StartFleetis in the Finance-Accounting Tech Industry

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I don’t get doggedly persistent academics and venture capitalists trying to get a hard and fast definition of what the metaverse is so I decided to write this in response. From Wikipedia, it has been defined as this - The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet. The word “metaverse” is made up of the prefix “meta” (meaning beyond) and the stem “verse” (a backformation from “universe”); the term is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe.” Bit of a mouthful. Neal Stephenson refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. Matthew Ball states that it has to span the physical and virtual worlds; contain a fully-fledged economy, and offer “unprecedented interoperability”. In an earlier blog, I mentioned that the metaverse is . And in one before that, I throw around the terms Metaverse, Multiverse and Omniverse as expressions of the structure of the overall concept. Will Burns, referenced in the same post, uses terms like Galaxies to describe what I called Multiverse. a collaborative and immersive environment that should blend both the physical and virtual realms to the point that data exchange and interactions become fluid and affect each other Are we all wrong? Are we all correct? Metaverse definitions are so wild right now, I’ll propose a new tagline for the movie version: “In The Metaverse, everyone can hear you scream.” @avibarzeev Who cares. They express a common understanding of the same concept in the way people think about what the metaverse represents. The metaverse is not an equation. It cannot be described in only one set of terms. How I explain the metaverse depends on the context of the conversation because the idea of the metaverse is fluid. If it creates a common frame of reference for many then job done. I’m reminded of trying to explain artificial intelligence during a TEDx event to a crowd of 2,000 people of different ages, backgrounds and careers. If I went with a strict academic definition I’d have been met with some pretty blank faces. The metaverse is no different. Definitions are only of interest to people who want to be considered as the one who is the last person to edit a Wikipedia page or be named in some sort of LinkedIn ‘Hall of Fame’. It is the most boring of all pub conversations and the one most likely to cause a fight after a couple of pints. We’ve been here before with the other realities — AR, VR, MR, XR — to the point it becomes a marketing exercise for vendors and stops the industry from moving forward. @KavyaPearlman The problem with trying to rigidly define something that has such far-reaching consequences and impacts on society is that the metaverse will mean something different to everyone. A brand will want to its audience in new ways, an educator will want to their students in new ways, an artist will want to in new ways, a manufacturer will want to in new ways — you simply cannot define what the metaverse is as a static ideal when every person or business may be approaching it in their own way, looking for their own meaning. reach teach create simulate Why do you think Facebook released Workrooms as a virtual embodiment of a boring office meeting space when the metaverse is supposed to represent unlimited imagination? Because that is what’s familiar to the audience it is pitching it to. If Zuckerberg fell into a hole and adlibbed the Wiki entry then the message and context would have been lost. Discussions about technologies and taxonomies, architectures and infrastructures, standards and interoperability are an entirely different layer of topics that don’t need to wait for that singular definition to be uttered. Nor frankly, do they take into account any of the philosophical, economic or societal impacts which make up what a metaverse is or can become. The metaverse will one day be viewed from personal perspectives the same way as religion is for many. That is something no academic or technologist can ever define. I’m reminded of the Star Trek: TNG episode, The Mark of a Man, where Data is put on trial to prove whether he’s a machine and property, or whether he’s something else entirely. That to me is a farmore interesting debate to have about the metaverse than what technologies are bolted together to create it. “It sits there looking at me; and I don’t know what it is. This case has dealt with metaphysics; with questions best left to saints and philosophers. I am neither competent nor qualified to answer those. But I’ve got to make a ruling, to try to speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Yes. Is he the property of Starfleet? No. We have all been dancing around the basic issue: does Data have a soul? I don’t know that he has. I don’t know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself. It is the ruling of this court that Lieutenant Commander Data has the freedom to choose.” Also published here.

Stop Trying to Define The Metaverse

Hello and welcome to . Noonies 2022 StarTech: Tech Awards for the Brightest Stars Today's lesson: Noonies 101! For those who aren't familiar with it, fear not - in this short guide, we'll teach you all the essentials to turn you into a stellar tech warrior. So, gear up, accelerate to warp 9, and let us dive into the unknown. Mission Report: A Wild Noonies Appears We all love healthy competition, and HackerNoon loves to award bold and knowledgeable techies like yourself. The Noonies are awards from and for the tech industry that aim to reward people and companies from every corner of the internet. The previous Noonies editions racked up more than 7k+ nominees. Over 400k votes were cast, and 2k+ awards were given. It comes as no surprise that Noonies numbers are so high when the award winners get more than those . oh-so-sweet bragging rights These prizes include a .Tech Domain for life (10 years), an official HackerNoon NFT, HackerNoon shop credit, and even a few cash prizes. Plus, a few unearthly treats like internet street cred and celebrity complex. Noonies 2022 winners get to share in over $100k worth of prizes. See the yellow box on the individual Noonie for complete prize details on each award. This year's Noonies presents five main categories: , , , , and . Web3 Gaming Programming Internet Heroes Emerging Tech Each category holds a number of different awards that you can get your hands on, such as , , , , among many others. Best Data Science Newsletter Gaming Guru of the Year Android Advocate of the Year Ultimate Startup Strategist PS: You can nominate a worthy techie for a Noonie until August 31st at . noonies.tech A Nomination? Little old me? Did you get nominated for a category? Well, beam me up, Scotty! You should be thrilled! You might just be our next Captain Kirk or Janeway! However, if a nomination isn't enough to fully satisfy you, let your Starfleet (community) know it's time to vote and get a leg up on your competition, aka those nasty Klingons. Who knows? You may very well win that award! Don’t forget to publish your Noonies interview based on the category you were nominated for: Programming Web3 Internet Heroes Emerging Tech Gaming Writers Non-writers Top-secret recipe for victory: account for all the Federation to see: "I've been nominated for a @hackernoon #Noonies2022 award. To show your support, head over to and cast a vote for me! [link to your award page]". Post this on your Twitter noonies.tech Yet, if you haven't got that itty bitty nomination, don't worry - you won’t be sent to Cheron. There's still time. Public nominations are open until August 31st, 2022. Visit to nominate your friend, boss, coworker, sister, or friendly neighborhood techie for a Noonie (or yourself cause like no shame). Just click on any individual award and type the name and information of your nominee. The HackerNoon team will review your nomination. noonies.tech Electing the New Starfleet Commander StarTech is filled with excellent specimens, warriors worthy of wielding a Noonies award. How to power up your vote The higher your level within the Federation, the stronger your vote. We weigh votes to elevate the voice of our contributing writers, reward verified expertise, and devalue spam. HackerNoon published writers' votes count as 10, authenticated users' votes count as 3, and unauthenticated visitors have their vote count as 1 (pending spam reviews). The reasons for this are: , the contributing writer has earned the right to have their voice count the most when it comes to who deserves HackerNoon rewards; By publishing their words and expertise on Hacker Noon Authenticated users have a much lower spam rate, so their votes should count more; We want to continue to ensure that any human can vote, even if they don’t want to share any personal information. All visitors can vote once on each award in the voting season. Sponsoring the Noonies' Starfleet The best sponsors also offer cool prizes to the winners. . Here's more information and how to book a meeting Current sponsors include but are not limited to and . BingX .Tech Domains Pill-sized snippets of information Cast your vote between August 15th and November 15th. Winners will be announced on December 1st, after the HackerNoon team reviews the results. If you need to contact us about the Noonies, visit to reach the relevant person or email us at . HackerNoon.com/contact Yes-Reply@HackerNoon.com

Noonies: A GIF-Full Guide for Noo-bies

Noonies: una guía completa de GIF para Noo-bies

Noonies : un guide GIF complet pour Noo-bies

Noonies: Noo-bies के लिए एक GIF-पूर्ण गाइड

Noonies: Noo-biesのGIFフルガイド

Noonies: um guia completo de GIFs para Noo-bies

Noonies: Hướng dẫn đầy đủ về GIF cho Noo-bies

Noonies：Noo-bies 的 GIF 完整指南

Blockchain technology is poised to change the world in more ways than we can imagine. From digital citizenship to Crypto Kitties, we’re approaching a more decentralized existence every day. Technology such as NFTs and DeFi have especially exciting implications for us gamers, as they shift the scales away from favoring huge publishing corporations. Play 2 Earn games reward players for their time investment, unlike traditional games. Can you imagine getting paid to play your favorite games? Maybe that’s a reality for pro gamers, but the rest of us won’t have to dream for much longer—here are five upcoming games looking to a part of the play-2-earn revolution. 1. Drunk Robots "Chug a beer, battle other players for territory, and collect resources as you explore the city of Los Machines in this action-packed game. Aside from having an amazingly hilarious premise, stellar artwork, and enjoyable lore, Drunk Robots features robust customization options as you power up your robotic fighter. Whether you buy one of 10101 Drunk Robots NFT characters to experience the full game, or you just enjoy the free-to-play minigames, you’ll earn valuable rewards along the way, all of which can be sold or traded on the secondary market. Bottoms up!" ( ) source https://drunk-robots.com/ 2. Spark Era It might be a while longer before space tourism is a reality for us Earthlings, but Spark Era might scratch your interstellar itch in the meantime. This extra-terrestrial MMORPG offers players the chance to manage and upgrade a Starfleet, ally with guilds, and discover resource-rich worlds as they navigate the perils of deep space in this extra-terrestrial MMORPG. Spark Era’s GameFi economy will also render you real-world riches, such as the game’s $QUARK token, but watch out for enemy players looking to take your treasures via PVP combat! https://www.firework.games/ 3. The Sandbox You might have heard about The Sandbox: a virtual world where players can build, own, and monetize their very own gaming experiences. Though it may seem similar to Minecraft or Roblox, The Sandbox differs by giving creators true ownership of their virtual creations in the form of NFTs. Jump into The Sandbox to explore an endless variety of games and worlds created by other players! Feeling creative? You’ll also have free access to the tools needed to create voxel character or environmental models, to build 3D games without coding knowledge, and to sell your creations on an NFT marketplace. https://www.sandbox.game/en/ 4. DopeWarz Have you ever thought about running your own drug empire? Or maybe just making a few extra bucks on the side? Well, now you can—legally! In the criminal underworld of DopeWarz, the drugs you sell, the loot you steal, and the reputation you build all translate to real-world rewards in the form of $DDZ (Dirty Dollaz, the in-game currency), as well as the $DRUG governance token. Think you have what it takes to run the streets? You’ll need to dodge the police, compete against rivals to hustle your way to the top! https://dopewarz.io/ 5. My Neighbor Alice Ready to build your own farm and develop a world with other players? Check out My Neighbor Alice, where you can purchase plots of land as NFT tokens, then develop and customize them as you wish with in-game assets such as houses, plants, animals, and cosmetic items for your playable avatar with the $ALICE token. The charming and peaceful art style of this game is sure to please fans of titles like Stardew Valley, but now you can truly own your creations! My Neighbor Alice also lets you use your $ALICE tokens for DeFi activities such as staking, collateralization, and buyback, giving you even more options to earn as you play. https://www.myneighboralice.com/

5 Upcoming Play to Earn Games to Keep your Eye On

Doesn't that sound like a fantasy? What if I tell you that it is more likely that the gaming scene of the future will look like this. HOW DO OBJECTS GET THEIR PRICE TAG? In essence, any object's value, material or virtual can only be determined by its Kin and no one else. Since the world is becoming more and more specialized, a tool useful to you can be really a worthless item for someone else. A gimbal for example is useless for a normal person but of high value for a cinematographer. So, the value of 'objects of the future' cannot be determined through a common man's perception. The value of a gimbal can only be determined by a cinematographer and can range for $60 to $5000 depending on its function and usability. The same analogy goes for specialized software like MATLAB which is of use only to the engineers and of which annual license for a single user costs $10,000. This software is used to write code and solve complex equations but a normal man a $10 calculator would do just as good of a job. Let's call these groups of people with similar goals as Kin. In essence, any object's value, material or virtual can only be determined by its Kin and no one else. The strategy of catering to the Kin is equivalent to targeting a niche audience. Due to the over-saturation of companies which pander to a wide range of audience, a start-up sees success only when they target a niche audience. Not only this is within their financial constraints but also such a strategy generates them profit like no other. WHAT IS VIRTUAL OR MATERIAL, IF YOU CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE? What if, the skins you unlocked or bought with fiat were indeed NFTs and you can resale them if you wish so? The excitement when people unlock skins in games like Counter-Strike: Global Offense and Fortnite is telling of the fact that the human brain cannot distinguish between the value of material and virtual objects. Just like material goodies help them to brag in front of strangers in real life, virtual objects help to flaunt in front of their fellow Kin. The price of the virtual objects is similar to the price of as explained above since they are highly subjective and are determined solely by the Kin. specialized material objects The only problem with these virtual items from the aforementioned examples is that, they are based on an archaic philosophy of game designing where only the game developers are allowed to earn money, off the game. Therefore, the items in these games (more on this later) and are . can only be purchased with USD not resalable This is immersion-breaking for the player who spends their time playing the game only to realize that the only thing that holds actual value is the fiat currency. This also motivates them to stop doing what they truly enjoy and go find a "real" job like everyone else. Now imagine, if this was not the case. What if, the skins you unlocked or bought with fiat were indeed NFTs and you can resale them if you wish so? This changes the game altogether, no pun intended. Axie Infinity which is traded as $AXS is an NFT-based game like Pokémon where each monster is an NFT. The common monsters which you can catch will of course have no value. But the monsters you mix and breed will. This token is running quite hot now and is backed by the billionaire and Shark Tank's famous Mark Cuban. A SLIGHT DETOUR Twitch isn't for everyone but crypto is. Websites like Twitch make it possible for gamers worldwide to monetize their time playing video games with a decent PC and a webcam. This is another way of how gamers all over the world would earn money without indulging in immersion-breaking activities. This service is a unique blend of streamers who are also content creators and their viewers, a special type of people who enjoy watching others playing a game. Every single genre of video games create their Kins. Genres like -- Fighting, Souls-likes, Horror, Adventure, Puzzle, Racing, etc. There are also different tiers of subscriptions and the Twitch Channel offers special benefits like unique emojis based on inside jokes and profile tags to their subscribers belonging to higher tiers. This creates a sense of community and loyalty towards the streamer. The only problem with Twitch is that while it's good for streamers and their subscribers aka viewers, most gamers are not content creators and they usually prefer anonymity while playing their favorite games and prefer chatting over talking. Twitch isn't for everyone but crypto is. IN-GAME ECONOMIES Think of the game as, like a country using ISK as its legal tender. Games like Eve Online allow gamers to earn ISK (Interstellar Kredits) just by trading in the game. You can be anyone from a Starfleet commander, an asteroid miner, or even a pirate. An asteroid miner, for example, earns ISK by selling the minerals they acquired by mining in-game. These minerals won't regenerate and the miners would have to find another source after the present asteroid depletes. The generated ISK can be converted into USD and that is how many players who play the game, earn their livelihood. The game has a running economy similar to our real world and the exchange rates keep on changing depending on who does better. Think of the game as, like a country using ISK as its legal tender. The game often makes headlines due to the money lost in millions caused by in-game wars in opposing factions but news related to its booming economy and increasing interest of new players always take a backseat. To regulate the in-game economy, the game developers have hired economists who are tasked to regulate it. This has never been heard of in a video game and mixes FinTech with online gaming. WHY SHOULD WE PAY FOR THEIR MISMANAGEMENT? If the developers can implement a better currency and help themselves as well as the player in the process, why should they not? The fiat currencies have their own share of trouble. Not only they are old in technology and backed by thin air, but also mismanaged by their respective central banks since their value only depreciates with time. So, what if an independent entity creates their well-managed, decentralized currency and NFTs, for their Kin, backed by modern technologies like blockchain? Cryptocurrencies are the currencies of the future. Their values are backed by the service they provide (except meme tokens), and they use very clever deflation strategies like setting a hard limit for minting and token burning. For the uninitiated, this basically means that the price of these currencies will rise even if they lie idle in your wallet. The use of cryptocurrencies in video games will be easy to implement since many popular games are free to download and run on in-app purchases model, already. If the developers can implement a better currency and help themselves as well as the player in the process, why should they not? METAVERSE AND BEYOND Recently in the Epic vs. Apple hearing, the term metaverse was used very often for describing the future of games like Fortnite and Roblox. What Tim Sweeney, head of Epic Games, thinks of this addictive game's destiny is a similar form of the world that won't only have an economy but a social playground for the Kins to hang out in while maintaining their anonymity. The money generated in the process of playing the game can not only be used on in-game items, but also converted into any fiat currencies and used to pay bills and buy groceries. Platforms such as have already developed a voxel-based metaverse where gamers and developers alike can create 3D playable characters and objects which are also NFTs and thus, have a resale value. As the technologies are becoming more and more immersive with the advent of VR, AR and Brain-Computer Interfaces in the future, as pointed out by Valve's Gabe Newell, the fantasy of living in a metaverse is going to become ever compelling. The Sandbox This article is part of The hosted by HackerNoon in partnership with Gaming Metaverse Writing Contest . The Sandbox Submit your today for your chance to win up to $2000. #gaming-metaverse story

NFTs and Crypto: Earning Money by Playing Video Games

What's Developing In The Indian Crypto Ecosystem [An Overview]

A parody, not written by Elon Musk If you have read my , you are familiar with my trickle-down approach to new businesses. By developing Roadster first, then Model S and X, and eventually to more affordable Mode 3, we were able to concentrate our R&D resources on solving the toughest problem early on. So my plan for Starlink will follow similar patterns and basically consists of: master plan for Tesla Create the first Starlink terminal for professionals, which would necessarily be a bit bulky and expensive to use Use that money to build a consumer terminal that can be installed on people’s rooftop and offer competitive broadband rates Use that money to build a low cost and high volume mobile phone (StarPhone) Build out an interstellar communication system that will support Mars and beyond Starlink’s initial plan starts with professional users such as government, military, oil & gas, and shipping fleets. But recently I see signs the second step “consumer home Internet access” can come much earlier and might even be concurrent with the professional customers. There are a few reasons behind this. We learned quite a few lessons from previous unsuccessful attempts by Iridium and GlobalStar. Their satellite deployment was too slow, constellation too sparse, customer acquisition too narrowly focused on the professional market, and they lost the narrow window of opportunity to compete against land based cellular carriers. This time around, technology and economics have both improved. Our SpaceX rockets have slashed the price of launching by more than half: . Our Starlink Satellites are designed for mass production and much cheaper. And we reduced the complexity of our user terminal by initially focusing on a pizza box sized device instead of handheld phones. $150M for a maxed out Falcon Heavy compared to our closest competitor at $400M However, the economy of satellite to consumer Internet service is far from proven: the window of opportunity is still narrow, the deployment cycle is still quite long and somewhat unpredictable, and the mobile carriers are racing ahead with 5G on earth. So what will we do? Fast and furious deployment We have a boatload of satellites to launch, 12,000 (with possible later extension to 42,000), and we have to be fast. By clever engineering, we can fit 60 satellites into each Falcon 9 launch vehicle and we plan to launch as often as every 4 weeks. Once our Starship is ready, we can launch as many as 400 satellites at a time. Back on earth, our SolarCity team will be able to install customer terminals on their rooftop. If installed together with Tesla solar panels, we can achieve energy positive for the entire Starlink system since all our satellites are solar powered. Offer a better service to the under-connected Starlink will be able to provide a first class Internet service to the developing world where a large portion of the world population is not yet connected. Even in developed countries like the US, Starlink can significantly increase the Internet access speed for rural communities, as well as provide alternative service for urban areas where there are typically less than 2 competing Internet Service Providers. From our 2019 tests, we can achieve up to 610Mbps throughput and 25-35 ms latency. This is not your grandpa’s geosynchronous satellite: by using very low orbits (340KM), a very large constellation (>12,000) and new radio bands (V-band in addition to Ku and Ka bands) we can achieve insane total capacity. And Starlink can be competitive against 5G, because the cellular carriers need to deploy a lot more cell sites and buy expensive spectrums. And best of all, we don’t need to pay site rentals and backhaul. Therefore we can be cost competitive even factoring in the high cost of manufacturing and launching those satellites. Once our entire constellation is completed in 5-7 years time, we will have the most advanced Internet service covering the entire globe. And everyone on the planet can enjoy the same level of high speed Internet service at roughly the same cost regardless of where they live. Sharing I mentioned ridesharing in our of Tesla, but we will go a step further for Starlink. We will soon start a refundable deposit program in order to secure your user terminal and early access to the service. Better still, that deposit will make you not only a user of the Starlink service but also an owner of the Starlink project. Your deposit will be used to fund the satellite launches and build-out of the Starlink constellation. Master Plan, Part Deux In addition, your rooftop terminal can serve as the local hub to provide Internet service to your neighbors and you can make money while you sleep. In a way we are enabling you to become a mini Internet Service Provider, just like you can resell your surplus Solar energy back to the electricity grid. Every Starlink user’s terminals will be able to connect in a mesh to each other using laser or high frequency radio waves, so the constellation is both in the sky and on earth. And we bought a good brand name for it, EarthLink, from a now defunct ISP company. My friend Jack at Twitter has been a fan of decentralization and we are exploring new ways their team’s learnings can be applicable to Starlink. To Mars and beyond We skipped the StarPhone part, since it is purely a miniaturization effort. But Mars is clearly in our oversized vision. We are already testing the laser link between v1.0 Starlink satellites to form a mesh network, which will pave the groundwork for our Mars expedition. We envision a continuous flow of passenger and cargo spaceships (named StarFleet), as well as many intermediate drone space stations between earth and Mars (named SpaceBarge) to form an Interstella mesh network. This will enable our Mars pioneers to be always connected between the planetary colonies. And my hope is that, after successfully colonized Mars, you and I will be even more appreciative of earth and use the technology we learned from Mars to make earth a even better home. And anyone who pays a refundable deposit for SpaceLink by the end of 2020, can win a chance to become one of the first passengers aboard Starship to travel to Mars. So in short, the master plan is: Create the first Starlink terminal for professionals, which would necessarily be a bit bulky and expensive to use Use that money to build a consumer terminal that can be installed on people’s rooftop and offer competitive broadband rates Use that money to build a low cost and high volume mobile phone Build out an interstellar communication system that will support Mars and beyond Don't tell anyone. P.S. Countries with administratively limited Internet access Some readers have emailed me and proposed that Starlink Internet access can be the killer app in countries with, well, administratively limited Internet access. They even sent in some design of the Starlink antenna disguised as roof owls, Bonsai tree and other roof ornaments. Our position on this is quite clear, as Gwynne Shotwell stated in recent interviews , “in many countries the company will be required to partner with local telecom firms to offer the service”. Besides, as chairman of Tesla Motors, I need to make sure our gigafactories around the world can produce Model 3s to its full capacity. P.P.S. Your nightly sky Some astronomers have expressed concerns about our large constellation that “brightness in both optical and radio wavelengths will severely impact scientific observations”. We intend to paint all future Starlink satellites to chroma green, so they can be easily removed in photoshop or in your smart glasses in real-time.

SpaceX Starlink Master Plan 

Blockchains depend heavily on network effects, i.e. the notion that networks such as telecommunication services, the Internet, or social networks become more valuable when their number of users grows. This is why ecosystem building is one of the main factors that drives the value of a Layer 1 blockchain enterprise. Here is a comparison of how different blockchain projects handle this. Ethereum As a smart contract platform, Ethereum was the first of its kind. before, the Ethereum Virtual Machine, in addition to the Turing-complete Solidity programming language, made it possible to execute arbitrary smart contracts. Arguably, Ethereum might have overshot the target with Turing-completeness, as this leads to some vulnerabilities within Solidity smart contracts. Although it was technically possible to implement some smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain Nevertheless, having the first-mover advantage, Ethereum is still the largest smart contract platform to date and they are blessed with a vibrant community of developers and users. In fact, the Ethereum Foundation doesn't have to do much in terms of ecosystem building, as there is a ton of community-organized events, meetups, and hackathons happening every month around the globe. Any other Layer 1 blockchain enterprise, maybe excluding EOS, doesn't have the same luxury. As such, I don't think that there are smart contract platforms in the race viably contending to be an "Ethereum killer". The only blockchain that will eventually kill Ethereum is . This however does not mean that there is no place for any other Layer 1 smart contract platforms, but they will have to find a market niche and tailor their technology specifically to their customers, while simultaneously investing a lot of their time and funds into ecosystem development. Ethereum 2.0 Multi-Chain Scalability Ethereum still has the issue of low transaction speeds and the resulting transaction fees. If something like CryptoKitties can make transactions fees explode in an instant, it is hard to imagine that any DApp that constantly generates transactions will be able to support a user base with mainstream adoption. Remember the times when every self-proclaimed Ethereum killer boasted about their transaction throughput? Of course, transactions per second is an important metric, as they pose a technical limitation for the potential use cases of a blockchain. However, with a high transaction throughput, we quickly run into a storage problem, as every full node needs to keep a record of the complete transaction history. This will ultimately transfer into a more centralized node network. One way to address this problem is to implement sidechains in one way or another, like for example Ethereum’s . The problem with such Layer 2 solutions is that they are foreign elements to the mainchain. In order to move assets from the sidechain to the mainchain, or between sidechains, the sidechains must be bridged to the mainchain using smart contracts. Like any other smart contracts, the bridges may contain exploits that allow hackers to steal assets and must be executed on the mainchain, making them inefficient and costly. Plasma solution The nature of decentralized development has it that sometimes multiple solutions for Layer 2 scalability may emerge simultaneously. Whether you consider this a feature or a problem is up to you. Anyway, next to Plasma, which is heavily backed by Vitalik Buterin, other scaling solutions like the and are being developed. , which is an adapted version of Plasma, features an impressive ecosystem with high-value partners, such as Decentraland and MakerDAO. Raiden Network Truebit Matic Implementing a multi-chain architecture on Layer 1 like or avoids some of these problems, as the mainchain has bridging capabilities from the get-go. While the technical limitations of Ethereum for proof of concept development, garage startups, and small companies, Cosmos markets itself to enterprise-grade blockchain projects such as and , allowing users to develop custom blockchains. In contrast, Polkadot takes somewhat of a middle ground between garage developers and full-fledged enterprises. As such, they put more emphasis into making their product interoperable with other blockchains, most notably, Ethereum. Recently, they have announced to make in projects that want to deploy a parachain. Cosmos Polkadot Akash Binance Chain strategic investments Additional Layer 1 Functionality Besides scalability, some Layer 1 projects focus on more functional blockchains in order to find their market niche. For example, encourages user-facing DApps with their naming system, allowing wallets and accounts to have a user-friendly, memorable name instead of public addresses. For smart contract execution, Aeternity runs three different Virtual Machines, giving developers a choice in what language to write their smart contracts depending on their needs. The Aeternity blockchain comes equipped with a Layer 2 scaling solution based on state channels for off-chain smart contract execution. , Aeternity Ventures has recently started the third round of their in Malta, inviting seed-stage projects to take the first steps from the garage into the business world. The fourth round is set to take place in India in 2020. Aeternity After having already invested a multiple projects Starfleet incubator program In contrast, relies on technological advancement by making . This means that instead of having to develop smart contracts themselves, developers can instruct the blockchain directly to carry out these functions with the same security and efficiency as simple payments, using a low-level, non-Turing-complete language called TEAL. Algorand atomic transfers, standardized tokens, and smart contracts available as a Layer 1 functionality That makes Algorand especially suited for transaction-heavy applications in the realm of fintech, tokenization, and DeFi. A good example for this is , a property-trading and investment platform for real estate. Next to , Algorand has pledged $100 million to a to help their ecosystem grow. AssetBlock partnering with various universities around the world venture fund Traditionally, there has been a great overlap between blockchain and mind sports enthusiasts. To further these joint efforts, . World Chess plans to conduct a hybrid IPO in association with the London Stock Exchange. In this capitalization model, , which can be converted into stocks when the IPO takes place at a later date. World Chess has partnered with Algorand for the FIDE Grand Prix Series they will sell 5% of their equity as security tokens Conclusion After 2018, most Layer 1 blockchain enterprises have turned away from trying to become the one blockchain that kills Ethereum. Since then, everyone is trying to find a specific market niche to grow an ecosystem, while building the appropriate technology stack around their ecosystem. While Ethereum is perfectly suited for the early stages of business development, an increasing adoption of Decentralized Ledger Technology will at some point require DApps to graduate onto a blockchain with better scalability. For this purpose, they have different options to choose from, each bringing their own set of benefits. Typically, Layer 1 blockchains have an accelerator program or ecosystem fund that provides venture capital to DApps and helps them in both taking their business to the next level and transitioning to a more mature blockchain solution. In the near future, we will see them put a lot of effort into blockchain interoperability through smart contract bridges and atomic swaps, which will ultimately pave the way towards mainstream adoption. Disclaimer: This is not Financial advice, the views expressed by the author above are merely his opinion on projects and businesses mentioned here

Market Niches for Blockchain Ecosystems

An entrepreneur is a proud name for people who have the courage and wit to kick off their business and cruise through the world of financial ups and downs. As many people know, not everyone in business reaches success, since span—only the strongest survive. Moreover, have managed to stay afloat since 1966 to 2016, making it obvious that there's a lot of work to do if you want your startup dynasty to grow and flourish. more than half of ventures fail in the first 5-year only 12% of the top 500 companies It’s no secret that the free market can be rough, but there’s beauty about it—it only depends on you how to take a stand and deal with inbound and outer factors. Your personal qualities, alongside with an attitude towards business, is what sets the pace for a venture before it's even launched, so make sure you put your mind to it and get things right. The next logical question is “ ” Well, you don't have to pay for a mentor or buy a book. Luckily, there are a ton of stories about failures and successes from predecessors. What are these qualities? My personal experience and theirs allowed us to squeeze in some valuable info about which useful skills should be possessed for you to thrive, and here are some of them: 1. Critical Thinking There can be several co-founders that make decision-making in your company democratic; but remember that, like in a country under a dictatorship, it's always the boss who will receive the praise or get blamed for the end result. Therefore, you have to keep in mind that there's not much room for mistakes—being honest with and critical about yourself is the best way to avoid them. Critical thinking has no clear definition; it’s a set of principles that spur you to analyze, interpret, conclude, and evaluate your own decisions and ideas. Spontaneous insights have surely spawned lots of great products, but on a larger scale, it's always the logical thinking that helps you consider factors such as demand, quality, production, and advertisement that will make your company flourish. 2. Problem-Solving Mentality No business is a road free of bumps, so problems occur from time to time. It can be a production bottleneck, staff flow, or market inconsistency, so make sure you’re ready to deal with these hurdles if you want a company to move forward. Addressing the issues before they emerge is great but requires vast mastery, so if a problem happens, it should be tackled immediately. Actually, the speed factor is more than just fixing the troubles—it shows others how much you care about the company and lead by your own example. It displays that the company has future plans and is ready to react if things don't go the way they were intended to go. You should never be afraid or stressed by problems; at its core, entrepreneurship implies facing and dealing with them. So, even if there's a failure, just analyze it, try to fix, and move forward. 3. Imposing Your Will Regardless of how much you respect the opinion of the people surrounding you, being persuasive is a quality you can't miss. You don't have to be vocal for that matter; it's more about making people believe in your ideas when dealing with potential investors, adherents, and the staff that makes the whole production possible. Don't be afraid to upset anyone. Determination is an essential skill for leading the charge, and you need to be able to light up the idea and make everyone follow it. Be ready to encounter people around who won't always agree with you, but that's for the best. It's a good indicator that they care and have their own opinion. Keep in mind that everyone sees the world from different angles, but it's you who should make the final decision. Regardless of how logical everyone's argument is, make everyone believe mean the most as if you're the captain of the Starfleet Enterprise from Star Trek. YOUR words 4. Creativity The fact that you want to launch a startup is already a great indication of bravery and creativity, but you have to carry that fire throughout the venture's life if you want to see improvement. Copying other companies' ways to success is not the worst choice, but if you want to stand out in a highly-saturated market, implementing cool ideas is the way to go. There are such as books, movies, or traveling—intriguing experiences can generate intriguing ideas. a ton of ways for you to soak the inspiration from However, there's another, more structured approach that implies 5 major activities to get inspired: observing, networking, experimenting, associating, and questioning; call it "trained creativity", if you will. But still, the main condition will always be your faith—you should believe when you come up with a stellar product that it could be used and enjoyed by yourself. Just don't let your train of thought go off the reality rails—the idea should always be applicable, that's the main purpose. 5. Planning "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." Benjamin Franklin was very clear about the importance of the planning process and this quote still applies to this day. As we all expect our creations to be a long-lasting journey, it's good to have a clue about the way it develops over time; history has plenty of sudden success stories, but it's usually hard work and precise planning that become a major part of a triumph. The plans for strategy, funding, roadmap, branding, and advertisement are the backbone for any startup to be later transformed into a large company—well-planned success is what unites big ventures that knew what they wanted from the start. Even technologies change over time, so don't hesitate to adjust your future plans accordingly; a good entrepreneur is like a chess player, always viewing the perspective one or more steps ahead. 6. Service Orientation Whether you believe in Buddhism or not, karma is an ever-present factor in business life. Yes, money is the main reason for creating startups, but it's important to remember that pleasing the customers is the ultimate goal—the way you treat customers often pays back. You need to care about what they think of your product, and if there's a chance to have some sort of focus-group, quiz, or beta-testing, don't hesitate to do so. If you can separate and extract good feedback from all the responses, this will give you an edge over competitors in the pursuit of making customers happy. Customers are used to a "corporate" attitude from big companies, so if a venture shows its loyalty, the user base will always appreciate it. A customer-first approach is impossible without the founder being compassionate and feeling empathy about users' problems; therefore, it's necessary to be able to put yourself in their place and then guess how to keep everyone happy, including employees and stakeholders. 7. Ability to Learn You can finish high school or even a university, but the learning process should never stop. Unfortunately, there was no such subject as or ; tons of courses or lectures aren't helpful either, so the only choice is to learn from your experience or someone else's. "tax management" "how to make a startup work" In the real world, things like frameworks, scheduling, negotiations, and business planning are a different beast, so make sure you master these things in real-life situations and not based on internet-guides or books. Even this blog post is more about general recommendations and is not a guide on how to become the best of the best entrepreneurs. Networking, on top of cracking deals, is hands-down the best option to gain experience without making mistakes on your own. Outbound consultants can also be helpful when you're dealing with legal procedures, advertising, and promotion, so their examples could be learned by you and used in the future. You should also cut your teeth on hiring over time—after all, it's an inevitable practice for smaller companies' CEOs to be a part of the onboarding process. This will be a nice perk to make high-tier hires when the company grows bigger. Conclusion Having enough money is not a remedy; a good entrepreneur is like a good employee and should have a set of qualities to fit that role. Although hard skills play a crucial role in your success, personal traits can come on top when managing a company with numerous employees on board. On top of having problem-solving and analyzing skills, a good CEO should be a creative and compassionate person as well. Things like persuasion, planning, and the ability to learn are also factors that distinguish a good businessman from someone who wants to toss around money and hope that everything works just fine. For certain, launching a startup is a big deal but, on a larger scale, isn’t a great achievement itself. Making it flourish is what can really make you look like an achiever, so don’t hesitate to improve upon your personal traits—they will pay off with impressive results.

7 Essential Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Possess

Why the Boring Motion Picture is Actually More Relevant Today than It was 40 years ago Last week, I went to see the 40th anniversary re-release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (or ST:TMP for short). I had seen the movie as a kid when it first came out in 1979, after seeing many episodes of Star Trek via re-runs pretty much every-day throughout the 1970s (which were responsible for increasing the show’s popularity since it had been cancelled after 3 seasons after its debut in 1966). The 40th anniversary screening had a little featurette before the movie that had some of the actors and producers talking about the onerous process of bringing this troubled movie to the screen (it was called ,”). The Longest Trek: Writing the Motion Picture Seeing it again now, after all these years, I was struck by a few different things about the movie and its history that I either didn’t know or hadn’t thought about.  For one thing, the re-issue had the same music as the TV show (ST:TNG) n, which struck me as odd. In fact, as far as I remembered that music wasn’t composed until the TV show started in 1987, many years later! (A quick search reveals that in fact, it was composed for TMP and re-used in TNG ). Star Trek: The Next Generation From the featurette, we also learned that fans can thank George Lucas for Paramount deciding to bring back to the big screen. The studio was originally thinking of starting a new TV network and bringing it back as a TV shown (called “Phase II”). The success of on the big screen in 1977 sent executives scrambling for science fiction properties they could turn into a big budget blockbuster – and seemed to fit the bill. Star Trek Star Trek Star Wars Star Trek While the film had a troubled history (and the featurette did a good job of pointing out all the problems and conflicts between Gene Rodenberrry, the director Bob Wise and other producers and writers), the real problem with the film was that it was deemed pretty boring.  Some fans even went so far as to dub TMP “The Motionless Picture”. I still remember the reviews in the Detroit News on the weekend when the movie was released in December, 1979  – they were calling it “Star Trek: the Boring Picture”. My brother and I still made our parents take us to see it –being huge fans of , we couldn’t pass it up.  As a 9-year-old, like millions of others, reacted that the visuals were cool but lack of action made it much less fun than George Lucas space opera.  At the time I wasn’t really thinking about some of the bigger issues that this movie brought up. Star Wars Which brings me to watching it on this 40th anniversary for its re-issue. The thing that struck me about the movie the most, this time, seeing it in 2019, (other than how young the stars, like William Shatner,  Leonard Nimoy, et al, looked). was how relevant this move is to things we are actively discussing in Silicon Valley today: Artificial Intelligence, super-intelligence, transhumanism, digital consciousness, and space travel. In fact, Star Trek : The Motion Picture might be to today’s computer savvy generation than it was to the audience in 1979!  The movie is all about issues that we may have to deal with in the not too far future and which make for many bestselling books in science and computer technology today. I’m surprised Elon Musk isn’t talking about the movie, since it pre-supposes many things that he’s been on record talking about around AI and the future. more relevant Seeing it in Silicon Valley at the Shoreline Century theater, which is pretty much located on the Googleplex, made it even more relevant. Of course, it’s Google futurist Ray Kurzweil who is known for popularization the term the “singularity” (which was actually invented by another science fiction writer and former computer science professor, Vernor Vinge).  It is referred to today, depending on who you ask,  as a point at which the exponential growth of artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence, or the point at which we can encode our consciousness as digital information, or in various other ways describing the advance of technology. Before we get into the film’s relevance, let’s do a quick recap for those who haven’t seen or don’t know the plot of the movie: Captain Kirk, who is now Admiral Kirk, misses being a starship captain.  When the Enterprise has been fully remodeled and almost ready for operation, a strange large cloud is headed towards Earth, making mincemeat of the Klingons and anyone else it has encountered along the way. Since the (not-quite finished) refurbished Enterprise is the only ship in the sector capable of intercepting it in time, and Kirk takes over from Will Decker, the new captain, owing to, well being the star of the TV show, of course!  They eventually learn that the cloud contains an entiy called “V’ger” that has significantly more advanced technology than even our twenty second century Starfleet has. V’ger turns out to actually be one of the Voyager spacecraft that NASA sent out into the galaxy in the 1970s (as of 1979, there had been only 2 Voyager probes, while the one in the movie, V’ger is actually the Voyager 6 probe).  On its travels, it had encountered a super-intelligent planet of advanced machines.  They looked at the primitive Voyager craft as kind of stupid long lost cousin, and they spiffed it up: making it much more intelligent and capable of fulfilling its mission of seeking out all the knowledge in the universe and then returning to its “creator” to transmit it.  The problem is that this new super-intelligent entity doesn’t know who its creators are – it assumes the creator is a machine like itself, and is surprised to find the carbon-entities which have (from its perspective) infested the 3rd planet from the sun (umm, that would be us, by the way) and is prepared to destroy them as it looks for its creator. Big Spoiler Alert: Whew! OK that is a lot to process – though most of it is learned in the last part of the movie ( more on the plot, the visuals and why it was considered so boring ). here Not only do I think the movie is more relevant today than it was 40 years ago when it was released, but I would offer that it will be even more relevant in 40 years. Consider the following plot points which reveal issues that we as a civilization will be grappling with in just a few years: A machine that becomes self aware and super-intelligent. At the heart of the movie is V’ger, a machine that was a standard automaton which has become much more intelligent than its original programming. In a way, the machine has evolved (in this case, with the help of other super intelligent machines) and has amassed way more knowledge than its creators have. Today, in Silicon Valley, AI is a hot topic.  The point at which silicon-based intelligence will “surpass” our biologically based intelligence is still speculative, but we are much closer to realizing this than we were in 1979. At that time, there were no semi-intelligent robots or algorithms (neither neural nets nor machine learning algorithms had been invented). We now think of AI as being separate from the “machine” itself – AI is the software (or more accurately, software and data). However, when the field of AI was new in the 1950s, pioneers like Claude Shannon and Alan Turing and others thought of intelligent “machines” that would play chess, that would pass the “imitation game” (known today as the Turing Test), machines that could write poetry, etc. Today, we have robots like Sofia (which is not yet able to pass the Turing Test), and we have trained algorithms which have beaten humans not just in chess, but in Go and even in esports competitions, and which generate realistic vocals (google duplex) and even can generate realistic text (open AI’s GP2). Could Hardware/AI that we create become self-aware? This is a question that further Star Trek series – namely, TNG with the android Data – have grappled with. Estimates of the singularity range from Kurzweil’s predictions of 2048 to “never”. Was V’Ger self aware? It certainly acted liked it. Was Data a “real” person with “real” rights?  This is an issue we that scientists are just beginning to grapple with but its ultimate impact go well beyond science to matters of politics, human rights, consciousness, religion and ethics.  As our technology develops, we will be grappling with these questions more intensely in the years to come: what is intelligence and what is self-awareness? Downloading and encoding a biological entity. One of the overlooked aspects of the movie is that V’ger digitally encodes biological entities into information – in one scene, the Deltan, Ilia, is “transported by V’ger” – transported to where? V’ger reveals that it has digitally encoded many beings that it has encountered in its explorations across the galaxy, just like it did with her.  Most people remember Ilia as the sexy bald lady who was wearing a short skirt and high heels.   But the heel-wearing version of her was actually a reconstruction that V’ger created from its stored representation of her atoms and cells, to make it easier to communicate with the “carbon units” like Kirk. Many in the neuroscience field today think that reproducing a human, or downloading them to a silicon device, is simply a matter of modeling all of the neurons and neural connections.  Researchers at MIT have been able to do this mapping with rat brains but not with human brains – yet.  In this line of thinking, all that’s needed is more computing power and more knowledge of the neural mappings, which effectively allows for digital immortality, allowing the reproduction to “live forever”. Actually this idea of “encoding” a person as information has been part of Star Trek lore since before TMP, with the invention of the transporter.  This was initially done to save money on special effects since TOS (the original series) had a limited budget and they couldn’t shoot shuttles going up and down to planets.  But the transporter has a matrix – which is really the information of the person.  In that case, it’s all of the atoms that make up the person.  Both the transformer and V’ger’s encoding of Ilia bring up a very important question we’ll have to tackle in the years to come: is a reproduction of the information of a person the same as the person? Or is it a copy? In the V’ger case in TMP, the reconstructed Ilia starts to remember her interactions with Will Decker, with whom she had a relationship with on her home planet of Delta IV.   We’re not there yet, but who’s to say that in another 40 years we won’t be? A planet full of machines. Another key plot point overlooked in this movie is that Voyager, in its travels, came across a planet of intelligent machines. It was because of the machines on this planet took pity on Voyager that it was upgraded and V’ger was born. Could it be possible that there are planets that only have AI or machines? We don’t think it’s possible without a biological civilization first creating the machines.  Elon Musk recently postulated that biological lifeforms (like us) could simply be boot-loaders for intelligent AI’s meaning that this would be the normal course of evolution!  This would mean that the planet of intelligent machines started out with biological entities, who created the AI’s and then somehow went extinct (or were destroyed by the machines, or originated on another planet and sent out the machines to this planet). In fact, many scientists believe that given the distances involved in interstellar travel, the only interstellar travelers will be machines – drones if you will, in which case, the Voyager probes (and the Pioneer probes before them) are the first generation of the much more sophisticated machines that we will send out in the future.   Already we are exploring other planets in our solar system using artificial explorers. Will we find planets where the biological beings are gone and only AI remains? Will other explorers arrive on Earth in several thousand (or a million years) and find that we are “planet full of machines”?  Or will they be  machines wondering about the “infestation of carbon units”? Destruction of Humans by the Machines.  How would a planet that started with people end up with only machines? This is a popular theme in science fiction that has come out since, ranging from The Terminator to The Matrix.  In TMP, when V’ger doesn’t get back a response to its call to find its creator, it assumes that the carbon-based entities (i.e. people) have killed the creator and occupied the planet.  It sends out probes, using its advanced knowledge of weaponry and energy, around the Earth which when activated, will “cleanse” the planet of the infestation of carbon units so that only the machines remain. Could AI really destroy us?  Many, including Musk,  are worried that developing autonomous weapons and AI which is in control of weapons is a very likely outcome of the next stage of technology development. Over 2000 scientists signed on to a document which warned of the dangers to the human race of developing AI that is both self-aware and super-intelligent which is in charge of weapons.  Like V’ger or Skynet, it might decide it doesn’t need us.  Or if it does need “carbon units” it might need only a small percentage of the human population and enslave us. AI and It’s Lack of Emotional Intelligence. While V’ger has gained considerable knowledge in its explorations, it has no understanding of human emotions, and for it to continue to evolve, it needs to “merge with its creator”.  While this is a crude representation, it’s a theme that would be explored further in Star Trek and much more science fiction.  TNG’s Data’s quest to be more human, culminating in an “emotion” chip, raises a host of questions about the nature of consciousness and beings. Should we imbue our AI with emotional intelligence as well as knowledge of the physical world? Would this make it less likely or more likely that the AI would try to destroy us? One of the haunting aspects of a movie like Deux Machina is that the androids could appear completely human but be devoid of emotion and be indifferent to suffering – a trait in humans which is associated with a psychopathic personality. This question, of how much emotion to put into AI and whether it’s even possible, will be much more relevant 40 years from now.  So will the “merging” of man  and machine.  Companies like Musk’s Neuralink are trying to create implants which use AI to make us more intelligent so thatAI won’t ever be able to overtake us completely.  The transhuman movement seems to be all about merging technology with biology.  This field is also still nascent and I suspect we’ll still be talking about it 40 years hence. has always been ahead of its time.  When the Original Series (TOS) came out in the 1960’s, the idea that a Russian would be serving on the multi-ethnic crew to outer space was completely new to American audiences.  The first interracial kiss on broadcast TV happened on TOS as well (and was boycotted by many stations in the south).  ST:TNG tackled many innovations and questions for the first time on TV, and it was the first TV show to have its own special effects budget. Star Trek By contrast, ST:TMP is not often remembered as a trailblazer, mostly because it’s remembered as the “boring movie” with nice visuals.  But on this 40th anniversary, it’s worth re-watching. The questions it raises about artificial intelligence and what it means to be “self-aware”, not to mention a depiction of a future that could actually come about some day (almost being almost destroyed by machines of our own creation) are more relevant today than they were when the movie was released in 1979. In fact, in the next 40 years, on its 80th anniversary, ST:TMP may end up being the most relevant of all the incarnations! Star Trek

Star Trek Movie’s 40th anniversary, Superintelligence and the Singularity

Supposedly, 300 years in the future, we'll still be using sound to locate people. Once, Kirk was forced to eject a research pod containing a crew member to prevent the destruction of the Enterprise. He is presumed dead, and Kirk is accused of killing him. As the trial goes on, they suspect that he faked his own death, so they empty the ship and McCoy uses a sensitive auditory device tied into the computer to detect his heartbeat. Busted! He did it to frame Kirk as he blamed Kirk for hindering his Starfleet career. Maybe in the sixties, it seemed high-tech and cool but sounds pretty clunky today. The Next Generation did much better, the old-style communicator (which Kirk brandished and inspired things in the real world like flip phones) was banished in the new series, replaced with snappy little “Comm Badges”, gold communicators which Starfleet personnel wore proudly on their uniforms. A simple tap and you were able to initiate voice recognition to communicate with others or ask the computer a question, in a very similar way to Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant today. Star Trek: Although never discussed, Comm Badges also tracked your location, which was very useful for when you needed to be beamed out of a sticky situation, or when, more often than not, Picard was kidnapped by aliens (you’d think that they’d figured out some way to stop this after the second time the question “Computer, Locate Captain Picard” reverted with “Captain Picard is not on the Enterprise”.) While we can only speculate how they are supposed to operate, it’s pretty likely that they worked much like the Nodle Network does today. While a crew member is on the ship, it leverages a network of sensors, or other Comm Badges, (in the same way Nodle leverages smartphone infrastructure, via the proliferation of Bluetooth within personal mobile devices) to track location. Nodle is developing many technics to preserve privacy while enabling this type of services (see: ). Anonymization and Randomisation of IoT identities in the context of industrial applications We’ve had IoT devices that can track location for a while, but until recently these have needed a strong power source in order to operate properly, as GPS uses up a lot of power. Other location technologies (like Bluetooth Low Energy “BLE”) use very little power. While I’m sure that Comm Badges have some kind of magic-to-us power source, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the time, they used a technology similar to BLE. Sensors all over the ship could connect with your Comm Badge and report your location to the computer,  which relayed it to anyone asking (BTW, If anyone asks, I’ll be in Ten Forward). The Comm Badges of today are these new, low power consuming IoT sensors, inexpensive to produce, with long-lasting power sources and powerful enough to be tracked by other BLE devices nearby. Everything from embedded sensor headphones and wallets to industrial machines, to vehicles and shipping pallets, can be tracked by provisioning devices on things like the Nodle Network. Apple announced something similar for the release of iOS 13: “Find My” device. The Nodle network leverages over 5 million active nodes, making them all a part of a tracking and data collection solution, eliminating the cost for additional hardware infrastructure. Another good example, has created the next generation of shipping pallets with an embedded tracking chip and module. It's wood, like other pallets, but encapsulated with a polymer coating that makes it durable and easy to sanitize. Lightning Technologies It’s nearly indestructible, lightweight, hygienic, fire-retardant and comes with a tracking chip and module using BLE. It can record everything about the pallet’s journey from its temperature, humidity, accidents and makes it easy to learn its location. Instead of using power heavy GPS to track location, using BLE allows them to leverage all those pre-existing smartphones out there. Those pallets (or anything for that matter) can be located as they travel through more than 80 countries via the Nodle Network. These can be attached to anything which needs to be tracked. There are plenty of examples of using them to locate things. For example, in healthcare, costs of care increase when staff can’t quickly or easily locate and must search for wheelchairs or oxygen tanks. In warehouses, taking 30 minutes to find a lost $15 extension cord might cost you hundreds of dollars in stalled workers. “Comm Badges of today” They can even inventory for you: ensuring appropriate retail stock and flow is key to maintaining and improving revenue and profit. In manufacturing, they can ensure appropriate supplies are on hand to build an item which is critical to ensuring cost-effective production. You can even use them to understand traffic utilization patterns, anticipating peak times and improving resource allocation. Plus once you have the data, you can use machine learning to optimize your asset management, applying algorithms to distributed, real-time decisions. The most interesting use? Finding non-obvious relationships and patterns which humans may miss because we simply do not have the processing power to gather and review all of this data. Prior to something like the Nodle network, this was impossible. If you think about it, not only did we literally invent something 300 years too early, we made it even better than expected. Who knows what we could do next?

“Star Trek: The Next Generation” Style Location Services Are Finally Here

“Hey, you’re Elon’s best friend now, huh?” I asked my friend, who has been interning at Tesla for the past 3 months. “You have no idea. For a few hours, my desk was like five meters from Elon’s.” “No fucking way” I shouted. “It’s true. The first day they were like ‘here is your desk’. I literally freaked out. I think Elon could have read my code if he wanted. I quickly managed to change desks though.” “Man, that’s insane. How many months do you have left? You started, like, in September, right?” “Yeah, I’ve got, like, 3 months left.” “But how did you manage to get a work permit in the US? Didn’t you start with a tourist visa?” “It’s a long story. I tried…” “ ” Please, tell me. I want to know it all. “[laughs] Really? Everything?” He then went on explaining the full story. Eduardo Saverin writing the Elo rating system in “The Social Network”. Credits: Columbia pictures The Starfleet Program “So, on January 2018, I took this plane to 42 Silicon Valley. My dad could only give me the minimum money to pay the rent (an Airbnb). For the first months, all my money went into this Airbnb. I had almost nothing left to eat. I would eat half a taco a day, and sometimes pasta. That’s it.” “That’s some crazy shit, man. In fact, it’s not that far from that didn’t even have enough money to pay rent.” I said. the story of the Airbnb co-founders “Yeah, tough times. I was so hungry . I would ask to see the director of the , and ask him, like, ‘can I join your thing’, and he would refuse everytime. I only had a 6 months tourist visa, but the Starfleet program is one-year long. At some point he got tired of saying no, and eventually accepted.” I stopped giving a fuck Starfleet program “You’re an absolute madlad. You never quit dude. You’re fucking insane.” “ . I came all the way back from France. I to get into this Starfleet program. I was dying for 24/7 coding and a Silicon Valley job.” When you are broke and hungry, it’s not that difficult to ask for what you want needed “Makes sense.” “Then, a few months after I got accepted into this Starfleet program, one of my friends that knew quite well the executive team asked if I could have a dorm room. They quickly looked at my projects before accepting. I think they quickly understood that I was a serious guy. From this point onwards, I had more cash to spend on food, and I could dedicate all my time to coding.” The work environment at 42. Source “At this point, we had an insane amount of work to do. I remember having to do [a VM project that usually takes a month to complete], [one of the hardest shell project] and the [two weeks of intense PHP challenges] . We stayed up all night to finish our projects. One of our traditions was that one guy would buy food for everyone at 5am. It was crazy.” corewar 42sh PHP piscine at the same time “You’ve got no idea how jealous I am” I uttered. “Yeah, it was tough, but really fun at the same time. Anyway, at some point the workload was . Like, we had 6 projects at the same time. I remember we had to code [a client and a server to transfer files over TCP/IP network], [a web app for video streaming that usually takes 2 months to implement], [an AI project] and [a server, a graphic interface, and an AI client for a multi-player game over TCP/IP network. It’s one of the last projects of the UNIX branch].” unbearable ft_p Hypertube Walking Marvin Zappy “That’s like impossible, right?” I genuinely asked. objectively “Not impossible, but really tough for sure. The solution I found was to only focus on the Zappy project. The main problem was that, from the initial group members, the only people left were me and a Polish friend.” “I would have done the same, I guess. But Zappy is, like, at the end of the UNIX project graph, right? Must have been pretty tough without having done all the previous projects.” Screenshot of his “ ”. From left to right: (end of web branch), (shell/Unix), (Unix/DevOps), (AI) and on the far right the project (that he eventually validated!) holy [project] graph Hypertube 21sh ft_p/IRC Walking Marvin , Zappy “Kinda. For Zappy we had to code a graphic interface, a server and a client. The worst part was the “dead code” from the initial team members that left Silicon Valley. It’s worth mentioning that, at that moment, we only had two weeks and a half left to ship this project. So, I said to myself: ‘ ’. I went to talk to other people from the Starfleet program, asking them if they were available to work with us.” fuck, let’s do it “That’s so much . You tell people you want and you want it. You make everyone believe in your projects and end up managing a whole team.” I told him, smiling. you what how “[laughs] I guess. So, I went to see this guy that was coding [a video game project in ], and asked him if he wanted to join us to do the graphic interface. He was like ‘oh, no, I don’t want to let down my Bomberman partners.’ . I told him that there was a bunch of cool new stuff to learn in Zappy, and that no one in had ever completed it. We would be the first. He said he needed time, so I told him I would come back in a day, and see if he had changed his mind. He joined the group.” Bomberman C++ I insisted 42 Silicon Valley I came back two hours later. “Fuck. You’re so man. You really can’t take no as an answer!” pushy the final graphic interface, implemented by the Bomberman guy “[laughs] Maybe. To sum up the situation, two weeks before the deadline, we had some code for the graphical interface, a half done server, and a working client. My Polish friend was trying to connect different “dead code” parts to make the server [the most difficult component] work. That’s when she started to become a little depressed about the whole thing, and decided to take a week off. While she was off the grid, I tried to debug her code, but it was .” uncommented, cryptic and incoherent “Shit. It’s horrible when something like this happens. It takes more time to rewrite the thing than to just start over.” “Yeah, it’s tough. When she came back from vacation, we had a lengthy discussion. I said that it would take me too long to decipher her code. She got upset. When I went to sleep, I had already given up on Zappy. But the next morning, : it turned out my Polish friend had pushed a beautiful code that implemented all of the necessary features, taking into account all of my previous feedback”. something magical happened “I don’t believe you.” “That’s crazy right?” he said “So the three of us stayed up all night for a couple of days, and ended up finishing this impossible project. It works pretty well now !” “That’s awesome man. I wish I had such amazing stories to tell.” I said. “But what about the whole Tesla thing? How did you eventually get an interview?” Securing an Interview with Tesla At this point, we had been talking for about an hour about his awesome projects at 42. Now, he was finally going to talk about how he managed to get an interview at Tesla, and how he secured his internship. “The whole Zappy thing ended in July, with the [an introduction to OOP; about two weeks of small projects]. On Sunday, it was the final of the Worldcup, and France was playing [my friend and I are both French]. Since I was living in a free dorm, I had some extra money. The two-way ticket to Paris was pretty cheap, and I was really homesick, so .” C++ piscine C++ I decided to take a flight back to France “No-fucking-way” I slowly said, bursting into laughter. “[laughs] I really wanted to come back home. I arrived on Saturday, I watched the final, and then stayed in a vegetative state for, like, a week. But then, I couldn’t relax anymore. I to code.” had “So you literally came back to France for only a week?” I said. “That’s about it, yeah. When I came back from the Worldcup thing in France, the director of the school came to me. He had his laptop open, and told me: ‘I have this friend who works at Tesla. I am sending him an email recommending you for an internship.’ ” “Lucky you!” “Maybe. I was like ‘yeah, you know, I haven’t done much apart from the “piscine” [ was part of the stack for the internship, as you’ll see below], so I’m not really sure it’s the time to send an application. Why don’t we wait, like, a few months?’. But the director had already typed his email. He told me: ‘Oh, you haven’t coded much in , huh? YOU’RE GONNA LEARN!’, Fucking Kwame [name of the director]!” C++ C++ best C++ and pressed “Enter”, sending the email, right at the end of his sentence. 42 SV (past) director’s twitter pic “No way! What did you do then?” I said, baffled. “I had no choice but to send one more mail adding my curriculum vitae and a cover letter. I then said I was available if they wanted to interview me.” “Wait, you said that knowing that you needed a few months to really grasp ?!” C++ “Yep. And I think it was a mistake. The guy at Tesla answered in literally 20 seconds saying: ‘Sure, let’s meet next week on Wednesday’. The day was Sunday. There was no way I could be ready in four days. So I explained to him that I needed more time . We agreed on an interview in two weeks.” to finish a project I hadn’t started yet “That’s That means you had enough time to prepare for the interview, didn’t you? is really difficult, though. I don’t think it’d have been to learn anything substantial, even in two weeks.” crazy . C++ possible “That’s why I prefered to focus on working on an interesting project I could show them, rather than learning . Plus, the director told me that they often looked at our projects, to check our code.” C++ “Makes sense. What was this last project about, then?” The Final Project After having finished coding FaceMash, in “The Social Network” “I wanted to do something related to Tesla,” he recalled, “so I tried dozens of different ideas, but wasn’t really convinced by any. Every day, I would go to the director’s office with a new problem. He would look me in the eye, and tell me: ‘your idea is shitty, huh? .’ At some point I found a project that convinced me: .” It must suck to be you a simulator for self-driving car traffic “Hum, yeah. I remember you telling me about this project.” “Oh, right, we might have discussed it. Essentially, I had to read many papers with a lot of math. I didn’t really care about the equations, I just wanted a way to implement a cool demo. I recruited the Bomberman guy, and two of my best friends (including my Polish friend), and we started coding. We worked very hard. We only had, like, a week, to code the whole thing. If I remember correctly, one of my best friends was working full-time, so I had to convince him to come to 42 after work [laughs].” “Ace, you were managing a team for a project this time!” real “Kind of. I was under so much stress, you know. But yeah, when I look back at it, I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished.” “Sure. How did the interview go then?” I asked, curious. The Interview Courtesy of Tesla. source “First, I had a call interview with the guy. He told me the call would be at 11am. I looked at my phone anxiously between 11am and 11:45am, until the phone eventually rang. The guy was really nice, and he asked questions about my personal life, what I’d done in the past, my projects, and so on and so forth.” “Then, I had an interview in person with the guy I talked with on the phone. We met at noon, and he invited me to lunch. During lunch, I couldn’t think of anything but the questions he was going to ask me during the afternoon. I’d only had one week to prepare for the interview. All I had been doing was finishing that self-driving car traffic simulator. I wasn’t even prepared for basic CS binary tree questions. I might have peeked at a book, that’s it. ” C++ “That’s pretty risky. But, I guess, taking into account your time constraints, you couldn’t have prepared much more, could you?” “I guess. After we finished our meal, he presented me to someone from his team: ‘you said you liked math, right? Here’s one my engineers. He holds a PhD in math. You two should get along.’ I then followed this PhD guy. We went to a room where guys were finishing their lunch. We couldn’t use the whiteboard, so the PhD guy just started asking questions right off the bat.” C++ “Shit. That’s what you feared the most, right?” “Definitely. Especially since at 42 they teach you the standard, so I was completely unprepared. The first question was, like, ‘can you define what a smart pointer is?’, which is a modern question.” C++98 C++ “What did you say then?” “I tried to answer the question as best as I could, talking about how compilation worked, etc. For all of my answers, I always started by saying ‘ .’ I think he liked that.” I don’t know what the answer to this question is, but here is how I would approach it “It shows that you’re humble and know your limits, that’s great.” “Maybe. At some point, he started asking about examples of . I didn’t know what to answer. I, like, [laughs]. Then suddenly, one example from my past projects came to mind: ‘when multi-threading, if you declare a variable without a keyword, the compiler might end up deleting that variable (for optimization reasons, I guess), resulting in undefined behavior.’ The interviewer answered: ‘Alright. Don’t you have a simpler example?’. I ended up giving an example that was , like, .” undefined behavior segfaulted volatile even more low-level out-of-order execution “[laughs] That’s also to give such complex answers. I guess it showed that you had experience in programming, and weren’t just reciting a manual. What happened next?” very you C++ “Yeah, I had experience, I guess. Well, after those questions, the guys eating lunch were done. He started using the whiteboard, and wrote a binary search tree problem. That was much easier because we had had all this oral preparation for math problems in undergrad, remember?” some C++ Image Credit: and Coding Interview University Silicon Valley “Finally, at the moment I finished the exercise, some guys asked us to leave the room. The only thing my interviewer said was ‘That seems to work’. So I think I nailed this part. The whole interview plus whiteboard thing must have taken, like, an hour. Afterward, the engineering manager came back, and he interviewed me for an additional hour. He asked very low-level questions about compilation, because he used to work with the optimization team in charge of or something”. C++ clang “Damn, that’s impressive.” “Anyway, that’s everything I did there. After that, I never returned to Tesla. Well, not before my internship.” “Makes sense. But didn’t you also do something connected to a hackathon?” “Oh, yeah, hackathon. In short, a few weeks after my Tesla interview, I ended up participating in a very long hackathon with my friends from 42. We kinda won the thing, so I got the opportunity to talk with one of the organizers who knew people at Tesla, and even showed him my self-driving car traffic simulator.” this “That’s pretty cool.” “Thanks. The coolest part about it is that, apparently, when he talked to the Tesla team, they were, like, ‘oh, yeah, we know this guy, we met him a few weeks ago.’ So I think at this moment I knew my internship was secured.” “That’s awesome,” I said, now totally in awe of the guy. “I’m really impressed by everything you’ve been able to achieve since you arrived in Silicon Valley. You’re a great inspiration to me. All this conversation makes me want to go to 42 Paris right now [it was 2am] and start coding [laughs]!” “[laughs] Gotcha. It was a pleasure talking to you as well. I guess you don’t really need this story to stay motivated, right? You’re already doing some crazy shit by yourself, aren’t you?” “Right. But it’s still a huge boost to talk to you. Do you mind if I write a blogpost summarizing our conversation?” “No problem.” If this article was helpful to you, hold the 👏 button (up to 50 times) and become part of the 👏 gang. You can also connect with me on Twitter , LinkedIn , Github and Medium to stay up to date with my latest blogposts. This blogpost wouldn’t have been possible if 42 Silicon Valley wasn’t disrupting education, so thanks for existing. Also, I would like to thank Emil Wallner , Laura Sibony and Harry Begg for their amazing feedback. A special thanks to my mysterious Tesla friend that agreed to chat for two hours, and checked all the details.

How my Friend Got an Internship at Tesla After Only 8 Months of Coding

‘Multidisciplinary Artificial Intelligence’ ¹ —t_he combined resource, human capital, technology, technical assistance, and Ontology (Information Science) to unleash and embrace the potential of individuals, systems, and policies._ GIPHY — top source for the best & newest GIFs & Animated Stickers online. Artificial Intelligence is among us, and has useful applications. AI is the new electricity, and will transform every industry. Domain specific AI, and augmented intelligence may be the rise of new market verticals. Augmented intelligence may find solutions where we were unable or unwilling to. Without realizing it, we already use multiple forms of AI. In search we utilize machine learning, natural language processing, and image recognition. Focusing on multiple disciplines is key. Today’s challenges intersect with multiple industries requiring broad skill sets able to assess, evaluate, and understand the solutions of tomorrow today. Many AI toolsets are out of box solutions ready to tackle tomorrow’s challenges today. This was the beginning of a for executives, small business owners, entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, and designers decentralizing specialized knowledge, relationships, and understanding of multidisciplinary artificial intelligence. gathering place, twitter chat, and virtual incubator From past experiences I learned it was sometimes difficult to gain access to the right relationships and information. However the miracle of Digital Borders allowed anyone with a stable internet connection to collaborate and learn together in real-time. Intrigued and inspired with the ideas of becoming a digital nomad was the beginning of an audience intelligence design firm. Along with professional email marketing and automation application, , and coworking pop up powered by a mobile cloud. social media outreach plan for target audience What does this mean? What does it mean to turn every end computing device or smartphone into an incubator. What does it mean to turn every coffee shop, restaurant, sitting room, and underutilized office or commercial space into a coworking space? Resilient societies will unleash and embrace the potential of individuals. Many papers, , , and related to deep learning are open source. This has delivered a democratizing effect, empowering individuals to build powerful applications. datasets image recognition hierarchies software tools WhatsApp was able to build a global messaging system , compared to thousands of engineers needed for prior generations of messaging systems. serving 900M users with just 50 engineers Sharing Economy Disruption is now happening in AI. Software tools like Theano and TensorFlow, with cloud data centers for training and inexpensive GPUs for deployment, allow individuals and small distributed teams to build state-of-the-art artificially intelligent systems. Or plug and play domain specific AI options with Movidius Neural Compute Stick. Organizations, non governmental organizations, and digital communities will seek platforms to maximize profitability and sustainability in global markets. Emerging technologies, systems, and policies will require parsing to appreciate the cumulative effects on human beings, societies, states, and the planet. Establishing safety standards, and common protocols for emerging information communication technologies (ICT), biotechnologies, and new materials are among us. The development and deployment of AI without regulatory standards can be inherently dangerous to humans. Failing to develop standards for Multidisciplinary Artificial Intelligence can lead to economic inefficiencies, and lost economic opportunities. What blockchain AI product, service, or process will an individual or small distributed team build next?: Labor & Education Find employment Grow business or project Mark essays Be a teaching assistant Create custom textbooks Create personalized learning plans Tutor kids in math Administrative Get parking tickets cancelled Organize your photos Be your personal assistant Do data entry Improve your writing Make a staffing rota Schedule your meetings Take notes in a meeting Finance Detect payment fraud Do your accounts Find cheap flights Help you look after your money Make lending decisions Manage a hedge fund Optimize your spending Price risk Identify target audience Market transparency Provide financial planning advice Provide investment advice Suggest venture capital investments Trade equities Professional Cloud Storage for Business Buy and place ads Check commercial loan agreements Optimize retail inventory Review theft insurance claims Build project teams Coach call center staff Conduct M&A due diligence Conduct legal case research Design a pricing strategy Detect benefit fraud Handle customer support Personalize customer experiences Review NDAs Review motor insurance claims Run a luxury concierge Write financial bulletins Write sports bulletins Predict box office performance Predict court cases Predict fashion trends Run a hotel reception desk Home & Lifestyle Recommend movies Recommend music Recommend stuff to buy Adjust your lights Clean your windows Give you fashion advice Guess who you know Invent recipes Learn your weekly shop Mix cocktails Mow your lawn Optimize your heating Predict how long your relationship will last Reduce your water bills Vacuum your floors Buy stuff on your behalf Control your entire house Cook your meals Security Block spam emails Detect malware Enhance pixellated images Detect compromised user accounts Flag extremist videos Identify surface-to-air missile sites Operate a sentry gun Patrol shopping malls Spot burglars Spot trolls on Twitter Staff a police station Verify your identity from a selfie Predict protests and riots Predict who is going to commit a crime See through walls Industrial Manage supply chain Reduce industrial energy consumption Spray pesticides Clean floors Detect crop diseases Predict crop yields Predict maintenance tasks Sort cucumbers Pick up fruit and vegetables Run a factory Run a warehouse Transportation Dispatch taxis Navigate Drive a car Drive a truck Fly an F-16 fighter jet Pilot a drone Predict parking availability Design a sports car Predict where you want to go Science Hunt for subatomic particles Classify extreme weather events Discover new models in biology Discover new planets Find new uses for existing drugs Identify bacteria Draft research papers Invent alternatives to meat Predict disruptions in fusion reactions Predict earthquakes Simulate quantum systems Medical Diagnose pneumonia Diagnose skin cancers Predict autism Predict heart attacks and strokes Diagnose cataracts Generate oncology treatment plans Identify diabetic retinopathy Identify malaria parasites in blood Predict Alzheimer’s disease Predict high blood pressure Predict hypoglycemic events Predict schizophrenia Predict sepsis Predict sleep apnea Detect falls in the home Diagnose common conditions Diagnose prostate cancer Make precise incisions Monitor outpatients Predict hospital readmissions Screen for cervical cancer Suture a wound Vision Identify you from your face Identify you from your walk Describe what’s happening in a picture Distinguish chocolate chip vs raisin cookies Identify objects for visually impaired people Identify plant and animal species Tag your friends in photos Track multiple faces in a crowd Detect child abuse images Distinguish chihuahuas vs muffins Guess your age Recognize emotions in pictures Recognize partially concealed faces Turn photos into videos Computing Organize your Facebook news feed Search the web Improve your UX design Predict hard drive failures Improve your WiFi performance Learn how to use a computer Learn how to use encryption Turn wireframes into working apps Write AI software Write unit tests Speech & Language Lip read Pick a single voice out of a crowd Translate over 100 languages Interpret orders from a Starfleet captain Speak naturally Transcribe a conversation Translate in real time Write convincing reviews Learn to speak like someone else Recognize emotions in speech Spot fake news Translate like a native speaker Creative Fake a video of someone talking Mimic famous artists Spot forged artworks Compose classical music Copy your handwriting Design logos Direct a panel show Draw creepy pictures Edit photos Generate photorealistic faces Mix like a DJ Recognize doodles Compose pop music Write a film Write a novel Write poetry Write songs Games Play Atari 2600 Play Battleship Play Go Play Jeopardy! Play Shogi Play Texas Hold-Em Play chess Play Doom Play Dota 2 Play Sokoban Play Super Mario Bros Play table tennis Robotics & Positronic Brain An Imagination Juggle balls in mid-air Animate the poo emoji Dance Gangnam Style Do a backflip Nail an IQ test Tell if you are dreaming Judge a beauty contest People tolerance and open-mindedness Ready to unleash and embrace your potential? Join DisruptionTalk.

Definitive List of Artificial Intelligence Examples In Use

Many years ago I read a book called “All I Really Need To Know I Learned From Watching Star Trek.” I was attracted to it not only because I’m a fan but also because I do agree that coincidentally, so many of life’s great lessons are encapsulated in that great TV franchise. Well, to be specific: , , and — not and that horrible excuse for a reboot called . Jury’s still out on [Update Oct. 9, 2017: is very good] — But I digress. The Original Series The Next Generation Voyager Deep Space Nine Enterprise Discovery . Discovery The cites many examples, including relationships, job satisfaction, management, family, peace, war, love, hate, life, death, and the overall nature of humanity — and in the most hilarious ways it explains how “every situation you will face in life has already been faced by the crew of the Starship Enterprise.” book Given that the book was written in the mid-90’s, I think it’s probably time for at least one addendum: While the handheld communicator was the stuff of fantasy when aired in 1967, in many ways we’ve far surpassed the capabilities of Starfleet’s standard issue. One could argue that today’s iPhone is really a combination of a communicator, and Spock’s tricorder, but with crummier battery life. The Original Series This got me thinking. Those devices were used in times of great need only. Need to beam up? Communicator. Check for signs of carbon-based life? Tricorder. One thing we didn’t see? Officers on the Enterprise glued to their communicators, checking social media, playing games, etc. About a month ago I decided to apply a life lesson from Star Trek, and I deleted all except for mission-critical apps from my iPhone. No social media, no games… (that’s Klingon for “nothing”). Notifications are now from humans only, i.e. text messages & phone calls — no Twitter, no weather, no news flashes — just inbound communications from people. Pagh I can still access the fun stuff when I’m on my laptop, but I’m not addicted to that screen and I don’t have it with me all the time. After just a few weeks I’m now far more productive, attentive, and present. It was hard to make the transition, but I highly recommend it. If you’re like me and always looking for ways to be more productive and efficient, I’d highly recommend applying this easy lesson from Star Trek: Want to have the time, the creativity, and the attention span to explore strange new worlds? To seek out new life and new civilizations? To boldly go where no one has gone before? For starters, ditch the non-essential apps on your phone. Originally published on www.peterbrack.com

All I Need To Know I Learned From Watching Star Trek: Lesson #928

Inventors are the most spectacular causative agents of humanity’s progress. Today invention mostly occurs within commercial firms and universities. Commercial firms primarily seek profit. Universities seek both money and renown from invention. Both firms and universities, the two great poles of the landscape of invention today, seek to temporarily monopolize inventions through patents and other means of monetizing intellectual property. There has always been a third pole, which I call . This is invention carried out primarily in the public interest for the benefit of all humanity. Benjamin Franklin, Jonas Salk, Buckminster Fuller, and Richard Stallman exemplify Public Invention. They enriched the world through things they created and gave away freely. These were, respectively, and only in synopsis: the Franklin stove, the Polio vaccine, the Geodesic dome, and Emacs. Nonetheless public invention has not historically matched the great poles of commercial firms and endowed higher education. Public Invention The burgeoning of the Maker movement and the flowering of the Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement suggest that the age of public invention is dawning. The FLOSS movement has borne fruit not only in GNU-Linux but also in the Wikipedia, and has set down roots so deeply in the consciousness of most technologists that it cannot be eradicated. Standing on its shoulders by promoting sharing and openness, the Maker movement has democratized hardware by lowering to hobbyist levels the cost of technologies such as microcontrollers, drones, 3D printers, and virtual reality so quickly as to startle a futurist. The Maker movement is filled to overflowing with creativity and craftsmanship, and within it is the seed of a more more effective public invention movement. Today, a lot of the energy of the Maker movement goes into make fannish toys and simulations — which is proper. But it is also time for Makers to become more serious and choose their projects based on what will benefit humanity, or in other words, what is in the public interest. It is time for public invention to rise as a third pole of human progress. Technology is not neutral. All know-how can be used for both good and bad, and it is beyond human power to predict where one invention will eventually lead. But it is within our power to use our judgement. We must judge that the polio vaccine is a better invention than the atom bomb, if not more clever. All weapons can be used to destroy or to protect; and all weapon technology will eventually be disseminated. The Public Inventor accepts the difficult and error-prone task of trying to make things that help humanity, rather than harm it. In the words of Buckminster Fuller who espoused this philosophy so powerfully, we must make “livingry” rather than “weaponry”. To become a Public Inventor, make a list of projects that you have had in the back of your mind. Maybe something you thought of as a child. If you don’t have any ideas, take one of . Now write down an evaluation of that list in terms of the benefit to all humanity. The benefit can be in beauty and art, or science and wisdom, or efficiency and wealth. Concern yourself not with success, which is fickle and hard to come by, but with progress. Ask yourself: mine Which project will provide the greatest benefit to my fellow beings? Which project would I work on if I were the most rich, free and confident version of myself? When you have your answer, start working on it. I mean right now. Come back to this essay when you need a break. Because you are motivated by helping the world and not by seeking status or making money, you will work completely transparently, working in the public. You will share your ideas as you progress by publicizing them under appropriate licenses. Modern technology has made this easier than ever. I personally use GitHub, but that is a just one of many approaches. Twenty years from now, somewhat before Starfleet Academy is established, universities will teach “Public Invention 101”. The introductory textbook for this course has not yet been written. With luck you and I may get to write one line of it. Until it is written, I recommend the following practices: You may be tempted to seek patents, but I recommend against it. They have a glamour, but once you have been through the process a few times you realize obtaining a patent is not really a meaningful accomplishment except as an exercise in persistence. In the end patents demand secrecy and non-sharing and are contrary to the goals of a Public Inventor. They are in practice expensive, bothersome, and, worst of all, time-consuming. Freely share all of your hardware and software designs as open-source. Freely share your mistakes and failures as well as your triumphs. Own it. Proclaim yourself a Public Inventor. You don’t have to be a good one — most of us won’t be. There is no entrance exam, and there are no grades. If you feel it, rock it. Ask for help. Other people want and deserve a chance to participate in what you are doing. I, for one, am happy to help you personally, and will make the time to do it. Be frugal, but ask for money if you need it. We live in a world of ever greater abundance, and more and more people have both the funds and inclination to assist you. Reward yourself for each tiny victory. You are working for the benefit of all humanity and, for all we know, all the life that exists in the Universe, anywhere. That is not a small thing. You should expect to encounter difficulties. One of my inspiring professors, Ben Kuipers, once said “Really smart people do really mediocre work.” That may be the biggest problem that you face — -disappointment in your own competence. Invention, that is, the creation of something truly new and useful, is challenging. Your illusions may be shattered. You may have to lower your own estimation of your intelligence. It stings, but it is the beginning of learning. Kent Beck once told me, “Confusion is to be cherished because it precedes enlightenment.” On the other hand, you may succeed. It is absolutely possible to save the world and have nobody notice. Many times throughout history great work has been done that the world was not ready to receive, only to be recognized later when the inventor could no longer benefit from the recognition. You may succeed but not feel the love. Finally, you might be scoffed at. There will be voices who say, “Why are you giving up the chance to become a bazillionaire by giving away such a valuable idea?” They will rightly point out that much progress has been driven by the profit motive, rather than altruism. This voice may even come from within you. You will have to make your own decision. Fear not the disapprobation of those who would call you greedy, nor those who would call you foolish. The world is changing, and we are free to forge new ways of carrying it forward.

Become A Public Inventor

In this article, I will explain classes, objects, access modifiers, constructors, encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism in C++. The need for OOP in C++ Hey there, future coders! Ever wondered why everyone keeps talking about OOP when it comes to C++? OOP stands for Object-Oriented Programming. It’s like a set of rules for how to write code. It makes your life easier and your code more organized. Imagine a . A dog can , , and . In OOP, you’d make a class that holds all these actions (called methods). So, next time you want a in your program, you don’t have to write code for , , and again. You just say, “Hey, I got a new ,” and boom! Your new can do all that stuff. dog bark eat sleep Dog dog barking eating sleeping Dog dog So why do you need to know OOP in C++? Keep your code clean: You don’t want your room messy, right? The same goes for code. Easier to work with others: If everyone follows the same rules, no one’s stepping on each other’s toes. Saves time: Write it once, and use it many times. Stick around, and you’ll learn the basics of OOP in no time! Classes and objects In C++, a class is like a blueprint for creating objects. Objects are instances of classes. Here’s a simple class definition for a class: Dog class Dog {
public:
 std::string name;
 int age;
void bark() {
 std::cout << this->name << " said: Woof! Woof!" << std::endl;
 }
}; Creating an Object By defining a class, you’re essentially creating a new data type. An object is a variable of this custom data type. You can instantiate an object from the class like so: int main(void)
{
Dog myDog;
return (0);
} Accessing Members You can access the data members and methods using the operator: . int main(void)
{
Dog myDog;
myDog.name = "Rex";
myDog.age = 5;
myDog.bark();
return (0);
} : output testing % ./a.out 
Rex said: Woof! Woof! With the class, you can create many objects, each with its own and or any other parameter that you will add to this class. Dog Dog name age Access modifiers Sometimes you need to protect some variables in your class, and for this, we have access modifiers in cpp, there are three types: : Accessible from anywhere Public : Accessible only within the class Private : Accessible within the class and its derived classes Protected Public Access Modifier Here, is public, so you can access it directly. a class MyClass {
public:
    int a;
};

int main(void) {
    MyClass obj;
    obj.a = 10;  /*Allowed*/
    return (0);
} Private Access Modifier Here, is private, so you can't access it directly. Use a public function to get it. b class MyClass {
private:
    int b;
public:
    void setB(int val) {
        b = val;
    }
    int getB() {
        return (b);
    }
};

int main(void) {
    MyClass obj;
    obj.setB(20);
    int b = obj.getB();  /*Allowed*/
    obj.b = 3; /*Not allowed, will create error*/
    return (0);
} Protected Access Modifier Here, is protected, so you can't access it directly. But, you can access it in a derived class. c class Parent {
protected:
    int c;
};

class Child : public Parent {
public:
    void setC(int val) {
        c = val;
    }
    int getC() {
        return (c);
    }
};

int main(void) {
    Child obj;
    obj.setC(30);
    int a = obj.getC();  /*Allowed*/
    return (0);
} The main difference between and is who can access the members: private protected : Only accessible within the same class. Private : Accessible within the same class and also in classes that inherit from it. Protected Private Example class Parent {
private:
    int a;
};

class Child : public Parent {
public:
    void setA(int val) {
        /*a = val;  Error, can't access private member */
    }
}; Protected Example class Parent {
protected:
    int b;
};

class Child : public Parent {
public:
    void setB(int val) {
        b = val;  /*Allowed, b is protected*/
    }
}; In the first example, can't access because it's private in . In the second example, can access because it's protected in . Child a Parent Child b Parent Constructors Constructors in C++ are special member functions that get automatically called when an object of a class is created. They usually initialize the object’s attributes. Syntax The constructor has the same name as the class and doesn’t return anything. class MyClass {
public:
  MyClass() {
    /*Constructor code here*/
  }
}; Here’s how you can use a constructor to initialize an object. #include <iostream>

class Dog {
public:
  std::string name;

  Dog() {
    name = "Unknown";
  }
};

int main(void) {
  Dog myDog;
  std::cout << "Dog name: " << myDog.name << std::endl; 
  return (0);
} Output: testing % ./a.out 
Dog name: Unknown You can also pass parameters to a constructor. #include <iostream>

class Dog {
public:
  std::string name;

  Dog(std::string dogName) {
    name = dogName;
  }
};

int main(void) {
  Dog myDog("Buddy");
  std::cout << "Dog name: " << myDog.name << std::endl;
  return (0);
} Output: testing % ./a.out 
Dog name: Buddy Multiple Constructors You can have more than one constructor, as long as they have different parameters. class Dog {
public:
  std::string name;
  int age;

  Dog() {
    name = "Unknown";
    age = 0;
  }

  Dog(std::string dogName) {
    name = dogName;
    age = 0;
  }

  Dog(std::string dogName, int dogAge) {
    name = dogName;
    age = dogAge;
  }
}; Encapsulation Encapsulation enhances data integrity by locking down data access to specific methods within the class. This secures your code by making variables private and providing controlled ways to modify or retrieve them through setters and getters. It also helps to manage the code more conveniently. For a better understanding, let’s consider a case with and without encapsulation: Without Encapsulation In this scenario, the data is exposed and can be modified directly, leaving it vulnerable to erroneous changes. class Dog {
public:
int age;
};

int main(void)
{
Dog dog;
dog.age = -15; /*Invalid, but allowed*/
return (0);
} With Encapsulation In this case, the data is secured through private access, and can only be changed via specific methods that include validation checks. class Dog{
private:
int _age;
public:
void setAge(int a){
if (a > 0)
  _age = a;
else
  _age = 0;
}
int getAge()
{
return (_age);
}
};

int main(void)
{
  Dog dog;

  dog.setAge(-15); /*Invalid, defaults to zero*/
  dog.setAge(15); /*Valid, now _age = 15)*/
  return(0);
} Abstraction Abstraction in C++ is like using a TV remote. You press the button to turn the TV on. You don’t need to know how the TV turns on inside; you just press the button. In C++, abstraction lets you hide the complicated stuff and only show the buttons (functions) that are needed. power For a better understanding, let me show a case with and without abstraction: Without Abstraction Imagine you have to do 3 steps to start a car: turn a key, push a button, and pump gas. class Car {
public:
    void turnKey() {
        /*Turn the key*/
    }
    void pushButton() {
        /*Push the button*/
    }
    void pumpGas() {
        /*Pump gas*/
    }
}; With Abstraction Instead, you can have just one button (function) that does all those 3 steps for you. start class Car {
  private:
      void turnKey() {
          /*Turn the key*/
      }
      void pushButton() {
          /*Push the button*/
      }
      void pumpGas() {
          /*Pump gas*/
      }
  public:
      void start() {
          turnKey();
          pushButton();
          pumpGas();
      }
  
  }; You just need to know the button, and don’t have to worry about what happens inside. It makes it easier to work with your class. start Inheritance Inheritance in C++ is similar to passing traits from parents to children. If your parent can run well, you can inherit that ability too. case with and without inheritance: Without Inheritance If you have two types of cars, both can start and stop, but they can also drift. Without inheritance, you'd write two separate classes. SportsCar class Car {
public:
    void start() {
       /*Start the car*/
    }
    void stop() {
        /*Stop the car*/
    }
};

class SportsCar {
public:
    void start() {
        /*Start the car*/
    }
    void stop() {
        /*Stop the car*/
    }
    void drift() {
        /*Make the car drift*/
    }
}; With Inheritance You can make a of . It will automatically get the ability to start and stop from its . SportsCar child Car parent class Car {
public:
    void start() {
        /*Start the car*/
    }
    void stop() {
        /*Stop the car*/
    }
};

class SportsCar : public Car {
public:
    void drift() {
        /*Make the car drift*/
    }
}; Polymorphism Polymorphism is like having a universal remote that can control different devices: TV, fan, etc. You press the “power” button, and each device knows what to do without you having to tell it specifically. And in C++ you can have the same, so to use the same functions, but for different devices. example of code with and without inheritance: Without Polymorphism If you have different types of cars, each with a special way of starting, you’d have to call each one differently. class Car {
public:
    void start() {
        /*Start the car*/
    }
    void makeSound(){
    std::cout << "vooom" << std::endl;
    }
};

class ElectricCar {
public:
    void startElectric() {
        /*Start the electric car*/
    }
    void makeSound(){
    std::cout << "vooom" << std::endl;
    }
}; in code, it will look like this: int main(void)
{
  Car myCar;
  myCar.start();

  ElectricCar myElectricCar;
  myElectricCar.startElectric();
  return (0);
} With Polymorphism You can make all car types have a common “start” function, so you can treat them all as just “cars”. class Car {
public:
    virtual void start() {
        /*Start the car*/
    }
    void makeSound(){
      std::cout << "vooom" << std::endl;
    }
};

class ElectricCar : public Car {
public:
    void start() override {
        /*Start the electric car*/
    }
}; in code, it will look like this: int main(void)
{
  Car* myCar = new Car();
  Car* myElectricCar = new ElectricCar();

  myCar->start();
  myElectricCar->start();  
  delete(myCar);
  delete(myElectricCar);
  return (0);
} With polymorphism, you just have one or function, and each type of car knows what to do when you press it. This makes it simpler to manage different types of cars. button Why Use Pointers in Polymorphism? Dynamic Behavior: Pointers let your program decide at run-time which version of the function to use. If you have an , it'll use If it's just a , it'll use . This happens on the fly. start ElectricCar ElectricCar::start(); Car Car::start(); Flexibility: By using pointers to base classes like , you can write code that works for any derived class like without even knowing what types of cars you might add to the program later. You can easily plug in a new type of car and your existing code will still work. Car ElectricCar Avoid Slicing: Using pointers prevents , which is when you lose the unique behaviors of the derived class ( ) if you try to store it as a base class ( ). slicing ElectricCar Car Memory Management: Pointers let you control the object’s lifetime. You can create objects when you need them and delete them when you’re done, which can help to save resources. You mostly lose polymorphism if you don’t use pointers or references. When you use stack-allocated objects, the compiler decides at compile-time which method to call, based on the object’s declared type. This is called “static polymorphism” or “compile-time polymorphism,” and it doesn’t offer the same flexibility as “dynamic polymorphism” or “run-time polymorphism” that you get with pointers or references. Finish I hope this article clarifies the intricacies of object-oriented programming in C++ for you. If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to leave a comment. If you found this guide useful, please consider connecting with me on and leaving feedback. LinkedIn Link to follow me: LinkedIn Hackernoon Also published . here

Why Object-Oriented Programming in C++ Matters

Practical Data Fetching with React Suspense That You Can Use Today

I’ve been involved in - projects for several years. After I first met with flux, I was impressed by its expressive power that describes complicated use cases in contrast to other dataflow concepts, which caused many troubles when the complexity of a project increased. react redux Data changes can be described as actions with a minimal payload. These actions make a deterministic, time-independent history of the application’s life. The application’s state at a given point is reducible by picking an action in the chain. The action controlled dataflow concept is simple and clear. The concept of Redux has many theoretical principles and advantages, but I do not intend to talk about them. There is only one major disadvantage of immutability: the cost of it. But We can always keep track of the difference between two consecutive states, and that is something why I cannot list immutability as a disadvantage of Redux. the price we must pay for immutable data handling is multiple refunded by avoiding re-renders and reflows in React applications. Motivation Redux has one more disadvantage: it is painfully verbose. Let’s suppose we want to create an async action, which fetches users and saves them in a Redux store instance. We need 3 action definitions: const START_FETCHING_USERS = "START_FETCHING_USERS"; const RESOLVE_FETCHING_USERS = "RESOLVE_FETCHING_USERS"; const REJECT_FETCHING_USERS = "REJECT_FETCHING_USERS"; The first action type starts the process, provides the new set of users, and is emitted if there is an error during fetching. START_FETCHING_USERS RESOLVE_FETCHING_USERS REJECT_FETCHING_USERS Let’s see the action creators: const startFetchingUsers = () => ({ type: START_FETCHING_USERS });  const resolveFetchingUsers = users => ({ type: RESOLVE_FETCHING_USERS, users });  const rejectFetchingUsers = error => ({ type: RESOLVE_FETCHING_USERS, error }); and the reducer: const initState = {   isFetching: false, users: [], error: null}

const reducer = (state = initState, action) => {   switch (action.type) {   case START_FETCHING_USERS: return {     ...state,     isFetching: true   };   case RESOLVE_FETCHING_USERS: return {     ...state,     isFetching: false,     users: action.users   };   case REJECT_FETCHING_USERS: return {     ...state,     isFetching: false,     error: action.error   };   default: return state; }} All that remains is to implement the async action creator: thunk const fetchUsers = () => async (dispatch, getState, { api }) => {   dispatch(startFetchingUsers()); try {   const users = await api.get('/users');   dispatch(resolveFetchingUsers(users)); } catch (error) {   dispatch(rejectFetchingUsers(error.message)); }} Okay, we finished the Redux parts & we’re almost done. Now we just need to connect the action creators and the state to the React component, and we are good to go! For this simple feature, we needed to type a lot of lines for action types, action creators, action handlers in the reducer, and we have not written any view components yet. This is especially inconvenient when we are involved in developing a large application with thousands of action types, action creators, and sub-reducers. It causes further difficulties too, because these resources are separated in many files, in different places. So if we want to trace the effect of an action, we have to follow the flow of data across many files, which makes it easy to get lost. By looking around in , we are most likely to find a bunch of libraries/helpers/middlewares, which help us to avoid typing, but using them introduces some other type of typing overhead as we need to import them in every file. npm Maybe we should think of a simpler way and consider which features we really need from Redux. Mutability is the highway to hell. So this is not a solution. Especially not in React applications. Do we have to keep the data immutable? In most cases, the actions are used only in single place. We do not need to keep them reproducible. What if you have a way to dispatch anonymous actions? Do we have to know the name of an action? This would be great. There are use cases where you absolutely need to be serializable, but in most applications, you do not. So let’s continue with the assumption that this is not a requirement for now. Do we have to be able to serialize the actions? We should adhere to the first restriction, while we can safely forget the others. We should transform the Redux concepts to make it possible that we can create actions briefly. We want to describe an action as a single function, either in place. Repatch drops action types and action creators from the definition set, and answers the question: “What if reducers were the payload of the actions?”. The creed of this library is: Repatch DISPATCH REDUCERS store.dispatch(state => ({ ...state, counter: state.counter + 1 })); In this terminology, an action is a function that returns a reducer: const increment = amount => state => ({    ...state,  counter: state.counter + amount});

store.dispatch(increment(42)); Repatch also has a class that we can instantiate with the initial state: Store import Store from 'repatch';

const store = new Store(initialState); Repatch’s interface is very similar as ’s, therefore we can use it with the library. The and methods have the same signature as in the Redux's . redux react-redux dispatch subscribe Store Middlewares and Async Actions Repatch also has an interface for chaining middlewares. This is convenient for using your favorite async-action middleware. The package provides a middleware - similar to - which is useful for creating async actions. If your reducer returns a function, it will be automatically considered an async action by the middleware. The and functions will be passed as arguments to it by the store instance. You can set up the middleware to provide one extra argument to. You can use that, for example to inject your client API library. thunk redux-thunk dispatch getState Let’s see the example related to our use-case below: const fetchUsers = () => _ => async (dispatch, getState, { api }) => {   dispatch(state => ({ ...state, isFetching: true })); try {   const users = await api.get('/users');   dispatch(state => ({ ...state, users })); } catch (error) {   dispatch(state => ({ ...state, error: error.message })); } finally {   dispatch(state => ({ ...state, isFetching: false })) }} Using this middleware shows the real power of repatch as we can describe async actions in only a few lines of code. As you can see, we did not need to define verbose action types, action creators and action handlers in the reducer, as we could simply dispatch an arrow function defined in place, thus creating an . How cool is that? This makes it possible that actions either can also be created from a component. thunk anonymous action All that remains is the instantiation with the initial state: Store const store = new Store({   isFetching: false, users: [], error: null}); and somewhere dispatching the action: store.dispatch(fetchUsers()) Let’s see an other example: const updateUser = delta => state => async (dispatch, getState, { api }) => {   try {   const editedUserId = getState().editedUser;   dispatch(toggleSpinner(true));   await api.put(`/users/${editedUserId}`, { body: delta });   await dispatch(fetchUsers());   dispatch(toggleSpinner(false)); } catch (error) {   dispatch(state => ({ ...state, isFetching: false, error: error.message })); }}; You can see from the function signature that in this example the extra argument is our client API object, as I mentioned previously. Also, note that the reducer’s argument is not always satisfactory for reading the state because it is a momentary representation from the time when the action was fired. Therefore we need to use the function instead of . state getState state In this example, is a regular synchronous action that we can . The method is a simple async method to call the API, there is no obstacle in the way of ing for it. The line is a bit more interesting. Using we got used to embedding async actions within each other and waiting for them. toggleSpinner dispatch api.put await await dispatch(fetchUsers()) redux-thunk Sub-reducers in Redux Redux’s reducers are composable to form a hierarchical structure. This way we do not need to define one giant reducer, instead, we can separate them to smaller nested reducers. Combining reducers is not magic, we just create a reducer that reduces the parts one by one to an object using their sub-state. const rootReducer = (state, action) => ({   foo: fooReducer(state.foo, action), bar: barReducer(state.bar, action)}); is equivalent to const rootReducer = redux.combineReducers({    foo: fooReducer,  bar: barReducer}); Sub-reducers in Repatch Repatch also offers a way to combine sub-reducers. We just define a function that takes a nested reducer as argument, and returns a reducer that reduces the whole state: const reduceFoo = fooReducer => state => ({   ...state, foo: fooReducer(state.foo)}); Now reducing the property is easy. Let's suppose we would like to set an property in the object: foo x foo const setX = x => reduceFoo(state => ({ ...state, x })); It will be really useful if the sub-reducer describes a deeply nested property: const reduceFoo = reducer => state => ({    ...state,  bar: {    ...state.bar,    foo: reducer(state.bar.foo)  }}); Testing How about testing? Writing unit tests for a reducer is simple: import * as assert from 'assert';  import { changeName } from './actions';

// ...

it('changeName', () => {   const state = { name: 'john' }; const nextState = changeName('jack')(state); assert.strictEqual(nextState.name, 'jack');}); Async actions are a bit more complicated because they take effect by depending on external resources such as the store instance and other APIs. But external resources always need to be mocked in all environments. import Store, { thunk } from 'repatch';  import * as assert from 'assert';

const mockUsers = [{ username: 'john' }];  const mockApi = {   getUsers: () => Promise.resolve(mockUsers)}

// ...

it('fetchUsers', async () => {   const state = { users: [] }; const store = new Store(state)   .addMiddleware(thunk.withExtraArgument({ api: mockApi })); await store.dispatch(fetchUsers()); const nextState = store.getState(); assert.deepEqual(nextState.users, mockUsers);}); The TODO app Every javascript library has a todo example, so repatch has too. If you are looking for the TypeScript example, you can find it . one here This Guest Post written by Péter Hauszknecht was Originally published at community.risingstack.com on August 16, 2017.

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