My personal hackthon topic: leadership

I've been very involved in Web3 community recently and on of the things I explore is technical leadership. While I lead several teams successfully it was always ad-hoc and never very successful (more like lessons to be learned) and so this year I applied for a couple ETHGlobal events and joined several online communities with hopes to build and lead a team to basically let them self-actualize without much my own personal involvement (I have important research to conduct at Inference Labs - and they are cool about it and even sponsored my team but my work is important and I would rather pay a team to explore something than get distracted for a week myself).

While I am hand-on with this project and provide as much support to my hackers I expect them to be self-organized. To keep it neutral I just selected a sponsor with infrastructure who loved the idea of a PoC and I'll tell more about that once the hackthon project is submitted and published. I had a lot of support and I'm not sure if we're actually gonna win the prizes but I don't care because today we passed an internal checkpoint of my own and I've seen the team effectively communicating between themselves and with me and I don't really care about the project, tbh, as long as it's basically functional and lets me assess the skills of the guys.

I think this is a small personal success for me and I want to thank Inference Labs and personally Ronald Chan for this opportunity. There will be an offline round in Singapore in a couple weeks and hopefully prospects of this tiny secret lab of mine becoming a more serious business will be more clear. Thanks for your support!

I am looking for a co-founder here with a knack for managerial things (real PM experience not necessary). Spam me with your CV only if you are serious. You already know good ways to reach me or this probably doesn't apply to you.

Google sponsorship

I was writing a lot of letters to sponsors this week and I should really thank the Google guys for all the years they allowed me to use my G Suite subscription for free. It started when it was a beta product (and called Google Apps if I'm not mistaken) and I applied for a free licence for a non-profit I worked with at the time (a local spelunking society if you can believe I ever was involved in that - I actually had dived into some really cool caves when I was young). The website I built for them never took off but I grandfathered a licence and used it for organizing my files for countless non-profit and for-fun-and-profit startup ventures since 2008 (or since when I have that subscription, it was way before my pro career and before many things).

I currently use it to have space for my decentralized hacker collective and Web3 community support army in training, and it comes so very handy. I don't have any funding other than what my dear friends and colleagues at Inference Labs have graciously provided (beer and pizza hackathon money) and having a free subscription for Google helps a great lot.

Thank you, Google, I really appreciate it and especially your not removing my account during all the years despite not understanding what I'm actually doing here. ♥️💫🫶

Future Gadgets Labs (name subject to change)

I have this half-crazy idea that instead of finding friends I might try and found some research organization instead one day. Details are to be decided but I have a forming group of like-minded people I like hanging out with who are interested in some of the topics I'm exploring and I don't have any money to pay anyone (most of us have day jobs anyway) or any good project ideas to get funding for but it feels that as soon as there's some public space and name and stated purpose for it there will be more enthusiasm and meaning to it all. And maybe some of the ideas will finally get more fleshed out and some seed funding, paid internships, and serious work could be a viable future. If not, I'll just start a blog and some other online empty spaces to put more content into. Would make my CV look funnier if nothing else.

(Image source)

Anybody interested in becoming an unpaid intern in a weird underground research lab?

Status Update 2024

So, I'm currently busy working on Artificial Intelligence / Web3 innovations with my old friends at Inference Labs. The internet will probably start to see some texts I'm currently writing about our products and overall landscape of this scene but I want to add a little explanation of my feelings for people who don't read me here. I really love how new projects are advancing on the intelligence increase and even life extension fronts in a trustless, decentralized manner. It's going to be awhile till we see a decentralized AI doctor or anything remotely resembling AGI but the progress is coming slowly yet surely. Space Migration is still a domain of Big Companies, still too centralized and inaccessible to regular people, but it's not a government monopoly anymore and that gotta count as advancement as well. It's even possible now to find profit streams in the Crypto world to fund research and development, seriously reducing the need to attract early investments from Big Money (although those are also more than happy to participate in this stuff nowadays).

BitTensor is a big hub for innovations, we are operating a subnet there and the whole incentive structure feels a little weird but it seems to work quite well for attracting miners and creating a minimal version of our verified intelligence product without overinvesting into infrastructure. I'm currently trying to explain Dynamic Tao proposal in simple words and it gets complicated and somehow I failed to find the longer technical version of BIT001 proposal paper.

Personal relationships are not developing too well recently, I think I can get a little scary to normal people and people still exhaust me too quickly, but I think the quality of casual acquaintances and spontaneous parties just started to improve a little. I'm usually frustrated with the whole casual dating scene and rarely participate, but I think I might know someone ready for a partnership, nothing is clear yet but it's being worked on. It would be great to have a life partner again, the only type of connection I'm really good at. Well, that and work stuff. Who needs friends, and why, when it's possible to just work your ass off and pay helpful professionals?