What this is is a community discussion. And we have people who are core devs. We have cat herders here. We have all kinds of people who are from different organizations who bring different skills to this. And what we're going to talk about is Ethereum 1x. And so this is an open format. This is a fishbowl format. And so what that means is people from the audience can join us. And we have this chair right here and this chair right there. We're going to try to keep open. So if you come to the front and there's someone there, you can kick them out if you would like to join. But I expect this to fill in more as more and more people want to participate. If you want to keep participating, you can move into one of these chairs and just stay. Maybe you won't get kicked out. But I think anyone could be kicked out. So sorry. But yeah, just keep in mind you're free to participate. So we're going to have, I guess, we'll try to keep a mic over here if anyone wants to come. And we'll put a mic right here. And so I guess we'll get started. The key to this is we're going to start with what does the community want to talk about? What do developers want to talk about? What do core developers want to talk about?  And then maybe you guys can get started with the conversation. Sounds great. Should we do intros with some of the people up here who are core devs and stuff just so people are familiar? Well, everyone in the circle gets an intro. Oh, perfect. Yes. If you're going to sit in the circle, then introduce yourself. OK. So let's kick it off. I'm Jamie Pitts. I work with magicians. I also work at the Ethereum Foundation. That's a net.  Hi, guys. I'm Annette, and I'm working with Ethereum magicians. And I'm helping out with operations and organizing events and making sure that all those people and all those important discussions will happen. Cool. So we'll leave it to you. Hudson, you want to introduce yourself? So my name is Alexei Ahunov. I've been working on Turbogest client, which is derivative of Go Ethereum. And also this year, I've also been involved into research and development into state-trend and stateless clients, which are all these things I'm still doing. Hey, I'm Hudson Jamison. I work with the Ethereum Foundation and with the Ethereum catherters. I also am one of the organizers of the bi-weekly core developer meetings, along with a few other people who we all help out. I'm not a core dev, but I try to keep up with the tech so that I can facilitate the meetings accurately. I've been doing that for the past three years roughly. So I know a lot about the process, EIPs, the hard fork decisions, things like that. So that's how I feel like I will contribute today. I also have a talk tomorrow on the main stage right after Vitalik. I think it's at 10 on ETH1X. So if you want to see a more formal presentation that I have slides for and stuff, feel free to come to that tomorrow. That's the end of my shilling. Hey, I'm Tim Beko. I work with the Pegasus team on the Hyperledger Basin client. I'm a product manager, not a core dev, but I do attend the calls to try to wrap my head around the process and the EIPs. And I'm also part of the catherters. I'm Rai, also at Pegasus, working on Hyperledger Basu. Yeah. Hi, I'm Martin Svende, and I work for the Ethereum Foundation with security issues, Ethereum Infrastructure Mainnet. And also, I'm one of the coders on Go Ethereum. Hey, so I'm Peter, and I'm currently the lead dev of Go Ethereum. That's about it. Who's this guy? I'm Vitalik. I advised a couple ICO projects. You did Bitcoin magazine before. Hello. Technically, I'm not the part of the core team. But since I'm sitting here, I'm doing the notes and the clients with the nation state cryptography for the Russian central bank. Hey, guys, my name is Cody Born. I'm a developer on the Azure blockchain team at Microsoft. Hi, I'm Lukas. I'm just a random software developer who worked on DApps. And I'm a bit humbled sitting in this magic round here. OK, so what do you guys want to talk about? What do you all want to talk about? If there's anybody who has a topic that relates to Ethereum 1X, please come forward with it. Do we have something? OK, come on down. Come on down. I also have a topic. OK, how about you first? I'm worried about the scalability of Ethereum 1. So we can't even reprice opcodes without breaking anything. I mean, we had this discussion with the 1283, I think it was the problem. And now we have the same problem again with the 1884. So as a developer, I would be really interested in seeing some invariance that I can work with so that my code that I write and deploy on the Ethereum main net doesn't break in the future. And I mean, in the case of the 1283, the developers weren't following best practices. But now in this 1884 case, yeah, people wrote code. They followed every guideline that was there. And now the code breaks. So yeah, I can kind of give a quick intro to this before we have some comment from some of the other developers. But we had an EIP. And basically, in order to make the blockchain a bit safer to prevent from, and please correct me because I'm going to butcher this, from like DDOS attacks, we repriced an opcode. And in repricing that opcode, if you have a smart contract that relies on that opcode being a certain price, that contract may break.  I believe Aragon was one of them. And those are going to be able to be upgraded. But it's a little bit annoying. There's other contracts that may have the effect of having funds locked in them. That's a little bit scary of a term. So what we did is, in order to prevent this from being another scenario where it's like, we can't get our funds out, things like that, what we determined was, if people come to us after we implement the CIP, and they say something like, hey, this is messing my contract up, we're going to research and come up with a solution to work around so that they can have their contracts work again and those limited amount of cases. Did I get that almost right? OK. Yeah, Martin can also comment a little bit more on that. Yeah, you brought up two cases, 1283 and 1884. And they're kind of different, because 1283 was made to improve the life of deaf developers, making it cheaper. Whereas 1884 has been added as basically a security precaution to rebalance the op codes. And the former one, we skipped that, so as not to break stuff. It's being implemented now again in the form of EAP2200, but with minor modifications so that it won't start introducing new vulnerabilities into contracts. And in general, the idea that has been floating around a lot is that if we do changes to the EVM, we will also do versioning so that these new features will be opt in. However, it really kind of makes no sense to have opt in features for security features where we want to protect the base layer. So thus, we're rolling out 1884. And the thing is this will affect a lot of contracts, but in the large majority of cases, it will only affect them a little bit. Like most use cases that are affected can be solved by adding a bit more gas at the beginning. And I think that would cover like 95% of all the cases where it's going to be affected. But then there are some particular flows where it's already encoded that it's an automated transfer into something else. And that flow between two contracts can thus be broken in a way that is not fixable, I mean not fixable by the initiator of the transfer or the operation. And so that much has been, we know that this might break things. The question is how hard will it break and how much pain will it bring? Because I think that in many cases, contracts are actually upgradable. And if you have a set of contracts which suffer from this, you can actually redeploy it and fix it that way, which further brings down the number of actual broken flows. And if there, if it can be evidenced later on that hey, we have actually these particular instances which are broken, cannot be upgraded, and cannot be salvaged in any way, then we can look at okay, is what fixes are needed to solve these instances? And there are a couple of ways that may help in most of them. I think for example, if we lower the cost of a log operation, that will solve a lot of the issues. But it remains to be seen exactly what kind of patches will be needed for the, yeah, to get the maximum coverage of the rescuing or what do you wanna call it? So maybe just a step back, I thought it might be useful to just offer an introduction as to like the specific gas cost increase and some of the security background around it. So it's a kind of general fact in Ethereum. So in Ethereum, we have different kinds of op codes. We have op codes that do computation, add, divide, subtract, elliptic curve pairing and so forth. We have data and we have op codes that do disk IO. So basically op codes that read from contract balances, read from contract state. So read things that require basically accessing the disk. And it's been a general fact of Ethereum pretty much since the beginning that the gas costs that we set for those op codes are for multiple reasons far lower than they should be. So one of those reasons is that the op, like relative to their gas costs, the op codes actually take a fairly long time to process because accessing disk is pretty expensive and takes a long time. And so for example, there was this recent paper that suggested that on their own hardware, a worst-case DOS block would take up to 80 seconds to process. And making a worst-case DOS block is hard because you have to outbid like literally all the other users, but it's security is still lower than we would want it to be, especially given the people's desire for more scalability in the medium term. And so from a security point of view, it's pretty much required to increase the gas costs of checking contract balances, reading contract code, reading contract storage. My own personal opinion is that the IPs that we have don't go nearly far enough. But the problem is that this requires increasing some gas costs and this basically breaks some contracts that relied on the assumption that there is a fixed amount of gas within which they could do some things. So I think I've written this opinion somewhere, but from my point of view, the reason why the increases of the gas cost break in things is because the gas is used in two different functions. So the first function of the gas is what Vitalik was talking about is to basically measure the impact on the system, the performance impact and charge people for the same transaction to compensate for that and discourage the abuse of the system. But there's a second function, which also gas plays, which is the restriction of the things like recursion and the callbacks. And that second function has been on the rise since 2016 when the, especially after the re-entrancy, the re-entrancy problems have been kind of brought into light and people are trying to use the second function of the gas much more to, so they would allocate a very limited amount of gas for a lot of operations to make sure that the recursion doesn't go deep or the callbacks can't do things. But we now see that these two functions are becoming at odds with each other. While improving one, we actually hurt in the other. And from my point of view, it is becoming worrying because that tells me that in the future where we need to do more of those things, adjusting the gas cost, and we have to assume that we should be doing it all the time anyway, because the hardware changes, everything changes. We have to, the way out of it is to split those two functions and then decouple them from each other. That does bring complexity because we essentially will have two gases now, two gas counters, one for the first function, one for the second function, and then you need to decide what is the gas limit then? Is it the gas limit for the first one or is it the gas limit for the second one? But I think it's solvable, and more importantly, if you decouple this, then you're kind of a bit more future-proof. So coming back to your original question, which was about like invariance as a app developer, like obviously we need to change the gas cost sometimes because security and a whole bunch of reasons, and some of which we don't know today. So I guess it's a question for people up here. Are there like actual invariance that you can give to app developers building an Ethereum, or is the sort of hard answer, things will change, they will break, and we'll try our best to make that the least inconvenient as possible, but it's kind of unrealistic if you're building an app to assume, there's any invariance. I think the truth is like somewhere in between, but I'm curious what people think about that. Yeah, I think that app developers should have the mindset that things may change, there are no invariance, and they should build their systems or deployments in ways that they can be upgraded because it's still developing. The EVM is still developing, that's my point of view. Just add to that. I think for example, another important thing that app developers should always keep in front of them is that every time you find a neat little trick that hey, I can store this data in a more optimal way, or sorry, in a way that kind of is a bit cheaper than storing it the other way around, our goal as maintainers of Ethereum is to make sure that everything is priced correctly, which kind of means that storing data should cost the actual resource. So if you figure out a cheaper way to store it, then there is a high chance that if it picks up steam, then it will get patched, simply because it's not balanced correctly. So our goal is always to balance the app goes to the resources actually being used, and yes, sometimes that means making it them cheaper, and sometimes it means making them more expensive, but all the loopholes will eventually be filled. So I think that's a good invariant. Can I ask a question unrelated? Can we move on from? Yeah, we'll watch another topic, go for it. Great. Hi, I'm Mariano from Maker, and I'd like to discuss a programmatic proof of work. Because I feel like there's a big divide between... Is it crying in the background? ...core devs and community in general, and I've seen a lot of prominent members of different projects and apps that feel strongly against it, and many core devs that feel strongly for it, and they're way around. And I don't think we've ever been closer to a potential hard fork since 2016, so I would like to see what you think about it. I think PraguePOW is really important as an issue that we need to decide. Not important in itself, necessarily, I am not taking a position, but I'll say that because of the politics around it, it makes it really challenging, because on one side you have the people like ASIC manufacturers and users and some investors and stuff like that who say we don't need it, the threat isn't big enough, or the people who made it are unknown and that's scary and things like that. And then on the other side, you have the GPU miners in the mining pool saying we need this, otherwise we're gonna go under and you're going against the promise that you made in the whitepaper, according to them, that there would not be ASIC resistance within Ethereum. And then there's many, many other arguments. I'm actually post DevCon going to make a large blog post, Reddit post, et cetera with everybody's arguments and counter arguments so the community can get a better idea of where everybody stands on that from each side. That's on my to-do list and it's nearing the front of it so that'll happen hopefully before November. And other than that, I do wanna kind of hear the perspective of some of the core devs because you're right, there are core devs who are supporting PraguePOW from their perspective, whether it's technical, political or both. And that's another divide that's very naturally occurring is you have this technical perspective where we had two audits done, a hardware and a software audit that basically cleared PraguePOW as something that wasn't super fishy. And then you have the technical perspective of it's good, we've implemented it, it'll take two to four weeks for the other clients to implement it, we're good to go. And then you have the political one where it's like, I hate Christie, Christie's bad, Christie lied, all this other stuff with core scientific and the people who are anonymously developing it. So long story short, a lot of politics involved, there's technical versus non-technical arguments and there is a division that needs to be figured out in a rough consensus style way. Yeah, personally, I kind of cooled down quite a lot on this particular issue for the last few months. I did see a lot of discussions, a lot of people getting, I hope they're getting more informed about this. So, and I really welcomed the audits that happened. I read through the audit report. Yeah, I mean, I sort of had my opinions, I put them out there and I'm happy that people were listening and there was discussion going on. And at this moment I'm, I'll be okay if it gets implemented, rolled out, and I'm gonna be okay if it doesn't. So I'm not really going to worry about this. So, if I'm basically, something that I said before, if I turned out to be wrong, that's fine.  I think it's made a good progress recently. Yeah, so I'm one of the core developers who are pro, progpow, and I've written down my reasons why. I believe progpow is the right way forward. The way I see it, I think there's a very loud, what I perceive as a very loud minority who is extremely loud and spreading a lot of fear and uncertain in doubt about it. And in my view, there has been signal and taken from the community. There's been coin votes, there's been mining votes and et cetera, et cetera. So I feel it has been kind of, there has been shown to have a great support in the community. And I don't think the situation has changed from six months ago, except that at this point in time, there has been a lot more, yeah, a lot more churn from the political side and the fun side. Yeah, and I, from the political side, I would say that one area that myself, that I fault myself on and others is there wasn't enough communication. People like to be heard, and this kind of got sprung on people, some people, because who's gonna read a transcript of the most boring core dev meetings every other week? I mean, it's not boring to everybody, but there's a lot of very deep technical topics and the average person isn't gonna realize that. So progpow got sprung on a lot of people and that was a communication error. And so because of that, now people are upset because they felt like they're not being heard now, they weren't being heard then, when they felt like they didn't like progpow and they thought it was dead because it wasn't getting implemented as quickly, because this has been on the radar for how many, since last, no, before last DevCon. So since March of 2018, progpow has been starting to be implemented, talked about, et cetera. So it's been a long time. So I think if we can have people be heard, that's going to heal a lot of the wounds and start to get us more toward a rough consensus. And I welcome people from the audience. If you have an opinion on this, you can go sit in this chair and give your opinion or whatnot. And otherwise, anyone else, we can go to another topic. One thing that I'd like to point out is. Intro. My name is Dan O'Farran, I'm picking my son up from school. One of the things that I've noticed within the past six to eight months with this is there's been a notable drop in civility in the arguments relating to progpow. And the problem with this drop in civility is people start closing their ears. And there are principled people with real solid objections to it who get lumped together with some of these people spouting these crazy things.  That's just not cool. I agree. Yeah, I think I want to echo Dano's statement. I'm Adrian Sutton, I work on Basu. I think one of the things that's very dangerous in this for the whole Ethereum community is that if we set a precedent where you can shoot down something by attacking someone proposing it personally, then we're gonna see a lot more of that in the future. So I'm really keen to hear technical concerns. And that includes some politics of do we actually want to be ASIC friendly? Is that that direction we want to go? Those arguments I'm all for, I really want to hear. But when we start diving into this person was associated with that or they're corrupt or they're and not actually being able to point to this is what they're trying to do. So if you've got a problem with Prog Power and you think it's all a great scam, then great, let's hear exactly what the scam is. Not just a vague thing where we're slandering personalities because that leads to more and more attacking people, which makes it incredibly difficult for people to stand up and make proposals and be involved in the community. We've lost people in the community who are doing great work because they've been attacked personally in the past. We don't want to see that happening in the future. Just to add my two cents, this whole Prog Power versus CTH discussion. I think one of the, so currently my feeling is that the whole discussion boils around whether we want to be ASIC resistant or not. And I think this is something that kind of just is tearing the whole community apart. And from my personal perspective, I don't really see what's the whole point of it. So currently we have a few big mining pools. Now if we have an ASIC friendly mining algorithm, then probably we will have some manufacturers that make a killing out of it and some mining pools. Now if we have an ASIC resistant mining algorithm, probably there will be some different mining pools and different hardware vendors making a killing out of it. But essentially, from my perspective, currently we're just trying to decide who we want to give our money to for mining or for creating that hardware. Now if, on the other hand, we can actually technically say that one of them is dangerous or one of them, or we can somehow prove that yes, ETH hash is a security issue and we can prove that publicly, then all of a sudden probably the entire community would shift towards the other one. So if there's a threat to the network, I think then the whole discussion is decided. And if there's no threat to the network, then it's kind of just a heated political thing of who gets to make more money out of it. And that's not going too far too fast. All right, do we have a next topic or somebody wants to discuss something?  You can come on up before we're done talking about the next topic, by the way, and just grab a mic so we know the next one's ready. All right, hey, I'm Hernando. What's the deal? What state run? Where are we at with that? It's canceled. No, actually it's more, the question is the answer is more complicated than that. So our current effort is to prototype and specify, so that's my main effort and my little team. So to prototype and specify the first viable version of the status clients, what's this? Oh, yeah. The most assertive of the status clients. So it might be the good thing to put out there is the data from the status client prototype. If that would be the proposed to, my misspelling, yeah, that one. That's probably like the closest one you can, if you scroll down to the there, it describes a slightly the idea of it, that go down a little bit. It's very old post, but it's still relevant and it describes what we kind of want to do. And the, yeah, further down to the graph, to the next one, break down, yeah, further one, further, further, okay, that one. So, yeah, so this is the, I've done some more analysis on this, but basically what we're trying to do is that, we kind of try to circumvent rent a bit, because as I said in April in our meeting in Berlin, after researching rent for a bit for a few months, I've realized that it is possible to do it technically, but it will be very expensive project to roll out practically. And the reason why it would be very expensive to roll out right now is the cost of ecosystem research, which had to be done, because the state rent wherever you implemented, it will change the programming paradigm in the way that, at least in the way I thought about it, because other proposals where you have kind of attenuated cost of the storage, which I don't call state rent, because it doesn't actually remove things from the storage. So, any proposals, any shape or form which will start removing things from the state after the rent is not paid, will inevitably change the program in paradigm, and some of the things will become kind of unexpected. For example, I'll give you example now. We have a smart contract in Solidity, and it has a variable, filled variable in it, and you initialize it in constructor, and that variable essentially like, let's say, pointer to another contract. You initialize it in contract, and it's a non-null, it reference to another contract, and you can happily use it within the contract anytime. And you assume that it will never go to, it will never disappear. So you don't have to check in every function of the contract that that pointer is still valid, that the contract that you point is still there, because you assume that, okay, I initialize in constructor, it will not go away. It's like in kind of const variable in C++, right? It will be there. It's once you initialize it, it's never changes. But then, with the state rent, you might see that this thing can just go under, you know, it will go under the pointer. So the contract will disappear, and then your pointer will point to something that doesn't exist anymore. So that sort of, lots of these things have to be changed in terms of the paradigm. So, and obviously there will be some contracts that will be suspect, susceptible to some griffin attacks that need to be researched as well. And obviously, the number, amount of resources that I thought would be required for that, if we really wanted to roll it out, would be something that I cannot afford, or maybe I'm not sure if your foundation would be able to afford that or something like that. So that's why we started to do more emphasis on status clients, which might actually, if implemented correctly, and if my sort of intuition is correct, it might actually give us enough runway before we, and then I've got another proposal, but which I haven't published yet, that actually introduces state rent after the status client, but in a slightly different and more surprising way, but I don't think I have time to explain it yet. Can you really answer the question? Is there a way to get it back? So basically it's postponed at the moment until we do the stateless clients. Okay, so stateless clients are the way to go until E2.0, that's what's gonna hold us over? Hopefully, because I don't know, because obviously the future is hard to predict. This is our current, I mean, the title comes to say something. So another reason why it's good to go this way is because by far the easiest way to kind of merge ETH1 into Ethereum 2.0 is to basically turn it into a stateless client by default because that's just the way that state inside of ETH2 works. So it actually kind of makes the road maps fit together very smoothly. So the downside of the status client related to the state rent is that there will have to be nodes in network that still hold the entire state, but this requirement will not be for every basically full node. So there will be still somebody has to have all the entire state. But we hope that this is, as long as not everybody needs to do that, it will be better. So one kind of hard thing about stateless clients that I think it's important to be very transparent and clear about is that making stateless clients work well ultimately will require basically the same kinds of kind of gas cost sacrifices that we talked about in the first question, but probably to an even greater scale, right? So for example, the witness size, so the size of like extramurcal data that you would need to pass to verify a worst case block right now is about 330 megabytes. And that's basically because you have contract calling that 700 gas, 24,000 gas for a contract and then add 4,000 bytes for a witness, 28,000 multiplied by 1,400 and like you got your hundreds of megabytes right there. So, and then there's kind of smaller versions of this attack with things like the balance opcode SLO and all of those things. So I think we will ultimately needs to have changes that say like one, the gas cost for these storage accessing opcodes go up more. Two is that the gas cost for accessing contracts that have a large storage, like what needs to go up even further, right? So for example, charge one gas per byte of code that you read and if we want to make this nicer, one thing we could do for example is we could waive the extra fee if the contract was accessed say within the last 10,000 blocks. And that would reflect the kind of the actual load of kind of quote almost stateless clients that keep stayed around for a little bit of time. So like those kinds of like that kind of rebalancing would need to be thought about as well. So basically kind of for multiple reasons like developers should expect that IEO is a likely to get a storage reading account reading cross-contract calling is likely to get more expensive relative to other things. Just to pause this topic for a second I wanted to introduce someone who just got here, Felix. Felix take the mic and just give a quick introduction. He works on some of the networking stack. Yeah, I'm Felix. I work on gas on the networking. I just got here from another, I missed the beginning so I don't really know what you guys talked about. But here it's mostly been about stateless clients which add also huge challenges on the networking side. So I feel like the stateless clients is basically just as unsolved as like any other problem. Like there has been progress but it's not really something that we can honestly say like it's easy to pull off. Yeah, I would use the same analogy as for quantum computers. I've heard like two, I've heard about two years ago that in terms of quantum computers all the fundamental challenges have been solved. Now it's the matter of engineering to build one. I mean, there is no real kind of super complex stuff in stateless clients that the idea is super simple. Yes, there will be more shuffling data around the network. There will be some issues with that but I don't see them as being fundamental. Can I interrupt? So I think there are really fundamental issues there. So the problem is that the moment, so currently transactions are really tiny. The moment you start entering into territories of megabytes and we're not talking about hundreds of megabytes, just megabytes, the whole networking layer needs to be gutted out and retrofitted so you can chunk up messages into smaller pieces. That's a lot of engineering effort, maybe not research effort. Yeah, let me just finish. However, even if that is solved and the network data shuffling is solved, then if you, so all of a sudden you also need to store these witnesses beside the transaction so you implode or explode, sorry, the data usage of the immutable side of the chain. And we can say that yeah, but that's cheap to store. We can put it on an HDD, sure, but we're already at 100 gigabytes or 150 gigs of tiny transactions. Now imagine that all of us in every transaction would be twice or not twice, 10 times the size and maybe instead of 150 gigs we would have two terabytes of immutable chain. In Archive Node, all right, basically is the information you need to give us the most client-fulsyncing data. Yes, he said that. I was just saying, like, in Archive Node, basically is the node type that has all of the data with the ability to produce it on-demand for any transaction. Yeah, but essentially without an Archive Node you would not, so are you, I don't need the Archive Node or you need the chain of witnesses? So one thing we can agree on with status clients is that basically it changes the user experience a lot where previously handing the state was kind of Ethereum's problem, with status clients it's a user problem? No, no, no, that's not true. In a way? Because I think you might be confusing it with what I call status contracts. So the status contract is the idea, it's actually the, it's a design pattern whereby you start, instead of storing your data inside the contract storage, you store some sort of miracle route and then you start passing the, like you pretend that the data is somewhere off-chain, well you don't pretend that there is off-chain, but whenever you do something with the data you start providing the miracle proofs and this proves to actually inside the transaction and that increases the size of the transaction and so on. The status client actually, it's not like that, it moves the burden into the actual layer, in the protocol layer, it's not the job of the smart contract developer will not change and the user will have exactly the same experience apart from paying more for the state access. So as Vitalik mentioned, the call, op-codes will be more expensive because you have to load the code, the S-store, S-loads and S-stores will be more expensive, balance reading will be more expensive, anything that touches the state will be more expensive to pay for the witnesses. Transaction format will not change. Essentially there will be more data shuffling around network but not as transactions as the basically witnesses and of course the witnesses will chop them up in parts so you don't have to ensure the better propagation. So that is also a kind of pretty solvable problem but yeah, it's not... Okay, well so in that case that's like, it's like halfway solution basically, like you do still want to have state, it's not like stateless as in Ethereum itself doesn't have any state, it's more about... So I would say the stateless client is basically approach of instead of asking all the developers to follow certain design pattern, you just basically solve it for them in a generic way. So if you have a stateless client, instead of telling everybody to put Merkle route in the contract, you just tell them just do whatever you did before and we're just gonna take care of that. You're just gonna pay for it a bit more but the whole technicalities will be taken care of. So we have the working group session scheduled for later this afternoon and about like 15 minutes left for this session. So maybe it makes sense to just like have a stateless client discussion this afternoon because I know there's a whole bunch of new people sitting there that probably have questions. 3.30 to the end of the day, I don't know what that is. They have this room here to just discuss working groups. Jason Carver also joined. Give a quick intro with Felix as Mike. Hi, Jason Carver working on the Trinity clients. It's an all Python client. I came here to talk about stateless clients so I guess I'll save that for a minute. I mean, we can talk about stateless clients, but yeah. Yeah, does anyone have anything else? There's two, three chairs. Oh, yeah. The mics don't reach that far. Hello, hello. Could you talk about EIP 1559, which is the idea of having the gas price set at the protocol level and it's burned instead of given to miners? Yeah, sure. So the basic kind of description of the proposal is that we basically add a kind of negative components to the block reward. So that basically says that we have some in protocol fee and within the context of any particular block, you can think of it as a constant, but the constant adjusts up and down over time. And basically, the miner of a block has to pay some amount, or alternatively, the block reward is reduced by that amount, which is equal to that fee multiplied by the number of guay of gas used. And this obviously if this kind of, whatever this burned fee is, so it'll push up the minimum gas price that the miner is willing to accept by roughly the same amount, right? So if the fee goes up to 10 guay, then the miner is not gonna accept transactions that are less than 10 guay because they're not even gonna be not profitable anymore. And the idea would be that we would say, increase the gas limit of a block from say 10 million to maybe 20 million or more, but then we would have this fee be adjusted according to an automatic algorithm that basically targets the average usage of a gas and a block to be at the 10 million level. So if a block, sometimes blocks will be bigger, sometimes blocks will be smaller.  Whenever blocks are smaller, the fee goes down. And so at equilibrium, like there's some kind of mandatory fee that kind of gets burned and miners aren't willing to accept below it, but the end blocks are on average gonna be like a half full or one third full instead of being completely full. The reason why we want to do this, and there's actually a few different reasons, one of them is that the most fundamental one is that currently fee markets work really horribly. So one example of this is that on average, people tends to overpay by a factor of somewhere between three and five or higher than five for transactions. And you see people talking about a trade-off of you either pay five times more and you get included right now or you pay the minimum and you wait maybe a minute and maybe 10 minutes. But in reality, that waiting is completely socially unproductive because it's the same load to the chain no matter if it happens now or if it happens 10 minutes from now. And also just like it adds a lot of wallet complexity that people have to like think about oh, is this gonna be a slow transaction? Is this gonna be a fast transaction? So EIP 1559 fixes it by making the calculation to a minor much simpler. The calculation basically is if there is a transaction that pays the burn like whatever the burn fee is plus whatever amount kind of overcomes the extra risk that my block will be an uncle and that value has been estimated to be about one quay, then I'll accept it. And so clients would just like calculate the fee that they pay based on a simple formula and it'll reliably get into the chain. And so users will be able to get like pretty reliable next block inclusion of any of their transactions even if there are like short-term spikes and there's like suddenly two times more usage this minute and like two times less usage the next minute. So it's intended as a kind of fee market simplification and a user experience increase because like users just won't have to wait anymore. What does that do for users who are willing to let a transaction happen sometime over the next day? They're very price sensitive, say.    So that's like totally fine and intended behavior that you can do. So I want to comment on this that a lot of times we're thinking about like the one user sending one transaction which is okay, you know, you can wait or you can do it within like you pay a bit more but the real problem is that for the people or for organization who actually depend on sending tons of transactions all the time and for those people it's crucial that the things work well because they can't just say, well, we're gonna close our exchange for four days until this whole things blow over, right? Or... Right. We still have some time? Under topics? 10 minutes, any topics? Yeah. I want to bring up this idea that in order to reduce storage requirements on nodes we like actually make more progress on implementing a mechanism where we only require nodes to store say the last year of history and for anything older than one year we figure out some way we're not where each individual node only needs to store part of that so that we basically instead of node storage being 200 gigabytes, it can just be like state plus 10 to 20. Yeah. When you say splitting it, you don't mean like... I mean like... You should go to Peter. Sounds like sharding kinda. Is it sharding or chained or different? Yeah, so I guess this kind of was one of my proposals from way back in I think last year, or this year January, last year January. So the idea was that currently a lot of the Ethereum's chain data about 150 gigs give or take is just immutable past chain. For example, past transactions, past blocks, past receipts. And many people don't really need this. I mean, yes, it's nice that you can dig up your transaction that you did five years ago, but do you realistically want to do it? Now, if you don't want to do it, and okay, that might be an interesting thing for you to want to dig up your transaction from five years ago. I definitely don't want to dig up your transaction from five years ago. So essentially it's just, we're wasting a lot of space for a lot of people that and it doesn't really give anything back. And then the idea was that can we somehow say that, okay, we're going to maintain the last some timeframe, maybe a year, and maintain everything on all full nodes, but everything that's older than one year, let's try to put it, stash it somewhere else and make it available. And generally, I think most of this is doable. So it is not even a hard problem to solve. The tricky parts come, start to appear with, for example, logs because the, so contracts, smart contracts use logs as a cheap data storage. And then they just, the DAP filters for the logs. And the issue is that logs weren't really designed for this, but it wasn't really explicitly said nor limited that this is not the intended use case. The intended use case of logs was to raise events. So your smart contract does something, it raises a few events, and then you react to those events. And yes, it's nice that you don't have to react immediately, you can react a day later, a week later, a month later. And that's perfectly fine. The problem is that, for example, there are DAPs, kind of like the Akasha social network, which uses logs to store the posts themselves, which means that when you want to list the posts that you've written or your feed, they will actually scan the entire blockchain for data. And these are the use cases that get really, really broken because all of a sudden you have a node that wants to access all the time, the history going back to the past five years. And this is really the challenge that needs to be solved. On the upside, however, the nice thing about this chain, that's chain data, is that it's immutable, which does mean that, I mean immutable, in theory it's not immutable, but in practice due to the proof of work, you won't have a reorg that's a million block deep. And this kind of means that you can move this data onto an HDD, so you can actually make store it relatively cheaply. However, I still say that if we want to enter this stateless clients territory, then well if the blocks all of a sudden becomes a hundred times larger, then we need to solve this because even on an HDD, you don't want to put a hundred times more data. So it's an interesting problem definitely. So something interacting with the next section of topics, how does the finality gadget figure in with the chain data? Do we need to keep historical data beyond the horizon of the agreed upon finality? And how far, you know, how important is that? For a finality gadget, you mean like the ETH2 finality gadget for each one. And for consensus purposes, you definitely don't need to keep any history older than about eight months. But in like one year was the period that I had suggested we make kind of mandatory to hold. Sorry, so the one proposal that I have for solving this receipt issue is that it's actually a very nice problem to just solve with a crypto economic light client market, right? Like I want a complete list of all the transactions that satisfies some particular bloom filter.  And if someone else disagrees, they can make a mergel proof and they can slash your deposit. So like basic turning, like making something like that. And the other benefit of that approach is that instead of requiring like you to scan a bunch of headers locally, it's basically a few rounds of network messaging. So could be also interesting to look into prototyping in the medium term. So maybe one thing we could do because there's so many people in the room who would just like ask like, a lot of you guys are depth developers, like who here needs access to logs from beyond like, you know, last three months or something like, whose dApps actually use this stuff? You can just maybe raise your hand if you need access to all the historical stuff. I see about 15 hands. Yeah. So what about transactions? Whose dApps use transactions? Could we also get some information on why those logs are needed? Well, maybe later. Because it's cheaper. Yeah. But that would actually be a really interesting question like to a lot of client developers, like which dApps are like, heavy on like actually accessing transactions, like transaction by hashed, transaction by block and index. Who uses those? Does any developer is there and wants to talk about it? Please come over inside this circle because this, those mics has a cable so we just come bring them. So just for the record, I saw two hands for the transactions. Three actually. Three, okay. Well, cool. Okay, so not a lot of people you actually use a facility to like access past transactions is what I'm getting. So from this room. From this room. It is not maybe not representative. Just to expand the reason why Felix was actually asking this question. So we've been sitting on a new feature, for example, in Gath, that so currently all full nodes, all Ethereum full nodes maintain an index, a transaction index that's simply saying that this transaction hash is located in that block.  Sorry, 20 gigabytes of data. So essentially every full node is storing 20 gigabytes of data just to be able to say in which block a certain transaction is. And if full nodes don't need it then we can immediately wipe out 20 gigs of data that can be reconstructed at any point in time. And that's the reason Felix's question was really, really good because we always wondered is anyone actually using it or can we wipe it? Should it be the default or should it not be the default? So it's actually reassuring to see that people don't need it. Yeah, come to the mic right there. Hi, so I work at Synthetics and so we obviously have what's like a dex, a bit like Uniswap. Excuse me, introduce yourself, please. Hello, my name is Justin Moses and I'm the CTO at Synthetics we're a DeFi app and we do indeed need to know the transactions that users have had over time in our dApps. However, we have been using something like the graph and that's actually been successful. So we're happy to use decentralized services like that that can track a lot of transactions instead of having to do like at point go back and look at individual one. So I guess what I'm hearing is that actually all the people who might actually want access to transactions will totally be fine to like externalizing that to some service provider because it's not really something of anyone like a lot of people expect from the node to like do for them to like get the transaction. I think Akash would have to like rewrite their stuff but I mean. No, that's for the... I thought they were log heavy. But if we kind of like get a crypto economic like client implemented then they could just like replace one to two lines of code and it would just work as is. And it would probably work even faster than today. But I was just follow up question for you on the DeFi thing. When you look up transactions don't... Is that ancient transactions or is it transactions for the last week or month? No, we'll have all of them. So there were times that we're going to go back to look at even, you know, years worth. Interesting. I wanted to throw this out there real quick. We're about out of time, right? What's it, three minutes? Yes. So I personally think ETH1X, ETH1.0 is getting stronger. There was a period of kind of like, you know, ETH2.0 is the new stuff and it's sexier and stuff like that. But now it's like the Ethereum Foundation has dedicated at least $8 million to ETH1.0 and 1X research development, et cetera. And that is being spun up. They did that back in May to do it for the next year and there are teams being spun up as we speak, coordinators being spun up as we speak. So there's a lot of good stuff happening. Some of it's happening in the background. A lot of it you're going to see in the forefront real soon. ETH1 forever. Wait, but is it really going to be forever? That's actually the next topic. ETH1 to ETH2 transition. Just one last bit about that.  But the guy was just standing there. Had like some pretty interesting comments. Oh, come back still there. Yeah, well, it wasn't about you. But just like in general, I think that developers, if you have like these peculiar use cases, trying, I don't know, like on ETH magicians or somewhere like that, to try and like explain, like answer those questions and like, oh, our DAP is like kind of weird because it uses logs in this way and we'd like the note to do that or not do that. Like if there were like ETH magicians supposed kind of either complaining or requesting features, I think that would be pretty useful. I mean, like 1509 was like one I was very interested in already. And I imagine a lot of DAP developers care a lot about that because gas is lifeblood and having a forum to be able to talk about that because you don't really want to jump in on EIP unless I have something meaningful to say. So I feel like ETH magicians is kind of that more general, less formal forum where you can just kind of write a post and people will see it. Yeah.


Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Peter Bohack, Philip Less, Howard Jermisch, and our new patrons, Eric and Eric, two of them. On this episode of DTNS, an AT&T outage reminds us all that wireless service is kind of important. Google Gemini has a people problem of sorts, and Charlotte Henry has thoughts on OpenAI's sores' impact on the entertainment industry. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 22nd, 2024. From Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us today from the edition at newsletter, Charlotte Henry, welcome back Charlotte. Hello, hello, how are you guys doing? What we're doing well. How are you? I'm very good. I had uninterrupted sales service today, so I guess I can't complain. Yeah, yeah. Me too, but I'm on Verizon. If you're scratching your head wondering what we're talking about, we'll get to that in just a few. Coming in right before showtime, Reddit filed its S1 to go public. Its ticker is going to be our DDT on the New York Stock Exchange, and that is the Reddit News. It was going to be March, but it was February after all. Let's get into the quick hits. Nvidia GeForce users can now download the beta of the brand new Nvidia app, which merges the control panel and GeForce experience into one, along with connections to other Nvidia apps and features. The user interface got a redesign. You don't have to log into an Nvidia account anymore to get updates. The new app will also let users modify game settings and driver settings in a single location or set a global profile for all games and apps. Nvidia says it will eventually integrate all features from Nvidia control panel into this new app, including display and video settings. After Google Wallet launched in 2022, Google kept the original GPay app around at least in some markets. Today, the company announced that the app which many people still see as GPay on their Android home screen is going away in the US on June 4th. Users in India and Singapore will still have access to GPay as Google continues to build for the unique needs in those countries. Google is also shutting down the peer-to-peer payments that's the part that seems kind of like PayPal, Venmo, Cash App to let you send requests or receive money from others in the US, but you can still use the Google Pay website to view and transfer your Google Pay balance of money once you've received it from another person or rewards and cash back to a bank after June. Sony's PlayStation VR2 headset is meant to work exclusively with a PlayStation 5, but the company says it's now testing support for PCs as a gaming rig. The Verge notes that a year ago, when it asked Sony about this, the company would only say the PSVR2 is created for use with the PS5 console, and that was kind of it. After the Verge tested it on a PC last year, it was picked up as a second screen by Windows, but SteamVR didn't recognize the headset, so we've got progress. Match Group announced an enterprise agreement with OpenAI that includes over 1,000 enterprise licenses for the dating app giant and home to Tinder, Match, OK, Qubit, Hinge, and others. Enterprise released written with the help from ChatGBT. Match said that the AI tech will be used to help employees with work-related tasks and come as part of Match's $20 million-plus bet on AI in 2024. Match Group says it will begin using the AI tech, specifically ChatGBT-4, to aid with coding, design, analysis, building templates, and other daily tasks. Following some high-profile exits from newsletter service Substack, the company said Thursday it had more than 3 million customers subscribed to paid newsletters on its platform that's up from 2 million announced last year and 1 million in 2021. It's growing. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie and product VP Sachin Monga told Axios the new efforts to improve its recommendations feature for growing its paid subscriber base is working and that it plans to expand recommendations to help writers promote other newsletters in its network to include more newsletters that can be recommended at any time. All right, we've alluded to outages today. There was there was there was a big one. So let's let's walk through what we know at this time because there's a lot of unknowns. Wireless carrier AT&T, one of the US's biggest networks, whose 5G network covers around 290 million people across the US has been dealing with widespread service issues for, you know, the better part of the day. Now, they seem to be wrapped up now, but we were going on 10, 11 hours before we got some confirmation from the company. The Federal Communications Commission has been investigating the incident in the US Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA, which is a unit of the Department of Homeland Security also said it was working with AT&T to understand what happened exactly. Now, of the 290 million people across the US, the outage affected a pretty small amount of AT&T's overall customer base, but still a very large number of people, especially since it was hampering the ability to reach emergency services by Dali 911 or the fire department, that sort of stuff. Tracking website, downdetector.com, clocked around 76,000 customer support complaints as of this recording. It also seems to affect carriers that use AT&T's network, MVNOs like Cricket Wireless. So here's what the timeline of events seemed to be, because we're still kind of just at the end of this and figuring everything out. But Cloudflare first noticed a significant drop in data for AT&T in the early hours of Thursday. That's today. AT&T acknowledged the issue and advised customers to use Wi-Fi calling when possible. But some of those users reported that that wasn't working either. AT&T also told the BBC our network teams took immediate action. And so far, three quarters of a network has been restored. Tom Merritt noted in his newsletter today that a CNN source said that it had to do with network peering or how different carriers exchanged traffic with each other. Well, Charlotte, I know you weren't affected directly by this, but I wasn't either. I'm a Verizon customer. I also just wasn't on my phone that wasn't connected to Wi-Fi at all this morning preparing for the show. But have you ever had an outage such as this? And if so, what did you do? It's a great question. Now you're saying it. I'm remembering there was a major outage at various points. I can't remember if it was network or software related. But it's quite a terrifying thing. You feel very incapacitated, right? We're also dependent on our phones. You know, I've been walking around going to different meetings or whatever in London today needed the Maps feature. If there's no cell signal, you don't get it. Never mind the point you made, which is really important about contacting emergency services. That's a really scary prospect for people who to be possibly stuck not being able to dial 911 your country 999 here. Like it's very scary to see if you know, I saw I was following this because obviously I was awake for all of it following people on the East Coast. Waking up and finding they had no cell service. I am I was seeing people being told apparently we're told to like use their landline. Remember those? Just just use the landline. You know, the one that everybody still has in their kitchen. Like I mean, I have a landline, but people feel really vulnerable. There's obviously a big question to ask right about how dependent we are on these devices. I mean, is it is it a good thing that we want, you know, these outages make us so vulnerable? Not being able to call emergency services, that that is that is pretty, pretty, that is that's pretty terrifying. But the outage itself reminds me of going back to like 1994. I mean, there were cell phones that existed at that point, but most people didn't have them. Most people weren't using clearly. You weren't using them for data. So I think that for me, although I was not affected by it, I don't know that I would have been terribly bothered by it because I don't think I used my phone for anything until probably right around the time we started getting ready to do this show. I made no phone calls. I sent no text messages. Everything that I did was through my data plan. So now if my Wi-Fi would have gone down, if my broadband would have gone down, then it would have been an issue. So I would imagine that for quite a few people, AT&T is the only way they have to get access to Internet capability. So that would be, once again, going back to 1994 or before, you can just do all the things that we're so accustomed to doing today. I mean, a couple of a couple of weeks ago on this show, while we were live, we had a little earthquake in L.A. It was not it was it was, you know, four point something. It was a huge deal. Yeah, of course, of course, because that's how life works. But not not a huge deal could have been worse and it has been worse in the past. And that was the first thing I thought of today when, you know, people needing emergency services, those are services that people need all the time for a variety of reasons. But what if a large metropolitan area had some sort of a crisis on the same day that this happened? Oh, would we be in a world of hurt? Yeah. Yeah, that would that would be significantly different. Obviously, we don't want to, you know, give any conspiracies or whatever to what has happened. I find it really interesting that agencies in the US that are looking into this. Now, of course, it makes sense that part of Homeland Security would look into it because we've just discussed why it's relevant to Homeland Security. If you can't talk about the word. And just and just affected so many people. It was a hundred or five hundred. It was, you know, many thousands. And I guess that, you know, this type of thing is going to bother the White House as well, because there's a national resilience question as well, isn't there? There potentially. And, you know, as as we learn more about the outage, I'm not I'm not convinced I don't know if AT&T either knows about it and is trying to frame this in a public relations way well enough, you know, before the rest of us hear about it, or if it really is just a big question mark. But, yeah, I haven't had a landline in in quite some time. And people always say, well, you know, it's a good backup option. I go, yeah, yeah, but, you know, when am I ever going to need it? Well, these these are the days when you need things like that. Yeah, I think I do technically still have a landline. I'm not I've never used it, and I'm not sure if it actually works. But my internet provider made me have one was part of the package. So OK. So let's change gears a little bit and talk about Google Gemini, because Google has temporarily paused the image generation of people in Gemini while it tweaks the AI model so that it generates more historically accurate results. The pause comes less than a day after Google apologized for what it describes as inaccuracies in some historical generation depictions. Google received criticism that it depicted specific white figures like US founding fathers or groups like Nazi era German soldiers as people of color, possibly as an overcorrection to longstanding racial bias problems in AI. So when I saw this story today, it kind of made me chuckle for, you know, for a myriad of reasons. But this is this is a big deal. You know, Google has had issues and not just Google. AI has had issues with misclassifying, mischaracterizing people for for a while.  You know, the controversy, you know, this controversy was promoted largely through not exclusively by right wing figures. But it was a fair amount of them that they just kind of feel that Google is a, you know, as a left-leaning company, it's a very liberal company. So this is basically, you know, you guys, you do never actually show white folks as kind of what the sentiment was out there. But it really just kind of goes to show you that this is hard work. And, you know, Google has to be really, really adept at making sure they get this right. Because when you start messing with people's identity, they will feel some kind of way about it. There there was a I mean, a variety of people chimed in on what they think was happening at Google. And yes, there's sort of like the like overwokeness conversation that some people are having. But there was one that stood out to me from somebody who had posted on X and said, you know, this feels like an engineer at Google somewhere was sort of like, all right, we want to make sure that our bias is not swinging too far towards against people of color. So, you know, what if we just, you know, enhance people of color that show up in search results? That makes it more inclusive, right? Now, that's a very naive way of thinking about the sort of thing. And obviously it backfired in a big way. You I don't I can't tell you how many threads I've now seen of people being like, and look, the best, you know, show me pictures of a successful basketball team. Well, they're all white, you know, but show me pictures of founding fathers of America. Well, that's not right.  I don't know. I guess I guess the point I'm getting at is I would like to think this is not deliberate in any way. It is just clueless. Yeah, I guess so. There's always an element of cluelessness when these can come in and I think it's always better to put most things down to cock up, not conspiracy. I think there is a general issue that we all need to talk about in tech in general and tech products in general, which is if only a very small demographic of people are making tech products, that gives a certain output. And that's a really important issue when we're talking about generator of AI. Yeah, yeah, it's like if I start a clothing line and I like certain clothing, then my clothing line is going to reflect, you know, my feelings. Right. That's that's pretty not harmful.  We can identify biases and say, OK, that has to be better. And I think that's that's what we're doing now here with Gemini and Google saying, yeah, we yeah, we're going to we're going to shut this down for a little while while we figure out, you know, what's next. But it certainly doesn't help doesn't help for trust. Yeah, I don't I don't believe that anyone at Google purposely coded this to, you know what, if somebody asks for who the founding fathers of America were show them black and brown people, I don't think anyone coded for that. But I do think that because Google has been dinged on this in big ways back in 2015 with Google photos, they actually were classifying black people as gorillas. Google is basically we're never going to allow that to happen again. So this could be a pendulum swinging too far back to the to the other side. But once again, I don't think that there's any malice here. I just think that Google has to really think about and make sure that they have diverse groups in the room, that they actually have diversity in their, you know, people who are actually coding this so that you just don't have implicit bias is just coded into the system. The system is spitting out the numbers that you put into it. But depending on who put those numbers into the system determines what the output is going to be. And I think that Google just has to get better at doing that. And this is one of those areas where I do think it's going to get fixed. It's also just I mean, it's not even, you know, whether or not somebody is offended by what is being generated is is one part of the conversation. But it's also just inaccurate. Yes. So, you know, that that's that's, I think, you know, that's the problem that Google has to grapple with is like, yeah, you got your bias problem, but also you're just churning out stuff that it's inaccurate and laughable in many ways. If you say founding fathers, those are specific people that you know who they were and what they looked like. You're right. It should not be getting that wrong. Yeah. And there should be proper training data and training data sets that you can build that kind of factual thing on. But just to go back to that general point, you were talking about it, Rob. There has to be stuff built into the systems and the creations, you know, the people who are creating and engineering this and overseeing it that people can flag up things that might be a problem for certain groups and certain communities of all kinds. You know, in this case, it's a very obvious misstep against people of color.  That it shouldn't be happening anyway. It shouldn't be happening from a company that has Google.  Or as close enough as it can be, you know what I'm saying. That like so so that there is some resemblance to reality, because if we're all going to become more dependent on these generative AI models, we need it to almost be a tool to break bias, not have those preexisting biases and racism and sexism and all the other things built into them. Well, I have a feeling that this will be a subject on the next episode of The Tech John. I think Rob, Rob, I was going to say, I don't even have the time to discuss this. Rob Dunwood, Stephanie Humphrey and Terrence Gaines are all hosts on The Tech John, which is a really, really great show that examines how technology affects and disaffects communities of color. Go hang out with them every week, delivered from points of view. You don't always hear in mainstream media. And I think we need a little bit more of that. New episodes land on Tuesday afternoons. Find it wherever you get your podcasts and visit The Tech John. That's J-A-W-N dot com. All right. Welcome to something we like to call additional conversations on DTNS. Last week, we discussed Open AI's new text to video research project called Sora, implementing a version of the diffusion model used by Dolly 3 and GPT-4 to generate up to 60 second video clips. And boy, has the internet responded. The obvious challenge is the potential to create misinformation. But it's also creating some fun stuff. Charlotte, I know you've been thinking a lot about this. What are your first reactions of Sora? Yeah, I wrote a newsletter on this actually the other day. And I all I could think of when I first started seeing these clips circulating around was the Hollywood Strikes. Because one of the key things about the writers and the actors was how worried they were about the effects AI would have on their role. And they made those agreements with the studios, include stuff about AI. And part of it was issues around using someone's like this. Now, you can see if there's a likeness floating around and famous actors have lots and lots of images that a model could use of them. Like look at think of the content you could create or what you're going to be creating in the future. Again, this is the beginning, right? What we're seeing now is not that impressive. I mean, it's more it's, you know, fairly impressive, but it's not like ground is not like movie quality yet. You can sort of tell in most cases it's created using some AI tool. But this is the beginning thing. What's going to happen? And if you're Tom Cruise or whatever, think of the ways your image and likeness could be used in these kind of videos. And I'm not surprised actors were worried about it. I'm not surprised writers were worried about how AI was going to affect their jobs. And you rightly said about misinformation. We're going into elections both in the UK and the US. You could easily use these kind of models and tools to create false videos, which will be very, very convincing of senior politicians and could cause real, real issues. But this is serious stuff. This might just be the beginning of it. But we sort of need to get ahead of these things. I have to say, I'm not convinced, right? I don't know what you guys think. I'm not convinced we're going to sit down all that soon and be watching TV shows made by Sora. I think we might, though, start seeing creative content made by it. I would say that soon is relative, because I remember. I remember a long, long, long, long time ago, like eight, nine months ago when we were talking about how Mid Journey and Dali couldn't get people's hands and fingers right. And now today we're literally talking about, you know, a solution where you can type something and it will generate video. That's pretty impressive. So once again, I am with you, Charlotte. This is this does not look real yet. But what will it look like in three years? And when we were when we were talking about the story, you know, earlier, you know, when we were talking about the rundown for the show, you know, I mentioned those old spice commercials where you had Isaiah Mustafa and he's like on a horse.  And I'm like, this is good enough to do that kind of content. So I just I just think that you're good. You know, this this stuff is moving so quickly that we're talking about today. Well, it doesn't look real yet. But what is it going to look like in three years? Well, not even three years. What is going to look like in 13 months? You know, how good is this going to be? Yeah, yeah. Advertising industry part of this is, you know, somebody had brought up that point in our pre-show as well that because a lot of advertising is I mean, you don't look at a commercial and say, well, that's not real. It's a commercial. Look at the hands. Look at the hands. Right. Right. Well, OK, so and I agree with you, Rob, it wasn't that long ago that we were all like, well, cool technology. But everyone said this about Photoshop too and the creators still have jobs and it just made them do their jobs better. These are tools and that is probably very true to a point this morning. I found this thread on X where somebody had generated a I think the prompt was show me, you know, puppies who are going through the sky to save the world or something like that. It was, you know, the prompt wasn't even really that specific. And the the reaction from a lot of people who followed this account. Yeah, the video folks can see we're like, this is amazing.  And, you know, Cloudy, with a chance of puppies, you know, there were all these things that people had generated to be creative based on, you know, this initial prompt that someone just said, like, hey, look at this, this one's pretty good. And, you know, it's animated, right? It's not some sort of live action puppies, you know, in clouds in the sky. It's it's very clearly something that would be animated. But then someone was like, you know, I wonder how long before Paw Patrol sues this guy, right? Or the first thing I thought of. And to your broader point about that, suddenly there was a little clip and then suddenly there was a whole kind of storyline that, you know, a minute's worth of content or whatever. That's why I'm saying I can see content creators really taking this up in the way people use tools like Canva already, right? People do that stuff already. So this is just the next step of that. I think if I'm a Hollywood exec, I'm keeping my eye on this. But there are bigger things that Hollywood needs to worry about in the short term, like getting people into movie theaters and that kind of thing before they need to worry that Sora is going to take all of their jobs. I'll tell you one thing. Tell me one thing, Rob. When I get my hands on this, my podcast promos are going to be epic. Just because I, you know, I haven't I do not have an artistic bone in my body. So if I can actually just type some stuff out and get something to the level of those cute puppies that were flying through the air, I'm just telling you my promo game will be next level. I want to see AI generated one done. Rob Dunwood flying through the air. That's where we're at. I mean, it I'm sort of just thinking about this now as we're talking about it as content creators that we all are.  You know, there's a certain way that people are successful at that. If you don't try very hard, you're less successful. But there, you know, you're you're you're getting people to click on stuff. Something like Sora that is at least at this point, a small, no audio, video, generation tool, but but still extremely impressive. That could really that could really help a lot of us. I don't know exactly how yet. I'll have to think it through. But I feel like, yeah, you know, to your point, Rob, this this opens up some some avenues to have some fun. I'm sure people are just going to create like minute long TikTok videos and Instagram reels and stuff using this tool. Surely that's the next thing that's going to happen. Yeah. I mean, it's already happening. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes in from stealth Dave also chiming in on our conversation. We have with Lamar Wilson on Tuesday's show about form factors when it comes to iPads. Boy, did we strike a nerve and record we hit a nerve. Um, uh, stealth Dave says, I agree with Lamar that figuring out what size tablet you need is at least as important as how powerful a tablet you need, probably more so. I've been using eight inch Android tablets almost since they were introduced for what I would call reader activities, reading ebooks, watching movies, casual web browsing, occasionally remote access to other computers and devices. Eight inches is perfect for these activities for me and easy to hold in my hand as I read or browse the web. If I need something bigger, I go with my laptop. The problem I find is there are severe lack of options for mid to high end Android based eight inch tablets. There are low end options everywhere, but they suffer from extremely low resolution, 720p at best. Heavy lag for even the most basic web browsing. I left Apple for mobile devices years ago because I need more control over my device than Apple is willing to give me. I'm a software developer, but if no other manufacturer is willing to make the tablet I need, I might need to reevaluate the iPad many. Thank you, still, Dave. Yeah, I mean, we we we have learned over the last few days that people care very much about screen sizes of all sorts of devices, phones, tablets, laptops, television. And your mail bag yesterday, people were talking about how it was kind of a Kindle like device, right, that kind of size. Yeah, I've always had, you know, a kindle and a full size for one of a better phrase. iPad, I just find them very different use cases. But I can see, you know, how people are chiming in that they have kind of, you know, again, find the tablet that fits for your fits for your use case. Right. They're finding that, you know, you don't need it. If you're not using it, as I say, a laptop replace when you can have something much smaller, if you want it for reading or whatever. Yeah, I'm with Stealth Dave on this as an Android user. I I used to rock the the the Google Nexus back in the back in the day. I have always loved the seven to eight inch form factor on tablets. But the problem is that they're just not powerful. They're just they're very, very low end tablets. And that's the reason that why I've moved away. So I now just try to get the biggest possible phone that I can get. Rob, with his iPhone, Max, Max, Max. So Dave in snowy upstate New York, he writes in regarding the sports discussion yesterday. Tom seemed to want it easy way to get score updates. Here's my favorite way to do it, which I may have heard about on the DTNS show without ads on sites like ESPN. So. Oh, and that's plain text sports, plain text sports. You know, I don't know if it came from us. It's not something that I use, but yeah, good, good to know. We're actually going to continue the the sports conversation and GDI. So stick with us, even if you don't like sports, but you like tech. We've got a little something for everybody here. But sports, Charlotte Henry has thoughts. And that's why we love to have you on the show. Charlotte Henry, let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do. Head over to the addition dot net for blog posts. There'll be podcast episodes, their videos and you can sign up to the newsletter. And I'm actually a Henry across most of social media. Beautiful. And patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We'll be talking a little bit more about what's missing from Apple Sports and where Substack is headed. Just a reminder, you can catch our show live when we do it Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. It's Friday tomorrow, so we're back with Len Peralta and Molly Wood also joining us. Talk to you then. The DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


We acknowledge you as our Creator and Sustainer and Saviour through Jesus Christ, who is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. We thank you for your many blessings. Restore upon us and we celebrate your abundant goodness. You Lord, are great and worthy to be praised. We thank you for the privilege and the honor granted to the Turks and Caicos Islands, the host of the 52nd annual meeting of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank. We invoke your presence. We pray for all the arrangements that have been made that all things will be done efficiently in decency and in order. We thank you for our premier, Honorable C. Washington Music, and all the Board of Governors and all delegates in attendance. We pray for their safety and well-being as they attend this conference. Heavenly Father, as they meet under the theme, measure better, target better, adaptation and resilience. Bless these discussions and deliberation as they deliberate on important matters of mutual interests. We pray that your Holy Spirit will guide them, grant them the wisdom they will need to deal with the issues before them. We recognize the challenges in each country and territories. They are many, but we acknowledge that government is a divine institution. Therefore, we pray for our parliamentarians and leaders, your servant, that you will continue to ground them the resources they need to fulfill their responsibility. We ask you now, most merciful Lord, to bless this conference, bless our beloved Caribbean, bless them as they measure better, bless them as they target better, bless them as they adopt and bless them with resilience. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, we turn the proceedings over to the Chairman of the Board of Governors, the Honorable Charles Washington Music. It gives me great pleasure as your outgoing Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank and the Governor representing the British OCS territories of Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Comprising a single membership of the Caribbean Development Bank to welcome you first to the Turks and Caicos Islands and then to welcome you to the 52nd Annual General Meeting of the Caribbean Development Bank. Give me a minute to make sure I get my salutations sheet with me. Haven't made that introduction. His Excellency Nigel Dakin, Governor of Turks and Caicos Islands, visiting dignitaries. Honorable Ellis Webster, Premier of Anguilla, Honorable Joseph E. Farrell, Premier of Montserrat, Honorable Philip J. Peer, Prime Minister of St. Lucia, Honorable Gordon Burton, Speaker of the House of Assembly, His Excellency, Your Excellency, annual Williams, Deputy Governor, members of the Cabinet, Honorable Runderley, Brathwaite Knowles, Attorney General, members of the House of Assembly here present, senior government officials of the Turks and Caicos Islands, Government of the Turks and Caicos Islands Government and, last of all, but certainly not least, our special guest and keynote speaker of the William D. Maas lecture last night, all the way from Africa, President of the African Development Bank Group, Dr. Ekin Wumi Adesina, members of the Board of the Caribbean Development Bank, members of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank, members of the Board of Directors of the Caribbean Development Bank, President of the Caribbean Development Bank, Dr. Hygienus Jean Leon and his wife, Ms. Brenda Thomas, the Caribbean Bank, Vice President of Corporate Services and Bank Secretary, Mrs. Yvette Limones-Seal, the Caribbean Development Bank's Vice President of Operations, Mr. Isaac Solomon, other members of the Caribbean Development Bank's senior leadership team and members of staff of the Bank, specially invited guests and members of the media. Coming out of a difficult period, many of our barring member countries, let me first say that as the host and as the Governor, I am going to be merging my welcome with a very short speech. The keynote address will come to you later from our President, but coming out of a difficult period, many of our barring member countries face a conundrum of having to do more with less. It is therefore most fitting that we should theme the meeting today, measure better to target better, adaptation and resilience. Indeed, achieving the special development goal, sustainable development goal targets will require not only adaptation and resilience in a fast-changing global environment, but also a measuring system that considers the internal resilience capacity of our barring member countries. The concept of this, I'm sure our President will speak to in his address, and so I would say no more on that particular point. At a time when we seem to be moving from one crisis to another from severe storms, COVID-19 to supply chain challenges resulting from the Russian-Ukraine war and rising price inflation, all member countries need to take care and interest in supporting the Bank and to ensure that it is equipped and able to help barring member countries navigate the challenges of food insecurity, renewable energy, climate change and environmental degradation. Therefore, as we emerge in this our very first face-to-face meeting since 2019, let this 52nd meeting of the Board of Governors serve as a clarion call for strengthening our regional partnership and recommitting to the changes that will be necessary for the sustainability of the CDB. We in the Turks and Caicos Islands and the overseas territories have gone through what is hopefully, and I think that is the case for all of us here, I believe, we've gone through what is hopefully the worst of COVID-19 and are able to host this regional meeting of the Caribbean Development Bank face-to-face. Because of the partnership and support from the CDB non-barring member, the United Kingdom, and in the case of the Turks and Caicos Islands, we have been able to open our borders earlier than many countries because of the gift of vaccines and technical support. As a result of that, we have experienced or are experiencing a V-shaped economic recovery. Our ability to support life and livelihood during the pandemic was, in addition to the availability of vaccines, the fact that we entered the pandemic with a strong economy and significant reserves would served us well. But our good fortune is not taken for granted, and we remain conscious that our gains can be erased by the full impact of a single Category 5 hurricane. So collectively we face the same threats, but together we are able to decrease our vulnerabilities and build resilience by smart planning and committed resources. Crisis often gives us an opportunity to press the reset button, and the pandemic is no different. Our survival and sustainability depend on remaining, or reimagining rather, our futures. Working with the President and his team at the Caribbean Development Bank in planning for what we hope is a renewed interest by all member countries in reshaping the future of the bank, I am reminded by Stanford psychologist Jamal Zaki of the concept psychologist called growth through adversity. Zaki challenges us to be uncomfortable with merely rebuilding or the state of merely maintaining our position, or with the state of being unscathed by the adversity, but finding ways through the lessons of hardship to focus on what it will take to not survive but to grow and to thrive. Growth then is charting a new course, escalating the former system, which will require us honing the ability to measure better, to target better. Growth will require new ways of thinking about the value proposition of what it truly means to be partners and to collaborate in our common interests. Measuring better means that borrowing member countries will need to see the value of consistent engagement and discourse of the various issues that we can collectively address, and for which we can and must find solutions. Solutions can be found when we invest in and support the Caribbean Development Bank by giving a voice at the table, articulating our considered view on perplexing matters, being a voice at times for a brother who is not doing as well as we are, by provision of resources financial or otherwise. Solutions can be found in funding research and development and other interventions that will assist all of us. We are not clairvoyant and difficulty comes to all mankind. We don't know how or when, but because it comes when we least expect it, then as McCarthy would say, maybe the thing to do is to always expect it and be prepared for it. A voice around the table will help us to plan collectively how to address these issues. We must continue members, member countries, delegates, governors, to see the Caribbean Development Bank as a regional public good and enable of the progression of the entire development agenda of the entire region. A resource that is supported by all of us. This, governors, requires all hands on deck. Admittedly, some borrowing member countries are able to access more affordable lines of credit than that offered by the CDB. However, interest rates should not be the sole variable in accessing credit. Clipping banks like the CDB have the added value of in-house technical expertise that allows them to participate in decisions involving choices relating to technology and scale. The Turks and Caicos is engaged with the bank and it is our intention to leverage our good credit rating to the betterment of the Turks and Caicos and the bank toward economic transformation. I wish to go on record in acknowledging the contribution that the CDB has made to the success of the Turks and Caicos over the years and to express thanks to the support from the bank's membership, both the borrowing member countries and the non-borrowing member countries alike. And so, I want to take the opportunity to thank the team here in the room. I gathered from a lot of the delegates at the conference and the experience so far has been good. So I'd like to thank the team here at the Office of the Premier and Public Policy and the CDB who have undertaken such a mammoth task of operationalizing the events of the meeting on the ground and commend them for a job well done. If you notice the average age of the team on the ground, you will see that they all feel young and it's important that we invest CDB in our young people and I believe part of this, the discourse of this event over the next day or so will put some emphasis on our young people. But at the risk of singing out a few persons who have stayed at the preliminary planning session, I am proud to say that the Deputy Permanent Secretary Miguel Suan willingly and ably accepted the responsibility of spearheading the plans and has been working closely with the CDB and in the Turks and Cakers with event planners, transportation and logistics experts and of course our hotels, our tourism service providers who we consider all class and have hopefully made you feel at home, away from home. Mi su casa, how you say that in Spanish, mi casa is, anyway I wouldn't go any further. This highlights the point for us to be multilingual since we are all so closely related in this region with members that speak different languages and if you notice the song, our national anthem, our national song spoke about multiplicity, races and kinds and languages. So TCI is very keen on this integration that will enrich all of us. And so without further ado, again I bid you all welcome to this 52nd meeting of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank and I thank you and I wish you a very pleasant experience for the rest of your stay here in Turks and Cakers. Thank you very much. Well ladies and gentlemen, we now have some replies to the welcome address on behalf of the Barring Member countries on behalf of the Board of Governors I'd like now to invite the President, I think I'm getting it wrong here. I'd like to welcome on behalf of the Barring Member countries, the Governor for Guyana. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Mr. Chairman. Your Excellency the Governor of the Turks and Cakers Islands, Governor Nigel John Deakin, Honourable Charles Washington Missick, Premier of the Turks and Cakers Islands and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank, Fellow Governors of the CDB, our very special guest President of the African Development Bank, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of the CDB, Dr. Jane Leon, Directors, Management and Staff of the Bank, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am greatly honoured to respond on behalf of the Bank's Barring Member countries to the warm welcome extended to us by the distinguished Premier. Considering that this is our first face-to-face annual meetings in three years, one must indeed applaud the decision to meet in beautiful Providenciales. Provost spectacular beaches provide a picturesque, even if occasionally slightly distracting backdrop to the important discussions that we are having this week. And her warm and hospitable people have already embraced us in a full display of the oneness of our Caribbean family. Lest we be mistaken, the fact that we are meeting face-to-face this week should not lull us into believing that we have returned to any semblance of comfortable normalcy. In fact, we are meeting in times that are anything but normal. To begin with, the battle with COVID-19 is far from over. Over the past seven days, 3.3 million new cases were reported worldwide, of which 2.3 million came from Europe and the Americas. As a result of COVID-19, global production and supply chains are still disrupted, with shipping costs rising by more than seven times since March 2020. The war in Ukraine has further dislocated supply of key commodities. For example, wheat prices have gone up by as much as 60%, given that Russia and Ukraine account for 30% of global wheat exports. The result is a delayed recovery from the pandemic, with sharp downward revision in growth forecasts and even sharper upward revision in inflation forecasts, raising the risk of stagnation. For us in the Caribbean, the vulnerabilities which we all knew prior to COVID-19 have now been laid bare. In 2021, our BMCs are estimated to have grown by a modest 3.1%. In 2022, they are projected to grow by a more respectable 9.1%, but this growth is heavily concentrated, with only 5 of the 19 BMCs projected to grow at rates at or above the space. At the same time, we continue to carry a heavy debt burden, with 13 of our countries ending 2021 with a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 60%, and four of our countries ending the year with a ratio above 100%. The result is that our prospects for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals are even dimmer today than they were three years ago. And the implication of all of this is that the Caribbean needs the CDB, our bank, more than ever before, as we tackle the long-standing problems of economic diversification, infrastructure gaps, particularly in transport and energy, human capital development, access to basic social services, food security, and of course climate vulnerability. In this regard, I wish very briefly to highlight the following issues for special focus by the bank. First, resource mobilization and intermediation is a core function in the bank's original mandate. The success in 2021 in securing the $383 million replenishment for the tenth cycle of the Special Development Fund is therefore commended, and the role played by contributors to this replenishment much appreciated. The partnership with the United Kingdom on the Caribbean Infrastructure Fund is also an outstanding example worthy of replication. Second, the financing of projects contributing to economic development of the BMCs is the bank's core business. Maintaining a strong record of project approvals and disbursements should be a paramount objective to be pursued actively and aggressively. Reduced approvals and disbursements affect net flows to BMCs, and increased net flows are critically needed by BMCs, especially at times like these. Third, regional integration and intraragional trade are germane to the bank's objectives. At the Agri Investment Forum and Expo held in Guyana last month, the bank advised that it will use its best efforts to mobilize resources in support of a regional initiative to establish adequate and sustainable regional transportation, a historical impediment to regional trade, especially in agricultural produce. The bank has an incomparable convening authority in the region which should be deployed to support such regional initiatives. Mr. Chairman, we the BMCs look forward to this week's discussions on these and other priorities for the bank. And I conclude by thanking on behalf of the BMCs, you, sir, and the government and people of your beautiful country for the warmth of your welcome and for the excellent arrangements you've made to ensure a comfortable and conducive setting for this 52nd annual meeting of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank. I thank you very much. Thank you, Guyana. We will now have an intervention on behalf of the non-regional member countries to be delivered virtually by China. I think we missed a step here. And on behalf of the regional non-barring member...


Bemidjiri Opiate Programs gathered this morning to discuss ways to fight the drug epidemic in Minnesota. There were representatives from about 20 different agencies including Sanford Health, North Homes Children and Family Services, Leech Lake, White Earth and Red Lake Indian Health Services as well. District 5 Representative John Purcell was there and the organizations took turns sharing ideas on how everyone can work together to solve the crisis. We've been reaching out to mental health, medical, business community and we want to find the place to reach out to the general public so that they can both learn more about this and also in some cases they may be able to plug in like the peer recovery support and you do need certain training for that. There were two main objectives in the meeting. The first was to find common ground on opiate related issues. The other objective was to discuss the new services that will be provided by the state of Minnesota. The group also discussed how to bring more awareness to the issue. For people individually there is knowing about opiates, there's knowing about things to reduce the risk of them getting to the wrong places. There is knowing what to do with friends and relatives which is can be a very challenging situation if they're involved with opiates. And then as I said there's recovery support and there are prevention efforts and those are all things that I think community members can get involved in. The meetings are scheduled to happen bi-monthly. Organizers say there's a possibility they could be opened up to members of the general public and with clarification that was District 5A Representative candidate John Purcell who was at that meeting today. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.