898
Sam Ragsdale

@samrags #898

Building a new economy for Open Source at Merit Systems. Prev @a16zcrypto. Did my time in big tech, since recovered.
1455 Follower 51 Following
Awesome effort to make the hidden network of open source work legible. OSS is an engine of tremendous economic productivity.

Deep Funding builds a weighted dependency graph of the open source ecosystem to enable fair, automated payments for sustaining developers.

$170k is meaningful, but once fragmented across hundreds of repos, each will receive $50-$5k. The payment is unlikely to cover its own admin overhead.

Our team at Merit Systems is focused on reducing the friction in the last mile and growing the pie. We expect automated incentives for code contributions to hit escape velocity soon. Stay posted for more details.
The zeitgeist is circling back
July Roadmap Update

TL;DR: Jolt is faster, simpler, and more usable than ever.

Huge shoutout to the contributors who made this happen!
/zk
It's time to build (verifiable compute).

Jolt will support many different zkVM configurations in a unified codebase.

OS contributors accelerate Jolt's development but we can parallelize these efforts further. Reach out if you want to build the core infra of the future.
/zk
Jolt has a ton of low hanging fruit waiting for the right harvester.

We're teeing these up in Github issues and we'll regularly refresh. Great way to get your feet wet with ZK and play a role in the impending revolution.

Examples below.
/zk
We're finally releasing Jolt Alpha – the world's fastest zkVM.

Jolt is fully open source. Always has been and always will be.

zkVMs are the closest I've seen to algorithmic magic and I believe they'll allow us to deliver on the promises of web3.
/zk
Anybody know the expected conversion rate on the new Chipotle points system?
Cholesterol is big health propaganda — if you’re not butter maxxing you’re falling behind

*none of above should be taken as health advice*
“yes, I’ll take a whole cow milk, maximum fat latte, thanks”
The Github talent team managed to hit the same repos as the Binance airdrop scams.

Inside job??
Does anyone use a Linux EC2 AMI which comes with some of the normal dev stuff pre-installed?

Ideally my EC2s would boot with zsh / Rust / Git / Go / LLVM
SNARKs on ARM just got ~10% faster.

The primary operation in a SNARK is mul between field elements – maybe 80% of total CPU time. These 50-70 assembly instructions run repeatedly on different inputs to create proofs.

We upstreamed a PR to halo2curves to shorten this hot path.
/zk
Attempting to allocate over 50% of free RAM in chunks results in serious slowdowns around the 25% threshold.

Is the best way to avoid this to use an arena allocator or custom via the allocator API? I'd rather not write unsafe code.

Minimal recreation:
https://github.com/sragss/rust-memory-alloc
garden hoses are a great example of utility unlocked by composability
Looking for the best resources on understanding the costs of dynamic dispatch in Rust.

We’re refactoring some things in Lasso to support Jolt — anecdotally the cost seems tiny, but hoping to understand long term implications
Today we're releasing Lasso 🪢

Lasso enables efficient lookups over massive (seriously, colossal) tables. That means a fast, comprehensible, and modular zkVM backend. 👇
Anyone have a good strategy / library for desktop application transaction signing?

I'd like to be able to sign Walletconnect / MM transactions.

I'm thinking a background server which hosts a light HTML / JS site and allows browser extension signing.
Ferrari allocations are Herbalife for rich people
Users of web2 marketplaces know their rating systems have failed without recourse. Signals derived from these systems cannot be used in conjunction with economic incentives.

Some thoughts on the protocolized web3 edition:

https://www.samragsdale.com/subjective-oracles
Is this “malicious prover” in the room with us right now?