The Swyx Mixtape

Listen to the PH podcast: https://soundcloud.com/thepornhubpodcast/leo-vice-asian-male-pornstar

Watch and subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYFFKuuaF3k

Watch the Intentionally Blank podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnbmku3lFmg (20mins in)

Listen to Films to Be Buried With (1h in): https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/films-to-be-buried/pete-holmes-films-to-be-6f_tQjdSLmH/

Listen to After On: https://after-on.com/episodes-31-60/057

Roger Hanlon's research online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogCIqaCe2zI

From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVmfpULFk-M

Points of interest:
11:24 Doc Ock’s theme

21:20 "Goosebumps"

37:30 Tom Holland standing in the pouring rain while he watches Jonah on the big screen right after SPOILER

42:00 The movie's max hype moment

48:05 SPOILER 3's theme

48:42 SPOILER 2's theme

51:44 Final fight

1:01:27 Goodbyes

1:04:36-1:06:12 Credits-only Spider-man theme

Track List:
0:00 Intro to Fake News
1:11 World’s Worst Friendly Neighbor
2:03 Damage Control
4:20 Being a Spider Bites
5:25 Gone in a Flash
7:18 All Spell Breaks Loose
10:44 Otto Trouble
15:04 Ghost Fighter in the Sky / Beach Blanket Bro Down
17:52 Strange Bedfellows
19:37 Sling vs Bling
24:38 Octo Gone
28:12 No Good Deed
33:13 Exit Through the Lobby
37:28 A Doom With a View
39:29 Spider Baiting
41:04 Liberty Parlance
42:33 Monster Smash
43:55 Arc Reactor
46:52 Shield of Pain
51:44 Goblin His Inner Demons
55:39 Forget Me Knots
1:02:28 Peter Parker Picked a Perilously Precarious Profession
1:04:00 Arachnoverture

Listen to the Economist podcast: https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2021/12/15/meet-the-cryptokings

Read the article: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2021/12/18/the-most-powerful-people-in-crypto

Listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2fDTuh5aU (start at 25min mark)
Crypto villain of the year https://cryptobriefing.com/2021-review-the-top-10-crypto-villains-year/

Transcript

i would be curious to learn in

what sense has ether over optimized for

being money so what at what points did

it make a trade-off like a conscience

trade-off to say

we

we designed the chain to be better money

and worse as let's say an execution

layer

sure

i think a good broad way to understand

it is if you look at antonio the founder

of do idx's tweets about it afterward

and he he said you know

the ethereum user experience on on layer

one has basically not even 10xed over

five years

um and at that time the roadmap

was very much to to figure out how to

cater to users and developers right um

and and so i think just like if you just

zoom out that far it's pretty easy to

see that we're we're in a very different

place today

on ethereum than it was uh

a couple years ago and i think the

another easy way to see this is just

with d5 itself right where if you look

at the d5 that's kind of really taken

off and done well it's been crosstrained

it's been non-ethereum right so you know

luna versus snx but then also you know

um

sort of projects on avalanche versus

projects on ethereum the you know the

same exact project but they'll do better

on avalanche um and then you know you

you you kind of get a sense that um

i think ethereum rightfully says that

they're the bedrock or kind of the uh

birthplace of defy innovation right but

what that also means is that if that's

the

main claim to to to um

sort of power that that that becomes

quite

it becomes quite nostalgic like in a way

right uh where

um what about the new users or what

about the new developers where do they

go and and you know what we're seeing is

that new developers are just multi-evm

right so they

deploy where the users are because their

goal is to

have their product be used you know so

an example is we back tranches which is

a

quite quite uh novel mechanism for doing

risk sharing across um longs and shorts

and it's got one of the highest tbls in

d5 right but they started off on bsc and

the the founders love ethereum but they

just

said if i launched on l1

uh there's no way and i'm not gonna

launch on matic because

if i'm gonna launch on another chain

anyways i might as well launch where the

actual users are

right so

uh okay

this is what kind of work this is kind

of what we're seeing on the app side and

then you look at the performance of d5

coins too right you know when we have

that part let's take note with the

performance let's let's stick with the

sort of the tech for a second because

yeah sure sure so

um

if we i think if we look at blockchains

from

actually first principles

it's really just you know it's a shared

database where anyone can can verify or

where anybody can see that the the

computation that was done whether it's a

transfer or a smart contract execution

that was done with

integrity so that was that was done

correctly right

and you can have various

kinds

of such uh

database basically so being the most

centralized would be just binance right

the centralized exchange nobody has any

insight into their database but it has a

lot of reputation at stake um so you

just trust it to you know perform all

the other updates correctly pretty much

and on the other extreme

you have something like bitcoin and

ethereum where they say oh we throttle

the network um really hard to sort of

keep um

this verification cost this cost for

people to actually do the accounting

themselves to to to to walk through

every step that was done and say oh i

can i can verify

without making any trust assumptions

that all of this computation was done

correctly

right and in the middle between these

two extremes centralized exchange and

the completely decentralized blockchain

you have a pretty wide trade of space

right and um that's where you find bsc

that's where you find avalanche and

solana at some points across these

spectrums right

but

sort of what i'm wondering is

i mean

are these other chains really gonna you

know

develop in in in any other way i mean

than ethereum and bitcoin so their

databases are always so yeah

i guess my answer would be they already

have and they will continue

because they are attracting all the new

users i think this is the just the

reality of the space right and i think

you know when i told you that half of

metamask users are bsc users and it

under shocked you

it's because a lot of

you know a lot of ether ogs and biblical

energies they don't use

chains because they don't need that

money right like you don't need to make

a thousand dollars you don't need to

make ten thousand dollars right you're

too wealthy to care

but that says more about you than it

says about other people right so

it's kind of my point which is that um i

i find that a lot of ethiopians they're

in the mindset now where they're like

i'm already rich and you have to

understand why what i've done is so good

and also what i why what i'm preserving

is so valuable and valuable

as it may

um you have given very few outlets for

new users to come and participate

in what you've done and and so you know

that's the reality of the space and and

you know having matic is not is not an

answer right because if you have matic

then they say what is the difference

between matic and any other l1 right and

then and then you open up that door and

then

yeah of course of course there's none

right so so i think that that's kind of

the reality of the space and i agree

with you a hundred percent on you know

there is a

you know a decentralization trade-off uh

between each of these and i think what

the novel sort of

understanding that i have or or that um

i think the market has as well is that

um

where ethereum is on the trade-off scale

um

[Music]

it

it is optimized for a world

that um

it's struggling to maintain its network

effect for evm itself

where evm developers are immediately

deploying to every chain

and then users are using where

they find it most convenient

so

i would say in april or march i would

have said that ether itself uh will

benefit a lot from this multi evm i

believe i said that in a thesis um and

he did and i think in part ether has

right it has outperformed bitcoin quite

a bit uh since then because ether

benefits from being able to be ported

around on evm just much easier right so

you can bring your you know y...

Listen to the Changelog: https://changelog.com/podcast/467

Essays:

• https://www.swyx.io/LIP
• https://www.swyx.io/api-economy
• https://www.swyx.io/cloudflare-go

Transcript

Jerod Santo: So swyx, we have been tracking your work for years; well, you've been Learning in Public for years, so I've been (I guess) watching you learn, but we've never had you on the show, so welcome to The Changelog.

Shawn Wang: Thank you. Long-time listener, first-time guest, I guess... [laughs]

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah.

Jerod Santo: Happy to have you here.

Adam Stacoviak: Very excited to have you here.

Jerod Santo: So tell us a little bit of your story, because I think it informs the rest of our conversation. We're gonna go somewhat deep into some of your ideas, some of the dots you've been connecting as you participate and watch the tech industry... But I think for this conversation it's probably useful to get to know you, and how you got to be where you are. Not the long, detailed story, but maybe the elevator pitch of your recent history. Do you wanna hook us up?

Shawn Wang: For sure. For those who want the long history, I did a 2,5-hour podcast with Quincy Larson from FreeCodeCamp, so you can go check that out if you want. The short version is I'm born and raised in Singapore, came to the States for college, and was totally focused on finance. I thought people who were in the finance industry rules the world, they were masters of the universe... And I graduated just in time for the financial crisis, so not a great place to be in. But I worked my way up and did about 6-7 years of investment banking and hedge funds, primarily trading derivatives and tech stocks. And the more I covered tech stocks, the more I realized "Oh, actually a) the technology is taking over the world, b) all the value is being created pre-IPO, so I was investing in public stocks, after they were basically done growing... And you're kind of just like picking over the public remains. That's not exactly true, but...

Jerod Santo: Yeah, tell that to Shopify...

Shawn Wang: I know, exactly, right?

Adam Stacoviak: And GitLab.

Shawn Wang: People do IPO and have significant growth after, but that's much more of a risk than at the early stage, where there's a playbook... And I realized that I'd much rather be value-creating than investing. So I changed careers at age 30, I did six months of FreeCodeCamp, and after six months of FreeCodeCamp - you know, I finished it, and that's record time for FreeCodeCamp... But I finished it and felt not ready, so I enrolled myself in a paid code camp, Full Stack Academy in New York, and came out of it working for Two Sigma as a frontend developer. I did that for a year, until Netlify came along and offered me a dev rel job. I took that, and that's kind of been my claim to fame; it's what most people know me for, which is essentially being a speaker and a writer from my Netlify days, from speaking about React quite a bit.

[04:13] I joined AWS in early 2020, lasted a year... I actually was very keen on just learning the entire AWS ecosystem. You know, a frontend developer approaching AWS is a very intimidating task... But Temporal came along, and now I'm head of developer experience at Temporal.

Adam Stacoviak: It's an interesting path. I love the -- we're obviously huge fans of FreeCodeCamp, and Quincy, and all the work he's done, and the rest of the team has done to make FreeCodeCamp literally free, globally... So I love to see -- it makes you super-happy inside just to know how that work impacts real people.

Like, you see things happen out there, and you think "Oh, that's impacting", but then you really meet somebody, and 1) you said you're a long-time listener, and now you're on the show, so it just really -- like, having been in the trenches so long, and just see all this over-time pay off just makes me really believe in that whole "Slow and steady, keep showing up, do what needs done", and eventually things happen. I just love that.

Shawn Wang: Yeah. There's an infinite game mentality to this. But I don't want to diminish the concept of free, so... It bothers me a little, because Quincy actually struggles a lot with the financial side of things. He supports millions of people on like a 300k budget. 300k. If every single one of us who graduated at FreeCodeCamp and went on to a successful tech career actually paid for our FreeCodeCamp education - which is what I did; we started the hashtag. It hasn't really taken off, but I started a hashtag called #payitbackwards. Like, just go back, once you're done -- once you can afford it, just go back and pay what you thought it was worth. For me, I've paid 20k, and I hope that everyone who graduates FreeCodeCamp does that, to keep it going.

Adam Stacoviak: Well, I mean, why not...?

Shawn Wang: I'd also say one thing... The important part of being free is that I can do it on nights and weekends and take my time to decide if I want to change careers. So it's not just a free replacement to bootcamps, it actually is an async, self-guided, dip-your-toe-in-the-water, try-before-you-buy type of thing for people who might potentially change their lives... And that's exactly what happened for me. I kept my day job until the point I was like "Okay, I like enough of this... I'm still not good, but I like enough of this that I think I could do this full-time."

Adam Stacoviak: I like the #payitbackwards hashtag. I wish it had more steam, I suppose.

Jerod Santo: We should throw some weight behind that, Adam, and see if we can...

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. Well, you know, you think about Lambda School, for example - and I don't wanna throw any shade by any means, because I think what Austin has done with Lambda... He's been on Founders Talk before, and we talked deeply about this idea of making a CS degree cost nothing, and there's been a lot of movement on that front there... But you essentially go through a TL;DR of Lambda as you go through it, and you pay it after you get a job if you hit certain criteria, and you pay it based upon your earnings. So why not, right? Why not have a program like that for FreeCodeCamp, now that you actually have to commit to it... But it's a way. I love that you paid that back and you made that an avenue, an idea of how you could pay back FreeCodeCamp, despite the commitment not being there.

Jerod Santo: Right.

Shawn Wang: Yeah. And Quincy is very dedicated to it being voluntary. He thinks that people have different financial situations. I don't have kids, so I can afford a bit more. People should have that sort of moral obligation rather than legal obligation.

I should mention that Lambda School is currently being accused of some fairly substantial fraud against its students...

Jerod Santo: Oh, really?

Shawn Wang: Yeah, it actually just came out like two days ago.

Adam Stacoviak: I saw that news too, on Monday.

Sh...

Listen to the full concerto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cg_0jepxow

Paganini while Hula Hooping with TwoSet Violin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOjO4ekcJQA

Hilary on Wikipedia and Documentary and NPR Tiny Desk