Alex North

An abundance of scarcity

@waitbutwhy You will love reading it!

I keep being recommended Godel, Escher, Bach, so I finally bought it. Now I have it. Do I actually have to read this thing or can I just have it be an impressive addition to my bookshelf?

@LRxword Loved it! Took ages, so glad I pushed through without a hint.

Minute Cryptic - 24 September, 2025 12 - 55 + n = 9 - 12 (5) minutecryptic.com/?utm_source=sh…

@iannuttall Yes! I'm in much the same place. I do have ideas and small projects, but none that get me excited to go hard. Wanna chat about it? I think collaboration would make a big difference to energy.

Real talk: I have no idea what to work on 😰 I spend a lot of time in Claude Code and Cursor IDE/CLI testing features and building proof of concepts and small apps for myself. With all this knowledge I think I could build something good and meaningful but struggling to find that spark of an idea… I make a little bit from ads on here and have side projects and property but nothing resembling fulfilling work with a product people would pay for. There are plenty of lucrative offers in my inbox to sponsor posts and emails and videos but it doesn't feel right for me to make money that way. Building is what makes me happy. I just don't know what to build. Anybody else hit a creative/idea block like this? There's no AI for that...

Oh, and the query (for Google BigQuery): gist.github.com/anorth/ff3b113…

One dimension not captured is whether projects are industry-sponsored or not. Contributions might be more valuable where industry funding is absent.

Looking for signals on where a marginal contribution to open source might be most valuable, I ranked GitHub projects by the ratio of watch ("star") events to unique contributors over 2024-25. I'm not sure the results are much good as answers to the question, but interesting. 🧵

@ptrwtts @usv So awesome, congrats!

Reservoir has raised a Series A led by @usv! What makes Reservoir special is how we've responded to the exploding number of blockchains. We're not just "multi" chain. We're "every" chain. It's deep in the DNA of how we design our products, and we're starting to see it pay off with the success of @RelayProtocol But we're just getting started. So. Many. Chains. Plus some insane new products that we haven't announced yet. All pushing towards unleashing the potential of onchain assets. Super thankful to everyone who has supported us along the way, especially the earliest believers: @nickgrossman, @jessewldn, @ashegan, @dberenzon, @yonatansela p.s. come join us, we're hiring!

Quantum Punks ⚛️ Over the years, I met quantum people that had no idea about crypto and viceversa. However, I also met people that are in the perfect intersection. @ObadiaAlex and I decided to call them Quantum Punks and wrote a short manifesto. quantumpunks.org 🧵

@haxor I think python and Julia are the answers today, but I don't think that's good enough. If you're interested in creating a better answer, I would love to work with you.

And by "best" I mean: 1) Most approachable for people who are not professional software developers, 2) can precisely and clearly express domain-specific problems and solutions, 3) robust and scalable for real-world usage, not just proofs of concept.

What is the best programming language for subject matter experts to use for complex systems and domains? The users I'm imagining are people doing work in physics, math, biology, economics, operations research, simulation, medicine, etc.

New monster post: my own current perspective on the recent debates around techno-optimism, AI risks, and ways to avoid extreme centralization in the 21st century. vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/1…

Math notation is good for a lot of things, but representing algorithms is not one of them. Fortunately, we have other formal languages that are really good at representing algorithms -- programming languages. It's a shame academic papers don't use them more often.

Very excited to share that our latest result is finally out: Testudo! A SNARK proof system designed to be prover-cheap to support large scale circuits. Here a short story of previous attempts 🧵

This is awesome, such a great idea germ, and execution to go with it.

Secure bridges are hard, but an active area of R&D. The eventual development of high-throughput, general purpose message bridging may be as transformative to the Web3 platform as the Internet was to the PC platform.

Early computers didn’t have much more! The next most important component was ... Filecoin ⟷ secondary storage. Storage networks are the persistent storage for world computers. Large, cheap, but slower to access. Important metrics are capacity, and latency and throughput.

The decentralised infrastructure of Web3 is a platform for application development, much like a PC: a world computer. An analogy between the physical components of each clarifies the basic components, and also points to future needs. cryptonet.org/blog/the-web3-…

This analogy of the Web3 platform as PC points to a missing, or at least underdeveloped, piece of infra. Bridges ⟷ network. Bridges are how applications running on different world computers communicate with each other. Important metrics are latency and throughput.