Yesterday FTX imploded in a classic “Emperors New Clothes” moment. It appears that they are insolvent and may be sold in a fire sale or declare bankruptcy. All of the details have yet to emerge, but it’s clear that this is the end of the road for FTX and CEO…

The web3 community is obsessed with decentralization to a fault. They believe every company should be a DAO and every API a protocol. Let me tell you what this trades off, and why it might not be worth it. In August 2022 I was defrauded of $26,000. The scheme prays one of the few major vulnerabilities of the…

Surveys are broken. We loathe them when they land in our inbox, and if we do manage to complete their long lists of tenuous multiple choice options, most of us feel like our submissions disappear into an empty abyss. This general feeling is called survey fatigue, and it has eroded…

A year ago I was working on a robotic smoothie machine and trying to pass finals. Six months later I was bailing people out of jail and pitching for $1M dollars at the United Nations. This is that story. Chapter 1: Engineering a Problem The University of Waterloo is a funny place. Visually unremarkable, it…