D-Squared Musings – Week 13

Security

🐛 Demystifying Exploitable Bugs in Smart Contracts

  • This systematic approach to reviewing historical Web3 exploits and bug bounty rewards sheds light on how unique Web3 is when it comes to security. Surprisingly, there’s a large gap between “machine auditable bugs” and “machine unauditable bugs”. Web2 bugs come in common forms such as overflows, info leaks, privilege escalation, etc., but Web3 bugs are application and domain-specific. This specificity makes it difficult to create tooling to find bugs in mass. Video summary

Education

🎤 Chamath Palihapitiya Interview: Wharton Private Equity and Venture Capital Club Fireside Chat Series

  • It’s moments like this that I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for the internet. In the past, an informal interview like this would’ve happened only in Wharton, but thanks to the internet we can all access the information.  Chammath’s 25-year beat is inspiring and surprising to see that he’s dedicating his money, time, and resources toward these two trends… The cost of energy is going to zero and the cost of computing is basically going to zero. 👈 This last point is something I plan on diving deeper into to truly understand the implications and logic backing his beat. 

♣️  Thinking in Bets | Annie Duke | Talks at Google

  • Recently, I’ve been spending more time thinking about risk and my association with it. One of the books on my list to read is “Thinking in Bets” – Above is a good summary and conversation with the author Annie.

Miscellaneous

The Week Of AI: This week has been a heavy one for many with banks being bailed out and AI dominating the airwaves. 🤯

🤖 GPT 4 dropped

🎨 AI imager Midjourney v5 stuns with photorealistic images—and 5-fingered hands

  • This new version of Midjounrey can actually produce hands. Ha! Finally. The image below highlights the evolution of Midjourney V3 – V5. Here’s a funny video summary.  

Prompt: A comparison between the output from Midjourney v3 (left), v4 (center), and v5 (right) with the prompt “a muscular barbarian with weapons beside a CRT television set, cinematic, 8K, studio lighting.”

🧑‍💼 Microsoft 365 Copilot

  • I’m by far the most excited about this announcement from Microsoft. Their new Copilot will change the way we work. Some use cases are data analysis, presentation creation, document completion, and email sifting, the use cases are diverse. My hope is that Google is able to keep up. 🤞