This orientation against the role consumer software traditionally plays is why the platform is called Tortoise. In an industry that moves quickly toward specific goals and "KPIs", Tortoise explores freely and calmly. In an industry obsessed with a shiny tinfoil-wrapped hypertechnocapitalist future, Tortoise embraces ancient forms.

Over time, the Tortoise brand has shifted from something shaped by the product's intended values to the name itself being the main driving force behind it. The name has ended up being more fitting and inspiring than I imagined. It has helped solidify Tortoise's guiding principles:

Patience

Patience is Tortoise's relationship to time.

Tech moves fast, and when you are actively launching products it feels even faster. It feels like every day is a race against the clock and if you ever let up you will not survive. The issue with that mentality is that it leads to burnout, and when you burn out, that is when your startup actually dies.

Patience looks like: shipping when it's ready, not when the timeline says. Measuring in years, not weeks. Never manufacturing urgency for users, because urgency is how you get people to act against their own interests.

We don't need constant wins and we don't need to always move quickly. We just need to keep moving.

Resilience

Resilience is Tortoise's relationship to weight.

The tortoise is not simply protected by its shell. Its shell is part of its underlying skeletal structure. Likewise, resilience is an integral part of Tortoise's design.

It means music and relationships live onchain, where they are not easily affected by the whims of companies. It means operating costs are taken on mindfully and kept low. It means the health of the community is judged by how well we support each other, not by how many members it contains. It means bear markets are not a death sentence.

Carrying a shell on our back slows us down, but its worth carrying that extra weight for the peace of mind of knowing that we are prepared for the future.

Ancient Roots

Ancient Roots are Tortoise's compass.

Tortoises and turtles have been around for about 200 million years, and for nearly as long as humans have told stories, we've put the world on their backs. In Hindu mythology, Kurma the tortoise held up the mountain that churned the ocean so the gods could recover immortality. Many Native North American nations like the Iroquois know their continent as Turtle Island, formed on a turtle's back. Early China read the shell itself as a map of the cosmos, with the dome of heaven above, the plate of earth below. The Maya painted the maize god reborn from a cracked turtle shell. These cultures never met. They looked at the same animal and independently saw the same thing: a foundation stable enough to build a world on.

There are even ancient ties to music. The first lyre of the Greeks was called the chelys, their word for tortoise, because its soundbox was a hollowed shell. In the Homeric Hymn, Hermes finds a tortoise at his mother's doorstep and makes it "a singer." Halfway across the world, with no contact, turtle shells were struck as rattles and drums in ancient China.

So when the trend of the moment is loud, this principle asks one question: what has already survived? Music has, and so has the way humans share it. For nearly all of its history, music wasn't something we consumed alone. It was something people did together, and the oldest way of valuing it isn't royalties or ad-supported playlists. It's patronage: people directly supporting the musicians whose work moves them.

Music, like the tortoise, is a window into an ancient force that was here long before the internet and will outlast whatever comes after it. We build on that. Not on trends. On the shell of the world.

GTM(Going Tortoise Mode) Strategy

Every startup needs a GTM strategy and Tortoise is no different. Going Tortoise Mode allows the community and me to zoom out and see past whatever happens to be trending in the current moment. It reminds us to breathe, find stillness, and think deeply. It reminds us to slow down and spend time making music. Not for the purpose of maximizing streaming revenue. Just because it's what we do.

OpenClaw is an AI harness that allows an AI like ChatGPT or Claude to control a computer on its own. Its code is messy and completely written by AI. It is inefficient and full of security holes. Many of my software developer friends look at these flaws and deem the product to be worthless because of them. What they don't understand is that I, and the rest of the claw connoisseurs, do not see this as a technological breakthrough. It is a breakthrough in creativity. An expansion of the Overton Window of what you can achieve with AI models.

It is hard to find a conceivable limit on what an OpenClaw agent could do, apart from things like 2FA and government ID verification, though I am not even certain those things are hard edges. I use my main claw assistant to research jobs, work, and open source code contribution opportunities every night. It uses web search and a CLI research tool that it partly built itself for the purpose of doing its job better (the CLI tool was the result of asking it to build a tool for itself to help it do its job). It manages my schedule, tracks my protein consumption, and tracks event calendars and newsletters.

Using OpenClaw has completely changed how I think about work. It is now clear that in the near future there will be nothing that agents can't do on a computer that humans currently do. Given that all of my work is done on a computer, there is only one logical conclusion: work is for bots. When I say work, I mean everything besides high-level decision making. Things like strategic direction, logical flow of systems, approval and review, and creative tasks like writing (I am writing this by hand and I do not plan on changing this process) will continue to be done by humans. Decision making is the new work.

This is not a new idea. Tech bros have been saying for years that the only skill that will be valuable in the future is taste, or the ability to make good decisions, and now I am seeing straight into this future in a concrete way. The future of work is within arm's length now and it's time to do something about it.

That's why I am building an AI Operator for my startup, Tortoise. This AI system, known as tortOS, is already live and becoming more powerful every day. Currently, it is running the social media account, including sharing new music uploads and responding to mentions, and drafting a weekly strategy report, aided by its access to relevant platform data, as well as a thoughtfully crafted SOUL document that gives it its personality and priorities. It is also contributing to the app repository, drafting issues based on my feedback and its own strategy research, and then opening PRs upon my approval of issues, which I can then merge into production. This is how far I have gotten hacking around on it for two weeks. Soon, it will be taking over quality assurance and user feedback as well. It will use a browser agent to test the product and message users directly through XMTP.

The AI operator experiment has gone better than I expected so far. Yesterday, I told it to build a website for itself that allows the public to follow its journey. I was mildly impressed that it could do this without issue. Then, just for fun, I asked it to run the site locally and test, which it did and then started fixing bugs. I was astounded at that point. Then, I asked it to send me some screenshots, and when it sent me screenshots of every page on the site, I was speechless.

I don't know where the ceiling of this system is, but I am increasingly spending less time working and more time making decisions. I am tempted to say that AI operators are the future of work, but that's not quite true. They are already here.

The Music Value Gap

People listen to music for hours every day. It's the soundtrack to work, exercise, commutes, cooking, cleaning, parties, breakups. Try to imagine your life without music. You probably can't.

The current value being added to people's lives by the record industry versus the value that it captures in revenue are so laughably far apart that it is clear that virtually everything about how recorded music is monetized right now is broken. Inflation adjusted recording industry revenue is still far below what it was in 1999 even though the world population and economy has grown significantly in that time.

Spotify users pay about $12 a month. Artists get about $0.003 per stream. After the platform and labels get their share, only a few dollars of that are going to artists. For the soundtrack to their entire life. People spend more on a single coffee.

This isn't because people don't value music. It's because streaming services are charging for access to music in a world where due to the internet, access is hard to restrict and therefore must be kept at a very low cost, otherwise people will just pirate it. Universal instant access to all music should have lead to a time of creative prosperity and abundance, but instead it has lead to a race to the bottom. Providing high quantities of music as cheaply as possible, and paying artists next to nothing.

Tortoise: Free to Listen, Valuable to Own

Access to music on Tortoise is free. Anyone can listen at no cost. Users pay to associate with the music.

Association is already a vital element of how music is monetized in the real world through merch, vinyl, and live shows. You buy merch to show you're a fan, not just because you need a new shirt. You buy vinyl not just to listen to them, but to decorate your living room and start conversations. You go to shows not just to hear music, but to be part of something.

To associate with music has been a valuable economic incentive for the entire history of the record industry. Without decentralized social networks like Farcaster and decentralized ownership networks like Base, bringing the social proof economy to the internet was not feasible. But these technologies, which allow you to truly own digital property and relationships, make this is possible. Digital music brings immense value to the world. It is time to close the gap between music's crucial societal function and the revenue it brings in for its creators.

The Tortoise model is a conceptual shift in how music is valued:

1. Digital things can be owned, not just accessed

2. Ownership creates social value

3. Social value can flow back to creators as real money

Vinyl and merch sales prove people understand this for physical goods. Seventeen straight years of vinyl sales growth while streaming was supposedly making physical media obsolete. People are paying $40 for something that is already included in their streaming subscription. They're buying identity, not access.

$TORT

$TORT is the ecosystem token for Tortoise. $TORT holders will be the curators of music on the platform. The holders will be the tastemakers. The better they curate, the more attention on the platform and therefore the higher the price of $TORT. Aligned incentives.

$TORT powers the ecosystem through staking and collection rewards. Users stake TORT in their "shell" to receive ETH rewards, and to unlock pro features like enhanced curation tools, premium discovery, and platform benefits. Every time they collect a song, they receive TORT rewards directly to their shell, incentivizing curation and collection.

The value of $TORT largely comes from Tortoise being a place with great people and music. Where artists want to release. Where collectors want to discover. Compare that to Spotify. Their stock price goes up when they reduce costs, including royalty payments. That's why they're experimenting with AI-generated music and promoting ambient tracks that cost them nothing. Their perfect scenario is users who pay $12 a month and only listen to royalty-free muzak. Every real artist getting plays is a cost center.

In the Spotify model, the platform wins when artists lose. In the Tortoise model, we only win if artists win.

Why Tortoise

Tortoise represents the antithesis of the status quo in music and tech. Musicians are told to constantly make content and always be available. Technology companies are all about moving fast and being futuristic.

Tortoises are slow and ancient. The message is that it's okay to move slowly and unplug. It's okay to tune out and focus on what you love. It's okay to spend time making music.

Where This Goes

Of course I don't know if Tortoise becomes the future of music, but I know the current system is so broken that something has to supplement it.

The pieces are all here. Farcaster for social context. Base for ownership. Artists who are fed up with streaming. Listeners who miss owning music. A growing understanding that the platforms extracting all the value aren't adding much value themselves.

We're not trying to kill Spotify. They can keep shuffling your LoFi beats in the background. We'll be the place where music becomes meaningful again. Where collecting a song means something. Where supporting an artist actually supports them.

The recording industry needs a new layer. A social layer. An ownership layer. A value layer.

That's what Tortoise is building. Slowly. Steadily. One song at a time.

Tortoise.

1. Deployed the Tortoise Token ($TORT)

2. Launched the Tortoise Player, a Farcaster mini app for streaming, sharing, and collecting music

3. Released a song called Vains on the Tortoise Player

A ton of work went into this launch, and it was quite successful. The project took over the timeline on launch day, $TORT did over a million USD in volume, and most importantly, people are using the mini app.

Why Clank?

I decided to clank Tortoise to maximize attention on the project and to generate some initial capital. I also wanted to align incentives with the Clanker team, because I like how they move. They strike me as people who care more about innovating and shipping than looking cool or impressing VCs. I thought clanking on launch day would be good since there would be no expectations. And most importantly, $TORT is an integral part of the Tortoise ecosystem, with the first use case being announced in a couple days.

Feelings

The most surprising thing about the launch was the extreme dopamine hit I got from all the engagement. I was getting hundreds of notifications. It was impossible to keep up with. This had lasting effects on my brain chemistry and made it difficult to focus for about a week.

Future

With such an energetically concentrated launch event, it's easy to lose perspective on the fact that this is a long term project, the continuing culmination of a vision I have been forming for about four years. A vision of using blockchain technology to save the recording industry, which has been struggling greatly since the advent of digital file sharing and streaming. The short term mindset of token traders has been the biggest negative aspect of clanking this project. When that launch hype hits, it's hard to not want to do everything you can to keep the token price going up. I was somewhat prepared for that though, because I have seen many clankers launch, and it is almost universally the case that there is an initial hype followed by a crash that is just as intense. I am glad the the $TORT price has crashed and the dust has settled, because now I can focus on really earning the market value. Hopefully the new buyers will be mainly believers and contributors, and not just short term traders(although I appreciate and encourage trading as well).

I created something out of passion and shipped it. Something that I would be happy being the only user of. It's generating revenue from day one, but more importantly, it's laying the foundation for a new record industry. Tortoise moves slowly but deliberately, just like its namesake. And in the end, we all know who wins the race.

We are explorers in this ocean and the ocean is filled with islands. Where your journey starts is up to the hand of fate. Some people start out on a near perfect expansive island that they never find themselves wanting to leave and others start out in open water, far from land and with no flotation device. Most of us start somewhere in between, lucky enough to be born on an island, but that island is not lush or big enough to live out the rest of our lives on. And so, once we reach a certain age or set of milestones, we must set sail in search of a more suitable island.

We don't usually see any obvious places to land when we first set sea, but the chances are very good that there's somewhere better than where we started. There are predetermined routes available though, so most of us take them. As we travel whichever paths we choose, we find more islands. Many islands are obviously bad and we skip over them, but some of them look quite nice. Unfortunately, most of the islands that look nice are not good for long term stays. Maybe it's too small, or there's not enough resources there. Maybe the island is geographically perfect, but the inhabitants are not welcoming.

The thing about this ocean of life is that it's quite scary. As you sail through open water, its easy to feel like you will never find another nice island again, not to mention an ideal one. Most people end up having long stays on islands that are not ideal because of this fear, and this is a great source of unhappiness for many. They have either settled on a bad island, or they are lost at sea.

The big trick of life that so many fall for is thinking that the bad islands are better than the sea. It makes sense. At least the bad islands give you a decently comfortable place to rest your head and allow you to feel the ground underneath your feet. At least you have a community there, even if it is not the best one for you. The big problem with the bad islands is that as long as you are on them, you are not looking for something better. Bad islands are devoid of hope.

On average, the quality of island that one is able to find depends on how much time and effort one is willing to put into sailing. And to find a truly amazing island, one that is truly your ideal place, usually requires risking being alone at sea for the rest of your life. If you want to be a true explorer and find new abundant land, you must risk not finding anything at all. That is what it takes. Most are unwilling. As I sit here and write this, I am drifting at sea and afraid. There are some pretty nice islands in my view that I could settle for if I choose to, but I don't want to at the moment. I have a feeling that there's something better out there, off-course from the currently established routes.

So for now, I coast along this deep endless ocean. I have spotted promising land masses many times on this journey, but so far, I have not been happy with what I found when I went ashore. The temptation to stay there anyway has always been strong. Sometimes I've resisted that temptation through my own will and sometimes I've been forced back into the sea kicking and screaming. All I can do is keep sailing, looking for my place, with total acceptance that the sea may be my only destiny, and maybe that's just as beautiful and fulfilling as any other fate.

That being said, I am getting pretty tired of sailing.

All of these tokens will be launched with the Clanker tokenbot from my Farcaster account, hughassle.eth. Creators of Clanker tokens receive a portion of transaction volume known as creator fees. This is what I refer to when I say that creator coin holders will receive a share of creation coin fees.

$HUG is my creator coin. I am a musician and software developer. You can think of it as owning stock in me as a creator. Creator token holders will receive a portion of trading fees from all creation tokens.

For all of my major creations, I will launch a creation coin. Creation coins are like owning stock in that particular creation. For me, most of these creations will be songs and apps. For each creation coin, 50% of creator fees will be distributed equally among the creator coin holders in proportion to the amount held.

The first recording device, the phonograph, was invented in 1877. The only way to hear music before that was to see musicians play it live. The recording industry continued to grow from that point and evolved through different formats, starting with the wax cylinder, then vinyl, tape, cassettes, and CDs. CDs, with their high price as a physical item and low cost to produce, were the absolute pinnacle of the record business. The nineties, the CD era, were to the record business as the 2010s were to the software business, with record companies paying out huge advances to unproven artists.

This all came to an end around 2000 when digital file sharing allowed for the infinite replication of recorded music. In a few years, musicians went from making fifteen dollars per listener to fifteen dollars total from their records. This led to the creation of ways to monetize digital music in a more fair and legal way, first with iTunes and now with Spotify. Yet, recorded music revenues for musicians are still far lower on average than they were during any point when physical record sales were popular. This has led us back to the start, with live performance being the center point of most musicians' careers once again.

Zooming out, it almost seems like the natural order for music to be all about live performance again, as it has been for almost the entirety of human history. A real "nature is healing" moment.

But, I would argue that live performance being the only practical way to sustain a music career results in all of us missing out on some amazing musicians. Those who are not as focused on performing live. Those whose main fascination is diligently sculpting a pleasing combination of sound waves to be preserved forever. The main advantage of recording music being marketing for live concerts, as it is currently, results in mismatched incentives for the listener, who wants to listen to the best music possible, and the artist, who wants the listener to go to their concerts. Suppose the listener enjoys classical music while relaxing, but prefers to go to EDM concerts, does that mean the listener values classical music less than EDM? Not necessarily. To put it in basic terms, artists making less money from recorded music results in lower-quality records.

To most, this war seems over already. The streaming genie is out of the bottle and now all music is at our fingertips. Why would anyone pay more than ten dollars a month total for music when they don't need to? But there is one trend in particular that stands in opposition to that assumption: vinyl record sales.

2022 was the seventeenth straight year that vinyl sales grew in the U.S. Vinyl is purchased to be both consumed and collected. Many would argue that they like vinyl because the sound quality is better, but as a former professional sound engineer, I am extremely skeptical that most vinyl collectors could tell the difference between analog and digital music playback in a blind test. The main reason people are buying vinyl is because they want to own the music they love and for other people to see it. They want to have a physical connection with the music and artist. They want guests to see their collection and discuss it when they visit. They want everyone to know that they really care about the music and that they have good taste.

Music NFTS are digital vinyl. It is music whose ownership is recorded on a blockchain. They are a way to have that same sense of ownership that comes from vinyl in a digital context. Thinking like this makes it easy to see the potential value, since unlike vinyl, NFTs are not limited to people who own a record player and can afford expensive physical records. NFTs are accessible to everyone with an internet connection and are on average much less expensive while at the same time providing more income to the artist since there are no physical production costs.

There are two main disadvantages of NFTs as a means of collecting music when compared to physical records:

1. Terrible wallet user experience

2. Lack of tools to show off your collection

The wallet UX issue is being solved by many smart people. It is simply a matter of time and immense progress has been made in just the last year on things like account abstraction and layer 2(low-fee) blockchains.

The answer to number 2 is open social networking protocols. Social media platforms that integrate open blockchain-based protocols allow users to bring their digital property into a social context. Vinyl records bring friends together around a shared love of music. The digital equivalent of this is having on-chain music in place of physical records, and web3-enabled social profiles in place of the home. Music fans can show off their music collection to the whole world in a digitally native way rather than only those in physical proximity. Right now, music NFTs are like in-game items or skins that can be purchased for a game, but it is still to be decided what that game actually is. Decentralized open social protocols could be the game that unlocks the potential of on-chain music.

I am obsessed with what every one thinks about me, even people I don't know or look up to. It's not a secret that most people are. This desire to fit in, the natural pressure every person feels to bend to the rules and expectations of their community, is often a helpful thing. It helps to ensure you have stability and that you can add value to that society. The problem arises when big groups get off track in their values, placing more importance on growth and prestige than well-being and sustainability. It is up to us as individuals to identify where the rules of society are benefitting us and where they are not.

There are certain people whose desire to act against the Norm is so strong that they figure out how to thrive off of this feeling of alienation, using it to their advantage. These are the non-conformists, those who have ascended the need to impress anyone but themselves. No domain of action is off limits to being the pursuit of one's true calling, and that calling may or may not happen to be accepted by the Norm.

Being a non-conformist sounds simple enough, just do whatever you want, but it is actually rare. I have definitely not mastered the art myself. I, like most people, am paralyzed. I am not free. There is a barrier between my intuitional compass and my actions. I am terrified of saying or doing something that causes my status to be diminished. Until I can be guided only by my own intuition, with no consideration of external influences, I will be a conformist, at the whim of the omnipresent yet arbitrary Norm.

Of course, this is not a binary thing and we all fall on a certain place in the spectrum of caring what others think. To truly not care, to be a true non-conformist in every way, you have to be a psychopath. Maybe that's what this essay is really about, my desire to be just a little more psychopathic.

Joining Farcaster has been an exciting experience, because not only is the team building this vision of decentralized social networks, they are bringing users to the network in an intentional way and focusing on providing a great user experience as a prerequisite for providing full decentralization that is actually useful.

Varun Srinivasan, a member of the team building Farcaster, has been graciously providing video explanations of the protocol on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0eq1PLf6eUdm35v_840EGLXkVJDhxhcF

These are my notes on the videos released so far.

Video 1. Overview

Social network: A network that enables users to perform actions on other users.

Decentralized social network: A network that enables users to perform actions on other users using different applications. This creates four potential core problems to solve:

1. Identity: Users must be able to use the same ID across different apps(decentralized IDs)

2. Authentication: ID must be verified

3. Availability: Data must always be available no matter which app is used to interact with the network

4. Consistency: Network state must be reliably shared between different applications

2. Trustworthy Identities

There are two options for creating identities:

1. Human readable usernames(@alice)

- Advantage: Good UX

- Problem: Allows claiming of untrustworthy usernames such as @google

2. Numeric identifiers

- Advantages:

- Issued from a smart contract

- Unlimited quantities

- Problem: Bad UX

Farcaster's solution: An optional username(Farcaster name) connected to a required numeric identifier(Farcaster ID)

- Allows the network to take away misleading Farcaster names(FNames) like @google

- Allows users to change usernames while preserving the same Farcaster ID(FID)

- Numeric ID == FID == primary ID

- Username == FName == governed namespace

This system requires 2 contracts to manage user identification

- Contract 1: Issues FIDs

- Contract 2: Associates FIDs with Fnames

3. Authentication

Problem: We need a way to know that a message from an FID actually came from that user

- Solution: Sign the message with a private key that corresponds to that FID

- Problem: You don't want the app to know your private key

- Solution:

Each app generates a separate key pair called the signer. By signing a message with their custody address, the user gives trust to the new signer to create messages on their behalf. Signatures created by the signing address are now linked to the original custody address.

4. Account Recovery

Problem: If the private key of the primary address is lost, the user loses account access

- Solution:

Users have the ability to associate a second address, known as the recovery address, with their FID. The recovery address can request a change to a different primary address, which takes effect after a 7-day delay. The delay period ensures that the recovery address only has access to identity in the absence of the primary identity.

- The primary address has the authority to instantly change to a new primary address.

5. System Overview

The Farcaster network is made up of 3 layers

- Layer 1: ID registry

- FIDs and their associated Fnames, stored on Etheruem mainnet

- Layer 2: Hubs

- Permissionless databases managing a decentralized conflict-free replicated data type(CRDT) which contains an entire copy of the network to provide full data availability

- Layer 3: Custom backend servers(optional)

- Take data from a hub and organize it in a way that optimizes the data for use by your client

Two ways to index data for clients:

- Directly from hubs:

- Fully decentralized because trust is delegated directly to the signer device

- From custom backend server: less decentralized because trust is delegated to the server which can be revoked or changed at any time, but allows for data optimization

6. Delta Graphs

Messages are used to represent actions that users take and hubs are used to store those messages

- A delta is an action, such as a cast, like, share, etc.

- Problem:

If Bob likes a post and then unlikes it, it creates a conflicting state. Hubs must handle this in a manner that keeps the state consistent.

- Solution: the set of deltas is combined using a specific set of rules to produce a valid social graph

- Social graph:

A set of vertices, representing users and actions, connected by deltas. This graph is produced from hub data using a specific set of rules. These specific rules, such as merge functions that resolve conflicts, ensure that all hubs produce the same social graph.

7. Merging Deltas

Merging deltas describes the process of combining conflicting actions, such as liking then unliking, to produce a specific and consistent result

- Every action contains a conflict ID(CID) describing the action, a state of true or false, a unique hash, and a timestamp

- Regardless of the order in which the hub receives actions, the one with the most recent timestamp wins the conflict and is reflected in the timestamp. This creates resilience to errors in the order in which messages are received by hubs.

8. Delta Types

Deltas are organized by hubs into three types:

1. Casts

2. Reactions(such as likes and recasts)

3. Amps: Endorsements of one user by another user

4. Verifications: Wallet signatures that verify account and token ownership

5. User data: Metadata about users, such as their bio

6. Signers: The first data type a user establishes, all other messages are signed with this original key pair

- Hubs store each delta type separately as a conflict-free replicated data type(CRDT)

Delete messages: Contain a reference to the hash of the original message it is deleting, as well as its own unique hash and timestamp

- Eradicates content of the original message so it is no longer stored on hubs

- This means that hubs don't store all messages, only those necessary to create a valid delta graph

Pruning Deltas

Hubs are run by two groups of users

1. Builders of Farcaster clients. Running their own hub ensures that their client can always publish to and read from the network

2. API services, which allow others to connect to the network without running their own hub(like Alchemy and Infura on Ethereum)

Problem: As hubs get larger, they get more expensive to operate

- This could result in more builders using APIs to avoid hub costs, which would result in more centralization

- People might spam APIs with low-quality messages, which could result in operators becoming more selective about who they allow to use their services

Solution: Limits on hub size

Delta Pruning: messages are removed from hubs after one year

- Messages can be archived with other services

- There is also an upper overall size limit to regulate extremely chatty users

- Ensures:

- That hubs remain small

- Each hub can be operated on a single AWS server

- All hub operators are on an even playing field -> Decentralization

Possible development: Allow people to pay for additional hub storage

10. Direct Casts

It is useful for a social network to enable both public and private messaging. Private messages on Farcaster are called direct casts

- Ideal characteristics of direct casts(DCs):

1. Secure: Private

2. Reliable: Confidence in the message's reception

3. Useful: Features such as automatic link previews, reactions, read receipts

4. Open: Ability to message between different clients

Problem: Openness and security are conflicting because different clients vary in their level of security

Solution: features to be gradually implemented over time, starting with security and reliability, then moving to usefulness and openness

- Security is already good but still improving

- Extreme reliability is in progress

- Usefulness and openness to be developed in the future

The first DC iteration is implemented only on the Merkle client until security and reliability are perfected. Messaging is not yet open between different clients.

Looking forward

As more videos are posted to the channel I will continue making notes and posting them here. This technology excites every fiber of my being, and I want to make sure that I have as complete of an understanding of it as possible so that I can contribute to making it what the world needs.

Why

Wikipedia defines synesthesia as "a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway." One of the most common variations of this phenomenon is a connection between color and sound. Although this is a rare form of perception to have, many wish that they did perceive the world in such a vivid and connected way, with certain colors evoking certain sounds and vice versa. It is an interesting concept that can tell us a lot about how our brains work. Although these senses are picked up and processed by different mechanisms, there is clearly some crossover in how we make sense of sound and visual stimulation. Both sound and visual art can evoke a wide range of similar emotions.

The concept of synesthesia is the inspiration for my latest project, Color Chords. The concept of the project is to randomly generate a color, then synthesize a sound based on the emotive effect of that color.

If you prefer a video, I made one on this topic which you can find here:

Setup

I started out the project by creating a vanilla javascript Vite project. You can do this by running the command "npm create vite@latest" in the directory where you want your project to live. After naming the project, select vanilla javascript. After your project is created, you will also need to install Tone.js with the command "npm install tone." Open up your project in an IDE.

Color Generation

I wanted the sounds to be based on a randomly generated color, so that's the first step. I used rgb format, so all I need to do is randomly generate three integers between 0 and 255 in the format of "rgb(Int1, Int2, Int3)". Here is how I did that.

Now that we have a random color generated, we will set the background of the div to that color and put it as a heading as well so that we can see the color displayed with its rgb formatted label inside.

I set the background color not only when the page loads but also in the click event for the play button so that the color resets whenever the button is pushed. You might have also noticed that I separated the r, g, and b into separate variables, which will be important for creating the chord.

Sound Generation Setup

Now that we are generating random colors with rgb values, we can create rules for these values that generate sound with Tone.js. There are many possible ways you could do this since interpreting sound from color is a subjective process. I decided that each chord would be made up of three notes which I am calling the root, second, and third. The root note is based on the level of red, the second note is based on the amount of blue, and the third note is based on the amount of green.

The first thing I did was summarize the emotions and thoughts that red, green, and blue tend to evoke. Here are the qualities I ended up with.

Since the root note is basically the key of the chord, I also did some research into the emotive qualities of musical keys and ended up with this summarization:

I then mapped out these qualities to how much they aligned with the qualities of red to rank all the root notes in terms of how "red" they are. I then mapped these rankings to their equivalent value ranges from 0 - 255. So if the color's red value is 0 - 20, the root note will be G, for example.

For the blue and green values, there are 6 options for each. I used blue for the second note, because this is the easiest place in the chord to define the emotive quality, and blue has a pretty clear emotive quality in western culture, representing sadness, melancholy, and calmness. So for the highest blue level, it was clear the second note would be a minor third up from the root note. For the lowest blue level, the interval is obviously a major third. I used major and minor sixths, perfect fourths, and perfect fifths, to fill out the rest of the value ranges for blue.

The level of green defines the third and final note in the chord. The third noted will either be a minor 9th, minor 7th, perfect 5th, major 9th, or major 7th. It is set using the same number ranges as the second note.

Now that we know how the notes will be set, I need to create JavaScript objects for each key so that the program knows which notes to play based on the root note and the intervals(distance) between the root and other notes. In a file called data.js, I stored the necessary intervals for all keys. Here is an example for the key of A#:

I also made a rootToKey() function in this file, so that that format compatible with Tone.js ("A#") would return the format compatible with my objects ("Asharp").

Sound Generation

Now we are ready to write functions to return each of the three notes. To generate the root note, we follow the rules previously established based on the level of red.

Then we do the same with our established rules for determining the second and third notes, using the key established by the root note to form the right intervals.

The octave is added to the end of the note in the return statement of all the note-generation functions. The octave is determined by the combined sum of the r, g, and b values, with a higher sum resulting in a higher octave. For some of the intervals in the third note, the octave is raised by 1.

Finally, to put it all together, we create a Tone.js polysynth, pass the rgb values into the note generation functions, and play the chord. All of this happens inside our button's click event.

Conclusion

Now, you should have a functional application that generates a new color and chord when the button is pressed. My next steps are to further customize the sound by adding variations to the timbre. I also plan to improve the interface design, among other fun things. Stay tuned!

GPT-3, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, Mid Journey….AI algorithms have been all the rage in the software development sphere for the last couple of months. There is a good reason for this. These technologies have a wow factor that is irresistible. It is the first time in my life that I have seen such a seemingly instant progression from pipe dreams to reality. This is what it must have felt like to be around during the dawn of personal computing and the internet. It is increasingly obvious that AI in the form of machine learning is going to drastically change all of our lives over the next decade.

Personally, I find GPT-3 to be the most impressive machine learning model. Don’t get me wrong, the text-to-image models are absolutely amazing and revolutionary, but there is something about receiving text answers to any prompt that slaps all of my preconceived notions of what is possible with technology right in the face. It doesn’t feel like just a tool, but rather an extension of my own brain. Like a friend who is always there to offer their thoughts and critical analysis. It is not just one friend either, you can design the traits of the “person” you are talking to. Mimicking the perspective of historical figures is a particularly interesting use case, especially those who are no longer with us.

If I could speak to any person in history, I would choose to speak to Siddhartha Gautama, known more commonly as the Buddha. We tend to think of spirituality and science as very different endeavors, even opposites. I do not believe this is the case. I believe that spirituality and science are very similar, with both of them being very incomplete ways of understanding the universe. This is why I have decided to make an application that uses GPT-3 to give advice from the perspective of the Buddha. Let’s get into how I did that.

I also made a video tutorial for this project, which you can find here.

1. Design Your Prompt

To start, we will go to the quickstart tutorial on the OpenAI API website. From there you can simply follow the given steps to set up your project. The first step is to determine a prompt. This is a vital step because with a custom ChatGPT application, what you are basically doing is putting the user’s input in the context of a bigger prompt so that the model responds in a particular way. Here is what I used for my prompt:

You can see in my prompt that the follower of the Buddha asks a question, this question is what will be replaced by the user input in our app.

2. Set Up Your Project

Now, it is time to build. You will need to copy the commands given in the setup section of the tutorial. After installing your .env file, you will need to generate a secret key and copy that key into your .env file. Once you do that, you will have a Next.js project which generates animal-themed superhero names. Run npm install and npm run dev to complete the setup and deploy the project to a local server.

3. Add Your Prompt

After testing out the application and exploring the code a bit, open the generate.js file, which you can find in the api folder. In the generatePrompt() function, you will see a return statement containing the prompt that is used in the app. Replace this prompt with your own custom prompt and delete the capitalizedAnimal variable that is declared before the prompt. The user input is currently called “animal” as you can see in the function parameter, so you will put ${animal} in your prompt where you want the user input to be. Now your custom prompt will be run when generating a response(I have changed the “animal” variable to “prompt” in my project, but you can stick to “animal” for now.

4. Adjust Settings

The settings for the model can be found as parameters in the openai.createCompletion() function. After some experimentation, I have decided to change the model to “text-davinci-003”, and set the max_tokens attribute to 1000. This gives me the most advanced text model and makes the responses much longer. I encourage you to do some further research and experimentation on these settings.

5. Style Your Application

Congratulations! You have created your own custom ChatGPT application, but unless your project happens to be in the theme of animal-based superheroes, you are going to want to change the styling. You can do this by editing the index.module.css file. You also are going to want to call the user input something else besides animal if you want your code to be readable. You can see in my code that I changed the variable name to “prompt”.

Picture this. The date is April 16, 1964. Angie shows up at her favorite record store in London to buy the first album of her favorite local band, The Rolling Stones. Now the year is 2022 and The Stones are still together and touring. Since she has a small part in their success as one of the band’s earliest supporters, she has been given free limited edition records and merchandise, exclusive access to events and clubs, and has even been given an ownership stake in the band which generates passive income. This direct and symbiotic relationship between the Rolling Stones and their day one fans has been thriving for 58 years and counting.

Why?

The previous scenario did not actually occur for anyone, of course. The Rolling Stones have no way of rewarding their earliest supporters. They have no way of verifying who listened to their first record with any degree of accuracy or respect for privacy. For new artists, this kind of verification is possible if the Proof of Listenership Protocol(POLP) is adopted.

The other methods for achieving this kind of direct relationship with fans are social media and email lists. Proof of Listenership offers distinct value over these other services because it enables direct peer-to-peer transfer of value, is not reliant on third parties, is programmable, is more secure, and is more resistant to censorship.

In addition, there is a beneficial macro byproduct of creating more rewarding experiences for early adopters of musicians: consumers will become more incentivized to seek out new and underground artists in pursuit of growing alongside them. With old music increasingly taking up more share of the music market, incentives to listen to new music are helpful to sustain a society that encourages creativity and values artists.

How?

The Proof of Listenership Protocol is what makes this direct and symbiotic artist-fan relationship possible. It works by providing a website to stream the music/content. Once the user has consumed the minimum necessary amount as deemed by the artist, the user will then be able to sign a message with their Ethereum wallet which proves that the owner of that wallet is a listener. POLP allows the artist to airdrop tokens representing money, tickets, merch redeemability, special access, or any other type of digital goods imaginable instantly and directly to fans in perpetuity.

The use of a crypto wallet enables direct peer-to-peer exchange of digital assets for anyone with an internet connection. This transaction does not require identity verification, making the process more seamless and more accessible. This means a content creator can reward their fans whenever they want with any type of digital asset they can imagine and vice versa.

With a direct wallet-to-wallet connection, much of the important data will be stored on-chain, where trust is put into a decentralized network rather than a corporation, and off-chain data can be stored wherever the content creator chooses to store it. The users own their data and assets.

There is a young musician getting started right now or in the near future who will use POLP to reward their early fans for decades. The early fans of this artist will still be being rewarded financially and experientially in the year 2100 and beyond.

Join the Movement

The first iteration of POLP will be a streaming website for my first solo EP to be released soon. In the meantime, you can stay updated by following me on Twitter here: (link to my profile).