Venture capitalist focusing on the Metaverse (2020-21)

WebAssembly (sometimes abbreviated Wasm) is an open standard that defines a portable binary-code format for executable programs, and a corresponding textual assembly language, as well as interfaces for facilitating interactions between such programs and their host environment.[2][3][4][5] The main goal of WebAssembly is to enable high-performance applications on web pages, but the format is designed to be executed and integrated in other environments as well, including standalone ones. WebAssembly (i.e. WebAssembly Core Specification (then version 1.0, 1.1 is in draft[9]) and WebAssembly JavaScript Interface[10]) became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation on 5 December 2019,[11] alongside HTML, CSS, and JavaScript... In November 2017, Mozilla declared support "in all major web browsers",[39] after WebAssembly was enabled by default in Edge 16.[40] The support includes mobile web browsers for iOS and Android. As of July 2021, 94% of installed browsers support WebAssembly... WebAssembly is supported on desktops, and mobile, but on the latter, in practice (for non-small memory allocations, such as with Unity game engine) there are "grave limitations that make many applications infeasible to be reliably deployed on mobile browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAssembly (more)

Matthew Ball: A Framework for the Metaverse. We need to think of the Metaverse as a sort of successor state to the mobile internet. (more)

Economy not constrained by physical goods. Could be within a Virtual World, Computer Game, or elsewhere. (more)

An interesting thread on the Design of Virtual World Market Economy systems. Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle talks a bit about designing economies. I've only skimmed it, but it is a well regarded resource. Ted Castranova's Synthetic Worlds hits on many of these topics as well. As an economist, he has done some of the best work on understanding economies in virtual worlds.

Tinderbox is an app (http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) from East Gate. Used to be called Ceres. (more)

Layer 1 vs Layer 2: Where’s the Next Block Party At? Several layer 2 solutions have been proposed for Ethereum, each with its own trade-offs. Plasma was an early solution enabling high-throughput payments but doesn’t support the smart contracts so vital to defi, nor do state or payment channel solutions similar to Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. (more)

John Herrman: Are We in the Metaverse Yet? Crypto people say they’re building it. Gamers might already be living in it. The art world is cashing in on it. Web veterans are trying to save it. But what is it? (more)

Matthew Ball: Compute and the Metaverse. Nvidia’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, sees the next step for immersive simulations as something greater than more realistic explosions or street races. Instead, it’s the application of the “laws of particle physics, of gravity, of electromagnetism, of electromagnetic waves, [including] light and radio waves … of pressure and sound”. And just as the virtual world is augmented, so too will be the ‘real’ one. (more)

Matthew Ball: Payments, Payment Rails, and Blockchains, and The Metaverse. Throughout this primer, the Metaverse has been positioned as both a successor state to the mobile internet, as well as a platform for human leisure, labor, and existence at large. The success of this vision depends on whether the Metaverse has a thriving economy (virtual economy). (more)

Gavin Wood: WebAssembly Is the Future, EVM Is Right Now. The EVM is what enables Ethereum to run smart contracts, the innovation it’s known for popularizing (more)

Matthew Ball: Virtual Platforms and the Metaverse. Here, Virtual Platforms are defined as “The development and operation of immersive digital and often three-dimensional simulations, environments, and worlds wherein users and businesses can explore, create, socialize, and participate in a wide variety of experiences (more)

Andy Matuschak note-taking app. Orbit helps you deeply internalize ideas through periodic review. (SRS) https://withorbit.com/ (more)

Apple Computer

Annotation/Blog Comment that is associated with a specific Paragraph (Paragraph Addressable), and appears next to it in the Margin. (more)

see To Do List

aka Coronavirus (more)

Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The site works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying "on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia article."[2] The neutral point of view policy that Wikinews claim to have, has an aim to distinguish it from other citizen journalism efforts such as Indymedia and OhmyNews.[3] In contrast to most projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikinews allows original work under the form of original reporting and interviews.[4] As of August 2021, there are Wikinews sites active for 29 languages[1] comprising a total of 1,663,849 articles and 600 recently active editors.[5] Wikinews editors are known as wikinewsies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinews

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 8/05: Much Ado About Nothing. Getting into the weeds on the CDC’s new guidance and scaremongering, and the study they cited as justifications, caused this week’s post to get rather long. That was necessary, but if you don’t need the details, by all means skip the sections in question in favor of this summary: The CDC’s failure to apply Bayes’ rule, correct for base rates or locate sufficiently large or remotely representative samples knows few if any bounds, and their conclusions are still mostly the same conclusions my model had reached weeks ago. Very little has changed. Our new model of Delta variant is almost entirely the same as our old model of Delta. (more)

see ADD