Hey everybody it's Sam at Mixed Up Craft thank you for watching my tutorial today. So I wanted to show you how to make these really cute cards using my new dies but without using the mechanism part so I'm using the toppers and just the base part. Now I actually did show this during my launch on craft stash during the facebook live but I wanted to do this into a youtube video so you have it here as well for reference. But those of you that have these dies you'll see here by using the base and the topper you can create these small cards and I said that these would look lovely if you'd maybe done five maybe even ten all together and you could pop them make a little gift box and they could be something that you could sell or they would look really nice as little table placings as well so you could have you know the person's name on here I just think they're adorable and you can see here is the cupcake and it's just delicious so I've got that lovely sparkly cherry I've done the glitter here and then the sprinkles are using a stencil and again you can see that one there with the chocolate sprinkles and I've used my embossing folder on the base here and then I've got this is a slightly shimmery gold there can you see it's gorgeous and I've used some glossy accents on the holly there as well but they stand up just like normal cards but I just thought there's something really nice and very quick and easy to do so let me show you how. Okay so this is the die set this is the six by six pudding and cupcake die set so this is your mechanism to have the pop-up card I'm just going to focus on these dies today so I've already gone and cut one because I'm going to do the cupcake and the pudding together so this is how you create your card blanks this is what we want first of all so you want this die here and then what I've got here is just a piece of A4 paper and I just folded it in half and then I'm going to lay the die down and you want to lay it down so this side comes off the edge and then when you bring it back onto it you want it to catch and you want that score line or the cut line sorry to sit next to that score line that fold there so that isn't going to cut the card so you can see I can see the the cut section there of the die so it's not going to cut that we want it to stay attached all we want it to do is just to cut all around here so I would suggest just to pop in a little bit of tape just to keep it in place so it doesn't move and then I'm just going to run that one through my machine okay so you can get two of these out of a sheet of A4 I'm just going to take that off it should cut through both this is 300 gsm card stock if it is still attached which I think let's open this up here yeah mine's a tad tiny little bit attached I'll just grab my scissors here just along the bottom it's just a bit a thread there's hardly anything there and again you're not really cutting it's just like such as I can feel it's just so thin there we go okay it's a very little waste and we've got our two bases then you want to use this again to cut whatever color you want so I'm going to have this mint green for the base of my cupcake and then I've got the brown here for the base of my pudding because you've kind of lost a little bit of the size of it there because you've kept that attached but it just means when you put that over you get back that whole piece again okay so I'm going to stick these both down okay so I've just stuck the pudding one down so I actually want to emboss this piece so I've got this one here which is my zigzag embossing folder and I'm going to line it up with the bottom of the actual embossed part not the actual folder but just the pattern there and then I'm just going to run that one through my machine okay so now oh yeah it's turned out really well I just thought it was a nice pattern for the bottom of your cupcake you can see now you could ink that up distress it do whatever you want so now I'm going to stick that one onto this one okay so while they're drying I've then gone ahead and cut my toppings so there's the dye that will cut your icing and you could use this as a cupcake as well it doesn't have to be a pudding you change the colors I mean if I was to put that one on top of there you know there's no reason why you don't turn this one into some kind of cool looking cake you've got the cherry here which I've also cut you see it look really nice so but I've got the icing one here and you can see when it in when it die cuts it also embosses this here now I'm going to do a little bit of stenciling with the sprinkles and I'm going to put some glitter into this part here so we'll do that one in a moment so we'll just finish off the puddings and now I'm just going to lay that one right over the top just line it up like so okay so that's that one stuck down and then I've got my holly here which comes from this one where I'm also using this sentiment so a merry Christmas pudding and then the holly so I'm going to stamp the sentiment I'm just going to grab my stamp in platform here okay and then I'm just going to lay that down and you get a really nice sentiment printed there so I'm just going to ink it again so it's really nice and crisp there we go please with that of course you don't have to do it on the icing you could do it down here if you want and just bring the icing up a little bit high it's entirely up to you but now I have my little bit of holly here and I'm just going to pop that on the top though and there you have really quick but very effective Christmas card and it's very cute as well and you just open it up and inside there you've got loads of space to be able to obviously write your message so I really like that and it stands up perfectly as well I think these are just adorable very very cute so that is your Christmas pudding and then we're going to go back to this one here so I have here one of my new stencils and this one has this kind of wallpaper effect on the top there but then you also have sprinkles you've got dots and you've got these kind of wavy lines for the cake but you can do whatever you want with them I'm just going to ink this up just check my color yeah that's a really nice color it's going to work well and I'm just going to start going across this here so I'm just going to do bit by bit like so lift that off there we go you've got your sprinkles it looks so good and then I can see now underneath here so I can see exactly where they are so I'm just going to sit this one I want to come under here a little bit more so let's go maybe there we go if you work it out it will perfectly sit in so that's going to work out just right so now again like so there we go and then I just need to do that little corner at the top here so again just move the stencil around until you find the right piece of the puzzle there we go perfect really pleased with that one and now I'm going to go back over these sections here with my liquid glue and some glitter so just pop the glue right in where that embossed pattern is and then I've got this snow white glitter I seem to be using this a lot at the moment but it's just so nice and I'm just going to sprinkle that over the top top off in the excess and once all the rest of that glue dries clear but now you get your icing through the top and obviously once we've got our cherry on top there it's going to look very delicious makes me hungry okay and now we can attach this piece here so I'm just going to run the glue in this part here so just like the lower part of the cake of the icing sorry and then when you lay this down you'll want to line up so that it just conceals the top bit there so you'll find the top of this piece will be kind of in line with these pieces here where it kind of dips in and see now if I open it up you can see where it covers so see it just kind of hits the tops there and then I've got my sentiment here which I've just stamped and heat embossed with some white embossing powder again from the stamp set here and it's the Happy Bethday cupcake at the top there just popped it on some foam as well and I'm just going to attach that to the bottom and then I'm just going to pop this just off to the left hand side down the bottom there and then with this one I'm going to pop it on some foam as well just to give it a bit more dimension. What I've done is I've just die cut it with a red litter card then I've put a piece of white just copy paper behind so you get that highlight there and now we can stick this one just there and it will sit on that glue that's still drying anyway but there you have your cupcake Happy Bethday cupcake again really nice quick little cards handy ones to just keep in your stash I think they're great for if you've got a daughter or a son to give to their school friends I think that's super cute okay so those are the finished cards I think they look great so I just wanted to show you some other ways to use the dies hopefully this gives you some more inspiration and I look forward to seeing your versions so thanks for watching and I'll be back again very soon bye


Welcome to the Agile People FICAcast. We talk about how to navigate with agility in our organizations. Today we were supposed to talk about how finance can enable agile organization. And Ingla, you said that yeah, I just met beyond budgeting. And so you're a bit enlightened in the subject. So maybe you have something fun to share or something thoughtful to share in this subject. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Martin and I, we attended a morning seminar with Richard Olsson from Beyond Budgeting. And Richard is actually a very good presenter of the subject. And he also has a strong financial background, so it's really interesting to listen to him, I think. But what he kind of started with today is a little bit like, you know, in our trainings we draw back to the why organizations are organized as according to Taylorism and that the world had changed and that. And it's also the case within the finance world. So he told about the story about why we started doing budgets. And it's really going back to UK and their history there, but also the first book on budget, it was written by a guy called Mackinsey. And I think we all know the Mackinsey name today. But that he really wrote this book to get. And he did that in 1923, which is 100 years ago. And at that time you had very many stable issues in like stable currencies. You had local production. You didn't have a global market. There are really long product cycles. The amount and supply. Yeah, and everything you produced, you kind of managed to sale. So it's really very different circumstances, but we still have the budget today. And then we started to talk about the limitation with the annual budgets. And also interesting that in his book Mackinsey pointed at two things. Why you should consider what you are doing with the budgets. And he said the need for consideration and the important on limitations. And he kind of in these two short sentences in the in the later part of the book, he kind of describes what's actually happening on the market today and why budget doesn't really work, but we still continue doing it. Yeah, we're using a tool that was developed for a situation that is no longer applicable today. So what's what is the comfort that the budget is giving us so we still continue with it. Tradition, traditional feeling of control. I would like to emphasize feeling of control. So what did Richard say, what should we do instead? There was one interesting thing and I on. He said, okay, we have agile or agile transformations. And they are sort of methods or tools or approaches. But if you put them in operating system, a fight financial operating system that is not suited for that type of behavior. It will fail. More or less, you need to adapt operating system of the financial structures in order for it to be enabled to succeed. Could be right. I, my first reflection is, okay, I'm not the financial focus person. I don't come from that space. So what, how would I look at it from my point of view, I would not look at it from as an operational system, but the person from a financial sector, of course, they use their perspective as the. Operational system, I think of it as people as being the operational system. And then we put them into a system. So it's a matter of perspective, I guess, but it was an interesting help for me to reflect on how can yeah. Isn't that something that will break or make regardless of if it's an operational system or if it's something else. Yeah, isn't that one part of the problem, because if you have been in a in a large organization that is super budget driven.  And when adjustments according to budget needs to happen. It's, it's more or less like they play a set of cards and remove some of the cards more or less. And that card is a seven that's, that's nice to somewhere else. So you lose a bit the people side of the system. Yeah, and that is also connected to what you were talking about the ring and the old operational system. Then if you continue to use that analogy. The old operation system is tuned to efficiency. To make things efficient to make sure that we have throughput and in an efficient way follow processes and structures. But in a volatile environment where we are right now. That is not what we want. We want to affect effectiveness. Want to do the right thing, not in the right way. Or follow the process, so to speak, and a budget sort of blocks us from. From doing that, then you need other types of approaches to handle financial. Systems and he also presented a few ways to handle that and order them in a good way. That was interesting also to see. I'm looking forward. I would like to attend this course that we have soon. I think I can learn a lot. I think that the key I was speaking in the wrong microphone previously so I said simultaneously. Martin that it's down to feeling that we are in control and that's why it feels good to have a budget and so on. And isn't it the same way when it comes to not keeping our eyes open to that we are in complexity. We think we can plan things in projects and then we can have budgets for projects. There are still kind of control mechanisms for feeling even more secure even though we somewhere no one realized that we never really turns out as we think it does. We end up in some kind of chaos with delays and task forces and so on. So I think it's the strength of it that it provides control and feeling of control but it's a false feeling. You still need it to some extent. You need to have some sort of forecast. You need to understand how much money you have but you need to be flexible. I guess I died. The money where they are needed now based on the situation at hand so you need to be adaptive. And if you create budgets you're not flexible anymore because you're sort of boxing the money where there's where you think that they will be needed. And you're forecasting that for 18 months before it actually is needed maybe. I can see that the old system of having a budget it also puts on a lot of control in order to function. And when I have tried to or when I have been coaching people to take away that control and give that control to the people to take bigger responsibility. That's a challenge also. Sometimes it's hard to get the people and the teams to take that responsibility and at the same time having the behavior of the budget holder to behave in a different way and to coach people in order to be able to feel empowered to take that budget. It's quite easy if you say we are three developers and we create this app and we get money from App Store. It's quite easy to take the whole responsibility of how much money do we have, how much can we spend, what's the investment of this feature we would like to build. But if it's a bigger system than that it's tough to make teams aware and also to dare to take that responsibility. I, it really depends how you do it because today, I know Beatte Boknes he gives this example from from a pharmaceutical company about traveling. Instead they removed all the travel policies, but they made it all transparent. So everyone could see how much you had spent. And then it's kind of, I don't know, in Swedish you would say self-justice, what is the English word? Self-regulated. Yeah, self-regulated. Where people act, they take the responsibility, they act responsible. And Richard also gave some examples of that today from when you make people aware of costs and that people are much more responsible when they get the responsibility. It really depends how you do it. But what I hear sometimes in many organizations is that managers say that they give responsibility, but in practice the systems doesn't go there. The system is not designed for them to take this responsibility. And it might be of historical and company culture. And I think that is what you highlighted, Daniel, and what you built on to English is one of the biggest transformational challenges. I think to move away from a system that is quite controlled and maybe boring and not that fun to work in, but it's quite convenient. So when moving in such an old-fashioned organization, you can feel that you can have lots of frustration on that system and you feel that you're not allowed to do things and so on. But then if you too quickly get that responsibility, then it's kind of difficult and it doesn't feel really good because how can you trust on me to take that decision? I think that just points at the journey that's needed. It is a transformation journey with all these things. We can't just move from day one to day two to different behaviors because the system doesn't allow it, the culture doesn't allow it. People are stuck in the old culture, for instance, and they need some guidance and some time to transform and transfer to the new way of working. It is more convenient the old system in some ways, frustrating and limiting, but kind of get used to it. So you need to understand and gradually be able to take the new kind of responsibility, I think. What do we do if people don't take the responsibility then? You need to give them all these possibilities to take it, but they don't dare to. You need to give them the foundation and enable them to be able to. You need to trust them to take it, but you of course need to make sure that it's possible for them to take it. Baby steps, small steps. So as I see it, you need to make this maybe a new type of leadership because they are used to punishment, maybe. So they dare. So you need maybe to implement a learning structure and talk about failures and these classic we have in software development, but it needs to be part of budget and money. So it hurts us more because it's actual money that we maybe have lost in a certain learning, but on the long term, it's a fantastic investment because it's a good learning. So that's a bit what I'm after. We also need to help them and to show that you're not punished and you can make mistakes even though it's direct money that it is about. Yeah, and for the leader as well to be vulnerable and saying that I have I have done mistakes as well in these from a financial perspective for instance so so I'm what what I don't have more information than you so so I'm not it doesn't make sense that I take those decisions and I have been in the past maybe and I've messed up so you should feel the trust for me that you can. You won't get punished because you're likely to make an even as good decision as I did, for instance. I also think it's about training because you know if you're going to take financial decisions you also need to have background to be able to take that. Of course, skill and skillset it's important, of course, but I was what I was what I'm on meaning to being enabled. We need to have a developer skillset and you need to have some person to interact with in order to take those steps by yourself does not just happen. Here's your your budget or whatever you call it. Go and play. You need some sort of framing of course. But when I talk starting to when I'm talking here I'm starting to think about the book humanocracy. It covers financial parts in it in itself in very different type of companies and I'm thinking especially at the end of that book. They are talking about Michelin is called Michelin tire company creating tires. I'm remembering I think I remember I don't it's been a long time I've read it but I think it was in in that they have an example of a transition from a very traditional type of company and manufacturing structures and ownership of different things on on a hierarchical and how they change the behavior and also in the financial area if I don't recall incorrectly, which I thought was very interesting because they they are explaining different challenges that happened through the way there because it's sort of a storytelling chapter. That's what's very interesting because there will of course be backlashes when you interact and change it's not yet you can just if it's an operating system. It's not super easy to change an operating system. It's sort of the base. So where do we start them in that book. He also describes a corporation called new car, which is still company. And I think that is a very good example to start. Yeah, they have grown into a large corporation, but they have built even if it's even if it's an all company. It was founded in 1940, I see. It's still very untraditional to if you compare to companies in that from the same. Yeah, very self deciding sections or manufacturing plants that are very and they're, yeah, it's a steel manufacturing company. And they have a very different type of salary approaches where it's more easily to compute, I guess, the feedback mechanism for for producing and improving things but they're very open and free to how to go into different type of initiatives. Anyone can start to think of, okay, how can we improve this furnace thing that melts all the metal so that we can start to be in a better way so and people can go out on business trips to other type of plants. It's much easier to actually act and do things, which makes them more resilient, I guess, to changes. So the words that I was missing from Richard also on stock, by the way, resilience, he did never talk about resilience. Start, what is the first thing you should stop them budgets. I don't think you can just stop doing budgets then. Okay, but we don't have fiscal budgets. You can have budgets that stretch through the time when they are needed of horizon of where we can see. Couldn't it be that we keep the budgets that we have but we start to iterate. We start to follow up the budgets more frequently and start new types of behaviors and how we talk around the budget and maybe we can start some adjust in a quarter or in a month or whatever it could be because we see new opportunities or new challenges or whatever it could be. Beyond budgeting, they talk about you need to because the budget really has three purposes, which is target setting forecasting and resource allocation. And you need to separate them into three different processes. So the target setting is really what we would like to happen. And, you know, we have talked a lot about separating that targets from payroll and so on. And then he covered that today also. Because I think most companies are very much driven by sales profit and loss. So when it comes to resources like a new onboarding employees on board it, they are not even willing to buy a new laptop but they give a very, very old laptop that been used for many years. So, and there is no willingness even like the employee complains the laptop is not working properly. The battery is draining but the answer that the person get is like we are very stringent on the budget so we don't have an allocation. So that's that's quite sad. That's the fact it's like because when we talk about finance, the company is surviving with projects when they get a new tender. That's where the revenue is coming in but if they like do not know how to manage it, then it's very difficult for the employees in that company. So how an organization can change the mentality. Yeah, it's a challenge. I can see that we are just touching the surface of this extremely big subject. I think we should dig into it, especially since we have the new training being launched in Business Agility Foundation. So I think we should talk more about this subject but the FICA for today is over. So now it's time to go back to what we are doing to fulfill our budgets at the moment where we are working. So thank you very much for today. Thank you. Thank you. Good day. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye bye.


Hi and welcome. My name is Adam Helens. I'm a clergy consultant as well as a psychologist from the tiny country of Belgium. The topic I'm about to expose today might be a bit polarizing, we could say. I'm sure that most of you have heard about blockchain or crypto in general, but the thing is there is so much buzz and fuss going on that it's hard to have a clear understanding of what such decentralized systems really are. So that would be my task for today. Try to provide you with a more balanced, more realistic understanding of what decentralized systems are and what you can achieve with them. Lucky us, it turns out that closure as a framework, as a way of thinking, becomes very useful for that kind of task at hand. The word decentralized is not new at all, but it certainly has become pretty well known in the field of computation for the past few years. But really, it's just the act of trying to avoid concentrating all our things, all our stuff, all our resources into one area, whether it's speaking physically or conceptually. Why, you may ask? Well, let me show you this picture. This is the Evergreen boat that blocked the whole US canal not that long ago. And this whole thing has resulted in billions of dollars of losses because a huge part of the world's logistic was simply halted. Now, sure, the whole canal remains a good idea in spite of that kind of incident. But the thing is, it shows that centralized systems introduce single point of failures and usually at more than one level. And so as a society, it would benefit from trying, at least trying, to avoid that kind of scenarios. Whether we are talking about, you know, the distribution of goods or services or politics or economics or education, the common denominator that I see in all that is that we tend to centralize truth and trust. Now, putting those two words in the realm of computation, truth would be data. Effectively, you don't really want your data to be represented by one single source of truth. Because when that source of truth starts to misbehave, then there is nothing you can do about it. And your data is essentially brittle and vulnerable. Trust would be more about permissions. We want to have a clear model, a clear idea of what individuals, what entities owns what capabilities over some pieces of data. But it's not enough. You also need security. You need the guarantee that those permissions will be enforced. And once again, you don't want one single entity to be behind that kind of guarantees. Because otherwise, as soon as this entity stops behaving in your own best interest, then once again, there is nothing you can do about it. If we had a way to decentralize those three aspects in the field of computing, we would reach something that is commonly known as the Internet of Value. You could say that it's a network that's effectively this public database, public as in anyone can read from it. And it is massively replicated. So we don't have a single source of truth, we have many. And it's a peer-to-peer network where, in theory at least, any peer is just as good as the other one. And it's a permissionless network. You don't want to be asking permission from anyone if you want to join in and take part, because then you could be vulnerable to censorship. And of course, people will try to cheat the system as always. So you have to have a secure protocol that guarantees that even in the presence of such malicious, malevolent peers, the whole network still performs as intended and securely. If we had that kind of network, then the word value in Internet of Value could have two meanings. First, it's data, right? But this data becomes so reliable that it can be seen as an asset. Asset as in the sense of being useful, or even having a monetary value. And this opens the door to so-called digital assets. Now, we don't have to go that far, of course. If you don't care at all about digital assets, I'll be mentioning NFTs later, for instance, non-fungible tokens. If you don't like that kind of stuff, we don't have to go there, but that's how far you can go, essentially. One implementation of such an Internet of Value is the convex network. It's not the only one, I'm not going to lie. There are quite a bunch of projects trying to achieve this vision, but this one has been designed to be especially energy efficient, because many networks tend to waste resources and energy. And it runs on the GVM, which is really convenient for us, clodgerists, because then we can access this stack and use it, any part of it. And what is more important here is that convex has been designed and really based on what we could call the clodger philosophy. And it's super important, because it is kind of rocket science. It's a really complex piece of tech, a really complex domain, where we mix networking and distributed systems and databases and cryptography and all that. So if we could borrow ideas that you already know, then it would certainly be a lot easier to understand. What I mean here by the clodger philosophy is fairly uncontroversial. First, we like to use a fairly small number of data types, because we have shown many, many times that we can build very complex data models if we are careful about the basic data types, the basic building blocks that we chose to do so. And those data types are even more versatile when we can combine them. Like in maps, for instance, keys can be literally anything. And this strong emphasis on immutability is something that is really important for that kind of system where truth and time have quite precise meanings. So let's start with the very first step, the data itself. Here we can see decentralized data values, or also known as cells for short. Now we can see that they have this strange familiar aura to you, because yes, they have been modeled directly on clodger data types. So I don't have to explain what are symbols and vectors and keywords and maps and all that. We do have a couple extra ones, like we have blocks, which are effectively kind of byte arrays. In this network, we have accounts and those accounts have addresses. We can see here address 42, for instance. But yeah, overall, we are pretty good to go as such. Now why are they called decentralized? How are they different from just clodger types? Well, it would pull down to design and implementation. Because we will care later about persistency in the network, we had to embed that into the design of those types. Notably, they have a very dense and very efficient binary encoding. And this binary encoding tends to match quite closely the type that it represents. So if you give me a vector, for instance, an encoding of a vector, I mean, I will be able to very quickly deserialize it into an actual vector, because the number of steps is quite reduced. And vice versa for serialization. And you know how clodger types have, these collections have structural sharing? Well, you could borrow that kind of logic for the encoding themselves. Where if you have, say, a vector once again with a very large item in it, you don't have to actually embed this, the encoding of this item into the vector, you could just store a reference. And a reference here would be the hash of the binary encoding of that item. That will become a bit more clear in a minute or so. Imagine this vector of integers from 0 to 100,000. So we have effectively 100,000 elements. Yet if we look at its binary encoding, it's only 70 bytes. So what happens here is that obviously we don't have those ints here embedded in the vector.  And what this gives us are fast incremental updates. So the state of the network could be gigabytes. One day it could even be a terabyte. What happens here is that even though the state could be that big, if I modify it, for instance, and I send its binary encoding to you, you'll get that kind of very compact, very dense definition. And you'll be able to very quickly spot what is different. Most likely just one reference has been changed, for example. And then you can ask me back for it. And we can go back like this, back and forth a few times. And very quickly, even though the whole state might be huge, you will be able to get up to date with me. And this is super important for networking, obviously, but also persistency. Just a quick example here, because we do have some Clojo libraries that you can use for many things like creating those cells. We have this star macro here where we can use Clojo notation to create those convex cells. And many functions, I mean, Clojo functions, standard ones, tend to work with those. And for the rest, we have some alternatives that we would expect, like conge, get, and associated, and all that. Now, it turns out that if we take care about those cells and implement them, then implementing a database, just a plain local database, becomes a lot easier. Let me introduce you to H. H is a database, you know, I think it's a thousand lines of code, really, because it leverages the cells and those binary encodings and everything I was just talking about. It is effectively immutable, it's append-only, and it is content-addressable. What that means is that here, you could picture it as being a huge map, essentially, where when we store values, we store their binary encodings and keys, well, keys are hashes of those binary encodings. What I've just described is known as a miracle tree, a kind of tree where keys, I mean, are hashes of the values that it points to. Although here it's more of a graph, because remember that those binary encodings might themselves contain references, that is, hashes to other encodings in the database. And that kind of key value store slash map is really convenient to use because what you can do when you want to retrieve, once again, a very large value, you can just retrieve that top binary encoding and you're good to go, right? Then when you need to access one particular item that might be a reference, then only you can fetch it from disk when you actually need it. And what you don't need can be garbage collected. What this whole scheme allow you to do, no pun intended scheme, what this whole scheme allow you to do is to handle data that is way bigger than memory, right? Once again, just a quick example here of how we could create such a database just even for local use, you would point to a file, then you would create any kind of cells that you want, and then you would simply use the write function on your cells, and that's it, they are persisted. And then when you want to retrieve them, you would use the read function and provide the hash of whatever stored cell you want to retrieve. So very convenient, but you would feel a bit naked if you wanted to design a networked database. What is missing is to do some sort of computation, to have some sort of way of executing code for transactions like in any common network database. And this is the primary goal behind the convex virtual machine. It's an execution engine, Turing complete, and deterministic. Later we'll see that it's really important that the transactions that we issue are entirely reproducible. Like any kind of execution engine, we have a set of fundamental operations, we can create some constants, we have branching, we can define some stuff in some functions, but of course as a developer, writing transactions and code, and later I'll be using the word smart contracts, you don't want to write all that into that kind of assembly, if you will. You want to have a higher level language. And what kind of language would be suited for manipulating Clojure-like data types? Let me introduce you to convex LISP. Convex LISP is effectively almost a subset of Clojure, given some additional utilities and a couple of minor differences. And here is just an example. So let me stress the fact here that this is not Clojure, this is an example of convex LISP. And you can tell right away that it looks oddly familiar, because yeah, both are just so similar. Now I'll be coming back to this example a bit later. What I'm quite thrilled to say is that convex LISP is probably the very first decentralized LISP in the history of computing. I say probably because it has been mentioned before when it comes to distributed systems, but this particular flavor of LISP has an actual on-chain compiler, something that you don't seem to find. So you have lambdas, you have eval, you have macros. If you remove any of that, like a LISP without eval or a LISP without macros, it would look a lot less like a LISP, right? So probably when LISP was mentioned, it was more about just syntax and S expressions, and this could be effectively the very first actual LISP when it comes to decentralized systems. You would use that kind of execution engine to alter the state of the network, the state of this public database. But what is it, this state? Once again, you could picture this huge map where we have a whole bunch of stuff and not only accounts. Let's focus on that because accounts are the minimum through which we submit transactions. If we had an account, then you could run this transaction here, Def Hello Reclosure. And if we inspect your account after that, then we can see this kind of map where we have a whole bunch of key values and not only the environment, but being this map where we can recognize our Hello symbol pointing to this Reclosure keyword.  Accounts are, as I said, very important and there are actually two flavors of those. There are user accounts and those are operated by humans and they are linked to a key pair. If we come back to this description here, we can see that, yes, it has a public key, a 32 byte public key. So what happens is that when you create an account, you generate a key pair, you provide the public key to be stored on the network, and then, of course, you keep the private key for you. And so when you issue a transaction in code, then you sign it using your private key. There's no one like a peer who can very easily verify it because your public key is on the network and if it's the case that indeed you have signed it and submitted it and it has been verified, then your transaction can be executed. Then we have actors. Actors are fully automated. They have no keeper meaning that no one can issue any kind of transactions on their behalf. They still account so they have an environment. They can store some states and values and they become really useful when at initialization you define some functions for altering that environment because this will lead us quite naturally to smart contracts. Let me give you an example. Here is how we can create a new actor by using the deploy function and you provide quoted code that is being called and executed when this account has been created and in the context of the new account. What will happen here is that it will define a symbol here, myState and then a function setState taking an X argument and essentially rebinding myState to X. Just a function for altering the environment but only if the color of this function is account 42. Believe it or not, as simple as this example might look those are debounding blocks that you find everywhere in any kind of smart contract no matter how complex. You always have a notion of state and a notion of an interface that is here just plain old function describing how this state is being altered and who can do it. Let me show you an actual example that you have already seen. This bit of code for creating so-called NFTs, non-fungible tokens. They are a type of digital asset. We have an actor here that we import and then we can call its create token function and provide this map. In this map, believe it or not, is effectively the NFT that we will meet. An NFT could be really any kind of data. In the end, it just bites. And if we have a look at what could be the state of this actor at least a simplified overview, then it would be something like this. Probably a map where we have some ideas pointing to those so-called NFTs or data and we just assign a sense of ownership on top of that. You can see here that account 42 supposedly owns this NFT. But of course it's not that simple. The whole idea here is that the actor himself allows you to do many, many things especially when it comes to ownership. For instance, you can decide who can transfer it, who can destroy it, who can modify it. Although the data can be quite simple, when you have that kind of guarantee provided by such a decentralized network in that kind of interface, then it can become a digital asset. Now, this was really important in the history of convex. This library has been written by Mark Engelberg, by the way, who is also the author of Instapars. And it has shown that you simply don't get that level of sophistications on other networks. Because the level of abstractions that you get from claudial-like constructs is really unmatched in expressiveness. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I'll go very quickly about the last missing piece here that is consensus. So what happens when you actually issue a transaction? Well, it gets received by a peer and this peer sends it to like 10 other peers. And each of them will again send it to a whole bunch of other peers. So your transactions is being gossiped through the network and very quickly the whole network becomes aware of it. Not only your transaction, but all other transactions being emitted concurrently all the time. And of course, it's a bit messy. All those transactions appearing all the time continuously. So because they are independent, they have no intrinsic order. So peers have to vote on an ordering and agree on one. So they do that kind of continuously until they have agreed on some order up to some point. And then they know that they can execute those transactions at least. And that was what I was referring to earlier when I was talking about being deterministic is that if you and I have the same state and receive the same instructions and we execute them in the same order, then we have to reach the same result. Makes sense. Now, why would peer do that? Why would they do that kind of work, I mean? If we have a glimpse once again at our account from earlier, we can see this balance. This is a balance in convex coins. Because when you issue a transaction, you do pay, so to say, some fees in convex coins. That's native token. In other networks like Bitcoin, those tokens are kind of numbers that you shuffle around. But here they have an intrinsic value because they are used to reward peers and that's why the network is kind of self-sustaining. If you want to read more about it, then you can hit the website and find the white paper and you'll find all you need to know about the convergent proof-of-stake algorithm and many, many other things. So to recap, if you want to build a decentralized application based on everything of the site, there are two sites to it. First, there is what happens on the network. You have to write the smart contracts in convex lisp, deploy them on the network. And if you want to learn more about this, you can once again hit the website and have a look at the developer section. There you find everything you need to know about convex lisp. You'll find some examples like this voting example here and the kicker, in my opinion, the sandbox, where you can create an account on the network. It's completely free of charge because it's a test network and you can issue some transactions. It will provide you this rich interactive, ripple-like experience, the best way to learn about all that. And then you have what happens on the client side. You have to have some way to talk to the network to provide some user experience, usually. We've seen a bit of closure today, but we have a whole set of libraries that you can use for creating some cells, as we've seen, and many, many things, and notably for talking to the network. You can connect to the current test alpha network and issue some transactions like calling those smart contracts that you have written. Alright, reaching the end of this presentation, I'd like to thank Mike Anderson, he's the founder and the director of the convex foundation and he's the one who first imagined this really elegant design and first implemented, so he sure deserves our credit because we can see in the end that it's quite straightforward to build decentralized application and when you use the Clojure philosophy to see how it looks like and how it behaves and what you can do, then I hope that it makes a lot more sense to you. The convex foundation has been established so that the whole project remains open source and what we do is that we try to make it self-sustaining, community-driven as much as possible. We try to reward people who actually contribute to it and make this dream come true, so to say. Sure, come and have some fun, you can help us build everything I was talking about today, improve the database, the execution engine and all that. You can help us with writing some libraries, Clojure ones, convex list ones. There's certainly a lot of things to do when it comes to dev tooling.  You could try to decentralize that one thing in your application and in the end it's all about the people of course. So do join us, we want to spread those ideas, their novel, both in the Clojure community and in the blockchain decentralized community. So yeah, come and have some fun. Thank you very much, it has been a pleasure. I can get really quite passionate about those topics. So let me leave you with this slide here where you can find us. We have a community discord, do come there if you have more questions about the project as a whole. If you're more interested about the Clojure integration then we have this convex channel on Clojureians and of course have a look at the repos. My name is Adam Helens, it has been a journey pleasure and all I can do now is I guess just wish you an excellent conference. Thank you.


in Saturday's press conference. Again, Priti Patel excelled in demonstrating, I mean, the complete uselessness. I mean, not just of this particular government, but of the British state, right? So she took the opportunity to celebrate a drop in certain crime figures. Let's take a look. Now, provisional data from police shows a fall in overall crime during this coronavirus outbreak. Car crime, burglary and shoplifting are all lower than the same period from this time last year. Now, Priti, why might burglary, car crime and shoplifting have gone down in this period? So I was thinking, you know, when I was planning this show, maybe we should get a criminologist on and we should talk in depth about what it is that affects rates of shoplifting and burglary and car crime. But then I realized, no, I'm just going to use my common sense, right? Shoplifting goes down when all the shops are closed, burglary goes down when everyone's in their houses and car crime goes down when everyone's cars are parked outside their houses and they're in their houses. I mean, it's the idea that you could as you know, standing up in front of the nation, you're the home secretary is one of the most important jobs in government. And you were there in the middle of a lockdown when literally all shops have been told they have to close and boasting that shoplifting figures have gone down. I mean, Ash was talking about people, you know, not doing their homework properly. I mean, her started up there and saying, you know, we should all be really grateful that shoplifting gone down is absolutely nuts. It's like killing half the population and saying murders have gone down. Aaron, I want to go to you. I know you love this topic of sort of like how neoliberalism has made the state completely useless. I mean, what do you make of Pretty Patel, you know, putting that all on show in these two press conferences? Well, can you imagine what a sort of minister of the interior from China must think if they were to be shown that? And this is the British home secretary. I mean, they must think, sure, that's not possible. Really? This is the country which has the world's oldest and still largest public service broadcaster, employs thousands of people, the BBC, has the world's one of the world's largest employers, the NHS, certainly the world's largest integrated healthcare system, has achieved innumerable bureaucratic and technological firsts for better or worse as a country. And the response to a massive rise in domestic violence is a campaign hinged around you drawing a heart on your hand.    The first commercial airliner that was built was, it was a British jet. The world's first commercial nuclear reactor for civilian purposes was built in Britain, I think in the early 1950s. These are really impressive achievements. The same state is asking people to draw a heart on their hand. I mean, this is the extent to which neoliberalism has just collapsed in his state capacity and problem solving has to go back to problem solving, put the ideology to one side, put the politics to one side. How do you solve certain problems? Could be in work poverty, could be homelessness, could be domestic violence, could be child poverty, whatever. These are problems we need to solve as a society, and they can't solve them. They can't solve them. The solutions are so absurd, they're actually increasingly ridiculous. They're funny. You know, another story, you know, we talked about it last week was Deloitte running one of the testing centers. Deloitte, they're accountants. This is like me asking, this is like me asking Burger King to run psychotherapy for people who've been through trauma.  But the point is, there are people at the top of government who are, you know, very close to senior directors and partners in Deloitte, so it happens, right?  It means Deloitte are doing the testing for your healthcare services and your home secretary is telling people to draw a heart on their hand. This is what you expect in a play school, not government. And Deloitte also, it turns out, weren't, you know, surprise, surprise, very good at doing testing. So it was the Deloitte Center in Chessington World of Adventures where people had gone to get tested and then they sent the results to the wrong people. I also just want to mention that I love it when you both do it is you sort of think, how would other countries see us and how would we talk about other countries if this had happened there? And I think this, the shoplifting example is a really good one. It's like, you know, when people talk about late stage Soviet communism where they're like, oh, because it was all based on targets. It had these disincentives.  The idea that, you know, you would have a home secretary who would be boasting that shoplifting went down because she'd closed all the shops. I mean, even that you wouldn't believe if it was on like one of those, I'm watching Chernobyl at the moment. So it's full of these ideas that you've got all these disincentives. If it was in a show about a decrepit, declining empire, you wouldn't believe it. It would seem too on the nose. If that wasn't a political satire show in Iran, the audience wouldn't believe it. I'm being deadly serious, but come on.  Come on. My friend, let me tell you something about the running of that empire.  I mean, the thing about the thing about what this government can get away with, Matzab cousin, a friend of the show, loves to say the conservatives can get away with playing politics on easy mode. And I think what we're seeing during this crisis is that in particular, since Boris Johnson took over as leader of the party and as Prime Minister, that they're able to play it almost as a tutorial. So you've got these very senior journalists who are helping them along baby step by baby step, even sometimes supplying the very lines and the arguments that a government is simply too dumb to come up with themselves. And meanwhile, you've got staggering levels of, you know, venality of incompetence of outright stupidity.  Now, any fourth estate worth its salt, and especially one which holds itself in as high as a regard as the Westminster lobby does for itself, should be pointing these things out. And instead what we've got is, you know, political editor of the BBC saying, look, Boris Johnson is being very mature, very reasonable here, very tough decisions. We're not going to get literal paradise on earth where everyone is immortal. And there are songbirds and angels, you know, he's being very reasonable. That's what that headline is.  I don't know which is the stupidest thing.


What's going on everyone? Sam here with late sports cards ripping one box of 2022 tops dynasty formula one racing hobby for UW. So good luck here. You let's see what we got in here for you, buddy dynasty See something crazy. It's a one-on-one one-on-one with a nutty patch Is Charles Leclerc there he is Ferrari's golden boy Very nice congrats on that one. Gotta love pulling the clerk. It's got kind of a nice signature, too. I don't hate it.  Thanks again for the support over here. We'll get that right out to you