✦Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom

What is a virtual machine? - Stephen

January 9, 2023 · 56 min

MP3 · Apple Podcasts · Spotify

About this episode

Stephen is working on AI dev on Near protocol and developing on Ethereum

  1. What is the NEAR blockchain?
  2. What is sharding?
    1. Increasing throughput of the transactions
    2. Breaking up the blockchain into shards so that you can get more parallelism
    3. When does ETH sharding begin?
    4. ETH sharding is based on blobs
  3. Why are you attracted to Rust?
  4. Can you use Rust on Ethereum?
  5. What is a virtual machine?
    1. Something that is interpreting bite code instead of binary
  6. Why would a blockchain need a virtual machine?
  7. Why are virtual machines more secure?
  8. What is web assembly?
  9. How do interfaces work for smart contracts?
  10. What is a blockchain?
  11. Why would someone want to have a blockchain for gaming?
  12. Why does a blockchain economize resources better than something like AWS or cloud computing?
  13. What are zero knowledge proofs?
  14. What is the relationship between zero knowledge proofs and KYC networks?
  15. What is determinism?
  16. What are your thoughts on AI right now as an AI developer?
  17. How far are we from AGI?
  18. How much has psychology or biology informed the development of AI?
  19. Has anyone formed a plan to actually get to AGI?
  20. Would gaming be a good way to create an AGI through this bootstrapping thing you mention 25 minutes in?
  21. Why is gaming AI dumbed down?
  22. Is it dumbed down because of resource efficiency?
    1. No its because you want that determism and the expected range of behaviors
    2. QA doesn’t want to deal with unexpected issues which cause bugs you can’t fix or expect
  23. How is deep learning affecting gaming developments?
    1. How is gaming affecting deep learning?
  24. Are you using copilot for developing?
  25. What is reinforcement learning?
    1. Find out how much you value decisions that lead to certain rewards
  26. What does it mean to “discount something”?
  27. Whether OPENAI is open source?
  28. What did NFT protocol did you create?
  29. What is a Markoff chain?
  30. What is a lottery smart contract?
    1. You purchase tickets with your crypto wallet
    2. The more tickets you purchase, the better chances you have for a payout
  31. How does peer reviewing work for writing solidity?
  32. What are the implications of developing on a blockchain versus a normal database?
  33. What is state when it comes to programming?
  34. How do you visualize the state of the EVM?
Episode transcript
Stewart Alsop III00:00

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcasts. Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is Stephen and he is working on it as an AI dev on NEAR Protocol and he's developing on Ethereum as well. He'll have some insight into artificial intelligence and also blockchains and development on Ethereum. Welcome to the show.

Stephen00:56

Thank you.

Stewart Alsop III00:58

So what is the NEAR protocol?

Stephen01:02

Well, NEAR is a. As an L1 blockchain which is pretty sophisticated. It's, you know, it was, it was built, you know, with sharding in mind. It's got proof of stake based, it's got great wallet integration. Yeah, I'm a bit of an advocate for NEAR and their blockchain. So I was attracted also to the fact that you could use Rust or JavaScript or whatever your favorite languages were, the common ones, and the application level smart contracts, and then it would. The virtual machine for Infernia is based on webassembly. So it's more, you know, I think it's more of a standards compliant thing than Ethereum's virtual machine. So I was attracted to that aspect of it too, I think.

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