Some Things I Read Last Week Dec 19 — Dec 26
In this final post for 2016, I cover disrupting health technology, how solar is about to take off, the future of the decentralized internet, some incredible artists, and more.
In case you missed last week:
Energy
Lots of great news in the world of Solar Energy this week. It turns out many people have been incorrectly calculating it’s efficiency, and it’s now out performing oil.
Virtual Reality
I learned a lot on VR design in this article from Roxana Brongo. It also made me even more excited to see what other designers come up with when they start experimenting with VR.
In 2017 we’ll see the arrival of a wide range of low to medium end VR headsets, and Microsoft seems very intent on pushing this along.
Elizabeth Edwards is an amazing artists who’s really learned to embrace VR as a medium. I also recommend following her Twitter https://twitter.com/lizaledwards
Business And Product
…no longer do distributors compete based upon exclusive supplier relationships, with consumers/users an afterthought. Instead, suppliers can be aggregated at scale leaving consumers/users as a first order priority. By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best
So you think you want to start a software as a service business huh? From start to finish, this series has you covered. I loved how quickly he dispels the myth that creating a software company is all about writing code.
Technology
Health technology is ready for disruption, and this article covers what that will look like for ultrasound machines in particular.
Make apps for the HoloLens with Javascript
Interesting
A Snapchat update caused a bunch of NTP servers around the world to get an excessive load. This lead me down a rabbit hole of “What are NTP servers?” “Why do we have them?” “Ok, they very accurately keep track of time, but how do they stay in sync?”
My friend Lexi is continuing her series of things she read as well!
In the West, we often forget that other countries don’t use the same calendar as us.
Decentralization
How can you, for example, determine the temperature in New York in a decentralized system. Or, more broadly, how does a decentralized system know facts from the real world? ShellingCoin is the answer.
I’m still very skeptical on using Futarchy as a way to manage and organize people, but there are certainly valuable concepts here that will be useful in decentralized systems.
Decentralized systems require us to rethink everything down to the data structures we use. The Merkle Patricia Tree is at the heart of Ethereum, so this week I wrapped my head around how it all works.
How can Blockchains be used to manage digital property rights and ensure that creators get paid for their work? Mediachain is working to answer that question.
While this article covers things like how one could make annoying ads for ad makers and how these systems could be used to prevent spam, a key insight was this:
a prediction market is a security deposit where anyone can challenge and require a higher deposit in response, and anyone else can back the original depositor up, and a security deposit is a prediction market where one particular party is forced to make a mandatory bet.
Security
Egypt is trying to block the fantastic private messaging app Signal. But don’t worry, the team at Signal has already built a workaround.
Good security is hard. Even a small bug can open you up to major vulnerabilities. The engineers at Google are trying to make it easier to find the bugs before the bad guys do.
This article has some good coverage on post-quantum cryptography, and crypto security improvements that have come out this year.
