Where Ideas Thrive

A friend tweeted something about trans rights today. They said that people who exist just to take joy from others are the ones who should be excluded from society. It resonated. Being the wrong kind of trans woman, I encounter these joy assassins a lot. So often, I count on them being present in spaces that I’m invited to. It’s hard. I never learned how to just ignore them. One thing I’ve learned is that a lot of the time that’s the hidden tax on those invitations. If you want to be here you ...

Steadier - for now. Gold is showing us the way

We don’t just need more powerful AI models; we need better ways to create together, with economic models attached. We need built-in structures to allow individual artists and builders to find creative expression in multiplayer mode: allowing human intent, curation, and promotion to combine and produce more positive sum outcomes for AI creatives. This May, I’m incentivizing participation in three open experiments: Arrowheads, LumArt, and Luminary. Each one explores how we can align AI creativi...

Never let a good crisis go to waste. That is the adage that universities should take to heart as they confront the threats of the Trump administration. Because the reality is that universities have been lost for decades and require dramatic changes if they want to survive at all in the future. Here are a series of major issues that universities urgently need to address:Frontal teaching, high stakes testing, even traditional essays are all outmoded. The rapid progress of AI is making many of t...

We are entering the age of living online. An increasing number of people have employment that exists only online. We have meaningful relationships that are primarily or even only online. It should not be surprising that a growing number of us -- especially we who are most intensely online -- are embracing the concept of ‘owning’ online things. A belief in the value of NFTs is a logical extension of the vitality of online experience and existence. As with the ‘real world,’ the things we own en...

It affects everyone. Whether you build, market, sell, pitch or look for job. We all have meetings with "higher stakes" and the psychology works its tricks the same way for everyone. There’s a fragile moment between ...

BizarreBeasts: Checkerz isn't just checkers; it's a vibrant, strategic showdown where hand-illustrated BizarreBeasts clash for supremacy! This latest entry in my expanding BizarreBeasts universe fuses hand-illustrated artwork, engaging gameplay, and web3-native experiences. Live now in the Farcade, Checkerz reimagines the classic game with a bold, artistic twist: each piece is a unique character, and victory is a chance to truly GO BIZARRE. All the artwork featured in this article is derived ...

We're back with the 40th edition of Paragraph Picks, highlighting a few hand-selected pieces from the past couple of weeks.

Navigating the future: How digital assets can power an important infrastructure layer that shapes innovation and regulation

When we closed on the development site for Project Bench at the end of 2023, our team went for dinner at Restaurant Pearl Morissette to celebrate. It's one of the top-rated restaurants in Canada, it's 8 minutes from the site, and so it was the sensible thing to do. Their architect — gh3 — is also our architect. I still remember when chef Eric Robertson brought out the amuse-bouche to start us off. He explained what it was and then reassured us that we would not be needing Uber Eats after this...

One perverse way to think about development is that it is a tool to transfer costs away from people who don't want to pay for stuff to people who don't know they're paying for stuff. Two good examples of this are development levies and inclusionary zoning. Inclusionary zoning is a popular policy tool to create affordable housing because nobody feels like they're directly paying for the requisite subsidies (i.e. no public money) and it does, to varying degrees, result in affordable housing. Ca...

Part one of the story of my dad lives here. Chapter Two: In the Desert, a Well“The work is long. The road is dry. But somewhere under all this dust, there is water.”Before the father becomes a myth, He must first become a man. And so Richard, son of Dora and Dick, Having walked from football’s field into stone’s domain, Traded jerseys for blueprints, helmets for hard hats, And entered the strange and shifting world of urban planning. Not a hero’s path, no trumpets nor cheers — Just paper, mee...

Onchain digital art is undergoing a fascinating metamorphosis. Initially driven by the digital scarcity model, personified by ERC-721 NFTs, which conferred uniqueness and ownership to digital works, we are now witnessing the emergence of a new vision: that of tokenized art as currency, utilizing ERC-20 tokens for freer distribution and the creation of vibrant micro-economies around artistic production. This paradigm shift is not merely a market whim but rather a reflection of a deeper discuss...

Face ID. Smart watches. Voice assistants. These aren't just conveniences. They're ideas that first appeared on screen decades ago. If you’ve ever unlocked your phone with your face, you’ve used something that showed up in Star Trek. The first Bluetooth headset looked suspiciously like a communicator badge. Touchscreens? The Jetsons had them too. We didn’t just build these tools out of innovation. We built them out of memory. So what happens when the kids who didn’t grow up on sci-fi, but on P...

Behavioral economists often state that markets are made of people, not rational agents. Human factors like emotion, biases, and social influences impact our investment choices, which breed irregularities and inefficiencies. We experience this daily, even outside of markets. It creates perfect imperfections and keeps the world interesting. Crypto markets are no different, in that Housecoin can pump because houses are too expensive, just buy $HOUSE and Fartcoin has no ceiling because hot air ri...

This week, we're going a level deeper: Opcodes.What is an Opcode?An opcode (short for operation code) is a single instruction that tells the EVM what to do. Think of it like a Lego block: each opcode does one very specific thing...

ENS DAO Newsletter #86 — 05/06/2025; A bi-weekly summary of the latest news and developments from ENS Labs, ENS DAO and the ENS community.

We didn’t push to production… but things got complicated. A short script about breakups, branches, and bad decisions made between you and your AI.

A relationship is like a plant. Meeting someone is the planting of a seed. When both people care for it, it grows fast. Each day brings a new leaf, a pleasant surprise. Over time, a good relationship will grow from a delicate sapling into a tree. The tree feels sturdy, like it has always been and always will be there. You stop noticing its growth because it becomes part of the landscape, quiet and steady. If you breakup, it doesn’t kill the tree outright. It stops feeding it. For awhile, the ...

Football is about achieving a simple objective: winning games (and by extension, trophies). You can further divide that objective into two sub-objectives: scoring goals and not conceding goals. That's how you win games after all, by scoring more goals than you concede. At this point, footballing philosophies and tactics splinter and diverge in a thousand different directions. Some managers prefer to play with the ball, some prefer to play without the ball. Some managers favour a back 3, other...