Val Town is a shiny, new social programming environment to write, run, deploy and share code. Steve Krouse –Val Town creator– joins Jerod & Amal to tell us all about it.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Jerod Santo: So where’s the BTC miner val? That’s my question.
Qalculate has a command-line interface, Michael Eischer adds compression to Restic, Emery Berger warns his fellow CS professors about Copilot, and Heroku GM Bob Wise details Heroku’s next chapter (which excludes free accounts).
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Jerod Santo: It’s called “Qalculate!” with a “q”. And it’s not just any ole’ calculator, an open source, multi-purpose, cross-platform desktop calculator that provides power and versatility normally reserved for complicated math packages, as well as useful tools for everyday needs (such as currency conversion and percent calculation).
Here’s something cool about it that I learned on the r/commandline, it has a companion CLI qalc q-a-l-c that’s super handy. It can handle stuff like: 1500$/week to <mark>btc</mark>/year or 5 apples + 3 oranges - 1 apples. The coolest part is it doesn’t merely give you the answer, it shows the broken down steps along the way. For example, give it 100 / 1000 and it will give you back 100 / 1000 = 1/10 = 0.1
A link to the Reddit thread with more examples is in the show notes.
We’re joined by Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a platform to monetize or incentivize work in open source software. We talked about how Gitcoin sits at the intersection of sustaining open source and cryptocurrencies, their history and roadmap, their decision to leverage the brand name of Git, bug bounties, funded issues, web3, MetaMask, and the future of Gitcoin and how open source benefits.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Adam Stacoviak: That’s an interesting take too on funding open source, because traditional models have been – you know, here on your homepage you’ve got “Find Funded GitHub Issues”, which is the exact reversal of “Hey, just give a community or a project or several maintainers just money and hope they do well with it”, where this is actually funding directly… Not so much somebody buying issues, because somebody could just say “Hey, project, here’s $10,000. Convert that to ETH or BTC and fund whatever issues you need done.” This is an interesting model of funding the work, rather than just – hopefully give you money altruistically or charity-wise… This sort of like puts value on the table, on both ends - monetary value for those who are doing the work, but at the same time, ways for open source to thrive and move forward in terms of progress.
Chris Beams joins the show to talk about Bisq, the P2P decentralized Bitcoin exchange and open-source desktop application that allows you to buy and sell bitcoins in exchange for national currencies, or alternative crypto currencies. We get some background on the issues faced by crypto exchanges like CoinBase, and the now defunkt Mt. Gox. We discuss whether or not Bitcoin is a censorship resistant payment system and what it means to have anonymous transaction currency options. Bisq also has an interesting white paper about its own DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to support its contributors and we discuss that in detail at the end of the episode.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Chris Beams: Exactly. And you can see that when you look at it through – in that trades tab, if you just show, say, euro trades, then you can see two charts; you see the price next to the BTC volume, and you can see the price going up at least… It’s still not the complete picture, but it’s just kind of funny; it’s sort of this super, super useful thing to graph, and we don’t really have it in the app. But we have it in some spreadsheets.
