I mean, I'm just happy if this becomes a dial because then we're finally actually a
dial and you know, then the meme is complete.
Don't let your memes be dreams.
We can answer the big question.
Is it a down?
Welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast for independent validated teams.
Hello, and welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast from independent validated teams.
We have Sporthy with us this week to tell us everything we missed at the recent slew
of European conferences that we were not at.
Obviously we had sneaking up from behind me last week, a friend of the show, Jake, who
could have told us a lot more about awesome wasm other than the mesh demo.
But essentially the osmosis cape was I think too much of a fun prop to actually be able
to get any reasonable discussion about those conferences, which I'm assured were very good.
So we reached out to Spoo because we thought Spoo actually will be able to sort of present
a reasonable summary and digest of what actually happened.
But first in the true spirit of ignoring the guest for the first period of the show, we
have a slightly edited from last week Null's News Corner, which I'm not going to update,
but I will for next week.
Null, do you want to take it away?
What's happened this week?
First of all, I fucking hate the Ben Amen.
I just, I hate banners.
You know, it's funny that Spoo was actually here before we went live and we haven't said
anything to her or whatsoever because we were talking about something else.
Anyway, first the news.
So I have a few items that I have collected whilst what was the term the fray doing Twitter
on the shitter, zitting on zitter on the shitter.
I'm not relevant.
I don't know how what the kids are saying.
Spoo, do you know?
Do we see now?
Is it zitter?
Is it just X?
What's the deal?
No, no, you just moved to Blue Sky or how?
Probably Blue Sky there, let's be honest.
So there you are.
And you tried threads.
What's that?
Threads.
It's the meta's alternative to Twitter.
I thought threads wasn't threads the film about the what happens after World War Three.
It's really, so this is again, phrase film corner, but I'm pretty sure threads is the
name of this super fucking dark BBC or like British TV thing that's like really harrowing
from like 1985 all about what happens if England gets bombed with a nuclear weapon during World
War Three.
And nothing good is the answer.
It's really horrible.
But I feel like it feels like a thing we were shown in school, you know, like water ship
down, you know, just to fucking make the kids have like PTSD.
This is 100% Rogentamutos.
100%.
There you go.
It's good.
It's certified fresh, certified harrowing.
It's a British Australian sci-fi movie, a Pulitzer War.
Hitting all of our demographics here.
Okay.
So what happened?
Okay.
So, this week has been like just a shit show of exploits and rugs.
And apologies if my internet goes out.
I'm seeing a little connection issue thing come up in the corner so it could die at any
time.
So the first one I have on my list is the White Whale DeFi.
I don't know what you'd call this.
A rug, a hack.
It's not really like it was an exploit of a hot wallet, but it wasn't really an exploit
because it was just like an old employee or something that had the mnemonic for a hot
wallet.
So, I guess you would put this down to like poor security practice.
But anyway, what happened was that there was a hot wallet for Osmo incentives.
So from the main multi-seg, 3 million whales were transferred to the hot wallet and then
someone who had access to the hot wallet noticed, I guess they were watching that wallet.
So I guess they were probably waiting for an opportunity for this for a while.
They transferred it and dumped it and tanked the price 25%.
So for somebody that's not on White Whale, do you say 3 million?
3 million tokens.
So it's like 7 million tokens.
What was the value here we're talking?
Because we're a bear market, right?
Yeah, yeah, it's 70 grand.
It's still, you know, it's half a land cruiser.
All this day's work.
So it's no laughing matter.
It's a fair amount of money.
And you know, the users, I guess, ultimately pay for that.
So, yeah, that is item one.
Any comments on that?
There is lack of dowification.
I mean, so the fact that they just reused an old wallet with shared mnemonics, I think
is not the greatest.
Man, take the banner down.
It's just, it's annoying to people.
I'm sure if you did a survey of people that this is annoying to, it would be 100%.
You know very well now that we have more listeners on podcast players than we do on the live
show.
And so repeatedly referring to the banner that is annoying you is just alienating those
people listening later who are wondering, what is this?
What are you talking about?
Those people who are listening later are going to be so chuffed that they don't have to look
at that fucking banner.
That's may as be, but the banner stays.
Okay, yeah, everyone's like, yeah, keep the banner.
Right.
Okay, so I mean that I was hoping for some discussion on that.
You seem to just be like listening, spook or nothing to say.
So I guess I'll move on to the next thing seen as my panelists don't give a fuck.
What?
I mean, like, you know, it's a rug.
We've seen a rug before.
What was the first episode of this was baby's first rug pool, right?
Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe you could be like, oh, this is how they could improve their security or why would
they do that?
Or I don't know, shit on them?
Well, I mean, the irony here, right?
I suppose if you go like do, but you go do like some corporate contracts or whatever,
like, which is what I've been doing recently.
And like everybody's fucking obsessed with like JML, you know, like join those movers
levers and that stuff.
They're like, oh my God, if somebody leaves, then like, we need to immediately get them
off our systems.
It was five minutes later, they're going to access our GitLab and they're going to take
down our middle market e-commerce site.
And you're like, I mean, yeah, you should have a policy in place, but it's probably
not your number one.
Don't procure software just to worry about that one problem.
Just hire people that are not going to, you know, and don't fire people like for no fucking
reason so they'll have a grievance against you.
Like would be my advice to you rather than making a big deal out of this.
But then, you know, the irony here is like we're actually in a space where that shit
really, really matters.
And of course, everybody's just like, yo, yo, yo, yo.
I mean, yeah, it's like the fact that that is a thing that they have to just rug them
from all of the systems as they're firing people is just, I don't know, it really says
something about the character of people these days, doesn't it?
That there's that many people who would be willing to just be malicious upon being fired.
It's no, it's a very old.
I mean, first of all, the whole malicious thing like walk out, burning the castle.
Like, yeah, I mean, I mean, fuck the system.
Right.
I mean, you know, there's two types of people in the world, right?
There's masters and there's workers.
But I don't know, like, you know, in the back, there's a great interview with the guy who
wrote Fight Club where he basically talked about after he wrote the book everywhere he
went in the world, people were like, oh, yeah, you know, the scene when like people like
the waiters fuck with the food and stuff like that.
People would just come to him and be like, oh, yeah, man, when when I work this job,
I used to fuck with the people that ate there all the time by doing this or that.
Or, oh, yeah, I used to work at this company and we built like this kind of software and
we just put in this bug that crashed it every four hours because fucking why not?
Nobody would ever find that bug.
And like he had this whole like fucking binder of random malicious shit people just did because
they fucking hated their jobs.
And it was kind of funny, you know, whatever.
So but I mean, this is like this is criminality, I think is the thing.
It's not just like, you know, being like, I'm going to change some of these passwords
on my way out the door because they haven't.
You know, it's like slash the bosses tires shit on the windscreen.
Yeah, like it's not like smashing the printer in office space is it?
It's like quite a different.
It's $70,000 worth of criminality.
That is also one of my favorite movies, by the way, office space.
Um, OK, well, moving on to an exploit.
Well, I mean, so this is this one's kind of funny.
This was on the Ethereum network and there was an exploit and some MeV happening at the
same time, which I found quite hilarious.
So firstly, there were some exploits in the curve pools, I believe, not 100 percent on
what happened there with the exploits.
Maybe someone in the comments actually knows exactly what happened with the exploits.
But when they were being executed, I think someone had some bots running, which noticed
the transactions were going to result in like an exploit and then front run those transactions
in the same block, which I'm not sure if they were like multiple people trying to front
run each other or if they just wanted to be absolutely fucking sure that I get coffee
babe, eat bots.
So I tried to look up that coffee babe, eat and could not find anything like it's not
a Twitter handle and the domain does nothing.
So I guess that's just, I don't know, is that like a Reddit Twitter account or something?
Anyway, so what it basically resulted in was just massive, like gas fees being paid to
make sure that they 100 percent front run the transactions.
So like the highest one was 584 ETH paid as a fee.
So the person who actually produced that block got the 584 ETH for that transaction.
So there's 584 for one block, 343 for another, 247 for another and 51 for another that were
all paid as fees.
So that's like what, about a thousand ETH paid in fees, 1100 paid in fees.
So that's somebody who, so I am not 100 percent sure how the whole MEV party works in that
particular scenario.
So some validator just netted a thousand ETH for that block.
A couple, like it was subsequent blocks, so it'd be various validators, but yeah, validators
netted a thousand ETH in fees over the duration of the exploit.
So there was a conversation earlier about why lawyers in this space are expensive.
And I believe I said to you, it's not worth having cheap lawyers if you work in crypto.
This is a prime example of why, right?
If you ever have to fucking explain that, yeah, so why did your company process those
blocks that were massive criminality and like handle the exploit and made a bunch of people
a load of money and ripped off a bunch of people?
And it seems like you also profited and you're like, ah, well, so it's not conspiracy because
we had no idea.
We were just fucking signing blocks, yo, though, but you also made like a hundred grand.
Yeah.
So the thing is like, yeah, I mean, it's proceeds of a hacker, right?
It's literally criminal proceeds.
But you're like, yeah, what the fuck?
I mean, I like, it's an interesting precedent.
What the fuck would you have to, what?
What?
Yeah.
I mean, it's not like you can give it back.
Is it?
I guess you're like somebody would maybe make you try.
So it's easy to get back off you than as the hacker.
Yeah.
I mean, I read through like a lot of comments regarding this and people, I mean, people were
shitty that the validator got that.
I don't know if it's just like, ah, could have been me type thing, but people are definitely
shitty that the validator took home, for example, 584, Ethan one block.
So yeah, lucky that validators are pretty in on right in ETH.
They might be getting some hate mail.
Yeah.
Maybe more than more than hate mail.
Yeah.
Um, so anyway, uh, I'm not sure what the actual maybe I don't.
So Reese says that rain trancy attack.
So I guess that's some sort of known attack for the, for the re-entry, re-entry.
What is what happens if you don't have atomicity in a block?
Yeah.
Okay.
That's above my pay grade, but definitely, I guess, makes it possible to steal lots of
ETH and then get it taken away by the validator.
So I think I did read.
I'm not sure if it was related, but I read something.
It's basically the summary is like, if you, if you have a hook in a con, let's say you
have like a hook in a contract and it means that another contract can effectively call
into that contract and do additional behavior, you then have a potential loop there, don't
you?
So there's, there's a whole bunch of conditional additional stuff you could do.
Um, kind of as a kind of side effect of the original is the best way to explain it.
Whereas like, if you have like, like a more atomic model, you have a set of calls that
succeed or fail and the site, well, so the difficulty here, right, is that there's a
thing called the halting problem.
So like kind of fundamentally in computer science, you can't actually know that a computer
program will succeed, fail, halt, or run forever, whatever.
Like you just can't know.
It's not actually possible to know.
Um, but you can very heavily limit down the chance of bad stuff happening by design to
only a space where it's the possibility of like, um, I guess like a VM level bug.
So only a bug could elicit the behavior where you could do out of bound behavior that isn't
defined.
Um, so cause and was it, what I think Reese is referring to is that kind of cause and
was and by design has an actor model.
So this kind of attack, um, is significantly harder to do because it's been designed out
of the system.
However, there are still callback based out of, there are still callback based attacks
that can happen and have happened because the July 27th, Juneau attack, which was last
year over a year ago now, um, was in fact an example of that behavior because, or it
wasn't a re-entrancy attack exactly, but it was, um, it was used to callback into a contract
to do undefined behavior and then trigger behavior that wasn't expected as a result
of bugs in the FFI, well, in the kind of interface between, um, Rust and go, I've probably explained
that really badly, um, but I don't see a spoo-shaking head.
So we'll assume that as a reasonable, reasonably digestible explanation, um, of what happened
now.
I did tune out a little bit.
So, well, I'm going to say you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the superior authority
on the go side of that, of that system boundary.
So I'm going to say that Spoo agreed with my rough summary and that's,
it's like, if you ain't going to talk to me, I ain't going to fucking listen.
Um, yeah, but it's a big, like there's a few things in the solidity, in the design
of solidity that essentially do mean that you can rug yourself more easily and they've
been designed out in Cosmoism.
They've been designed out in move.
Um, so mo, a lot of smart contracting systems, VMs, runtimes that have happened since are
kind of aware of that as like an attack vector in a big way, um, which is why, yeah, these
attacks are going to keep happening in one way, like various types of re-entrances,
the attack are going to happen in solidity because it's just, yeah, it's possible.
It's much more trivial than that system.
Okay.
So back to the news.
I think in the Cosmoism website, there's an entire page dedicated to why re-entrances
is not possible.
An entire page of docs dedicated to this because it's such a big problem in solidity.
I'll go and find them and put them in the show notes.
I know the page, I know the page of which you speak.
I'm sure people are going to find that riveting.
Um, all right.
So in other news and coincidentally, it's Ethereum six birthday this week.
So happy birthday, Ethereum.
I wish I had like a party pop or something.
Anyway, moving on.
The fray for all those listening to this podcast is now deep in search for this page so that
you can add it to the, the show notes.
So in other news, the apparently coinbase has their own chain now called base.
Spook, do you know?
Is it called base?
I think it's called base.
I think this was announced a couple of months ago.
Oh yeah.
It's not.
But this is due to me, I now know that they have a chain called base, which I'm sure is
just a repository of shit coins.
And anyway, there was a shit coin that launched on base called bald.
I'm surprised that Rama was not onto this straightaway.
But this coin was listed and everybody was very excited about it because of the depth
of liquidity that this coin had in comparison to other shit coins.
And so ultimately it was a rug, but it was a pretty like, you know, it was a pretty well
executed rug where the person who created it, you know, hyped it, added a heap of liquidity
and then was buying it themselves to pump up the price and then let it have a pretty
good run up on price and then gave it a little bit and then added more liquidity and then
bought more of it, debate more people into buying it as another pump where it doubled
and then immediately rugged out all of the liquidity.
So I think they put in like a fair amount of capital for this particular rug.
I think it was something like $12 million worth of capital to actually perform the rug.
And I think they made maybe like half a million dollars or something like that.
But if that seems like to me $12.5 million in Reese's, I mean, maybe Reese should do
Null's News Corner.
He seems to know all the news far better than me.
But in any case, I think he walked away with maybe, oh, okay.
So Reese says they made 20 million profit.
That is pretty good in terms of profit.
But I thought that only made like half a million or something like that.
But I was going to say, is it really worth the capital if you're only making sort of
like half a million dollars with that amount of capital, with that amount of risk?
But I mean, if they made that much, then yeah, worth it for them.
Not so much for the users they rugged.
Reese says he's the intern.
Maybe you should like give me a summary before the potty.
To some extent, we're all the intern.
We are all the intern.
All right.
So once again, the week of rugs.
And I do have another piece of news here that I made a note about.
However, I'm going to have to just quickly review this if you want to say a few words
in the meantime, because I forgot what it was about.
I can talk about further about re-entrances tax, if you like.
No, this was exactly about the, this was just more info on that particular rug in this little
what, no, there was, I don't know what's going on here.
I'm not very good at the internet.
Okay.
Oh yeah.
So I mean, this one's not like anything really new.
So this was more about the SEC telling Coinbase that they need to delist everything other
than Bitcoin, because you know, everything's a security unless it's Bitcoin.
But that's old news.
They've been doing that for years.
Yeah.
I mean, that's been for a while.
And that is all the items of interest that I put together this week.
So over to you, Defray.
So I've come up with a more succinct explanation for the re-entrancy thing.
And it is simply that solidity allows you to call into another contract and trigger execution.
Whereas the way that Russ essentially in Cosmos, everything's modeled as Russ results, kind
of a chain of monads, but that's not really important.
Each execution succeeds or fails, but they are all chained together.
So when you call another contract, it's actually just another thing stuck on the chain.
And then they all, all those, all those things have to succeed together, although they occur
in a sequence, in a chain.
So it's less likely that you will have outbound behavior.
And in addition, when contracts call into your contract, you have to provide a hook for
it where you define the behavior in a really specific way.
So it's less likely that you get caught in some really random way because you have to
be called with a payload that's serialized and then validated by your contract within
certain bounds.
Now, of course, you could have like a bug in your serialization library and then you're
still kind of be fucked potentially without bound behavior.
But it makes it less likely again.
So it's this, it's this kind of putting guard rails in by design, but you're still you claiming
anything is 100% safe is obviously just like not correct because there's always bugs.
And that's the summary.
Actually, I heard this really simple ELI five about reentry, reentry attacks.
So this is an example in which let's say you want to throw a basketball into the basket
and you clearly don't know how to do it.
So there is like a professional basketball player in front of you.
So in traditional way, you just possible to that person and they throw it and then succeed
success.
But the way solidity does it is instead of you passing it to them, you kind of borrow
their skill set for a while so that you can show it.
I mean, this is you might be on the you might be on the laptop and not on the thing or the
other way around.
I'll check your robot in a tiny bit.
Well, okay.
Yeah.
So the way solidity does it is you want to throw the basket into the hoop, but you don't
have the skill set, so you just kind of borrow the skill set of this professional player.
But in that case, you don't actually need to give them the ball.
You can just borrow the skill set and throw it yourself.
But what solidity does is you aim to borrow the skill set, but you're also giving them
the ball in the process.
So now they can do whatever they want with that.
So even though that's the flaw of the architecture that you only need to borrow their skill, you
don't need to give them the ball to actually do it.
Because you're handing them the power of execution in the runtime, essentially.
Yeah.
So if they do out of bound behavior, you don't have control over it.
Whereas what you want to do is have as much control as you can have over out of bound
behavior.
Yeah.
Okay.
Your explanation is a lot better than mine.
Yeah.
This was like E.L.
Like I went island.
How re-intensive was because there's so much jargon you get into it, especially Ethereum
specific jargon.
Do you understand it now, Nell?
No.
Okay.
Spook, have another go.
I didn't get it.
I believe.
I get it.
So hang on.
Well, maybe.
So what you're saying is that basically your contracts give some control to another contract
to do something for them, but they give them too much control and then they can do stuff
with it.
Is that what you're saying?
For the audience that can't see this, Spook is nodding that I sort of get it, but not
really.
Like her head's nodding, but the look on her face is like, who is this guy?
So that's the entrancey covered, done, done and dusted.
We've got a couple of important items before proceeding.
One of them involves Spook.
The other one doesn't.
We'll do the non-Spook one first because then we can actually just like actually go on to
Spook section.
The first one is Draw Tweet of the Week, which this week comes from the Tough Guys section
and I'm sorry, I can't, I can't replicate JX energy.
But I've taken off my shirt over a thousand times, sorry, over 10,000 times.
There you go.
That's the tweet.
I mean, that's a lot of times to count.
So you said that was from the Tough Guys section.
From the Tough Guys section.
There's a whole section dedicated to Tough Guys.
That must be a Tough Guy thing to do to take off your shirt a lot.
I feel like you have moved away from the random Draw Tweet of the Week into a curated Draw
Tweet of the Week seeing as though you went straight to that.
I mean, it wasn't particularly random, I guess in a sense, because I just flicked through
the book and I guess if I was going to be completely random about it, I would know how
many pages were there and I would use a random number generator to generate the page, right?
And then just where would you get your entropy?
Noise network.
Noise.
The League of Entropy would furnish me with the entropy required.
No, I would go to the fucking console and type RAND.
RAND.
Like, yeah, though.
Move your mouse around a little bit.
Every single programming language has a random function, but a lot of them call out to the
system clock and other random bullshit, so they're not like...
I mean, randomness as we've established is a pretty complicated concept.
I defer to Simon Water on this and the many, many books and whatnot.
I don't like to pretend I understand randomness particularly well, although I have read a
book on the subject called The Drunkard's Walk, which I'd recommend.
I like when you used to generate some keys, some SSH keys, you'd have to move your mouse
around to generate some entropy.
That was always fun.
But I don't know, they moved away from that, right?
I haven't done that in a while.
I can't even remember the last time that happened.
I don't know if that's just particular systems or...
It's probably Windows.
Maybe.
Yeah, it can confirm it's how it works on Windows.
Oh, it's a Windows thing.
Because there's no other available source of randomness, I guess.
You've got to move your mouse around.
Maybe it's just like time since last fucking crash would be pretty random for Windows.
Well, it'd be pretty low number.
So a piece of non-use, but also non why we got Spoo on the show this week, is when Spoo
was last on, which was I think a couple of months ago, maybe a bit longer actually, in
the after show, we were talking about keyboards because obviously there's a lot of interest
in the thing you use all day every day.
And Spoo was talking about getting a...
I was like, can I dock Spoo's keyboard?
I've gotten so fucking paranoid.
This is what crypto does, you know?
I'm like, oh, I can't say the name of the keyboard.
What the hell, man?
So this is a...
What is your keyboard speed?
I think it's called Charabdis.
But I have two right now because this is too bulky to move with me.
I have a portable one.
That is also from the same guy as the bussard keyboard.
So you've got a portable one too.
Is it the same model?
No, no, no.
That's the dilemma.
Oh, wow.
I've not seen that.
That's a little bit like a KRKBD.
Well, what's that?
Hang on.
Sorry, we've got to go.
You've got to do...
What are those pad things?
Is that a...
This is a trackpad.
Like a mouse.
It's got a trackpad.
Yes.
That's why I got this.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah.
Damn.
So that's what, like a 38 key or something?
Split Ergo?
Yeah, 38.
Damn.
Okay.
That's really fucking cool.
It, getting that small, it's, you know, when you lose the control key on the outside, that
as soon as I lose control and escape, that's when suddenly I can't fucking function anymore.
My control is actually what is S in the traditional keyboard.
So I just tap and hold for control.
Because my fingers are always there.
So you have like a mod?
Yeah.
Like I use a custom key map.
So my S and my K from a traditional keyboard would be my control.
Interesting.
That's cool.
But I'm also a fucking dickhead who likes to have, I like to have a different key switch
on shift.
I like it to be really heavy.
It's like a 90 gram linear.
Just like, ooh.
You know, you've really got to move that key, whereas all the others are like speedy boys.
So that's another thing you can do when you have like dedicated...
Yeah.
I do have a heavier Kale goal for the cube.
Because I keep pressing it by mistake when I'm playing Overwatch and I keep ulting when
I don't intend to.
You're gaming with it too.
That's pretty hardcore.
Oh, so that is...
Okay.
So I'm currently not on that.
Currently I am still on my moon lander.
Of course, moon lander.
Super cool as well.
Yeah.
I actually reached out to the CEO and he responded to my email.
Like, can you stop making Dactyl keyboards?
Because I really love your build qualities.
And then they were like, oh, we don't think there's enough market for that.
What for Dactyls?
Yeah.
Loads of people make Dactyls.
And you know, Kinesis have just released a new one.
Yeah.
Yeah, I saw that.
But I think all the people who are into these things would rather customize it to completely
for themselves.
And even this is not exactly end game for me, this is going to be like an ultimate end
game.
And then I'm going to do like the full nerd where I track my fingers and see how long
and the texture of movement and custom design the case.
I already...
So I also got a keyboard from the same place.
I got the TBK mini, which is essentially a KRKBD like this.
Oh, that, yeah.
This is a custom one I built myself.
But it's essentially this, but in tented bowl form.
So similar to Spooey's.
I have stubby little fingers though, like real stubby little boys and stubby little thumbs.
It's hard to tell on the camera, but I can't fucking reach the bottom key on this.
On this is like tented and fancy.
And you're like, oh, this is very ergonomic.
And I can't fucking hit the answer button because my thumbs are too small.
I'm like, oh, the same happened with Moomender, the most furthest away keys.
So I just use them for things I don't normally do like print screen because I might just
take my hand off of the keyboard for that.
Yeah.
It kind of makes me think that maybe I kind of already peaked with because the KRKBD just
flat on the table.
I have it set up.
So it's very slightly angled.
It just has legs that just made me slightly angle this way.
And for whatever reason, it's just the right size for my hands.
It's super crowded together, but like have stubby little hands.
And I think that actually maybe over-optimizing beyond this point is not going to work unless
I go like full measure my fucking hand, learn 3D printing, learn just...
I think it's quite easy because the place where you got it from, all the 3D printing
files, everything is open source.
So you just have to like move things around.
That is true.
I mean, originally I was thinking I should do it for the Dactyl because it's all written
in closure.
And like I'm one of the few fucking weirdos that's actually worked many years of their
life in that programming language.
So could totally modify it and build my own keyboard.
But I got to a point of laziness with it.
I built, I think...
One, two...
I don't know.
I want to say there's about six or seven keyboards knocking around here on the shelves
and whatnot.
And you kind of get... you know, you get to like 90% there.
I think like maybe 90, 95% there is the point where I get off on the over-optimization train.
I don't know.
It sounds like you're prepared to go a lot deeper than I am.
That's kind of my feeling.
I can see it in your eyes.
You're not going to take no for an answer on that final 10%.
No, I'm just like...
I'm just going to try it as long as my mental malleability hasn't died off.
So however long that takes.
Because I moved from Korty to Colmack about one and a half years ago and that felt...
That is the toughest thing in my life that I've done.
The way you feel when your fingers are doing not what you want them to do, your brain and
your body are doing completely different things.
It was a weirdo.
And I feel like it was kind of fun though.
So maybe I should try more.
How do you deal when you're just having to type on a regular laptop?
Oh, that's actually easy.
Somehow my brain is like, oh, if you're on a split keyboard, you're on Colmack.
If you're on a membrane keyboard, it's Korty.
So it works both ways.
Okay, that's great.
Because this is going back a few years when I first got into building my own keyboards,
I was like, do I switch?
And I was just like, I spend half of my week on just like, no...
I'm not going to have a choice, I'm going to have to be on a Korty keyboard.
And I bustled it, but you're telling me that I could have just changed years ago and I've
just wasted five years of my life.
Cool.
I think it's still possible.
I asked one of my colleagues who's like 45, I think, and he was able to switch to Colmack
and...
Hey, come on, I'm not 45, what do I look like?
I'm just saying, like, a person older than you could do it easily in two weeks, so it
should be fine.
I like the vote of support, but maybe I don't know.
I fear it now.
I mean, it's cool.
Colmack is easy.
Colmack is easy because your shortcuts almost all stay the same.
So your control C, all that stays, Dwarak might be too much.
But also, I don't think it's very useful.
They're working with programmers.
Null over here is still trying to figure out how to use a Korty keyboard.
I mean, we only got to control an R last week, didn't we?
Control an A, control an E.
Yeah, all very handy.
Thank you.
I'm guessing that your workload this week took probably 20 minutes compared to the week
before.
Now you know control R.
You're just like, this validator shit's easy.
Why is everybody complaining about it being loads of work?
I mean, I forgot about the control R.
I was thought I had to go back and look up the show notes.
It did save you time, right?
Like it was pretty marginal.
To be honest, my history gripping was reasonably good to begin with.
So does it save time?
Yes.
Is it world changing for me?
No.
I mean, the control A is handy, though.
That is definitely handy.
Fair enough.
Like, wait till you learn about regular expressions.
Although to be fair, again, it's very, I pretty much only use regular expressions when I'm
manipulating data to do my taxes.
So you know.
I mean, I already know about regular expressions.
I use them.
I fucking hate them.
You hate them.
Well, I hate how they're implemented into software as a regular expression.
You're going to have to expand on that a bit.
For example.
That's a weak statement.
Well, I just, for example, like in Xabix, right, you can use, you know, how do you know
a guy who uses Xabix if I can talk about it all the time.
If I can tell you.
You know, you can have filtering with regular expression, but it doesn't seem to be like
there's different kinds of regular expression like how you use it.
So I think the way Xabix uses it is more like how you would use it in Perl or something
like that.
So I don't know.
It's confusing to me because if I go to like one of those websites where you can just put
in your regex, regex, like your, your data and then your regex expression and it'll like,
you know, filter the data live.
So you can see if your expression works or not.
And then, you know, I can't just copy paste that into, you know, the other thing.
It's like, no, that's not a regex expression.
So I don't know.
I need to.
It's not a regex.
It's a regex.
So that's, it's regular expressions.
Sorry.
I say regula.
Reg X.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
I'm dumb with reg X.
I'm going to, I'm going to try and say that properly for you now, Spoo.
So it's very much a me thing probably, but I find it frustrating.
I mean, you could just look up a poll where I get tester on online and they could test
you reg X is like easy peasy.
Reg X sometimes one, sometimes the other spice of life.
So have Spoo and I convince you to get an ergonomic ortho linear?
Oh, what's the, what's the third category?
Because they're bold as well.
Aren't they?
Tented?
No.
There's the stagger, the column there was a star.
It's columnar staggered ortho linear ergonomic 10 keyless with a thumb cluster, thumb cluster
keyboard.
How we convince you to get one now.
So all the buzzwords are there pretty much.
There may be more keyboard buzz, keyboard buzzwords, but I'm not certain there are.
I feel like whilst this gentleman that Spoo is referring to was able to make the transition.
I've, I, I also like, I feel like there's quite a lot of work involved in that.
Um, like not just using it.
Like I feel like if he was able to make the transition, he probably spent a fair amount
of time sitting there practicing.
And I don't really have time for practice on things.
Like I've, you know, gotten out the, the typing, uh, you know, practice thing to try and improve
my typing, but then at pretty short point after that, realized that in reality, do I
really sit there and bash out 10,000 words?
Do I really need to be able to type that quick?
And then so I decided that the investment of time for the benefit of that time use was
not really worth it.
Uh, do I need an ergonomic?
Keyboard?
I don't think so.
I don't really like, you can keep a normal key map though.
You can just customize a key map to what you use most often.
I mean, yeah, I just, I don't, I don't feel like it's going to benefit me that much that
I would bother.
That's not the shit on.
So without lead just or totally near there is one called plank by ZSA, which is, which
is like a normal keyboard is just awfully near instead of real staggers.
So linear is the hardest individual trans thing to get used to, I think probably.
I don't know what you think, but like, it's so weird the first time you're like, because
you're used to just doing that slight normal keyboard and you're like, I think for me,
the split was the hardest part because I did not learn typing the right way.
So I was using the wrong fingers for like B and, you know, G and I would try to type
it, but it's on the other half of the keyboard when I split it.
So, so if you are not accurately typing that would be the most difficult part, I think.
I mean, I use this piece of shit.
So, you know, so, 20 bucks.
One of the big things that is genuinely useful, right, is that you are at your desk all day
and you are interacting with the computer in some way.
And yes, we are cold.
We are selling you keyboards.
And not that Jehovah's Witnesses, we're worse.
We are the custom keyboard club.
Sorry, no.
But like, for example, just looking at my desk here, I have my keyboard spaced like that,
like pretty much sort of together and that far apart when they're on the tabletop.
So and facing in like that.
So my hands are, what would it be like that?
That's how I type with a split keyboard.
Whereas on a normal keyboard, you have to kind of type like that.
I don't know.
It's just like that's how your body wants to have your hands sat on the table.
And it's really, until you have it, you don't know you need it.
And then you're just like, oh, it's just like one less thing you're straining your body with
throughout the course of the working day.
You're just like, my hands are in a place that makes sense to me while I'm typing.
Like which in my case is like fingers almost touching, but still sort of separate on two
different pieces.
I don't know.
Do you set yours up?
Like, like that, Spear?
Or are you like, so I've seen some people with them out, which is crazy to me, but, or are
you kind of inward?
Mine is like this, but like this.
So it's, oh, you're tending as well, aren't you?
Yeah.
But I go into every keyboard because I developed RSI and that was, that got so bad.
I couldn't even use a keyboard for two weeks because the pain over here was too bad.
And I had to do like a bunch of physiotherapy to fix that.
So I was like, I need to get into this for health's sake.
So I'm not like, I'm not shitting on people who do use like these types of keyboards.
All I'm saying is that I think the time cost to benefit from me in particular is not really
like worth it at the moment.
Maybe if I get RSI, it might be worth it at that point.
But like I said, I don't really sit there bashing out like heaps on my keyboard anyway.
More of a thinker.
Think about doing that.
And then don't.
I mean, to be fair, I guess like one of the things I do is write reports and write stuff.
And yeah, I mean, I write, I guess I, in fact, I know I can look at the word count of what
I've typed today, which is 3,840 words.
So I, I guess like I'm going to be more on it because like, I like Spoo, I got, I got
a really bad RSI.
I got my thumb from actually from cycling, so cycle a lot.
And it meant I couldn't type super well.
It was kind of like this whole, this hand was just a bit, got a bit weird.
Like it just didn't have much like, it sounds really weird to be like, yeah, you kind of
felt like it was hard to type.
Like it was functionally hard to type.
It wasn't like I was dropping stuff on the floor like an old person, but just like certain
skill activities.
My hand was just like not really 100%.
Anyway, we've talked about keyboards a lot.
Well, hang on it.
One final thought is that, you know, while I'm thinking about it, I think that maybe
if typing was like typing fast and ergonomics was a big issue for me, I think that I might
like probably spend time learning how to dictate to like an AI interpreter better than actually
type.
I don't have to use my hands at all.
And then just do the amendments that I need with the keyboard.
I think that would be a better way for me than trying to learn some crazy bullshit.
So I think that's fine for language, but both codes that might be very difficult.
I'll have you know, Sporthy, that I don't do that much coding.
Well, but the flip side of that, I guess, is that, you know, to your point now, I can
think of probably only three times in my career where my speed of typing had really any meaningful
impact on my work as a programmer.
Yeah, I mean, very rarely need to type super fast as a programmer.
You need to type accurately.
And yeah, specifically for me doing any type of code, my hand speed is not the problem.
Like it's more for most people writing code.
I mean, like even if you crank out a thousand lines in a day or more, like a lot of what
you're doing, you're like type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type,
you know, there's lots of like the number of words you're right to write a thousand
lines of code is probably only 2000 words or something that's like substantially less
than the equivalent natural language.
So I would like a day in the seat for me of trying to like, I'm air quoting to those
who can't see this code would be me like scribbling on a piece of paper to work out what I want
to do and then sort of just doing that slowly.
I don't really like have any reason to be able to type code fast because anything that
I'm doing is not like a complex program.
It's just something small that is more of like me figuring out how to do the small thing
than actually typing the small thing.
So yeah, code wise, I don't need to, I don't need to be fast at all.
So actually my speed has gone down.
My peak was when I was on a normal keyboard using QWERTY two years ago.
I have never actually reached that yet, but it's about comfort.
Your hands are just happier now.
Even if you're not comfortable.
Yeah, it's gonna save, but you're more comfortable, Spoo.
And that's the important thing.
My comfort's not important to me.
Now I think the things that improved my office life the most is buying a decent chair.
So that has probably been the biggest impact on my office ergonomics.
A decent chair and a decent desk is sort of...
Actually this keyboard that I have, you see the holes in the back?
You can attach it to armchairs of your keyboard.
So the two split hops are on your hand.
That would work well with my chair because I've got one of the ones where those armrest
things, they move around absolutely everywhere.
Oh, have you got one of the super fancy ones?
Yeah, I invested in a chair.
I spent enough on a chair that you could say I invested in a chair.
Okay, so to be fair, a really, really big thing that I think makes a massive difference
to working life is, and this is again one of those things where if you...
I think really good during COVID and stuff is people got a control over this though.
I'm not sure.
I think a lot of people probably didn't think as much about it.
Probably I thought about it too much.
But having a good chair with decent lower back support is obviously super important.
But I have the cheapest desk chair you can get from IKEA that's got a really firm back.
It's like $100 and it's perfect.
It's really supportive.
I love it.
The thing for me that is really helpful for comfort of the desk is desk height because
if you have a slightly lower desk, everything goes out of whack really quickly.
So I just need like literally it's like five or 10 centimeters higher than the average
desk height.
So I just bought a desk that I could...
It's not even a movable desk.
I could just make it slightly higher when I built it, when I screwed it together.
That's it.
I got a custom desk at the office for the company.
They replaced some desks in there.
I was like, I don't want the desk that you guys are getting.
I'm just going to get a custom desk to a custom height.
And I literally just went measured this desk to the floor.
It was like, yeah, that's the correct height.
And again, you're like, oh, thank fuck.
It's so good to just have your arms at the right height when you're typing, when you're
working, whatever.
That's just... I'll tell you, 10 centimeters really matters.
I don't know if I'm being crazy, but it feels like such...
No, no, it's...
It makes a difference.
The game changer for me in particular, like...
And this is a combination of desk and chair, is actually being able to have the armrests
just go under the edge of my desk so that my elbows, when I'm...
When I have my hands on my keyboard, my elbows are just resting on my chair.
That makes a big... At the right height, so I'm not slouched or hunched.
It's just sat there at the right height.
I can get a full width of my keyboard.
Yeah.
And that kind of actually makes me want to use shortcuts and stuff a lot more as well
rather than reaching for the mouse.
So I've started using Mac shortcuts a lot more to jump around windows and stuff rather
than reaching for the mouse all the time.
I mean, once you get really comfortable keyboard, you'll just learn all that shit.
Because you'll be like, why would I ever use anything but control left, right to shift
around?
Well, you know what?
It's not... Is it control?
What is it?
It's so in my muscle memory that I can't even think what it is because it's just...
Yeah, well, yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's control and left and right.
Yes.
I had to think about it a second because my arrow keys are on the lower layer.
So I'm using the lower layer of the keyboard to get to the arrow keys, but not because
the control key is different.
Spoo's probably sitting down there thinking...
He's not got an optimized layout.
Clearly.
None of this is Linux.
It's on this fucking layout.
Do you use Linux day-to-day Spoo?
Are you like on a Mac or...?
And on Windows, I use WSL.
Oh, oh, you use WSL, do you?
Yeah.
I'm not rich enough to have two computers, so I need Windows.
I had to just make the change at one point.
I used to use Windows for certain things and Mac for certain things, and it was just annoying.
And so I just had to rip the Band-Aid off and go like just to one or the other.
The problem I found for DevOps with Windows is just that it feels so much more native
in Linux or Mac than in Windows.
And specifically when you need to have access to USB via a Linux console, it doesn't really
work with WSL.
So that was more or less...
Yeah, I think that ringing was the next release of WSL.
I'm sure they're going to keep constantly improving it, but I did like the isolation of it a little
bit.
I found it annoying to get to the files.
You can dual boot.
That's always there.
A what?
Dual boot.
Oh, dual boot, yeah.
Yeah, I guess, yeah.
You could dual boot in a Linux.
There's always that option.
I have just found though that the tools available and stuff on Mac are pretty far ahead of what
you can do in Windows for my specific use case.
So I guess it's probably not that different, I guess.
If you're coding, I guess it's probably not that much of an issue.
There's go for Windows, right?
And then your Visual Studio and everything.
You've been WSL anyway, so...
Yeah, I guess you can just connect Visual Studio Code straight to WSL too, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I used WSL just to build the binaries because it's hard to build stuff for Windows, but
everything else I do, I have Windows, so this code runs from Windows itself.
I see.
All right, okay.
So here, why did you do that?
Not dual boot.
Out of pure curiosity, because I used to run Linux dual booted off a Windows machine,
and I literally had Windows just in case like work sent me a fucking PowerPoint or something.
Like I'd just be in Linux 90% of the time, and it was like a secondhand refurb Lenovo,
Carbon, one of the Ultrabooks, like the ThinkPads, the fucking rad.
And it was like an 8GB RAM machine, but it was still on fucking even a bunty.
It was just so fast.
And I got given a work machine in the end that was like 16GB or maybe even more RAM
Mac, and the Mac wasn't as fast as the Windows machine with the Linux machine with 8GB RAM,
because it was just so fucking efficient.
It's just such a light OS by comparison.
Yeah, I don't do dual boot because I usually use Windows just for like entertainment reasons,
so it's like, and it's not like I work continuously, like I work from home, so it's like switching
back and forth.
You're doing it for gaming.
I did it specifically just for Overwatch and Dota, but it's nothing else.
No, okay.
Now I understand it because there is nothing more frustrating than being a Mac user who
wants to kind of goof off for about half an hour a day while you're at your desk, and
you go, you open up Steam and you're like, oh, shit, isn't there a new home world coming
out?
You're not for fucking Mac users, it's not.
Like there's certain games you can play on Mac, and as a result, I have put way too
many.
I've put on works on Mac into the breach works on Mac, FTL works on Mac, very fucking little
else works on Mac.
High flee.
I really wanted to play that fucking.
No, you don't get that.
That new fucking space sim that's like home world, whether that's called falling frontier,
that look really fucking sick.
Is it for Mac?
Is it fuck?
I got a switch thinking maybe that would be my gaming device, but I don't like controllers.
I prefer keyboards.
So that was a waste.
So I actually don't game at all.
But that's because you're a beeman.
No, it's because I'm too addictive.
So when I was at college, I used to be stuck on Dota 2.
I'd just play that shit every day, and it ruined about two years of my life.
So I had to actually just cut off gaming and never game again.
You have such an addictive personality that you cannot fucking game anymore.
And you thought it was a good idea to get into crypto.
Yeah, it's.
Yeah, I do have like, you know, I get really into things.
And like, it was a big problem for me.
Like getting off Dota was like breaking that routine kind of really fucked me for a little
bit.
And I just don't want to experience that again.
So I just stay right the fuck away from games.
There's plenty of other shit for me to do anyway.
Like I kind of feel like I'm pretty time poor and I feel like if I played games, I'd be
really time poor because they're like really fun.
So I sometimes put on let's plays in the background when I'm working.
So I feel like I still have video games my life, but I realistically don't have time
to play them anymore.
And it makes me really like, I really wanted to get involved in Battlefield 2042.
When that came out, I was like, I love a love big online arena shooters with loads of vehicles,
even though I'm shit at them.
And I was just like, this is not a thing I can actually do in my life anymore.
So I'm just going to have to put on let's plays while I'm fucking around on the command
line on remote servers, and I'm going to have to pretend that I got to play that game.
It's quite sad.
Actually, now I've said it out loud, it sounds really fucking sad, doesn't it?
What a first world problem.
You just have to wait a couple of years and you can do it with your child in college,
call it Father London.
Lego Star Wars.
I've realized the only reason Lego Star Wars exists is because parents want an excuse to
play video games.
Like every bloke I've worked with who is like a few years old, and he's been like, fucking,
let me tell you, I don't get to play Call of Duty, but Lego Star Wars.
And I'm like, and now I see it.
And I'm like, I see, I see this is in my future.
It's looking enticing now.
But yeah, 100%.
Either that or just go straight to cod with like a three year old.
Be like, so we need to make the bad people go away.
I feel like having kids is just...
Bomb their village and then the surrounding villages just to be certain.
And then it's not a war crime.
It's going to be a police action.
And this is called International Relations, little one.
Anyway, now it's time for your bath.
Do you think dads enjoy being dads so much just because of all of the shit they get to
do that they couldn't do before without being like, why are you doing that?
For example, play games or even just like go outside?
I think there's probably a tipping point.
I mean, I don't know.
I haven't got there yet.
But like when they're a bit older and you can be like, we're going to go ride a bike
or play around in a sandpit.
I'm fucking looking forward to making sandcastles for starters.
Lego Star Wars already mentioned that.
Board games, fucking big like board.
I don't, you know, there's only three of us in the house.
So like, you know, we got a lot of board games.
There aren't enough people to play.
But when the little one could play board games, there's three of us that unlocks a lot of
other board games.
You know, my partner loves playing board games.
Shit.
You own wingspan yet?
I mean, speaking of like, we're trying to sell you fucking, fucking ergonomic keyboards,
right?
I feel like me and Spoo have maybe done a hard sell.
It hasn't been fully successful, but wingspan.
So you didn't let me finish.
Correct.
I fucking hate board games.
But my partner, every year when we go to like Christmas and shit with my partner's family,
they're all like big into board games.
And I'm like the grouch that doesn't want to play the fucking things.
I'm like, I just want to get drunk and relax.
What was the trauma?
What was the trauma in your childhood?
Nothing.
I'm just bad at board games, especially like, you know, the ones where the general knowledge
like trivia and stuff.
We're talking about good board games here.
Come on.
They love that one.
What's that one?
We've got like all the numbers and you have to, oh, no, letters.
What?
Not Scrabble?
Scrabble?
I don't know.
No, I think it's numbers.
There's another version of Scrabble as well, where you put in like plus sign, minus sign
to make the numbers match.
No, this one's like, you've got like a little panel, you're like all these numbers.
There's a lot of math involved.
There's sequences you have to make.
I don't know.
It sounds like you're getting pissed off about games that aren't like fun board games like
Catan or fucking pandemic or wingspan or whatever that have actually been designed with a lot
of thought and care into their mechanics.
I've never heard of any of those, but I mean, yeah, I feel it's Spoo.
Do you play board games?
Do you ever play board games?
Do you have opinions on board games?
Not a lot.
I have played wingspan and what do you think of wingspan?
I can't see myself.
I played it twice.
I'm the first time I was the last one.
I was the last one because it is very complicated and learning which to prioritize.
The second time I came in late third and I was like, okay, I can see myself getting into
this.
I just haven't been able to play it again.
So for a game for me, like what I'm safe, if I'm in a social environment and there's
a game playing going on, yeah, like I really lean towards things that require me to not
think like Jenga is great.
I just like pulling out the little bits.
I can get on board with that.
For those listening later, Jacket P Potato has said in the chat, Jenga is the only game
you need.
Yeah, I mean, it's maybe true.
It's fun.
You get drunk.
You pull bars out.
It's for a very long time.
Like if I'm there and I have to read the fucking rules of something, you know, the fun's already
gone.
Like I should send you like a copy of Deepsea Adventure.
That's a pretty simple game and it's funny because you're sending interns to the bottom
of the sea to collect treasure.
And if they fuck it up, they drown and the kind of drowning interns mechanic humours
me, humours me.
God, I'm tired.
Pleases me.
If it pleases you.
It pleases me.
Sometimes the interns don't make it back now.
Sometimes the interns don't make it back.
I feel like a lot of cool little German board games.
But that's a really weird sanding game, by the way.
You have a submarine, right?
And then you each have to send down a little sucker to go collect some treasure for you.
But everybody shares the same air supply, right?
So if one person gets greedy, everybody drowns.
But you're still safe in the submarine telling your interns what to do.
It's great.
It's actually like CardiCaptainless because you've, I guess, bankrolled the expedition.
You're just like, yeah, let's maybe dive a little deeper, see if there's some more
treasure down there.
It doesn't always work out for them.
Is this a board game?
Yeah.
It's a little like, is I think what's called a cafe board game.
It's like very small.
So you can play it on like a small table with like four to four players, something like
that.
I mean, it sounds quite complex.
Like it takes about five minutes to learn it.
And then like, you know, for about 15 minutes to play the three rounds is pretty quick.
What I mean is like the, what you're explaining here seems like you would need all this.
I don't know how you represent that on a little board game.
Oh, we have a little, little gubbins for, for treasure.
And then you have some meeples for the interns.
And you're obviously like just sitting in the submarine, there's little card submarine.
It's kind of.
It's always baffled me as like dice based board games.
It's like there's absolutely no, like, I mean, the whole thing's just the game of
luck, right?
Well, no, the dice is to take, is to level, partly level the playing field.
Isn't that?
I'm talking about like things like snakes and ladders.
Like you throw the fucking dice and you move your bit.
Like, you know, snakes and ladders.
Yeah, there's no strategy in that.
It's, it's, it's a representative of life.
You know, you can just get fucked and there's nothing you can do about it.
You start from scratch.
Did you just say it's the game of life?
You just fucking roll the dice.
Yeah.
I mean, that's it.
I think like it's important to teach children that you only have very little control over
your life.
Now, children, no matter what you do, so no, you go today, you're fucked anyway.
You're going down that ladder.
You stumbled onto a point of, of you sir have obviously not looked up the historical context
of snakes and ladders.
Snakes and ladders is based off of essentially like, like Spoo says, it is a, it is a teaching
mechanism from the Indian subcontinent to teach about the, like the kind of circular,
circular nature of luck and fate and that you always end up back at the bottom.
It's, what's the thing about, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you know,
the famous thing from, for, there's the Latin story about, you know, don't step on my, you
know, you can step on my wheel and I'll raise you up on my shoulders, but don't be surprised
when I cast you down again.
It's the same thing, but the whole point is it's a morality tale, right?
Snakes and ladders.
And then somebody just went, oh yeah, we can probably just package this and sell it.
Even though it's literally the, you lose.
That's literally the point of the game.
It's an incredibly boring fucking game.
I'll tell you that.
Well, it's not, it's not a game.
That's, it's been packaged as a game for children, but it's actually not a game.
The same way, you know, Monopoly is, we know Monopoly is not a game.
Either it was, it was a, I think from memory, it's Quakers.
It's a satire of capitalism designed to show that everybody loses and even when you win,
you get upset and everybody hates you.
And when you lose, you just feel miserable and you never want to play the game again.
And somebody thought, oh, this, this game is good.
We should sell it and they packaged it and sold it.
And everybody wonders why Monopoly causes arguments and families because it's literally
by design, it is supposed to show that the behavior required to win Monopoly is not desirable
in society.
Do you know what I love about Monopoly is that it's such a good analog for the real
world that when the bank runs out of money, it's in the rules to just write IO usershit.
There's an amazing game called Market Meltdown, which the aim of that game is to model the
2008 financial crisis.
And it models a liquidity crisis by every time you go around the board, liquidity is
taken out of the game.
So everybody's dealing with less money, but you can't write IO us.
So you just see the liquidity collapsing, but your obligations remain the same.
And the, that you have to roll the dice to move, but every other mechanic is via a roulette
wheel.
So you have to place a bet and then roll a roulette, a ball or a roulette wheel.
And that determines the outcome of everything that's happening to you.
So from your point of view, all that's happening is a roulette wheel is randomly causing you
to own money, win money, lose money, whatever, as you go around the board.
But all that's happening is liquidity is coming out of the system because of a bank run, essentially
it's happening in the background.
And so no matter what you do, you're just like, oh God, how do I get more money?
There's only so much liquidity left in the system.
It's actually very, very relevant for crypto now, I think about it.
But all that happens is like, you're just trying to survive longer than the opponents
because everybody knows their toast in the long run because you know the capital flight
is happening.
It's complete is one of the most fun and degenerate board games in existence because by the end,
you have such huge accumulated debts, like after only a few turns that you cannot survive
other than by putting it all on red and just being like, roll the roulette wheel.
And it's, it's great.
And you're like, oh, this is why people were like, they're like, oh, shit, we've got
loads of mortgage backed securities that are going fuckery over here.
We better go buy insurance on mortgage backed securities so that we could try and ensure
ourselves against them blowing up when they inevitably blow up.
You're like, oh, right, that's how that behavior actually happens.
Like, so in that sense.
Link in the show notes, folks.
Yeah, I think I think it might sound like it's linked to Amazon.
I should do.
Shouldn't I?
I think I'm recommending board games that are mostly out of print.
You definitely can get deep sea adventure.
That's definitely still in print.
I think market meltdown might be out of print and the even better game that the same designers
did called war on terror is also sadly out of print.
That was just the best game, which I'm not going to explain.
Sorry.
War on terror.
It sounds interesting.
It was basically like an much more sophisticated version of risk where you could model asymmetrically
just turning to be a failed state and then do asymmetric warfare against the imperial
powers.
And it was really clever in terms of its mechanics was really cool.
Cool.
So there you go.
Whilst we have included Spoo in the show, we actually didn't talk about the conferences
yet.
I was going to bring that up as someone who was unable to attend any of these things
on the other side of the planet.
I am interested to hear so I can live vicariously through the participants eyes.
Please go ahead.
Which was okay.
So straight up, which was the best conference?
Let's just hit a straight.
What did you go to?
Which was the best one?
Tell us the list and then tell us the best.
I learned to awesome awesome and nebula.
And I guess the more than eight CC and nebula.
Okay.
Yeah.
And the other two in Paris.
What about the Osmo con?
Did you go there?
No, I took a vacation from conference and I went to I'm strong for a weekend.
So good.
So what was your favorite and why?
Well, I'm not going to say easy because you know, this is a cosmos validator.
This is not a cosmos validator.
Anything.
This is just a general crypto shit.
Actually, I've been meaning to bring that up because the intro of the show is like
Broadway independent validators in the cosmos and no validator news are even in the video.
Like if I were to delegate to like where I would I know?
We have changed to just a general.
So we're we're trying to like be just more generally crypto and less like specifically
cosmos, but also like, you know, we're just shit at marketing really.
And that's why we don't have any kind of reference to our validators anywhere really on this
show.
I think for us, we kind of just like doing it for fun anyways.
So it's not really about trying to get delegations or anything.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that said, you're saying ECC was your favorite.
You just don't want to say that.
No, I only attended one talk in ATC by a normal team.
They they had a privacy focus talk called size matters about the privacy side, the anonymity
set and stuff.
But one thing I've noticed is like a lot of the ETC talks have become more and more
marketing rather than teaching anybody anything.
So yeah, but they are really good.
So it's like they had gelato right inside the venue.
Oh, yeah.
So even at ETH just meetups, there's a lot of shilling vaporware that will never get
built.
Whereas like, at least in Cosmos, like people generally stand up after they've built something,
even if it might not be viable and it's Cosmos, so there's a good chance it's not viable because
it's not Ethereum ironically.
Imagine all like, okay, we shouldn't do this because it would be lame, but imagine if all
the Cosmos builders who actually do ship stuff went and shipped non vaporware in another ecosystem,
people would be like, wow, that particular group of people are really productive at shipping
actual code.
Maybe like, oh, yeah, they all used to work in Cosmos.
They used to having to work for money.
But then they would be forced to write solidity and get exploited.
Fate worse than death.
I know.
Yeah.
So gelato ECC.
So that's why it's your favorite.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So you can bribe Spoo.
If you're a conference organizer listening to this podcast, you can bribe Spoo for her
conference review blog, which obviously has many thousands of subscribers.
I'm publishing a book on that coming down next week and this is my promo for the book.
There you go.
That's how you do it.
So my like, there's not a lot of opportunity on this side of the planet to go to these
bloody conferences.
However, there is one in Korea soon for Korea Blockchain Week.
Well, not really soon, but it's in a month or so.
I was wanting to go to that one, but my partner vetoed it because we have to go walk across
a fucking mountain for six days.
So I think my only other opportunity is a bit later in the year again with Singapore.
So maybe, maybe I'll get there.
Is that token, token 2049?
Token 2049.
Yes.
And anyone to the London one last year, but then I just thought it'd be like fucking
layman for the FinTech people to say, I bend it off.
And Artifact, who's of course the master of marketing, was like, you're a fucking idiot.
You should have gone to that.
It's on your doorstep.
And then ended up going to a fucking FinTech conference this year anyway.
So shows what I fucking know.
So you should go to it in conclusion.
I definitely will if the time slot suits and if the budget allows.
So there you go.
So if CC cover that one off, how was Nebula?
How was Awesome Wasum?
What do we miss?
Make us jealous here.
Well, Awesome Wasum, do you know about CWsCREP?
That was like the most interesting part for me.
So the Terran one team, they've built like a superset language, which compiles down to
Rust Cosmism.
So the typical counter contract is like 10 lines of code in CWscript.
And you just compile it and it turns into the Rust code.
And as a person who's not really into Rust, that sounds interesting.
It's very easy to understand language.
I think it's more like Rubyesque where it actually looks nice as well.
It doesn't look complicated.
So yeah, that was like the best thing.
And I think in the last episode, you mentioned Ethan Brace, sabbatical.
He mentioned that it was just from the end of the year.
So he's going to be back next year.
Oh, it's the end of the year.
I thought it was just for the summer.
He said to the end of the year.
Wow.
Okay.
That's a long, I mean, I'm jealous.
That face is more, I think he deserves it, but this is the face of somebody who's jealous
of the sabbatical of that land.
Bears hibernate in the winter, right?
Yeah, I guess so.
And what's Nebula?
What's that about?
I don't know if there's any team in Nebula, exactly.
There was a nice talk on Evo's feature direction, Evo's 2.0.
Apparently, they want to be more like a canary change Ethereum.
They're going to implement the EIP rate quicker so people can test that out.
How the fuck would that work?
I mean, Ethereum is kind of slow with building out features, right?
So Evo's wants to do it quicker.
But it's completely different, right?
No, I think stuff like the EVM stuff is...
Well, the VM, I think what Spear is talking about is implementing VM level features ahead
of Ethereum.
So the features that Ethereum want to implement, they want to recreate into Evo's initially.
I think they're just going to ship them before.
So if they're not yet live beneath, they're going to be shipped ahead of time.
I mean, what I mean is, is it directly compatible?
Do they not have to rewrite it to suit?
I think the whole point is you can cross deploy the contracts, right?
Yeah.
Okay, if they contract based, yeah.
But I mean, it's perhaps the thing of like, like, Evermorth's is an interesting idea.
If they're shipped six months earlier, eight months earlier, then there'd have been maybe
more likely to get like...
For one of that word, like a survivable level of traction, whereas...
Well, I'd see that they have a USP anymore, really.
Like being a bit faster than Ethereum, being substantially cheaper, fair enough.
But that cuts both ways.
Like Ethereum has deep liquidity and then VCs and all the other shit.
Not that VCs are necessarily a good thing.
I mean, I actually tend to think they're a super bad thing, but the reality is a lot
of teams don't have a product that makes money for a long time.
So they look to VCs and people to pay their salaries in the interim and like, you can
do all of that stuff, you know, over and ETH.
The gas fees and stuff are like just part of the other side of that equation.
But without all that, then, you know, that's the value of the token, right?
So it's all part of the economic system.
Maybe a bit of a broken economic system, but at least it's like...
So it seems to me then that like as far as the economics of the blockchain is concerned,
I think they've probably concentrated on the wrong ecosystem.
If they're compatible in both, like maybe they should have put some marketing power into
the Ethereum area, you know, trying to sort of...
I think that's it to be fair.
Like it's just that they kind of missed the end of the last bull, really, which is when
you have the most eyeballs on you.
But then I guess, you know, that still doesn't help when you're a year and a bit into a bear
market, does it?
Because you're still fucked.
But I mean, when you think of ETHMOS, you don't really think Ethereum, do you?
You still sort of consider it to be a Cosmos chain.
Yeah.
Well, maybe that's just from our perspective being more involved in that particular ecosystem.
I don't know if...
Like I don't really have a perspective from an Ethereum ecosystem participant.
Maybe they are known and popular.
I don't know.