil trivia
Only capital of a country in Europe to be outside Europe. I’m actually considering doing a whole new thread like Sunny’s, just with Brazilian historical trivia. Hands up if I should. The Amazon is manmade. Its highly fertile soil is the result of purposefully mixing broken pottery, manure and fish bones for large scale agriculture. Many native species that were believed to be wild are now known to have been domesticated over thousands of years. References: Terra Preta Domestication of plant species in the Amazon The first European on the Amazon reported it densely populated, which was later considered an exaggeration. Recent deforestation have uncovered hundreds of geometrical patterns now…
Turtles All the Way Down: Multisigs Owning Multisigs
Using UniLogin and Gnosis Safe to control a multisig from another multisig.
Despite challenging times, our team is doing our best not to slow down. After tackling the nuances of remote work, we have been focusing on stability and polishing UniLogin. Meanwhile we are happy to see that some integrations we’ve being working on are going live, namely Kickback and Gnosis Safe Multisig. But wait, didn’t we already announce we were using Gnosis Safe? To explain, let’s clarify some terms. Besides their prediction markets and exchanges, the Ethereum development company Gnosis has also built two widely used multisig contract wallets: the original Gnosis multisig and the newer Gnosis Safe, which supports etherless transactions. The latter is what we use internally as our…
Have we considered using the Uniswap model for domains, based on length tranches?
It’s hard to know the “right” price for a domain, and I believe to find a fair pricing algorithm is a common trend here, but usually, the hardest part is figuring out the metric we want to optimize. One I have considered now while looking for domains: "What’s the chance that the name you’re looking for is already taken?" We can assume that the ability to find available domains should be a worthy goal. Of course, the problem is that the theoretical limit is infinite. But that’s not so in smaller lenght domains. Uniswap uses a rather straightforward formula: x * y = k. Where k is a constant and x and y are the variables. The interesting thing about the formula is that it’s an asymptote, in…
Where Ethereum Is Going
Changes on Ethereum Foundation and ecosystem from an insider’s perspective
Ethereum is changing, and the Ethereum Foundation is rightly changing with it. While the high centralization of the early years of the foundation might have been crucial for Ethereum to develop and ship, it was also a great source of criticism as it was antithetical of decentralization. At Devcon4, Aya Miyaguchi, the new Executive Director of the foundation, gave a beautiful talk clearly influenced by Zen Buddhism on her management style. Aya believes there was more value to be created by subtraction than addition. The foundation aimed to be smaller, have less power, less resources, and to do it by giving it away as grants. No longer there would be “official” in-house teams versus external…
Sunsetting Mist
What’s ahead for our team
Personally it feels like yesterday, but I’ve been working on Mist for over four years. While I’m proud of all the accomplishments we achieved in this time advancing the usability of Ethereum and sharing a vision for web3, we feel Mist, the browser has outlived it’s usefulness: the ecosystem has matured so much that now the user has tons of great options of wallets and browsers on both mobile and desktop. At the same time, the message of how crypto can make a better web has reached so far that now great names like Samsung, Opera and Brave are all focused on integrating web3 features on their roadmap. Not all were roses, and in our way we faced some extreme security challenges that forced us…
Paying my whole team with a single click
Today I was able to pay my whole team with a single click. Could have been none but the scheduler service failed. This little tool really shows how much ecosystem evolved that we can solve simple real world problems today by connecting multiple contracts. I spent a half a day and was able to build a contract that keeps DAI in compound, but withdraws when it wants to make specific payments. I added yearly salaries of all team members and spent another half day in making a nice interface so they can request payment at anytime. I recently posted how after being paid in BTC and ETH I was now receiving in DAI. But there's a lot more to the story. In fact my whole team has been receiving in ether…
I’ve been to all devcons
I’ve been to all devcons (except Cancun) so here’s a perspective and pics. The first devcon (obviously we start counting at 0) could barely be called a “conference” it was mostly a team retreat. About 50 people, many meeting together for the first time, presenting their work Devcon1 was in London, about 300 people. The whole conference would fit in the main hall at the National House Smíchov which had three more floors of rooms and hosted many satellite events (Cryptolife Hackaton, Philosophers Salon, Magicians council, the ECF alumni show & tell). Devcon2 was in Shanghai and doubled in size to about 700 people. That’s the same headcount as the Prism sidestage, which ran on day 0 at full…
Sponsored Burning for TCR
Creating revenue for token curated registries members If you like reading about novel economic ideas in crypto (and since you’re reading this, I assume you do) then you are probably aware of “Token Curated Registries”, a token incentivization mechanism to help curate lists of stuff. The short version is that a given list (say, “best restaurants in town” or “funniest star wars prequel memes”) is maintained by a community of token holders which add new items by proposing a new entrant and making bets either the majority will accept that as part of the list. The incentive for small token holders is to only propose items they think are likely to be accepted by the majority (otherwise they’ll…
Token-Curating the Truth
Not all original ideas are good. In fact, often unoriginality is a better indication of a good idea. If multiple smart people have independently come up with similar solutions, thought it over and did not reject it outright, that might just one of the best filters for concepts. The glory of suceeding should never go to those who have ideas, but to those who sucessfully executed them, by grinding away at the practical problems, pivoting it in real world scenarios and turning it into a real thing that makes a small impact on other people’s lives. They are like farmers, who carefully tend to small fragile seeds, fight the pests and the elements until they become a real tree. Throwing ideas and…
Was the hard fork worth it?
Knowing everything I know today, I don’t think the hard fork was worth its many downsides. But I wouldn’t know most of that if not for the fork. Firstly, the White Hat hackers have shown to be extremely competent and I feel confident they would have been able to rescue at least 70%-90% of the funds back to dao token holders (as they did). They knew it was a possibility then, but they didn’t want that pressure on them. Also a Fork was sold as the “clean” option, the one that would solve the problem quickly so that everyone could get back to work. Instead the fork created arguments that persist to this day. While ETH/ETC communities have been mostly at peace, that animosity is still brought…
What I want from blockchain games
What I want from blockchain games: be a good game first explore what makes blockchain unique design around the limitations persistent always on world players own the game, the items and experiences allow anyone to design and improve the game embrace bots 1) be a good game first I see too often people just trying to make yet another skin for a cassino or trading card games. Reminds me of slot machine games, all uniquely identical 2) embrace what makes blockchain unique Don’t try to make a shooter or something that requires speed. Think about what sort of experience you can create that you couldn’t in any other platform 3) design around the limitations Only have few moves per second? Then…
Recovering lost ether, past and future
I did not start this intending to write a little trilogy on the Parity Multisig hack and its efforts to recover it: I do however care a lot about the integrity of the ethereum community and I wanted to make an alert on the dangers related to a controversial split, and then I wanted to explore a more general opportunity to use the future reduction in ether issuance to deal with this and other similar issues in the future. Now I want to explore another idea that emerged from the last two ones on how to prevent a chain split. Here are my starting premises: Community splits are bad and should be avoided If a major client gives users the option to fork, then the end result will not be a popular…
Avoid Evil Twins: every ethereum app pays the price of a chain split
Parity has recently proposed an EIP to recover funds lost on the accidental destruction of a multisig library, which held hundreds of millions of dollars at current value by multiple teams. There are many debates rehashing the same arguments of the DAO hard fork, about immutability, precedent and moral hazards. I’d like to present a new side by talking what has changed between now and 2016 in the ethereum platform: a lot of new tokens and a new understanding about forks. If you build it, they will split it The first, most important is that forks are not only possible but can be profitable. Saying this now might be obvious, but there were many people who believed, back in 2016 that once a…
So, about doge and ethereum
So, about doge and ethereum... Both coins share some long common friendship. When Ethereum was running its presale, doge was at the top of the game, sponsoring race cars and overall having a lot of fun. I think it was the first coin to really get that a community, not only tech, was the most important thing. The ethereum community was formed, in part from people that didn't like the bitterness that overtook Bitcoin, so we always tried to be light hearted and fun. Devcons accepted dogecoin. I mean, look at this guy, does he want you to take him seriously? Doge was excited about ethereum too and they posted a thread asking if it was possible to be integrated in ethereum. So a few days later,…
So, about the Petro
So, about the Petro.. Venezuela released a white paper. And it’s sooo good. First of all it was inspired by Chavez, the first person in history to think that currencies should be backed by things. Screw capitalist pig Satoshi, Chavez basically invented crypto. I mean really crypto: Diffie-Helman plagiarized him. He probably invented all currencies too. It’s super innovative. Can you imagine the consequences if the Venezuelan people had access to a currency that could be used for investment, savings or means of exchange? Why didn’t anyone think of this before? ‘The Venezuelan state will not be able to make new emissions”. Except the “superintendency of currency of Venezuela” reserves the…
Thanks Ming
When Ming took the job at the Foundation, she was told that we were a few months away from running out of funds. The situation was dire: there were 3-4 different entities, with different accounting and legal costs in 4 jurisdictions (🇨🇭🇩🇪 🇬🇧&🇳🇱), and mgmt infighting Bitcoin price fell from 600 to 300 just after the presale, before we could touch most of it so right there half of the money we had raised was gone. The other half was spent developing the clients and launching the network, by August. The network was live, but we still needed years of development and the money was running out. We had ether, but it was still under $1. They asked Geth devs (and therefore Mist) to take a 10%…
Everything you need to know about ERC777, the new proposed token standard but were afraid to ask
If you've been to ethereum for more than 5 minutes, you've heard the phrase ERC20, to refer to ethereum tokens. ERC stands for Ethereum Request for Comments and it's nothing more than a topic on the main Ethereum Improvement proposals GitHub, that help multiple main developers debate definitions of improvements, future forks and contract standards. Contract standards are one of the most important thing in ethereum: the reason so many projects can issue a token that can be used in other wallets, or exchanged via decentralized exchanges or really used for anything else, is that they all use a set of same standards, basically a "balanceOf" call that tells you how many tokens you have and a…
I didn’t want to have to wait 16 years to share my favorite characters with my new baby daughter, so I made her a Daenerys Children Book
So I planned my paternity leave to coincide with our 39th week but my daughter only came at 41 weeks and 3 days, giving us plenty of unplanned free time, so I tried to make a page per day during that period. I wanted to cover Daenerys story in season 1, but adapt it to a kid friendly format and with a empowering message for my daughter, so I decided to take as many liberties as the average Disney movie takes with their original content, which is to say, a lot. So I really removed most of the plot elements and it’s a story about a princess who really wants to be a queen, meets a bunch of weird people who give her lots of bad advices, underestimate her and say how it’s impossible for her to…
ELI5: Byzantium Changes
I'll attempt to explain the first Metropolis hard fork changes in a way I can understand them myself. Since I'm not a low level core dev, I hope this can be useful for others. I welcome any comments or corrections: EIP 98: Removal of intermediate state roots from receipts (#14750). This allows more parallelization on transaction processing, as not all transactions require the result of the previous one. Expanded by EIP 658: Embedding transaction return data in receipts (#15014). This allows light clients to be able to see if a call they made was executed properly or if it failed. This could only be verified by full nodes previously. EIP 100: Change difficulty adjustment to target mean block…
Great summary of the largest three fears
Great summary of the largest three fears. Here are how I see them: Censorship resistance: This isn’t a property of blockchains, but of information online. Once that shameful picture of you leaks online, it can live in personal hard disks, it can live in burned cds, it can live in small obscure corners of the globe. What we really need is a change in attitude: stop shaming people for their sexuality, past behavior and substance abuse. Understand that by sharing a picture of someone being bullied or hummiliated, you are also helping the hummiliation. Forgive people for their past mistakes. This isn’t a tech challenge, but a social one. Financial Freedom: It’s true, privacy can help hide…
Como aumentar a Representatividade mas diminuir os Representantes
Repescagem: uma forma de contabilizar os votos que une o melhor do voto distrital e proporcional e pode diminuir os gastos públicos Saiu o resultado da última eleição e você provavelmente está focado no que aconteceu no Executivo. Mas essa eleição, foi acaba de ser definida sua nova câmara municipal, que deveria ter um impacto grande no que acontece na sua cidade. E agora, você sabe quem te representa na câmara? Se o vereador que você votou foi eleito, parabéns, você está em uma minoria! Mas se você precisar que ele ou ela te represente em alguma coisa, você tem acesso ou a pessoa é popular e inalcançável demais pra isso? Se seu candidato não foi eleito, a pergunta fica mais complicada:…
.eth Registrar using only Deposits
.eth Registrar using only Deposits.md This is an attempt of setting up a name registrar that use deposits instead of burning or token contributions and tries to optimize name utility and reduce domain squatting. Previous initiatives of charging a "rent" based on the market price with an yearly auction proved impopular with many developers as they believed the registrar wasn't delivering any value for the "tax" as well as worries that a sudden big auction could force someone unexpectedly to be forced to sell the name. In order to start doing that let's define the problem: Name squatting is defined as buying a name and not adding any value to it, just holding it expecting that domains names…
The Truth about the Fork
I respect Ethereum’s Classic philosophical position, in fact I was among the first to be publically against the hard fork, and helped in all other ways to avoid it. Once I felt there was an overwhelming majority support for it (and after having helped build tools to try to measure these supports), and long debates to try to understand both arguments, I accepted — and still do, the majority decision as a good one. In fact, if the fork was merely a dogmatic schism I would be able to appreciate the beauty of the free market figuring out on two philosophical and political positions and no further words were needed. Except, that I care deeply about the truth. There is a common narrative in some…
How to build server less applications for Mist
Ethereum is not meant to be a platform to build esoteric smart contract applications that require a STEM degree to understand, but it aims to be one pillar of a different architecture for applications on the world wide web. With this post we will try to elucidate how this can be done and give some basic examples on how to start building a decentralized app. Who is this for? This text is intended at those who have a basic understanding of web technology and how to build a simple javascript and html app, and want to convert these skills into building apps for the Ethereum ecosystem. How can apps run without servers? Currently servers in web apps do much more than what they were originally…
Fork Vote by Ether commitment, version 2.
I'm making a second round at this vote by locking thing, basing on a lot of the feedback I received from the last time. If you missed, here's the gist of it: You vote by committing not to move your ether (or DAO tokens) for a given period of time IF a given fork is activated (or none is). The more ether you lock and the longer you are willing to hold it (last one is squared) the more weight your vote has. The fork which has the largest amount of people willing to lock is also, by definition, the one in which the least amount of people want to jump ship because they don't want to be involved in the project anymore and should be the more valuable chain long term, meaning miners and exchanges…
Update on the White Hat attack
I hope that I'll be able to write down a more complete blog post at some point, because the full story would make a fascinating read, but right now here's are the main points: Since Friday I've been in contact with a group of very smart people with the intent on replicating the attack to avoid any more of the ether being bled. Let's call this group, collectively "Robin Hood". Everyone in this group acted as an individual and did not represent or received the endorsements of their employers. Robin had been able to replicate the attack on the testnet but couldn't be sure it would work until it was tested. First it would require the group to successfully stalk and infiltrate multiple split…
If you are coming from /r/bitcoin because of a spam message, then we are sorry. Please read this.
So it seems someone is creating some hours old account and sending private messages to a lot of people in the /r/bitcoin community linking to this subreddit. Whoever is doing this is doing it on their own and is not related to our community at all Since we had problems with spam before, very young accounts can't even post on this subreddit. I have no idea who might be doing this but they have admitted doing it and are using a lot of hours old accounts. This forum is for discussions about the technology behind ethereum, it's impact on society and implementations. We ask Price speculation and all kinds of rollercoaster drama to be moved to /r/ethtrader so spamming because of price is not in…
Starter guide: (almost) all the links you'll need to start understanding ethereum.
Welcome to our community. Ethereum is a smart computing platform that uses the blockchain. This forum is for Ethereum tech discussions and related technologies. What is Ethereum? BBC explains Ethereum Ethereum the world Computer Where do I start? Download the wallet and build your own cryptocurrency Using the Wallet part 2: build a Democratic Autonomous Organisation Using the Wallet part 3: build your own transparent Central Bank Learn Solidity, the main language for smart contracts Build apps using Meteor and the ethereum tools Devcon Videos Devcon1 (2015) playlist Devcon0 (2014) playlist Technologies and Apps Do you have to use Meteor for building Dapps? Not at all! You can use any…
Ethereum in practice part 3: how to build your own transparent bank on the blockchain
This is the third and final post on a series on how to use the Ethereum Wallet to create your own autonomous organisations. On the first post we detailed how to create a token, and on the second we shown how to generate a digital democracy controlled by these tokens. Now we will do the full circle and create a token controlled by the Organisation! We are going to modify the token contract to allow it to be minted by your DAO. So save the address of your current DAO in a note pad (pay attention to the icon) and grab this source code and you know the drill: contracts > deploy new contract > solidity source code > pick contract You can fill the parameters any way you want (yes, emojis are…
Ethereum in practice part 2: how to build a better democracy in under a 100 lines of code
This is a second post on a series on how to use the current Ethereum tools to build smart contracts without needing programming experience. Download the latest version of the Ethereum Wallet, read the first part and let's have fun! Creating a token is fun, but what is the value of a token that doesn't do anything new? We are now going to create a new contract that uses the tokens we just created. The contract will be a Democratic organization that lives on the blockchain and that anyone holding a share token will be able to vote on proposals. So let's go back to " Contracts " and then " Deploy Contract " and paste the DAO source code on the "Solidity Source" field. Choose the contract…
Ethereum in practice part 1: how to build your own cryptocurrency without touching a line of code
A lot of things have happened in the past few weeks in the Ethereum ecosystem, so many that it might be hard for a casual observer to understand where we are and what's available out there. So I would like to use my first post here to give you an overview of the tools we've built and how you can use them to build interesting things right now. But first a short introduction: I am Alex Van de Sande and I am the lead designer on the Ethereum foundation. At DevconOne I gave a talk entitled "The Blockchain Versus The Average User" where I went into more details on the challenges to bringing the Ethereum ecosystem to the aforementioned "Average User", one of which is the difficulty of defining…
ERC: Default Ethereum Name Registrar
Abstract An important aspect of making ethereum Ðapps easily accessible is a name registry that will connect a human readable name to a hash for usage in IPFS/SWARM or any DHT system. The name registrar is not meant to be the one and only name registrar on ethereum but rather a default registrar to be used by Mist to resolve names. It will be an user configurable setting. Motivation The goal of this contract is: To find the optimal price for names: create a strategy where the nash equilibrium for each player is to simply put down the maximum amount they are willing to pay for a name, and not create incentives for names to be overpaid To allow optimal usage of names: allow good names to…
The Nightmare Scenario
For me, the real nightmare scenario is that Ethereum creates very powerful criminal organizations with no one in the top. In short, essentially the worse of our current systemm, but the top 1% is replaced by DAOs. Here's a short walkthrough of one of them: • A P2P drone delivery system is built in ethereum. Anyone can buy their own drones, config them and add them to the network, and the system will pay for them. These drones will be used to deliver packets from anyone in a city to anyone else, very fast. It disrupts all delivery companies. • The service is extremely useful, it grows and anyone can add charging stations, smart cars, or services to the network. Soon, there are whole…
Should ether contracts have GUIs? I'm a UI designer and here's why I don't think so.
This discussion was inspired by comments from @Stephan_Tual in two other recent posts so I though I'd put here because I really want to see what other people believe is the future of Etherum and the reference clients. http://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/751/so-i-designed-a-concept-ui-for-the-alephzero-client http://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/711/web-components-marketplace-for-ethereum-ui-markup The question is either Smart contracts should, in the future, have UI information. I see mainly two ways this could evolve: * Ether contracts start having more code related to UI and how to present the information to the final user. New GUI elements are created and can be reused. Ethereum evolves…
So I designed a concept UI for the AlephZero client
Since using the AlephZero client I began thinking about how the client could look down the line, and once I had that itch I had to scratch it. Of course this is a very rough sketch and shows only the contracts tab. I imagined it as a collection of all your active contracts, but added a few features that are not on the current code but seem no-brainer, specifically features in which a contract tells the client the kind of data it accepts (and what UI) and the current status of the client. I'm also adding the ability of querying a third party of your choosing to audit and describe each contract, so you can trust it before. Most features of the current AlephZero are visible on that screen. The…
What Micronesian stone coins can teach us about Bitcoin
I submitted this story on another thread about how to talk about bitcoin to a 14-17 crowd, but I thought other people here might like it too. It's a tale about something that appears to be nonsensical but it's actually not at all, and it shows how weird economy can be sometimes. If you want to google more about it, the island is called Yap, in Micronesia and the stones are called Rai Stones. Here's a true story that migh help get things started: There's a pacific island that or many centuries, the only currency they had were round disks of a given stone. But that stone isn't exist anywhere in the island and the disks had to be produced far away and brought back to the island by canoe,…
What prevents them from abusing it?
During the paranoid saturday thread I posted this scenario and the more I think about it, the more I believe it's inevitable to happen sometime in the future. Suppose bitcoin achieves the most optimist scenario where its an essential part of the modern world economy, used for trade worldwide and seen as something that's not going away ever. In this scenario, each bitcoin is worth a lot and mining equipment is very expensive, mostly owned by people who are in for the money — maybe they're banks, corporations or just individuals but what matters is that the pure idealists are the minority. Now there's a schedule block reward halving coming up. Then someone finds some flaw with that: maybe its…
What's coming: colored coins could allow P2P exchanges and value stability on the bitcoin network.
I see very often here people asking for P2P exchanges or open source P2P servers, but since there are many bitcoin newbies I think it's valuable to share with everyone a few innovations happening right now that could help bring those things. Colored coin is an innovation on "smart properties" the concept of taking a few of your satoshis and giving it some value that is bigger than the nominal value of bitcoins on them. Because all coins can be tracked to their origin, anyone can keep check of ownership of those coins. For example a bank can issue a bunch of promises saying "I promise I will give the owner of this satoshi an ounce of gold" and then sell those colored coins at however price…
It's not the price, it's the code, stupid!
You've heard it before: the dollar exchange to bitcoin is just a side show, it really doesn't matter. I would like to expand on that: When people ask you about bitcoin, avoid talking about the current price or how it exploded, because then you'll be talking about bubbles, pyramid schemes and the inherent value of things, and all that is irrelevant to bitcoin. Yes, I have a few and I love seeing my money grow when the price goes up and buying it cheaper when it goes down. But that's just a gamble: here's what made me stick to bitcoins. Bitcoin is a money API. It's a technology that allows computers to move wealth around in a more efficient manner, allows contracts to be abided by programming…
The largest Bitcoin exchange in Brazil gets hacked: depositors are not guaranteed to get their money back
Disclaimer: I'm not associated in any form with Mercado Bitcoin other than having done trades there. Luckily for me I didn't have any money there at the moment. Mercado Bitcoin, the largest – and only – bitcoin exchange in Brazil, has been offline for almost a week now. For the first few days there was no communication, but the owner just sent an email to all accounts explaining he was hacked. I haven't seen it posted anywhere in English so I'l do my best to translate what I got. As far as I understood, someone hacked his "redeem code" feature, being able to generate false credits in the system. Then during the night the hacker moved out all his credit into bitcoins, leaving MercadoBitcoin…
A tip for Bitcoiners with Brazilian friends (or travel plans) you can make a consistent 25% profit by selling BTC in Reais
In Brazil there are many more Bitcoin Buyers than sellers. I've been watching the market closely for the last 6 months and I noticed that you the Brazilian Real is constantly 25% undervalued in relation to the exchange rate. For example: if you buy 10 bitcoins right now in dollars (or euros) you'll spend $733.80 dollars. Those same bitcoins can be sold for R$1750 which at the current exchange rate is worth $868 dollars. So you could make $150 dollars extra, which would more than cover any exchange tax, a couple of caipirinhas, a hotel room for the night and you've still got some bucks left. Check it for yourself at: http://www.mercadobitcoin.com.br/ I expected this to be a temporary thing,…
I made this ocean-centric world map for wikipedia a few years ago.
Technical note: this is an azimuthal projection of the world centered on the Antipode of Ürümqi, the city which is farther away from any ocean possible.
Tarot for iPad and iPhone
I’m a big believer in making things simply beautiful, that the correct line is a beatiful one. Tarot isn’t more a divination game than making fridge magnet poetry, so when I decided to build a tarot app for iOS I tapped on that fountain. I created this app from scratch: from design, to code, to the interpretation algorithm and the subtle animated transitions from states. Download from the AppStore
Testes de Perfil
A Facebook app for fun profile games. This is what I would call a “skunkworks” facebook game. The company was under a reestructuration so many of the design projects we were working wer canceled, new ideas were outright rejected because our IT was already too busy or because they had no short term revenues. This left our the design team with a lot of idle time. Instead of slacking off, I recruited them to make a facebook app, which would be a good opportunity for teaching them some HTML and CSS basics and a great opportunity for me to learn more about the facebook app development process. All coding was done inside the team, using our own servers. At first when the project was launched and…
Cartola
Cartola is a Fantasy Soccer game created by Globo.com where soccer fans can put their (virtual) money where their mouth is. Users create soccer leagues where they buy and sell real world Soccer players and see how well their investment pay when the price goes up and down related to their actual performance. I was responsible to build the Visual interface to the iPhone and iPad port of what was originally a web-only game. Cartola in the AppStore
Estrela Guia iPhone
Understanding how things work is the essence of good design. I’m not personally a fan of Astrology but I do love astronomy and both are very closely related (and in some ways opposed). By understanding how orbits actually work, I pushed the developing team to go beyond a simple horoscope app and bring real world content, using planetary data from Nasa’s website to build a small virtual Orrery in your phone. The app shows people not only information about their Astrological sign, but information about it’s related celestial constellation: where it is in the sky, how to look for it on the sky, what planets are in transit and what this means in the Astrological mythology. Not only this makes…
Frugar
Frugar.com is currently a site for organizing lists of your favorite things – but it wasn’t always that. When I first came into the company it was intended to be a feature phone application for shoppers, which evolved into a barcode reading app for iPhone and into a social network for reviewing products. I worked as both a Designer (in the earlier versions) and a web developer for Frugar, going through six pivots of the company, an intense learning experience of the inner workings of a startup company. Frugar.com
site O Globo para iPhone
The mobile site for the biggest newspaper in Latin America. One of our first big clients.
Bolsa de Mulher
The biggest internet company focused Women was going through many renovations in 2011 and needed to reflect it on their home page. Our focus was to do a total revamp of the brand and site look, in short notice and but without needing a total rewrite of the complex and hard to maintain custom content management used. I was the leader of the team in charge of changing the main page. In about four weeks we were able to using mostly CSS and the fewest possible infrastructure changes, create a total portal page, more modernized and showcasing the content the team produced.
Cuponzal
Site for collecting and organizing Deals from deal sites. In 2009-2010 deals sites became a gigantic craze in Brazil, earlier and in a much different way from it’s american counterpart. While in the US, the game was dominated by a few early players in Brazil there was a new Daily deals site created every other day. Localized to small cities, to specific groups or very niche market at some point in 2010 there was more than 200 different sites using the same business model: selling coupon codes that could later be claimed for discounted items or service. Instead of building another deals site we focused on building a service for people who used them: a central repository for your coupon…
Presidential elections live results
A Webapp for accompanying online the results of the highly digital national Brazilian Election. An intense development during weeks, including a total interface rehaul in the last minute, for a few hours of use.
Trânsito iPhone
A surpresa
oque andei aprontando secretamente nessas últimas semanas era um plano simples. O que pode dar errado afinal? a surpresa parte II: tentativa um Lembram a primeira semana onde só fez chover e fazer sol no mesmo dia o dia todo? lembra, há tanto tempo atrás? pois é. E o mais triste é que nunca escondi nada dela e dessa vez nao podia dividir nada... a surpresa parte III - Porquê ainda não pedi ela em casamento? meu cabelo cresceu o bastante pra voltar a ter rabo nesse meio tempo. a surpresa parte IV: domingo de sol a surpresa parte 5- sobremesa na verdade não era um pudim, mas esse fica mais gráfico. Hoje estava sem vontade de colorir a surpresa parte 6 - como fazer pra tirá-la de casa? ok,…
O dia onde tive uma das conversas mais importantes da minha vida.
E eles responderam basicamente "te entendemos, não concordamos com isso agora, mas vamos te dar todo o apoio que você precisar"
Comic review: Ghost map (ou seria crítica em quadrinhos?)
Leio (ou nesse caso ouço) alguns livros que me deixam pensando muito tempo. Quase todos os do Steven Johnson ou Malcom Gladwell caem nessa categoria, pois são livros de não-ficção estruturados como uma ficção. Ghost map, especialmente é um livro que daria um filme, de tão bem que ele amarra todas as histórias em uma trama central e um cenário rico. Decidi então desenhar a minha recomendação de leitura. É também um ótimo exercício de storytelling resumir tudo a no máximo nove quadros por página, e me trouxe algumas exigências de desenho um pouco mais complexas...
lugares onde estive hoje e me senti sozinho
minha gata
Se você olhar direitinho, deixei no canto em branco os rascunhos que fiz do rosto. Esse desenho deu mais trabalho
Saber sorrir
alguns dias são difíceis de serem explicados em imagens ou palavras. Mas se você entender só o finalzinho, então é universal...
Margens de cadernos
todo dia eu vou treinando um pouco, parece que vai voltando alguma coisa...
Anatomia de uma reunião inútil
por que eu deveria ouvir mais feist e menos stephen hawking
Neutral milk hotel e feist me ajudaram mais a terminar o trabalho. Mas a idéia até agora ainda me fascina...
ironia
Não vou contar como eu saí dessa. Mas não envolveu pedir dinheiro na rua nem telefonar pra ninguém..
projetos que eu provavelmente não vou fazer
but someone should.
The Impact of Riots in Haiti on One Laptop Per Child
Timothy Falconer, from the Waveplace Foundation, wrote to inform about the current status of events in Haiti, as many riots took over Port-au-Prince, where he is running a OLPC pilot project: "The children and staff are safe, though they have only enough food and medicine for about a week. The markets have been closed in Port-Au-Prince, so this could become a concern. Emile said earlier today that he feels things will get better soon because of the peacekeepers. Everyone's taking it day by day. I just got off the phone with Emile, our chief mentor in Haiti, who is staying in the countryside until things come down. Our pilot is effectively on hold due to safety concerns. I'll update you when…
A prova final sobre a impossibilidade de entrarmos em contato com vida inteligente extraterrestre, conforme provado por diagramas visuais
Passo 1: Observar como, com o advento da civilização o homem foi criando cada vez mais formas de se autodestruir. Durante os primeiros milhares de anos essas chances eram negligenciáveis (chance de acidentalmente destruir todos os humanos com machadadas) essa possibilidade tornou-se palpável a ponto de ser ponto de debate constante em reuniões de cúpula política, processos judiciais ou aulas de ciência do primário. Medidas preventivas foram bem sucedidas nos últimos cem anos, mas existe um risco crescente que elas falhem em algum ponto nos próximos 5 mil anos Partindo do pressuposto que uma das milhares de opção de apocalipse se realize dentro de dois ou três mil anos, é importante…
Sobre o blog
Meu projeto Original para esse blog era de escrever semanalnte 200 palavras. aparentemente eu nao gosto tanto de escrever assim. Mas o blog não morreu nem morrerá. Tenho o que dizer e sempre que quiser dizer o farei por aqui. Decidi tomar a pílula do RSS que alivia o autor da necessidade de constância. O dia que eu colocar algo novo, deixe-mem que eu mesmo aviso. Agora seguimos com nossa programação normal..
Going XO Laptop Green is Better and Cheaper
If there's a trend that is universally welcome is the greener technology trend. But in most industries green is sold at a special premium: from organic food to electric cars, you are paying for your eco-conscience. But Mary Lou Jepsen has different approach. At first when told that to go green would be more costly the OLPC was willing to sacrifice a greener XO for a cheaper but not so green laptop. But as she progressed on the design process it became clear that to build a laptop that cost less also means a laptop that consumes less resources as a whole. In her words: "People are trying to make a buck off of green. Green is actually cheaper. Green isn't about (sigh) buying more stuff."…
Por que precisamos acabar com cadastros
Em quase todas as empresas de web que já trabalhei houve um mesmo momento, já participei da discussão sobre uma mesma página central: cadastro. Se cadastrar é tratado como um mal necessário, uma retribuição que o usuário faz ao site “fizemos o site todo, o mínimo que ele pode fazer é nos dar o seu email”. Espero que essa seja mais uma mentalidade que mude logo. Hoje há dois caminhos básicos para um site login-free: você cria ele como um anexo de uma rede social já existente, (api do twitter, facebook apps ou opensocial) ou você usa um cadastro universal decentralizado (openID) onde o usuário se identifica com uma url. Nenhuma dessas tecnologias ainda é perfeita, e talvez no futuro surjam…
UCA Brazil Auction for Classmate PC - Canceled!
Last Friday the Brazilian Government nullified the December laptop bidding that was partially won by Positivo Informática with the Classmate PC laptop, alleging the final US$360 per unit price was too expensive. Although it never published what was the reference price it expected, some government officials have compared to the US$199 Uruguay paid for each XO Laptop unit. SIMM, the company with the exclusive distribution of the OLPC in Brazil had offered the XO for US$387 a price that David Cavallo said it was the minimum they could offer at those conditions. And the auction conditions were in fact very different from Uruguay so the price comparison is almost unfair. For one, Uruguay…
The Apple Ultrathin: Who's Driving the Innovation Now?
The first manufactured computer to ship without a floppy drive was the original candy colored iMac, back 1998, which relied only on internet, a CD-ROM and a port called the Universal Serial Bus ports. Ten years ago, a cd burner was something expensive, few people had heard of USB connections and the keychain flash drive wasn't coming to market for another two years. This move was considered highly ahead of it's time for apple and for some this helped launch the USB as a standard and displace the 3.5" disks onto oblivion. Fast forward to 2008 and Apple announced the wireless Macbook Air, a ultralight low power laptop with no cd or dvd drive, no hard disk, but highly connected portable…
ú hebe quatro ponto zero
web 4.0 vai ser quando toda a informação estiver bem organizada, todos os metadados estiverem completos, todas as redes sociais estiverem saturadas, todos os artigos sobre o assunto forem escritos, a internet se desintegrar em oxigênio, o browser se tornar desnecessário, e pudermos, finalmente, seguir em frente com as nossas vidas nos preocupando com outras coisas mais relevantes. Eu desejo um 2008 com menos hype e buzzwords e mais conteúdo para todos vocês.
David Cavallo Interview on OLPC Brazil's Apparent Loss
The Brazilian auction to purchase 150,000 computers for children is on currently on hold after the end of the first round which ended on December 19th. Positivo Informática won the first round of biding with the lowest offer, 98 millions of Reais, 6 million less than OLPC had offered. No one has had access to details of each proposal but the most probable culprit were customs duties in Brazil which, along with all the maintenance and warranties, brought the total of each XO to $387,39, twenty dollars over the winning model. Positivo had by it's side decades olds tax policies that favors local assembly with lower taxes on electronics components, not ready made equipment. The model offered by…
Querido papai noel: eu quero uma interface nova
A lixeirinha que voce joga coisas fora, assim como as pastas as janelas e icones da área de trabalho, já fizeram 20 anos de vida O mouse com que você mexe tudo isso já passou de muito disso. 2007 foi definitivamente o ano que produtos com interfaces totalmente diferentes chegaram ao mercado mainstream mostrando que outra interação é possível e que ela vai além do nosso computador pessoal. <iPhone e seu Multitouch. Touchscreen já existe há duas décadas, mas era tão natural quanto tentar arrumar seus papéis com um dedo só. Poder usar mais de um dedo significa poder girar a mão, apertar, soltar. E adicionar elementos de física, inércia, desaceleração para os elementos da interface são mais do…
Um Computador por Aluno Laptop Auction Begins in Brazil!
Yesterday was the first day of the auction process for the Um Computador por Aluno project (One Computer per Student, in Portuguese). The process was suspended at the end of the day inconclusively and can drag for two more days. The lowest offer was at 71.2 million dollars which prices every one of the 150,000 laptops at US$475 which was deemed as unacceptable by the house. Over 8 proposals were made from prices ranging from $500 to $1,600 dollars, but the identity of all bidders will be revealed only after the auction is over. The whole process is being very open, and this was embraced wholeheartedly by the open source community which followed the auction site as if it was a twitter…
Pequenas ferramentas
Aplicativos gigantes sempre vão ter o seu lugar, mas assim como na internet, as vezes programas com um uso específico feitos por um time de 3 ou 4 desenvolvedores as vezes conseguem ser mais práticos, eficientes, menos bugs e serem muito mais agradáveis de usar. E como muitas vezes eles trabalham juntos, a soma das partes faz a experiência de usar um colosso como o Dreamweaver tão agradável quanto usar o software de imposto de renda eletrônico. Essa é a minha receita. Aceito sugestões. 1-O design em si, ninguém escapa do photoshop.. 2-Instale o Quicksilver. É a cola que junta tudo. 3-Abra uma janela do preview com o design. 4-Para acessar e mesmo editar arquivos direto do ftp: Cyberduck.…
Brazil Requests 150,000 Um Computador por Aluno Laptops
Brazil has officially opened a request for proposals for 150,000 "educational laptops" for it's Um Computador por Aluno project (One Computer per Student, in Portuguese) and OLPC looks to be the preferred candidate. Brazil's UCA Laptop RFP As the law mandates, the RFP is open for anyone to bid in, but the way the official solicitation is written it becomes clear they already have a winner in mind. The bidding demands that the laptops must have: A gnu-linux operation system A video camera, microphone and audio output Support temperatures between 5 and 41 degrees Celsius A screen at least 7 inches, a minimum 800x600 pixel, not too much reflective on highly bright areas and have a high…
Anúncio deve comunicar. Quantas vezes temos de nos relembrar disso?
Design é comunicar. Principalmente, claramente, comunicar. Um produto pode ser bem feito, bem pensado, bem realizado, baseado em necessidades reais e mesmo assim falhar em uma última etapa pela falha total de comunicar com o usuário para que diabos serve esse produto. Veja por exemplo esse anúncio que estava nos ônibus de metrô do rio na época do pan. (reprodução baseada em minha memória pois na época não tinha blog nem andava com uma camera) Bonita. Cores vivas, e uma Vag rounded bonita. Mas o que é? Uma compania nova de celulares para concorrer com o mesmo público da oi? Um novo serviço de telefonia fixa? Um voip phone? No fundo eles perderam a maior da platéia nesse ponto que tem coisas…
Papervision 3d: a web moderna como em 1998
Uma das tecnologias mais interessantes e menos faladas que tenho visto é Papervision, uma biblioteca open source que dá capacidade tridimensionais a qualquer objeto flash em um site, sem a necessidade do usuário instalar qualquer outro plugin. A comunidade em torno do Papervision é tão ativa que quase não recomendo a ninguém assinar a mailing. No fundo a promessa, interatividade 3d, leve e acessível em todos os browsers, atrai o olho de muita gente.A tecnologia não é fácil de instalar ou aprender, pra começar você tem de instalar um SVN, depois alterar class path nos settings do ActionScript 3.0 e todo os códigos devem ser postos em um arquivo.as externo. Além disso toda a programação e…
Brazilian OLPC Game Jam Results: Pong Still Rules
From 10 to 11th November, Sao Carlos, a city in Sao Paulo, hosted the first Brazilian OLPC Game Jam. Six groups of students spent 48 hours, some without sleep, developing new games from scratch to the Sugar platform. Sunday kids from local schools were called in to the daunting task of playing all the games and choosing a winner, which took home a brand new green machine to continue developing. The main goal of course was to seed developing of games, no one was expected to have a full complete game without errors, but a playable version that can be further developed. The winner was a game of Pong with a twist: they used the XO tablet mode to build a game for two players each one sitting…
Jesuits and OLPC Laptops: It's Education First, Religion Second
The recent pitch given by Negroponte at the Jesuits headquarters, might mean a lot more than just making the XO a e-Bible reader. The Catholic News Service reported: "Vatican officials, ambassadors to the Vatican, and representatives of the world's religious orders were among the more than 200 people attending an Oct. 29 conference highlighting the One Laptop Per Child initiative. The conference was sponsored by the communications office of Rome's Jesuit headquarters and two commissions of the international organization of superiors general of religious orders." The connection should not be as unexpected as it might sound. The Jesuits have, since their inception, sponsored schools across…
Ajude a dar computadores para 100 crianças
Trabalho com tecnologia. Sou um garoto que “trabalha com computadores” e “monta websites”.Quando no Brasil tantos blogueiros querem ser pagos a peso de big media, as vezes é importante dar um passo atrás e pensarmos no que somos. E se nos compararmos com médicos ou grandes advogados, qual é mesmo a importância de nossa profissão? OLPCNews one classroom at a time campaign from alexandre van de sande on Vimeo. Acredito que a solução de boa parte de nossos maiores problemas passa necessariamente por educação, informação, comunicação e colaboração. Em permitir que qualquer um registre o presente, lembre do passado e lance sua mensagem.Acredito que a tecnologia é capaz de dar alguma dessas…
OLPC News 100 Laptop XO Fundraising Drive
I believe that if you pick up some of the most pressing world problems, like poverty, corruption, tyranny, most solutions will need some of the same basic needs: easy and free access to communication, information, collaboration, education and by giving power to anyone to record present facts, remember their history and broadcast their own voice. Let me explain with a video: Technology is one tool that can help do that. That’s why I have always been a believer in the power of giving access to computing power and to the internet to the more vast array of people possible, and that’s the main reason I support the One Laptop Per Child program. Now that OLPC has made the Give Many program easier…
Sobre esse blog
Então decidi começar um blog. Mas será que esse mundo precisa de mais um blog? Precisa. Precisa de mais seis bilhões de blogs. Cada pessoa no mundo tem uma história pra contar que vale um filme. Mas isso não é um apelo social dizendo a quantidade de pessoas no mundo que não tem voz, é só um lembrete que acreditar que só vale falar algo se você for o mais ouvido, que a internet é uma competição pelo primeiro lugar, que dizer coisas per se – e não o que é dito – é uma profissão em potencial, você está ignorando não só a estrutua da internet, a cauda longa, a consumergeneratedmedia e tantas outras buzzwords. Você está ignorando a regra básica de viver em sociedade que seu avô aprendeu na…
Aquatic Sugar: The Children's Interface, Translated for Adults
The field of interaction design has been shaken in the last year as it hasn't been since the Xerox Parc, more than 20 years ago. The old metaphors of desktops and the idea that the mouse is the center of our universe are being radically changed by mainly three mainstream products: the Wii, the iPhone and – of course, since you are reading OLPCNews – the XO laptop. You probably know about the Motion Sensors on the Nintendo video game, and about all the multiTouch going on with the apple phone, but do you know why the "$100 laptop" interface experience, called sugar, is radically different from any other operating system on the market? And why not? Because you don't like the icons. They don't…
10 Reasons Why Negroponte Should Change OLPC Distribution
Hello I am Alexandre Van de Sande, an interaction designer currently based in Rio de Janeiro, and in this first article I want to address a fundamental-in my opinion flaw in the OLPC strategy: distribution. I don't think the One Laptop Per Child as a whole is doing well, there seems to be no government buyers, the production is being constantly postponed and the XO's newest price is around US$200. But is it really a two hundred dollar laptop that is being sold? At the minimum order of 250,000 computers Nicholas Negroponte is not in the business of selling cheap laptops, but of selling fifty million dollars in untested education reform. There are of course good reasons for not selling the…
Itsy Deal
Itsy Deal was built in 2007 as a service that would gather together all blogs that sold second hand clothing.
Diagram, Infographs etc
To make the complex visible. to make novel information understandable, with minimal or no words at all. The following are a series of infographs, diagrams and maps that tries to show a different view of things you are used to see. Some where made just for the fun of it. some where donated to wikipedia’s open commons and there where selected by the community as the best of the crop*. Many made their own way to graduation thesis and books in europe, books on photography and a lecture in MIT. Human world migrations Based on a buckminster fuller world map that has almost no distortion on land based distances, this is a map of the how, when and why humans colonized the world, based on…
How to sell Computers to Orthodox Monks
A video about how technology may affect certain cultures, and what could be changed in the computer as it is today, so we will not need to change the cultures themselves. How to sell computers for monks is a proposition that designers should start thinking about the laggards, the last people to adopt technologies, as benchmarks. Because if we can fit their requirements of a non-intrusive and fail-proof equipment, then we will build a better machines for all of us. If you like this you can see a first video draft (with a different script) here: about: Made in 2006/07 as a final diploma project
The Laser Chess – FAQ
This link appeared here and there even got a minor digg, so a lot of people seemed interested into building thier own laser chess game What are we talking about? How the table was made? It was a rather big game, a tabletop size. It had a wooden structure, covered in the outside with plastic (polyesthyrene if I remember well) sheets How you make the laser visible? If you don't make the laser visible you will be rather disappointed, having to search for where the red point had gone since you moved the mirror. You need particles in the air, and anything from clapping a chalkboard or smoking on the board will do. We decided to use dry ice, as we didn't have a smoke machine to spare, and the dry…
Le button
Le button is one single button that can transform any surface in a radio tuner. It allows to use any printed page as an link to an internet audio file which you can stream to your headphones. And because it’s able to save any pattern in it’s internal memory, you can re-save those links in any surface you can look at. how much can you do with a single button? about: Made in 2006/07 for Kenwood corporation and École Nationale de Création Industrielle along with Clément Tissandier, using Adobe After Effects* for the movie and Max/MSP/jitter* to program the working prototype. *(both which I had learned the week before)
Mélange
Digital tools are great but they lack the refinement or the sensibility of the classical drawing tools such as pens and pencils. Mélange is an attempt of bringing those together not by simulating how ink flows in a paper but by bringing the digital screen over the canvas. about: Started making it in Rio in 2004 and finished in paris, 2005 using watercolor, ink, pencils and a projector.
iPod Video
probably anytime before we start writing down our christmas lists apple is going to release it's new ipod, an all bets on the net are that is going to have video support. There is not much inovation on that single piece, and in a market where windows media mobile failed to get off, where sony's PSP have a comfortable large screen for playing games and watching videos and most important cell phones are already able to stream any video to their screen apple is going to have to justify it's next step. But there is still another bigger challenge on portable video players: what are they for? Videos, unlike music, requires your full attention and are unapropriate for jogging, walking, working and…
iPhone
Since Motorola and Apple announced a partnership the tech world started to speculate Apple releasing an iPod cell phone (which one can easily bet would be called iPhone iTalk or iAnything similar). Some initial images pop’d showing disappointing ordinary cell phones with built-in iTunes, without the iconic iPod click wheel. Later some pictured something a lot more applesque, but still a with a shy click wheel. The above is my contribution to apple: what better way to join wheel with a telephone than a beautiful dial-wheel phone? The only things that are certain are less hype, but equally tasty. Apple licensed iTunes software for Motorola, long with it’s own digital rights manager, the Fair…
In Between the Days
A video is about being into a daily routine while your mind wanders throught so many images and new ideas. Made for a video editing lab while I was in ENSCI, Paris.
Live video effects programming
Experiment. learn new tools. the following are a series of experiments I did when I first started exploring an isight iMac with quartz composer, a node-based visual programming language for open-gl effects. all movies are around motion detection, and video interferences. If you are a visual artist with a mac and an iSight camera, I recommend playing with quartz composer for a fun time. Below are the source files for the projects: download quartz source files
Mind the pad
Mind the pad is a mind-tracker application-concept for cell phones and PDAs that is at the same time a scribble & write sketch pad, an address book, agenda and file organizer. The main principle behind the application is that information is not saved on a fixed location, but is stored as separate pieces that are auto organized as the user reach for it. Each piece of information, or meme, is a small text file along with a drawing (superimposed over the text), which can be linked to images or any file. Upon reading the user may underline some words and they will be transformed on special index words. When the user clicks an index word all information is re-organized and every data containing…
Radio Jaba
Free music might change our culture. But only if it creates a culture. We live in a funny paradox. You can hear any music, from anywhere, given you already know it, or at least know how to spell it in a search engine. As a result, most of downloads are the famous artists seen in MTV, which makes the MTV guys very unhappy, as that´s precisely what they don´t want you to do. And at the same time, thousands of ignored musicians out there are actually asking to be heard, but remain in oblivion. The result: recording companies prosecute people who can´t understand what they have done wrong (we´ve all always heard music for free after all), independent unknown artists who remain unknown artists,…
Alchemy of Juices
Experiment the Alchemy! Can we map something as subjective as tastes? Alchemy of juices is a interactive infograph that is helps to choose a juice made with various fruits, by selecting either the fruits, the feeling or the taste. At the same time it tries to foresse those tastes and feelings of juices you mix there, based on user input from previous juices. Just as an alchemic diagram it’s about being a somewhat misterious but beautiful infograph. Yes, we’ve got bananas, and thousands of other tropical fruits. And it is not amazing that in any casual restaurant in Rio de Janeiro you may ask to mix peanuts, banana, and amazonian fruits like Guaraná and Açaí. Best of all, they’ve got…
Muvuca
muvuca is about connecting distant friends through some kind of non verbal sharing. throught their avatar on the movie screen they can sense that their friends have a common focus of attention. It’s a virtual movie theather, where all friends watch the same movie at the same time. The avatar, controlled by a puppet-like remote, allows the users to hav movements without sounds to allow silent comunications. Also, it can act as a passive microfone transforming the audio in semi controlled movements from the avatar. Also see this Bill gate’s comment on the project about: Made for the Microsoft Research Design Expo 2003 contest, along with Rodrigo Rego and Ricardo Bacellar
the Wall Maze
Enter the maze Game design and programming. While figuring out an algorithm for building a maze with only one right path, it became clear that in such a maze the walls would be a labyrinth of it’s own. Then it was a natural evolution transforming it into a maze whith special stairs and bridges so you could walk over walls or on the ground. For centuries labyrinths have been used for meditation. Taking the longest route to go through a short distance, priests would use that time to pray and think. Back then, no one had invented traffic jam. I also used my long hours in traffic jams to read and think. So I found some funny things about them. The first is that in a true maze (a labyrinth with…
Laser Chess
The rule of thumb in the first year of college is: bend the rules to see how far they can go. The teacher asked the students to build a game with resin pieces, just so we would know how to mould in resin. We added dry ice, acr ylic tubes and a laser beam. Laser Chess is a strategy game for two player s. Each one has four semi-spheric pawns (molded after a hlf cutte billir ball) with a mirror face, and the game objective is to reflect the central laser beam until it hits the opponent’s goal, an acrylic tube which glows red when illuminated. The game was constructed on a 1.2 m (4 ft.) high table with a space under which there is a blue light and a solidified carbon dioxide vapour. For the…