Unfortunately, a very similar doomerism has overtaken me lately. AI is going to change the world profoundly and I believe we have about 3 years before working a normal job is a rarity. I can’t help feeling there is going to be an abundance of unemployable humans. Excess humans if you will. Given society currently finds meaning and purpose from one’s job, we will need to re-define how traditionally we have found purpose.

I’m searching for my ticket out of becoming the permanent underclass. It’s going to be hard to acquire assets while relying on whatever welfare state has been put in place for the jobless. I’m currently putting as much energy as I can into acquiring assets, while I still can. A home is primary, Bitcoin secondary but the 3rd asset I’m keen on accumulating is related to AI. My thinking is that if AI is the root of the problem, owning a slice of that root should be valuable.

I have settled on the Venice ecosystem and the crypto tokens within it. Venice is an Artificial Intelligence platform that I find interesting, particularly because it was funded and co-founded by an outspoken libertarian with a passion for privacy, freedom, decentralisation and fighting back against censorship. I believe Venice will be a safe guard against the coming enshitification of AI where responses from OpenAI and the other larger commercial AI providers will start including Ads, paywalls or restricted content. Venice is to Linux, what OpenAI is to Windows.

Within the Venice ecosystem there’s currently two tokens: VVV and DIEM. I’m working on accumulating both. If private and decentralised AI is a useful resource in the future, I’ll be sorted and if it is not a useful resource, well good, because I guess it means I’m not living in the dystopia I’m worried about. So I win either way.

The Venice ecosystem tokens

	VVV – The Venice Token. Get VVV if you believe in the mission and want exposure to Venice’s ongoing project. Stake VVV to receive yield, or to mint DIEM. I like to think of VVV as: > “Venice: the Vision and Vibes“.
	DIEM – The Venice Asset. Get DIEM if you want utility from the Venice infrastructure. DIEM gives you credits to generate video or use the Venice API. > “DIEM transforms AI from a service you rent into an asset you own. Each DIEM token represents a fixed daily quantity compute capacity that never expires and never changes value“. (source)

I have started learning about Venice AI. My writing and Podcasting can be found at the Carpe Diem Website. If you want to follow my journey, subscribe to my podcast on YouTube:

We didn’t know all the in-jokes / protocols / terminologies so I’d welcome corrections.

(See, we freestyle sometimes…)

Know your gas limit… stay within it,
Don’t don’t don’t make mistakes, get invalid refund,

Okay Yo, not just a pre-compiler change of op-codes, we’re here to sustain the scale of our Full Nodes.
Proof of stake is hard but what I do know is that we learn to shard we’ll change the whole game though,

ETH 2.0 Yo, ETH 2.0 Yo, ETH 2.0 Yo, ETH 2.0 Yo.

SHA-3, T.L.S, LAN port. All this Crypto just sets the stage, for:

[Chorus]
Merkle Proof, Plasma Chains, Qwack Qwack, zk-SNARKs, becoming sober, Clap Clap.
Privacy, scaling in a Snap, Snap. Constant products, Oracles. DApp DApp.
Merkle Proof, Plasma Chains, Qwack Qwack, zk-SNARKs, becoming sober, Clap Clap.
Privacy, scaling in a Snap, Snap. Constant products, Oracles. It’s all about the DApps!

Every user, Every Wallet, Every DApp, ZK Miners, Double signers, Every villain with an axe,
Every Channel operator, every block, every Full Node, every sneaker, every HODLer in Iraq, and that is That!

Constantinople is done… Fork!
Plasma group L2 engage no Fork!
Call of incoming in waves, Fork!
Your boy Carlos is From New Yooooork!

Plasma, State Channels, Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 4, A16 Binary, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Trust, Human Co-ordination, You Know the drill!

[Chorus]

Not just a pre-compiler change of op-codes, we’re here to change the rails and create all our Full Nodes.
E-WASM is hard but what I do know is that with abstracted council we’ll change the whole game though,

ETH 2.0 Yo, ETH 2.0 Yo, ETH 2.0 Yo, ETH 2.0 Yo.

To build the Cathedral, we must coordinate.
But we ain’t no Cathedral, no insubordinate,
Every team and every project, we could get far, so perching by our logic we work like a bazaar, yeah!

Staking all in the first phase, Spork!
All of this coming in waves, Spork!
Deposits coming in waves, Spork!
Your boy Carlos is from New Yoooork! yeah.

Aah, everybody, it’s ETH 2.0 Yo, ETH 2.0 Yo, ETH 2.0 Yo, ETH 2.0 Yo.

ETH 2.0, go have some Froyo.

Difficulty: “Ice Age meltdown”. Layer 1, Layer 3, Line 27, Ternary. Build your own hash boxes for maximum security.

( This is what happens when you code A LOT!)

Whiteness failure, a lot less widows online.

SLASHED!

(Wow the outro is really long. Brrrrr-What are we going to do?)

Since I wrote “Bear in mind, this is the future richest person in the world “, Vitalik Buterin Made the Time’s 100 Most Influential People List.

They are a pair that was originally joined end-to-end as one long shed. One has a door and windows on the front, the other has a door at the end and windows along the length on one side.

Each individual shed has Dimensions:

• Width: 6 foot 1 or 186cm
• Height: 7 foot, 5 or 227cm
• Length: 14 foot, 2 or 432cm

The sheds deconstruct into panels that can be transported on a car roof-rack. But something like a transit van would work best.

Notes:

• The roof felt doesn’t transport very well, so the roof would need re-felting when they are re-constructed. This could cost £50 for felt and nails.
• Moving the shed is a 2 person job.
• The shed is not in mint condition. It’ll be 3rd hand when you have it. I’m not sure how old it is but it’s more than 6 years old for sure.
• The sheds ideally need to be located on a flat concrete base.
• There are also some free standing shelves that you are welcome to either take or leave.

The Sheds are in St Albans, AL3 – If you want them email me:

There’s a Bitcoin enthusiast called Michael Saylor that seems to do a hundred interviews a day lately. “Enthusiast” is too weak a word for him. He’s our champion. He has laser beam eyes of pure Bitcoin energy. From listening to him I have understood that not only has he put all his spare cash into Bitcoin but he’s also put all his companies spare cash, then taken a loan and converted it to Bitcoin, then he’s used his Bitcoin as collateral for more loans, that he’s also put into BitCoin. In short, he’s all in. I don’t think you can get any more in. The way he speaks about cash is as if it’s a poisonous liability for him and he speaks about loans in a way I didn’t understand at first. He treats them as financial instruments. Until now, I didn’t understand that loans aren’t purely a thing to be avoided unless desperate. They can be used to make money. It seems “the rich” frequently use loans to do stuff without selling the things they want to hold onto to. I often hear the saying “money makes money” and have come to realise that loans taken on existing assets are one way that this is true. It’s probably unbelievable to you that I didn’t know this given that I’m 41. Trust me, there are many obvious things I don’t know. You know nothing, Jon Snow Tom Fotherby.

The Ethereum ecosystem has many projects that have captured my imagination. Decentralised Finance is super interesting to me. There’s a bunch of projects all held together by smart contracts, rather than human gatekeepers. You can build money lego without needing permission from a bank. It’s a trustless system because you don’t need to trust someones word – you can check the code of the smart contract and it’ll do what it is programmed to do. Code executes – there’s no need to have to trust whether the code will do what it says. It will. That is how code works. It’s why I love it. It’s why I’m a coder by trade. They are calling this DeFi movement “web3“. web2 was when the web became interactive enough that we started to socialise on it. web3 is when the web has it’s own native money so we can do business on the web, but bankless.

I decided to try my own “financial engineering” experiment, on a tiny scale. I wanted to see if I could take a loan out, using some Bitcoin as collateral. I had collected a little Bitcoin over the last few years by paying a little pocket money into CoinBase every few months. My thinking was that my Bitcoin is sitting doing nothing. Given that the market seemed to be going “up and to the right”, I could put my Bitcoin to work. I used a platform called Aave. I was attracted to it because it seemed to have a idealistic CypherPunk mentality as opposed to similar platforms that are owned by Silicon Valley Bros funded by venture capitalists. Aave, to me, seem to treat the tech as their king. They seems the opposite of a Bank. It’s an open source and non-custodial liquidity protocol. Open Source? Non-custodial? Where do I sign? a.k.a. I liked their approach.

The important thing to make clear is that the loan can’t affect “real life”. The loan is purely related to the Crypto world and cannot impact my actual bank account or credit rating. Aave don’t know my name or phone number or home address. Failing to pay the loan and therefore getting liquidated is not a negative thing in their eyes. In fact, the Aave community make some money when loan liquidations happens so if anything, they are happy when degenerate gamblers get rekt. I wouldn’t do this experiment if it could affect my family or if it meant the difference between whether we could take the kids camping this year or not. It’s imaginary internet money only.

So I leant my Bitcoin into Aave, and borrowed something pegged to USD (called DAI) against it. Then I swapped the DAI for Ether. Then I waited for the Ether value to go up, hoping that it would go up faster than the loan interest went up. I called the project, “Project LoanShark” to explicitly acknowledge that the loan interest was excessive. It was 30% APR when I started the project! 30% interest on a loan is pretty bad, but Crypto has gone up 200% on average per year so it would hopefully be profitable regardless. I was planning the project to go for 2 years or until Ethereum v2 launches.

After just 40 days, I shut the thing down.

It feels like the loan won’t weigh on you. It feels like you put so much thought into the project and did the calculations so carefully that it’s not a loan, it’s a “financial engineering project”. You tell yourself this is magic internet money, not real money so it doesn’t matter if you lose it. But in my experience, after a few days it just felt like I had a hot coal burning a hole in my brain. It started to feel like I was holding my breath all the time. I started sleeping badly. It felt like there was a war going on for my attention, and the things that I actually value, like health and family were not winning. And this was even though the market was doing fine. I was miserable even though the CryptoSphere was pretty healthy.

So I settled up. I got out. And now I’m feeling fine. Actually, “fine” doesn’t do my feelings justice. I feel a BIG sense of relief. I feel like I’m not holding my breath all the time. I know I will feel I missed out when the Crypto upturn happens but I can’t win either way – I have to choose between either Stress on one side or the Fear-of-Missing-Out on the other side. I can live a nice life with FOMO, but I can’t live a nice life with Stress, so it’s a easy decision. Easy not easy.

From using Aave, this is what I learnt:

• It doesn’t seem like it will take any time up at all. IT TAKES ALL THE TIME. It consumes you. Dreaming, Nightmaring, Checking charts, Watching 50 hours of YouTube a Day, etc. It’s like a 2nd Job. A job that pays minimum wage (or potentially negative wage).
• Do not underestimate the fees. Eth fees are crazy and Aave fees are even more massive, in particular for taking loans AND even worse for paying back loans. If the project is a success, it means that  ETH has gone up so the cost of the fees (in USD value) are also up. Since the loan is in DAI, the dollar value of fees matters a lot. The fees make it hard to make profits. My Project cost me $1600 in fees. Like I said, NUTs!
• It works best if whatever you buy with the loan you put back into Aave as collateral. This way you can easily pay back the loan in minimal transactions and you can easily see your position within the Aave Dashboard and you have a healthier loan-to-value ratio. It’s good to see from the Aave dashboard whether you are at a profit or loss. Aave doesn’t offer a big selection of tokens that you can deposit as collateral. I was mostly interested in increasing my ETH position so Aave was a good fit.
  • In my opinion, it makes sense to have an aim of pulling out the original collateral when possible so that you are playing purely with profits.
• It’s cheaper to be simpler – It’s tempting to get a load of different ALTs and play around a bit. Don’t! Borrow just ETH, not BTC & ETH. The Aave fees are fixed, i.e. not relative to amounts, so playing with two tokens doubles the fees.
• Replaying a ETH loan is cheaper than a WBTC loan. e.g. repaying my ETH cost only $140 but repaying BTC cost $220.
• When big things are happening in the market, you need to up the gas price so the transaction happens quickly. I wanted to exit my position but the gas price went up after I submitted and I had to wait a nail-biting 90 minutes for the loan to be paid, all the time watching my profits drain away. It was horrendous.
• Due to fees, Aave is better for long term projects.
• Although the DAI loan APR was 30% when I started the Project, it was much lower on average, e.g. 20%. The good thing about the loan interest is that it goes down when there’s less demand from other people. I found this meant that when I was losing money, the loan APR was small, and it was big when I was making money. This makes it much more comforting.
• I originally envisaged topping up my collateral each month. Wrong! Don’t expect to do that. Depositing into Aave is not a normal ETH transfer, it’s got much higher fees. Since I only have a small amount to invest each month (e.g. <£100), the fees mean I have to wait until I have a more significant sum. It’s disappointing.
• In the same vain, don’t expect to pay a little interest off each month. It seemed to be about $120 in fees to pay off any amount of the loan so you have to plan to do it all at once at the end. The fees make it so it doesn’t make sense to slowly pay it off bit by bit.
• I originally envisaged being able to pay directly into Aave using their transak fiat onramp. Incorrect. The Aave fiat onramp puts the Crypto into your wallet and you have to pay the fees to get it into Aave. My mistake. Shame.
• Paying off the loan is even more expensive in fees that borrowing in the first place. It really eats into profits or makes it hard to break even in the first place. You won’t realise this until the end of the project so it bites you at the last mile.

I’m glad I did the project. I learnt a lot. But mostly I learnt that I’m allergic to loans. I have a mortgage – that’s 1 loan too many already. From now on, I’ll stick to Dollar-Cost-Averaging in a tiny bit each month and HODLing.

Mid life crisis averted? or is it the biggest opportunity of my life wasted? Time will tell.

There’s a token called hex, which I like because it provides minimal stress. You buy some and choose how long to lock it up. The longer you lock it for, the better interest rate you get. You can’t touch it until the end date. I locked some up for years and it’s a Godsend for someone who apparently doesn’t handle stress very well because there’s no point monitoring it or the markets. It’s not a time vampire. It’s locked, there’s nothing you can do even if you wanted to.

The other great thing about Hex is that, by my reckoning, it has the best utility of all coins. A good chunk of the profits will go towards what is called “The Origin Address”, which is a fund that could work on life extension projects. Richard Heart, the creator of HEX, supports the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit organization with a declared mission to ‘make 90 the new 50 by 2030‘ by supporting tissue engineering and regenerative medicine therapies. That’s my take on HEX anyway, Hex makes no promises and puts no expectations on the work of others.

Richard is one of the most interesting characters in the Cryptosphere. You see the wonky candles in the livestream screenshot above? You think it’s a mistake they aren’t straight? That’s how good at marketing he is.

Update Jul/21: ok so this was pretty spot-on nostradamus of me because 3 months after I wrote this blog post, Richard has initiated a $25 million dollar donation to https://www.sens.org . That’s A LOT of money. The entire HEX project is now validated as being worth it for humanity. I don’t think it’d be fair to call HEX a scam when $25 million has been spent on life extension research. I donated $500 myself to put my money were my month is.

The WordPress theme was original (created in-house, lol). I had open-sourced it and submitted it to the WordPress directory but alas, they didn’t accept it. More detail are at the end of the post.

Here at Bitvolution, we develop websites.

In a nutshell, that means that we sit at our computers all day punching out code for fine folk from around the world. The web is where we’re in our element! We pride ourselves in having the nerdy skills to resolve peoples ideas into websites and solve problems that come up along the way.

If you need a website, we may be able to help. We can develop and support your new site. Take a look at our portfolio of previous work and contact us if you want a quote for your new project.

↓
Bitvolution
code factory
↓

Why you shouldn’t choose Bitvolution to build your site?

How it works

1. Contact – Drop us a line.

2. Discovery – We ask you some questions about your ideas and figure out the website goals.

3. Quote – We tell you how much it’ll cost to create or modify your site.

4. Design – We design a single page mockup and get your feedback – we repeat the design until you’re happy.

5. Development – We turn the design into a fully functional website.

6. Payment – You pay us and we publish your site on the internet, supply you with documentation about your site and sign over the copyrights to you.

Our Portfolio

My Employer: PeoplePerHour.com

www.peopleperhour.com

PeoplePerHour is a online freelance marketplace, take a look, you may find the site useful. I have worked in the development team since November 2008. I am directly responsible for implementing key features such as the homepage, search page, the registration process and the job posting process.

Website: Deanos Tattoos

www.deanostattoos.co.uk

This is a website for a Tattoo studio in Worksop, Nottinghamshire. It showcases a gallery of tattoos done in the purpose built Tattoo studio attached to Deans home.

Technologies: WordPress

Website: Stoke Row Accommodation

www.stokerowaccommodation.co.uk

This website provides pricing and availability information for a studio flat available to rent nightly or weekly in Stoke Row, Oxfordshire.

Technologies: WordPress, jQuery

WordPress Plugin: Bitvolution Image Galleria

www.bitvolution.com/wordpress-image-gallery-plugin/

This plugin changes the way WordPress displays it’s in-built image gallery and turns it into something a little fancier.

Technologies: jQuery, WordPress, PHP.

Website: Greek Island Property Finders

www.greekislandpropertyfinders.co.uk

Are you looking for a property in the Greek Islands? Julia and Petros can use the local language, knowledge and facilities to explore and enquire about property that you might be interested in purchasing. We created this website to help showcase some of the property that they are finding.

Website: Heidi Joyce Gardens

www.heidijoycegardens.com

Heidi is a passionate plantswoman and designer. She wanted a website where her customers could find and contact her and she wanted to showcase her portfolio and post the occasional Blog entry about her gardening.

WordPress Plugin: Fotherplot

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fotherplot/

A simple WordPress plugin that can plot values stored in a custom field against the published-on date of all WordPress blog posts that use the field.

We have submitted the WordPress theme that we made for this website to the WordPress theme directory. It is currently being reviewed, so hopefully it will be available to download soon…

Theme features:

1. This theme is a no-frills fixed-width, two-column WordPress theme. It is based on a central-page with drop-shadow.

2. Licensed under the GNU General Public License (v3).

3. Includes Jquery in HEAD – so posts can use jQuery in their content.

4. WordPress features enabled. e.g. Widget enabled and Custom-background enabled (allows changing background image – uses in-built add_custom_background() function.

5. Theme options page – allows you to upload your own logo.

6. Includes Purisa Light font – See blog post for details.

7. Includes styleguide page to showcase the CSS styles available.

8. Drop-down navigation menu for sub-pages.

Theme details:

1. The page content is displayed on a 940px central-page.

2. The sidebar takes up 25% of the content area (which is narrower than average).

3. This WordPress theme uses the Yahoo CSS reset and 1KB CSS grid framework.

4. The page outline drop-shadows use a single CSS sprite image – as described in this blog post.

Extra theme details:

1. The theme limits the font size in the tag cloud widget – see blog post. This is needed because the sidebar is so narrow.

People who are continuously late are actually just more optimistic. Simply put, they’re fundamentally hopeful.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/07/why-im-always-late.html

(I’m often late) (I love the waitbutwhy website, it’s inspiring)

Currently her wifi is provided by a old Linksys WRT54G (hardware version 2.0). I plugged in the Time Capsule and used Airport Utilities to set it up. I couldn’t get “extend wireless network” to work. I tried all different settings, I tried with a password and without any wifi secrity, I tried updating the firmware of the Linksys WRT54G (from v2.02.7 to 4.20.8). Whatever I tried it just showed up with a horrible little red error bubble that shows “extend wireless network” failure. It could join the network fine, and it could access the internet, but it just wouldn’t extend the network. Eventually, I gave up, guessing that the Time Capsule is just plainly incompatible with the WRT54G. I Googled it and apparently you can only extend a wireless network if the network is already based on Apple products (I should have guessed!).

> Sorry, but Apple designed the “Extend” feature to only work among Apple devices.
> https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4067753

So I wondered if you can do it the other way round. Make the Time Capsule the primary wifi base station and use the WRT54G as the repeater. This kind of made more sense anyway because the Time Capsule is N but the WRT54G is only G, so it would probably be better if the master router is the faster, longer range option.

1. First I swapped the WRT54G firmware for one from DD-WRT which is a brilliant open-source project that adds extra functionality to routers. I followed this guide: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_WRT54G_v2.0.
2. Once I had DD-WRT working, I followed these instructions to turn it into a “repeater bridge”: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Repeater_Bridge.

It worked. The WRT54G doesn’t need anything except a power outlet to do the repeating. This basically saves £79 (the cost of a “Airport Express”, the Apple wifi extender).

If you live in or near Reading, please object online before 4/Jul/12. The Planning Application Reference number is: 12/00905/REG3 and the link is http://planninghome.reading.gov.uk .

The Planning Application Plan

Most of the green in this photo would be lost to a new building

A panoramic photo of the whole park, The left part would be lost. (this photo makes the park look much much bigger than it really is)

This is a view from Google maps (that also shows where we live).

I’m pretty upset by this. If I’m honest the main reason is that it’ll really kill our house price but it’s more than that, I really feel greenery needs to be kept green. On a nice day the park is packed all day. It’d be a real shame to lose it.

Yeah, this ooobuntooo thing is ok but it keeps freezing like a zoo and I have to switch the computer off and on again

I tried Linux Mint 12 instead of Ubuntu and got the same instablility. I was left with no choice other than to leave with Windows set as the default grub option. Oh Ubuntu, you have failed me – You are slower and less stable than Windows XP, on at least 1 machine. In fact Windows was a better experience in terms of speed and stability by a significant distance! Sad days. Ubuntu, please step-up. I love you, but only because you are better than the competition.

Another problem that left a sour taste in my month was that my Uncles old monitor didn’t like grub and switched off after the initial bios splash screen, kept switched off during grub and then switched back on when the OS actually started booting. Luckily I guessed than Ubuntu is usually at the top of the menu and Windows at the bottom so was able to choose the right OS even though nothing was on the screen. but having grub invisible is not a good user experience! And it make it tricky to change the default to Windows (I had to guess the GRUB_DEFAULT value in /etc/default/grub).

This is raw Satay style butternut noodles and raw brownies:

It was delightful. The “noodles” were tasty and surprisingly filling. You would think it tasted like eating a salad, but the recipe cleverly makes it taste more like a real meal. And the brownies are very rich, probably richer than the real thing. They taste like nakd bars.

I don’t think it’s easy to make – I was on a two and a half hour phone call and she was still working away at it when I had finished! It uses a weird machine that looks like torture equipment (a spiralizer).