there are no more moats anymore. moats are dead. was talking to a friend of mine who's a CEO of a rapidly growing startup (~$1B revenue). we're small investors. He told me that he has only taken one one-week vacation in the last eight years of his startup. I was like, "Hey this is crazy. You're gonna burn out. This is pretty serious." he said, "Auren, I don't know what to do. We don't have no moat." am like, "What are you talking about? The business is going great!" he said, "We have incredible competitors. We sell AI products and so we're selling to the smartest people in the world. If we don't have the best product that week, they won't buy us. If we don't have the best product for two weeks, our customers will churn. We don't have a moat." I started thinking about it: who does have a moat? There are just no moats anymore. Nobody has a moat. Everyone will switch their software providers in a heartbeat for better product or for cheaper product or for faster product. Anyone will switch. We looked at our 200 companies at Flex Capital and how they're buying software and AI services today. Almost all of their vendors are on month-to-month contracts or on usage-based contracts. That means they can switch immediately. The reason they have everyone on month-to-month is that they have no idea if they're going to be using those tools two months from now. They may not even be using those tools two weeks from now. Everything is changing so fast all the time. The only moat you have in software is that you have the best product. There are just no other moats. It used to be back in the day that you have a mediocre product and you'd be using it for years. we just dealt with all these of mediocre software systems, mediocre cloud providers, mediocre data providers, mediocre APIs. we dealt with it because the switching costs are really hard. Nowadays it's really easy to change software. It's really easy to change APIs. it's really easy to change AI infrastructure. It's super easy. You can change it in a heartbeat and every other vendor will help you switch. Of course, your AI tools will help you switch as well. All these things that used to give very high customer lock-in just don't exist anymore and so they're just no more moats. Moats are dead.  you just need to work insane hours all the time because the only thing you have is your product. goodbye moat, goodbye predictable revenues, goodbye 2010s era.

(1/30) @ethereum basics: Fee Systems, Before and After EIP-1559 Ethereum is limited by the hardware & bandwidth of its nodes; fee systems work to fairly distribute these resources to any interested in using the World Computer The original, and the what, why and wow of EIP-1559

A new scam called 'Address Poisoning' is on the rise. Here's how it works: after you send a normal transaction, the scammer sends a $0 token txn, 'poisoning' the txn history. (1/3)

Think you understand how DELEGATECALL works in Solidity (and the EVM)? How could you exploit this contract and take ownership?

Flipper Zero: The Thread. I received a Flipper Zero a few days ago, and since I'm idling here at my parent's house, for the holidays, I spent a lot of time playing with it. This thread captures my impressions about the device.

Good post by @yizhang7210 pseudofreedom.substack.com/p…

mmap() is a tremendously important Linux syscall. Many open-source and in-house databases and KV storages use it internally to simplify data access. That's why it's so essential for SREs to understand its interaction with Page Cache: biriukov.dev/docs/page-cache…

✨✨Understanding SSTORE2 ✨✨ In this article, I go about talking about Solady's implementation of SSTORE2, looking at each line of YUL SSTORE2 allows storing information gas-cost effectively utilizing contract's bytecode as storage A thread 🧵 1/n mirror.xyz/0x53478A49d7c16D8…

Ethereum is like a blackhole. Art, banking, politics, payments, gaming, communities, entrepreneurs, creators, devs & even real world assets. The bear market likes to hide this fact, but it’s important to take a look behind the curtains…

Let the game begin! 🫡 0xA0Eb20483Cb60213bF944c2C3833bebc9fbc4706 There is 0.1 ETH on the contract. You have time until 2023. Who will get it first? (might add more hints later)

🚨 Watch how I can run up a $1000 bill with a single call to a poorly protected LLM app 🚨 Prompt injection attack against an agent: tricking it into repeatedly calling the LLM and SerpAPI, quickly racking up costs

Today, I decided to do a deep-dive into the age-old gas saving trick: Using ++i instead of i++. You may have seen this trick and asked yourself how a change this trivial and inconsequential could result in a difference in gas usage. Well folks, here's the full explanation 🧵:

Recommend @binarybits' account of driving for Lyft, earning $1,111 over 46 hours (~52% of 100 fares). Conclusion: "The more I’ve looked into it, the more I became convinced that it’s going to take major cost-cutting for Lyft to avoid eventual bankruptcy." fullstackeconomics.com/p/i-d…

Wrote a quick lil script to disassemble EVM bytecode and parse out function selectors. Useful if you want to see what function selectors an unverified contract implements, call `selectors` and then query `sig.eth.samczsun.com` with a batch query. gist.github.com/ItsCuzzo/dbc…

The Most Innovative award went to FedTorch, built by @muxfdz & Minke Zhang. FedTorch allows anyone with a GPU to join a global cluster on a P2P network and pay to use GPU's on a per-job basis through distributed auctions. piped.video/LP47NHw8wtk

Publicly announced ChatGPT variants and competitors: a thread

The GRAND PRIZE winner was AI in Spreadsheets, by @hansonwng and Ethan Carlson. Imagine being able to clean data like a human would, unbound by the rigid logic of spreadsheets. Now watch it actually happen. It's impressive. piped.video/4qakpe-5V8o

for any anon dev, security researcher, or anyone interested in Ethereum security. I maintain a curated list of Ethereum security references, guidance, tools, and more on GH. For me personally, it's the go-to source. I hope it provides value to u as well! github.com/stars/pcaversacci…

Hackers have been able to steal NFTs like magic with a little-known OpenSea feature. It's the newest hack, and multiple millions in Apes have been lost to it already. (🧵1/4)

I like Solidity's move towards the Yul IR pipeline (--via-ir), but unfortunately it is quite difficult to use with Forge today. Much slower test runs and, depending upon your config, it can even break the "warp" cheatcode. Solidity should have a test mode (e.g. like Rust).