I've been hearing faint wind chimes every few hours for the past year or so, followed by two distinct voices in my head - voices not of reason, but of a higher being, someone who uses my voice, cadence and vocabulary, but is not me. He converses with me, answers my questions, but does not use my reasoning, logic or knowledge base. I had ventured on an unplanned acid trip on 12th January at a party on Oak Square. In a dimly lit room, 2AM, almost about to pass out, I had the most vivid, extraordinary experience. The host of the party had a replica of The Scream on his wall, and a light pointed directly at it. Over the next 16 hours, I sat undisturbed, conversing with the subject of Edward Munch's painting. For the first hour, I felt a sense of joy - I was conversing with The Scream - an experience only I can share, but then fear, anxiety and discomfort kicked in. I didn't move, I was practically paralysed in my seat. But this story is not about the trip - this is a story about what I discovered after.

The previous 10 rules for life were stolen pieces of art, and came from a place of desperation. I was desperate for discipline in life. It worked wonders, so I decided to reflect back upon those rules, and create 10 new rules. These are slightly more erratic, less practical, and definitely more edge-case. Straight from the occult. Any reference of “some people” is just me, pretending my ideas are valid, so as to not incur unsolicited medical help. Also - this article might form my insanity defense for when I commit tax fraud. Do not take this seriously.

At a high level, Ethereum Virtual Machine is a deterministic function that outputs a certain value for a certain input. The EVM is much like any other computer, but it specializes in running smart contracts. EVM is like JVM - but instead of using any other process virtual machine, on Ethereum we use EVM because we need things like finite determinism and gas-implementations.

Let me preface this piece by saying that Statistics as a method is not fundamentally flawed, but ask any Machine Learning engineer in your local cafe, and they’ll be quick to tell you that the process of data collection and storage is usually flawed. A new engineer is quick on their feet to go to Kaggle and download a dataset, perform a few cleaning operations, do a little analysis, classification, prediction and update their Linkedin headlines with “Machine Learning Enthusiast”, “AI Expert” and “Data Scientist”. While I find little points of contention with the first two titles, the last one is questionable, since you’re working with what is essentially a DIY data cleaning project, instead of true data processing, but I digress.

Layer 2 solutions have become an integral part of the Ethereum road-map, especially short term. This is a good time to do an overview on Rollups and talk about the progress on rollups this year.

High gas fees are a problem that Ethereum currently faces. dApp Builders have to be careful so as to optimise their code to cost the least gas to the user. Let's start with a few obvious places to reduce gas: Minimize what you store on-chain. For example if you're building a blog on Ethereum - store the blog in IPFS and the CID in your Solidity. Later on you can optimise this further.

“An Irrefutable case for Ethereum” - A thread addressing some of the more common criticisms of Ethereum.