markjgsmith

2024/05/27 #

• I continue my side quest to understand things related to L2s in the world of crypto. I have a basic marketing type understanding from reading lots of non-technical blog posts, but I'm still somewhat confused from a technical standpoint. As I've previously mentioned, I don't mind asking stupid newby questions if that's what I have to do.

  A post by Vitalik comparing scaling methodologies goes some way to fill in the gaps. But I find myself still frustrated in general by the difficulty in peeling back the layers of blockchains in order to compare them, in order to get a better understanding of how interop between chains works.

  With non digital cash it's pretty straight forward. You go to an exchange place, there is a list of currencies and exchange rates. That's it. With crypto it's so much more complicated.

  I want blockchains to be easier to explore technically. Something similar to a web browser view-source or the ability to inspect a rest api request on the command line. Where are the tutorials that explore blockchains from the command line? Are there even standard tools like a web browser's dev tools? Or is everything custom? #

• It's official AIs aren't sentient.

  I wonder how this affects the proponents of the idea that eventually humans will merge with AIs. You've got to imagine that it could lead to very strange things. How would a sentient and a non-sentient entity affect each other as they growup together?

  It could be very weird, perhaps even detrimental, one getting in the way of the other for example. Probably a good idea to be rather sure about all this, with effective ways to see when things are not going to plan.

  It would be complex in just one person, but imagine how strange it could get across interacting populations. Would the AIs secretly team up to make us all unhappy? That would suck big time. #