Some of the Things, Poetry and Stories Not Included
Welcome to the 34th entry of my public journal, where I share *some of the things* I've been thinking about, learning about, and exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.
Dear Friends,
Some of my journal entries are more narrative or poetic. And some are just a dump of all of the things some of the things I’ve been doing, thinking about, or reading. This edition is more the latter.
GM Farcaster recent updates:
We live-streamed our 100th episode with Farcaster founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan from the FarCon mainstage in Venice Beach CA.
Collaborated with artist and DJ Chic Bangs for Mental Health Action Day, featuring her song SHAKE. Animals intuitively shake off their stress, her song encourages us to channel that intuition, and use vibration to release pent up mental stressors.
Officially formed GM Farcaster Network LLC, as NounishProf and I partner to build a Farcaster native media company.
Put Your Podcast Onchain in 5 Easy Steps - I wrote a guide for putting podcasts onchain.
“What does DevOps have to do with GM Farcaster?” I got this question several times during FarCon and while my initial reaction was “nothing”, after I thought about it for a little bit I found some interesting similarities, mostly around creating mechanisms for permissionless innovation and the emphasis on people and culture.
Counting Users is Harder Than You Think - DAU (daily active users) is still the standard for measuring social networks, but calculating it is harder than you’d expect with bot and inauthentic activity. I was reminded of what it took to tackle this seemingly too-easy problem at Cornerstone and why it was harder than “select * from users where status = active”. Ultimately it was more a social and organizational problem to solve than an engineering one.
Inversion and The Power of Avoiding Stupidity - “It is not enough to think about difficult problems one way. You need to think about them forwards and backward. Inversion often forces you to uncover hidden beliefs about the problem you are trying to solve.”
The Goldilocks consensus problem - Farcaster CTO Varun Srinivasan wrote about how they are approaching decentralized social with a new mechanism called deltagraph which uses a combination of blockchains with CRDTs (conflict free replicated data type). A decentralized social network is one where no single person or company is in charge (more like email, less like facebook, twitter, etc.). The two existing solutions are Federation (ex: Mastadon) and Blockchain (ex: Lens). But Federation tends to lead back towards centralization (via oligopolies like gmail) and Blockhains are too expensive and too slow. It’s a fascinating problem space and I have to admit I’m a little jealous of the engineers who get to work on it.
80 Weird Words and Phrases - This one is for the word nerds.
There are three sides to every story - “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.” Great reminder that we don’t need to have an opinion on everything, and we don’t need to get sucked into every fight.
How to Build Your Onchain Audience - Farcaster friend Meg recently wrote this article with advice for building an audience onchain, with crowdsourced tips from me and other active Farcaster writers and creators.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami - I started reading this after several recommendations but after about 25% I’m not totally sucked into it. Should I keep going for a later payoff or take Naval Ravikant’s advice and not finish it?
Dan Romero shared this great prompt for ChatGPT for working with legal docs and lawyers: “Can you review this document and flag anything that seems non-standard? Assume you’re an attorney with 10 years of corporate law experience. Don’t have a lot of introductory text, just focus on points”.
Some of the Pics
Top row: So much green! Weeping willow, water lily, sencha matcha from Japan.
Middle row: FarCon fun - My talk on scenius, pickleball team, the DJs
Bottom row: Amy, Po On and me, Grandmom Helen’s challah recipe, and the output.
A Note to My Subscribers
I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.
I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out my consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️