D-Squared Musings Week 3

This is a special talk. Joran has done a great job explaining the process for auditing smart contracts, as well as the meta-skills needed to be successful. Additionally, he provided a healthy dose of reassurance that there are multiple approaches and that you’ll fail along the way (we all do). Many beginners can easily get bogged down by the technical jargon, tooling, complex systems, etc. Very rarely do beginners take a step back to think through the process and more importantly the meta-skills needed to be successful. My major takeaway is – Spend most of your time visualizing the system and interactions before diving too deep into any specific area.
- Note – yAcademy is a YouTube hidden gem. Only five videos, but they’re all great content for Web3 security folk.

Network State in one sentence – “A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”. This book is one of the more eye-opening books I’ve read in the past 3 years. Here’s a short presentation from Balaji on the topic.

This presentation “Entrepreneurship In Web3 Lec 5: Web3 landscape (III)” covers many of the open problems within Web3. It’s likely the most practical presentation Balaji has delivered. Many of the mental frameworks and open problems could easily inspire multiple startups. I highly recommend watching the presentation.

In the last week or so I’ve spent a lot of time playing with different generative models such as Dalle 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. I stumbled across Prompt Hunt recently and instantly fell in love. This is a great site for inspiring prompts to steal and plenty of free credits to use across all three models. If you want an entertaining evening, grab a glass of your preferred beverage, a few friends, and pass around the keyboard for a couple of hours. I promise it’ll be worth it. 😂