Preethi Kasireddy: Yeah, sure. That’s a great question. I’ll be honest, one of the things that I’m always excited by are problems that are not figured out, and blockchain is definitely one of them in the sense that there is this amazing technology that got created, but the actual applications and use cases have yet to be created, and there’s so much room for creativity and innovation. I’d say that’s one of the main reasons why I’m so attracted to this industry… Because I naturally have the entrepreneurial spirit, I wanna solve unsolved problems, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m gravitating to it. But at a more fundamental level, I think the technology itself is super interesting.

I think earlier you were saying how blockchain is interesting as a digital currency… I’d go a little bit further than that and say I actually don’t get excited by digital currency per se, because digital currency is just one application of the blockchain. There’s so many other applications that I think have potential that haven’t been created yet, and I’m more excited about those applications. In my opinion, it’s really hard for the current currency system in any nation – for example, take the U.S. For cryptocurrency or digital currency to replace fiat currency, that would take a lot. The government has a really tight control over the monetary policy and I just don’t see what benefits digital currencies provide today that would make people switch over, that would make the government friendly to this, and so forth… Because in the end, what digital currency is - it’s completely decentralized, completely open, completely censorship-resistant, which is not something any government really wants.

So for me, I’m more excited by what else blockchain enables. At a fundamental level, blockchain is a decentralized technology where it’s maintaining a ledger of transactions or basically state changes, and the state changes are cryptographically secure because they are maintained by something called the consensus process. This consensus process in Bitcoin or Ethereum is called proof of work, where a bunch of miners are there and they run a bunch of complex computations to validate these transactions, and they get paid for validating this blockchain. So the entire chain is decentralized, it’s trustless, because there’s no need to trust any central party to maintain this database or this ledger, and then it’s completely censorship-resistant because you can’t have really any central authority trying to censor it… And it’s completely secure, because it’s cryptographically secure. So with those primitives you can do just so much on top, and that’s kind of what I’m excited by.

Mikeal Rogers: It’s a whole ecosystem. There’s a bunch of other blockchains as well, there’s chains that are very compatible, versus ones that have some difficulty with compatibility… It’s important here to separate what is a technical limitation because we just haven’t figured out what to do yet, but there’s an incentive to fix it, versus issues that are actual incentive problems. The players in this industry don’t want to do this, so it’s not going to happen. There have been things floated to do in Bitcoin that would be good for the people that use Bitcoin, but maybe not good for the miners… So that stuff in Bitcoin is probably not gonna happen, and may happen in some of these other chains that are being created.

Transaction fees - there’s nobody who wants all the transaction fees to be super-high, actually. The business model here is to mine new tokens, and the utility of those tokens is somewhat affected by how difficult they are to transact… So there’s a real incentive to try and get that down over time, rather than up, because that’s just not where you’re making money; nobody is making money on that. They wanna get it down.

The same thing with the power consumption. Nobody wants to pay extra power bills. Everybody’s trying to get the power consumption down. It’s just literally a technical problem that we’re iterating towards.

And Flow, for instance, like we just talked about, and NEAR Protocol for that matter - they already use proof of stake, and use way less power, and they have much lower transaction fees. Not because of that… Because of other reasons, mostly.

Anyway, if you look at the ecosystem as a whole, you don’t really have a transaction fee problem because you have all these other chains that you can use that have very low transaction fees… And if an asset gets to a certain price, you can actually move it to Ethereum. And not every protocol has worked out exactly what this is, but one of the really popular things right now is called Polygon; it’s the sidechains that are Ethereum-compatible, which means that they look more or less like Ethereum. And so if you ever want to transfer an asset from there to Ethereum, you can.

So there you can create assets for sub-penny, do all these transactions, and if some of them get to be like a million dollars and you really wanna put them in the more secure, stable, broadcasted network, you can then move them to Ethereum and pay that transaction fee. And I think the way to look at this evolving is that the way that you have to scale it is through more decentralization, not more centralization. So the solution is not to get everything into Ethereum and make Ethereum so good that it has sub-penny transaction fees, and is doing a billion ops a second, or something; that’s not realistic. It’s fine to just have these sidechains and to have the assets move around.

Protocol Labs, Juan Benet who started the company - he’s always had a lot of vision about how this stuff works in the future and about this protocol interop, and we’ve been working on standards and protocols that are just open source, open protocols that we implement. A lot of people, I think, for a long time, thought that we were over-engineering. They tended to be like “Oh, why don’t you just do your own custom thing, like we’re doing over in this chain?” And we were like, “Because it’s not about your chain, it’s about the compatibility between the things”, right?

Gavin Wood: So what the Coinbase and other exchanges (there are actually a few of them) do is they essentially perform a bridge between the current, legacy world of value, of money, and the sort of new crypto world of value. They allow you to buy and trade Ether for fiat currency, and they have a foot in both domains. Now, the developer, once he figures out what they want to do with this shared computer, the developer will probably take some Ether - because you need Ether to pay for computation on the shared computer - and start coding up what will effectively be the backend.

What we normally think of as being something that sits on a server, that has maybe a database attached, that provides services to multiple clients, that’s basically the logic that’s gonna be moved onto the Ethereum computer, the Ethereum blockchain. And at that point we start coding a contract, which is just a piece of software; it’s almost like an object. If you’re talking C++ programming, it’ll be like a class; if you’re talking Rust programming, it’ll be a struct… It’s basically an object with some functions that can do some stuff. That will be uploaded to the Ethereum network with a small payment of Ether just to sort of pay off the maintainers of the network, the miners; then it will sit there until someone wants to interact with it. Then it’s up to the developer to write the frontend; this is basically the same sort of technologies JavaScript, CSS, HTML… It’s just that the Java – sorry, the JavaScript… [laughter] The JavaScript can…

Yasir Ekinci: Yeah. My dad actually was a miner when he was younger. I don’t mean like “and then he grew up”, but he was actually in the mines, down in the pits… And he used to – yeah, he’d come home and he looked like he was wearing eyeliner, or guy liner, because he’d have like soot in his eyes, and stuff. Obviously, it’s not showered out properly, but… Yeah, he sort of looked like a seventies rock kind of glam star. It was great.

Adam Stacoviak: Right? Because that impacts your ability to give talks, and stuff like that, or show up on podcast… Like “What do you do?” “I’m an Oracle Data Miner.” “No, what do you do?” “That’s my title.” “Okay.” “That’s me. I do that.”

Justin Searls: But beyond a certain point, cognitively, we can only carry around so many in our heads. Like, if I’m talking to James about this and he doesn’t even remember writing that thing… Like, what we’ve seen when you take that to the extreme in npm is how critical security audits have become… Because all it takes is like a domain name expiring, or somebody coming along and buying a package from somebody else, and then like secretly injecting a cryptocurrency miner, or a keylogger or something… Taken to its extreme, what you’re really doing is you’re creating a chain of trust with a whole bunch of strangers. And you’ve got to be mindful of the fact that if you’re effectively opening yourself up to everyone, you could never hope to audit at all. Hopefully, GitHub Copilot will be security-scanning everything and it’ll catch most of the stuff. I would still never feel comfortable if I didn’t feel like I could get my arms around it, and look at every single one of my dependencies and have some idea of who maintained it, and what it was, and what it did.

Jarred Sumner: Yeah. No, he’s great. Probably what he’s referring to, I’m guessing, is that we don’t have an implementation of something like npm audit in Bun, which sort of is the thing that’s like – there are 42 security vulnerabilities in your dependencies, or whatever. That’s what it logs. We don’t implement that right now. But on the other hand – so yes, that is a feature that is missing. But on the other hand, we also don’t run post install by default for dependencies, which is very good for security, because this is a very common attack vector that normally, if you want to get a Bitcoin miner on somebody that, then you compromise a package, and then you do a post-install… That’s usually the attack vector, is like post install scripts, or something.

Jerod Santo: So where’s the BTC miner val? That’s my question.

Paul Smith: It was acquired by MSNBC in, I think, 2011. It was actually part of NBC News, because we had that news angle. Nowadays people take, I think, for granted things like NextDoor, and Facebook Local News about their neighborhood. So we were kind of one of the early pioneers of that. We sold the company, and kept working on it for a little bit… But we did some interesting things on Everyblock. In fact, one of the things I’m most proud about is we built our own map stack.

So at the time, if you remember back in 2006-2007, JavaScript engines and browsers were starting to get faster, Google Maps popped on the scene, and it was suddenly “Oh, you can do these native desktop app things in your browser’ for the first time. And in fact, Everyblock kind of came out of this idea, of sort of like a Google Maps mashup of taking Google Maps and then using its API and slapping data points on it. And when we started the company, we thought it would be great, since that’s going to be such a central part of this - you want to be able to look at a map of your neighborhood, drill into your block, see where news is happening… And when I say news, I’m talking about maybe your block is mentioned in the news, or maybe a building license has been issued, or a restaurant inspection, or things like that. Public records, crime information… And we would aggregate all that and put that onto a map.

So Google Maps was great, but we wanted to have control over the look and feel, and user experience, so we built a map stack from the ground up, using sort of open geospatial tools at the time, OpenLayers, Mapnik, some other tools like that, and then kind of combined that with a Django app server we were using to pull the data out of the database, and then present that on the browser. We worked with a great designer, Wilson Miner, to kind of come up with their own palette and design for the maps themselves, which - I thought they looked really beautiful. So it was a way of visualizing the data, and I think it was a pretty interesting accomplishment. And now, you’ve got things like Mapbox, and there’s just a lot more flexibility when it comes to sort of the in-browser custom map and geospatial experience.

Jack Dorsey: We learned a lot from the solar platform, such that Cash App is going to do something similar. And TBD is entirely a platform. That’s its only reason to be and to exist. So we’re definitely on the track, and we wanna make sure that we’re building more and more platform-type things forever more. Everything that we do in the future should have platform elements.

We’re building a Bitcoin wallet and a Bitcoin miner - we’re building it so that it’s open source; all the code will be available, and the hardware design will be available. Everything about it will be completely open for any developer to use. They don’t need to build on top of it, they can just steal all the code and the idea and just build whatever they want.

Liz Rice: [58:13] Yeah. And then on the security side - so Falco was probably the first security project, certainly in the CNCF, that was using eBPF. This project from my former colleagues at Aqua called Tracy… And then in Cilium we have a sort of Cilian family, we have a sub project called Tetragon, which is allowing you to create low-level security primitives almost in Yaml form, and apply them to your Kubernetes cluster. And you can do really cool things with Tetragon. I get a bit overexcited about this, because if your kernel is modern enough, you can not just detect that something is potentially malicious behavior, a process is opening the wrong file, or connecting to a cryptocurrency miner, or whatever malicious thing that you’ve detected - you can kill that process synchronously from within the kernel. And what that means is the process gets killed - to me it’s not like you have to go and tell somebody and then eventually your process gets killed… It’s happening right there and then, and it stops the attack before it happens… Which is super-fun to demo. I love it.

Gerhard Lazu: We could do. Or a Bitcoin miner. [laughter] We could. It’s there, we’re paying for it… But you know, to be honest, the reason why this is exciting is because we can spin up on-demand, and we can have maybe more than four CPUs. We only chose four CPUs because of the cost. It just hits the balance nice. But if we could use 16 CPUs on-demand, that would be a lot better. And with Fly machines we can, because they spin up so quickly… You don’t wait minutes for it to come up.

Gerhard Lazu: Exactly, you have to know. So it took me few weeks to understand how this crypto miner got in our infrastructure. I will not say where… [laughter] So what happened - those secrets that were committed to the repo, they were encrypted. We didn’t know. And this crypto miner appeared on this VM, with root privileges because of the key; there was the private key, an SSH key. If you have that, you can SSH into the VM, as root, set up whatever you want, and off you go.

[34:20] It was a very small DigitalOcean VM, so there wasn’t like any reason to run a crypto miner, but you know, people do it… I mean, not even a GPUs… Come on. Anyways, people do that, like a throttled CPU, 100% for weeks, and we couldn’t explain what the hell is going on. And then after a few weeks, we realized how the leak happened. And it was encrypted secrets. We had committed them, the key was leaked, we didn’t know, the private key was discovered, someone SSH-ed, they set up their crypto miner, and there you go. Good luck figuring out how that happened.

Jack Dorsey: We learned a lot from the solar platform, such that Cash App is going to do something similar. And TBD is entirely a platform. That's its only reason to be and to exist. So we're definitely on the track, and we wanna make sure that we're building more and more platform-type things forever more. Everything that we do in the future should have platform elements.

We're building a Bitcoin wallet and a Bitcoin miner - we're building it so that it's open source; all the code will be available, and the hardware design will be available. Everything about it will be completely open for any developer to use. They don't need to build on top of it, they can just steal all the code and the idea and just build whatever they want.

Shawn Wang: Well, first of all, I’m not the most informed person on security. Probably Feross would be a better person to talk to about this… I’m not optimistic or pessimistic. I’m just kind of neutral on it. I don’t think it’s like a focus of anyone, apart from Feross, who is the founder at socket.dev. [laughter] And his approach is “Let’s just audit everything and give you ten different reports telling you that–” And we have some of these automated audits as well. It’s not clear exactly how venture funding was gonna affect this either way. Obviously, you can have people who are paid better to maintain these repos, but supply chain attacks happen in perfectly well-funded companies as well. It’s not just like someone’s acting out in open source… Which has happened repeatedly, and just puts a Bitcoin miner in a repo, or something like that.

I think it really has to be fixed at the runtime level, or the toolchain level. Deno has an attempt at doing this by locking down the permissions. People are realizing, unfortunately, that it’s just not that useful. You’re just gonna enable all the flags anyway. So it has to be per-module, and as far as I know, nobody’s tackling that, except for a company that I’m hopefully invested in, that might be trying to solve that issue. But it’s kind of an open question right now. I’m not aware of anyone else really tackling sort of per-package permissioning and just reinventing the npm ecosystem. For better or worse, the npm ecosystem is what we have, and therefore the security defaults that they choose - which is none [laughs] - we inherit those decisions.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: Yeah. So that’s one example. But there was another example before that in November, and another one in October of last year… This seems to happen nearly monthly now. In October and November it was Coa, RC and UAParser.js that were compromised. They had a Monero miner added to the package, as well as some malware that stole passwords on Windows from over 100 different programs on Windows, and also the Windows credential manager… So if you were unlucky enough to install one of those packages during the period where the bad version was on npm, then you would be compromised; you would have lost all your passwords, and you’d need to reset everything, and install your keys, and everything like that.

And UAParser.js is depended upon by React Native. So these packages had a lot of dependencies. Each of those three I mentioned had 30 million downloads a month each. So we’re talking seriously popular packages that were compromised. And the UAParser one, just as an example - that one has 7 million downloads a week, and has three million GitHub repos that depend on it.

Jerod Santo: Bitcoin miner…

Paul Smith: It was acquired by MSNBC in 2011. It was actually part of NBC News… Because we had that news angle. Nowadays people take for granted things like Nextdoor, and Facebook, local news about their neighborhood. So we were kind of one of the early pioneers of that… And we sold the company, and kept working on it for a little bit, but… We did some interesting things on EveryBlock. In fact, one of the things I’m most proud about is we built our own map stack.

At the time, if you remember back in 2006-2007, JavaScript engines and browsers were starting to get faster, Google Maps popped on the scene, and it was suddenly like “Oh, you can do these native desktop app-like things in your browser for the first time.” And in fact, EveryBlock came out of this idea of sort of like a Google Maps mash-up of taking Google Maps and then using its API and slapping data points on it.

And when we started the company, we thought it would be great, since that’s gonna be such a central part of this – you wanna be able to look at a map of your neighborhood, drill in to your block, see where news is happening… And when I say news, I’m talking about maybe your block is mentioned in the news, or maybe a building license has been issued, or a restaurant inspection, or things like that. Public records. Crime information. We would aggregate all that and put that onto a map.

So Google Maps was great, but we wanted to have control over the look and feel, and users experience… So we built a map stack from the ground-up using open geospatial tools at the time. OpenLayers, Mapnik, some other tools like that, and then kind of combine that with a Django app server we were using to pull the data out of the database, and then present that on the browser.

We worked with a great designer, Wilson Miner, to kind of come up with our own palette and design for the maps themselves, which - I thought they looked really beautiful. So it was a way of visualizing the data. It was a pretty interesting accomplishment.

Now you’ve got things like Mapbox, and there’s just a lot more flexibility when it comes to the sort of in-browser custom map and geospatial experience.

Suju Rajan: Building off of the standardized version of us looking at the data that we have… Daniel, exactly to your point, we do have a notion of what a member embedding needs to look like. The data for LinkedIn comes from LinkedIn profiles. So in this sense, understanding that “Hey, this particular member has a – in that space, it looks like people who are in this technical industry, in this location, and here are the sorts of jobs that they apply to”, as much as we can represent them in that member embedding space.

Likewise, we have things that are on the job and they’re inside as well; someone asking for a data miner, maybe because they were under a rock, is also still asking for an AI scientist, so how can we bring that job embeddings view into it.

And in some senses, being able to scale this. Because if you think about where – there was an earlier question of “What are the different services in which we have AI?” There is the search aspect of it, and we also organically recommend jobs to people - something that we call instant jobs, where you want to be the first to apply… So members actually sign up for alerts, to say “Hey, the moment you see a job come into our system, then send me an alert right away.” So we need this to be high, high, high precision, as an example.

Then on the flipside, on the recruiter search as an example, it’s all about matching members to get jobs. So we’re trying to build this notion of what we call these two-tower embeddings, which represent the member side and the job side, and bring that together along with more near-line and real-time features, to sort of then personalize it to what that particular member is also looking for, to do ad matching.

Of course, if it’s on the search angle, then you also have the query context that comes into play. On the recommendation side it’s a lot more just based off of your activity signals, and so on and so forth. We try to infer intent, to be able to make those recommendations.

But to your point - yes, on the underlying surface we do have these embeddings, and we are going to be writing a blog post pretty soon about this particular data layer in our talent solution systems.

Adam Stacoviak: I was thinking about the last 100 years, because I’ve found this interesting… My hometown where I grew up was a coal miner town. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania… And very common for the idea of a company house to be a thing. A coal mining plant would establish its routes, have its company there, they’d have a company store, they’d have a company house, the entire neighborhood essentially is owned by the company, and the employees get a house for free, or paid for by their wages/work…

Jerod Santo: Or inject your cryptocurrency miner and harvest the world… [laughs]

Nick Nisi: Some things that I’m pretty excited about are Eleventy – I am excited to check that out, and I just wanted to tell you that… And I really get excited every time I get a new LetsEncrypt email about my certificate expiring, and then we’re having to go figure out how to do that again… And I’m like “I should just rewrite everything and throw it on Netlify right, and be done with this whole charade”, because I don’t actually know how to manage a server, as is obvious by me having to shut down a Bitcoin miner that started up online at some point.

Adam Stacoviak: Adam, you’ve mentioned before about certain people who have used Tachyons and had an experience… You started this thing four years ago, and at that time people thought you were a little crazy for doing it, and over these years the trend has gone the way of Tachyons, essentially. Now, the people that have used this, at least based on Tachyons.io - Daniel Eden, Ian Storm Taylor, a favorite of mine, just because Wilson is so smart and had one of the most prolific talks at the Build Conference at least five years back - Wilson Miner…

These are not unknown or uninfluential designers. These are really influential people who have said phenomenal things. Let’s not leave off Dustin Senos… So these are people that have given you quotes; I’m assuming you’ve got the right to say they said these things, so having known who they are and their influence in the design space, continue on that path of like who’s used it and how they feel about it.

Eric Holscher: Well, I think one of the big ones is that it came out of a newspaper, right? And the people that created Django were journalists, and English majors, and really people that valued the written word, right? They really were good writers and they really valued that part of the world. I think coming out of a newspaper really does enforce that editorial power. I think really in many communities the values of the founders get set early and then they attract people who agree with those values, and then it just builds over time.

Both Adrian and Jacob were two of the co-founders along with Simon Willison, and Wilson Miner, who did the admin, he was the designer. They all really cared about that set of values, so I think the community just picked it up and ran with it from there.

Adam Stacoviak: Mineral water that gives you a physical and a digital uptick.

Jerod Santo: [00:19:40.06] Right. And sometimes the other strategy - I can rationalize the other strategy, which is like, “I don’t know, let’s just ask for as much as we – we might need it eventually anyways. Just ask for more. And that way we don’t have to come back and re-ask later if we decide we need this thing…” And so, especially certain people who are data miners, they’re like “We may need – just collect all the data. We may need it in the future.” That’s easy to sell that in a meeting, I think.

Tim Banks: What do you think powered the first Bitcoin miners for old servers? People’s old desktops that [unintelligible 00:43:01.17] stuff like that. The notion of buying it means that when I’m done with it, I can sell it and get some of that money back. Is there a secondary market for it? Absolutely. There’s already a burgeoning secondary market for buying older or used GPUs, and servers, and stuff like that. “Perfect. Let me make some money off of this.” That’s going to be far more economical than giving the money to AWS, because I’m never going to see that again. You know what I’m saying? This is the difference between investing – this is the difference between “I’m going to do this thing as an investment and I’m going to get some money back on it”, versus just giving it away to somebody else. But this is not a day one decision. Day one decision is growth, and it makes perfect sense to be in whatever cloud environments can allow you to grow, right?

Benjamin Consolvo: Yeah, and my use cases might not be the full expanse of what’s possible on our hardware, but I can certainly speak to the things I’ve been able to work on and had some fun with over the last few years. So one of them is working with OpenAI’s Whisper model, which is a translation and transcription model that works very, very well out of the box. I speak both English and French, and so I tested the abilities of this model, to transcribe my own voice English to English, and then also its ability to transcribe from English to French, and then going the other way as well. And yeah, first of all, the model does a really great job. I was really impressed with the fidelity of the model that’s been trained, that OpenAI has released in the open source. So that’s great.

And then what I was able to do was to run this model on our Xeon product line, to run inference on Xeon and run that really, really quickly, and kind of put together a notebook and a workshop around that. So that’s been something that’s been fun for me to work on, on this generative AI model that is used for translation and transcription. Yeah, that’s one.

Another one that has been exciting for me to work on is with my – I have a background in imaging and computer vision, kind of prior to working at Intel, where I was applying a number of different techniques like pixel segmentation and image classification, object detection to different problems in computer vision, especially around geophysical imaging, where we’re imaging the subsurface. I kind of describe it like an ultrasound for the earth. So if you know what an ultrasound is, looking at imaging, the subsurface of the earth to extract and find certain minerals, and that kind of thing. So where I’ve applied some of the techniques there is to help get some of those images more quickly, and both in fine-tuning models and also in inference. And so I’ve been able to use some of our Xeon, again, product line to fine-tune some of those models, as well as run inference. So that’s been exciting.

Justin Garrison: And miners meaning that people in the caves, not young children. [laughs] Just to clarify, as this is an audio podcast.