Month: June 2022

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The Stack Overflow Podcast - Talking blockchain, functional programming, and the future with Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman

While blockchains are huge right now, finding one to build on that doesn’t use a ton of energy, has good privacy protections, and operates efficiently is harder than it looks. The original breakout blockchain, Bitcoin, was slow to adopt any innovations coming out of research. Other blockchains use the electricity of a small country to play elaborate gambling games. For someone looking to build the future of Web3, what are your options?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk to Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman. After finding out that the Bitcoin blockchain wouldn’t incorporate all the good ideas generated around it—proof of stake, privacy improvements, and smart contracts to name a few—he decided to build his own. 

Arthur has a background in machine learning and statistics but spent his early 20s teaching self-driving cars how to turn left and working in quantitative finance for high-frequency trading. High-frequency trading was data-driven, but there was so much noise that machine learning didn’t do very well. Self-driving cars, meanwhile, presented a more structured problem, so neural networks could yield good results. 

Around that time, Arthur got bit by the crypto bug. It lived at the intersection of a lot of his interests: Cryptography touched on computer science and math, but his time in finance got him wondering about banks and money work. The idea of individual sovereignty scratched a personal philosophical itch. 

Naturally, Arthur decided to try some mining software. It took all of his computer’s resources, so he uninstalled it. But after seeing the price of Bitcoin break a dollar and other news items about it, he looked closer. He started to think about what a company could do if it didn’t have to maintain banking relationships. He thought about possible applications, like decentralized poker. 

When Bitcoin refused to adopt the improvements developed by competing alt coins, Arthur started thinking about a new blockchain that would respond to new developments and focus on efficient processing, security, and a good smart contract system. Forking the code wasn’t enough; he needed a new ledger. 

That’s when Tezos was born. It was initially built by a small team of OCaml programmers using that language’s functional subset. Arthur was inspired by the example of WhatsApp, which was built by a small team of senior Erlang engineers. While OCaml would limit the talent he could hire, it would be a very efficient way to build an error-free transaction system. He could have built the whole thing in Java, sure, but Arthur estimates that it would have cost a whole lot more. 

If you’re interested in learning more about what an engineer’s blockchain ecosystem looks like, check out the Tezos home page. Discover building on Tezos: https://tezos.com/build/

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Hayek Program Podcast - Liberalism for All — The War on Drugs

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, we begin a special summer series of the podcast on Liberalism for All, hosted by Jayme Lemke as she explores the underpinnings and outworkings of a free and open society. Driving the discussion is a set of core questions, including:

  • What does it mean to be liberal in the 21st century?
  • What is the relationship between liberalism and equality?
  • Is the pursuit of equality a threat or opportunity for the liberal project?

Joining Lemke for this episode is Audrey Redford, assistant professor of economics at Western Carolina University and an alum of the Adam Smith Fellowship. Redford shares her journey in becoming a political economist before explaining her concept of 'malnovation' in illicit drug markets and how it shapes the efforts of individuals to acquire illicit drugs. They also discuss what low-hanging fruit exists for drug policy reform, and what a more liberal approach to public drug policy would look like. As they close their conversation, Lemke and Redford share broadly what political economy can contribute to shaping free and open institutions.

If you like the show, be sure to leave a 5-star review for us on Apple Podcasts and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever else you get your podcasts.

Learn more about Redford's work.

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CC Music: Twisterium

Dirt Rhodes by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3650-dirt-rhodes

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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Headlines From The Times - California’s historic water restrictions

Unprecedented water restrictions in Los Angeles County are going to ensure the slow demise of lawns. And now, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is ready to deal green lawns a final blow. Today, how Southern Californians will have to get used to browner lawns — and why even that might not make a dent in a historic drought.

Read the full transcript here.

Host: Gustavo Arellano

Guests: L.A. Times water reporter Ian James

More reading:

Newsom urges aggressive water conservation and warns of statewide restrictions

California just adopted new, tougher water restrictions: What you need to know

California bans watering ‘nonfunctional’ grass in some areas, strengthening drought rules

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Oprahdemics - Oprah and The Donald

Donald Trump appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show eight times, with Oprah touting him as a model American success story. He also used the show to tease his political ambitions, with little pushback on his racism and misogyny. Their relationship reveals a lot about how Trump built his brand, how different audiences viewed his story — and ultimately how he forged a path to the presidency.

Special guest: Christina Greer of Fordham and the podcast FAQ NYC.

Find lots more and subscribe to our newsletter on our website — Oprahdemics.com

Producer Nina Earnest, Executive Producer Jody Avirgan. Artwork by Jonathan Conda.

Oprahdemics is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.

Your support helps foster independent, artist-owned podcasts and award-winning stories.

If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on our website: Oprahdemics.com

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The Intelligence from The Economist - The diet is cast: a coming food catastrophe

War and blockades in Ukraine are the largest but far from the only problems squeezing the global food system—and with prices already way up, a catastrophe of hunger looms. The prospect of whole-genome screening for newborns opens up many opportunities to avoid or treat disease, and many ethical debates. And more than just sordid history at Bangkok’s red-light-district museum.For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer
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Social Science Bites - Jonathan Haskel on Intangibles

The knowledge economy. Intellectual property. Software. Maybe even bitcoin. All pretty much intangible, and yet all clearly real and genuinely valuable. This is the realm where economist Jonathan Haskel of Imperial College London mints his own non-physical scholarship. “In the old days,” relates the co-author of Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy, “the assets of companies, the sort of secret sauce by which companies would generate their incomes and do their services for which they’re employed for, was very tangible-based. These would be companies with lots of machines, these would be companies with oil tankers, with buildings, with vehicles to transport things around. Nowadays, companies like Google, like Microsoft, like LinkedIn, just look very different.” And that difference, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, is knowledge. “What they have is knowledge,” says Haskel, “and it’s knowledge assets, these intangible assets, which these companies are deploying.”

Intangible investments, as you might expect, have different properties than do tangible ones. Haskel dubbed them the four S’s:

  • Scale. Once you have a handle on a successful intangible, like software, that can generally scale up without more capital spending;
  • Sunk Costs. These are invested costs you can’t get back, such as the costs of developing software;
  • Spillovers. Aspects of your intangibles that others can copy or adopt for themselves; and
  • Synergies. “If you put all these intangibles together,” he explains, “you get more than the sum of the parts.”

Meanwhile, intangibles help keep modern economies humming – we think. “Accountants and statistical agencies are quite reluctant to measure intangibles because it’s -- intangible. It’s a rather difficult thing to get at; these are often goods that aren’t traded from one person to another …”

Part of Haskel’s research effort is to quantify how much investment in intangibles is going on “behind the scenes,” which fits in with other interests of his such as re-engineering how gross domestic product gets measured. Businesses are now spending more on intangibles then on tangibles: Haskel’s work reveals that for every monetary unit companies spend on tangible assets, they spend 1.15 on intangible ones.

In addition to serving as a professor at the Imperial College Business School, Haskel is director of the Doctoral Programme at the Imperial. He is an elected member of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth and a research associate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, and the IZA, Bonn.

Haskel has been a non-executive director of the UK Statistics Authority since 2016 and an external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee since 2019.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - Notifications North Star – Eric Koslow, Lattice

Notification North Star, sponsored by Courier!

Guest: Eric Koslow is the Co-founder of Lattice, the people success platform. Prior to Lattice, he spent time engineering at TeeSpring, and now he is building a new venture called VStream.

Questions:

  • What impact does user communication have in the HR SaaS space?
  • What infrastructure issues arose that caused you to look for a notification infrastructure vendor at Lattice?
  • Tell me about your new venture Vstream, and how important will your communication strategy be?
  • Have you experienced particular preferences from your user base, as far as how and when they are notified?
  • How does Courier fit into your overall messaging strategy?

Links



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Bay Curious - Golden Gate Park’s Windmills Were Essential, Then Abandoned for Decades.

The Murphy Windmill is one of the largest windmills outside of Holland. It, along with the smaller and older Dutch Windmill, once provided essential water for irrigating the park. Though they are no longer used, the park still spins them on special occasions. We take a tour inside!

Additional Reading: 


Reported by Suzie Racho. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz, Sebastian Miño-Bucheli and Brendan Willard. Thanks also to Sarah Rose Leonard, Lance Gardner, Kyana Moghadam, Amanda Font and Rebecca Kao for their help on this series.