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#webdev

WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) team moves to Fastly.

• The members will waddle from Mozilla to Fastly another founder member of the alliance. Except if you’ve been living under a rock there is a growing consensus that web assembly holds the keys to the future of application development.

• The bytecode alliance goal is to evolve WebAssembly from a compilation target that you compile monolithic applications to, to a modular ecosystem that you compose applications from.

• At the same time, its goal is to secure external dependencies you add to your project so dependencies won’t be able to access let’s say, HTTP interfaces, or read memory outside of their scope if they don’t need to.

• In 2018, vulnerabilities for npm grew by 47%. In the meantime, use Synk.
  
  

  

Link: BytecodeAlliance Announcing Bytecode Alliance Yet another malicious package found in npm, targeting cryptocurrency wallets

HBO re-enabled for Linux after 2 months.

• Why doesn't HBO work on Linux? A few weeks ago, computer users started scratching their heads as they were suddenly unable to watch "Game of Thrones," "Frayed," and even the beloved "Sesame Street," for no apparent reason.

• HBO changed a setting in the software it uses to encrypt its video library, preventing computers running Linux from acquiring a digital license to play content. Users are advised that their computers "couldn't play this title," and that trying again later may remedy the problem. It doesn't.

• Weirdly enough the petition worked and HBO fixed it.

#gaming

Some people finally tested the PS5 controller, L + R custom resistance + spring effect + nicer vibration. Interesting. [Youtube]

Avaer tries Population one and gets briefly the second best player in the world #humblebrag:

Population one is probably the best multiplayer vr game out rn, would be interesting to do meetings in it

It’s 3 person teams with like 20 people total and the rest is fortnite with lower quality and more intimate mechanics for vr

If anyone wants to play sometime lmk, I think there are things to learn from the social mechanics
Just don’t buy it on oculus. It’s on steam

I’d recommend you find some space where you can do a full T-Pose + some margin (especially above your head) because of the climbing mechanics, since you have to aim top down some times being sitted doesn’t work much either.

Quibi is shutting down. Everything has already been said: they raised and spent well over $1bn before contact with the customer, giving no room to iterate or explore. The timing wasn't ideal, but Tiktok's short-form video has done great in lockdown and so has Netflix's subscription. You could argue they needed $1bn of content to launch, just as Fedex couldn't launch with only one plane - opinions vary, but surely they could have tried some small-scale experiments first? That also points to the fact that this was a media play - it succeeded or failed on a theory of content, not software. They're giving several hundred million back to shareholders, who are exclusively PE, family offices and some small stakes from media companies - everyone in venture said 'too big for us, and it's a media company, not a tech company'. To that point: this was a Hollywood titan trying to leverage his relationships to build a new colossus. That's how Hollywood works, but it's not how Silicon Valley works. Link

Learning From Quibi - every startup is based on “I understand something about the world that others do not”, so how do we apply that? Link

Politicians do Twitch. Alexandria 'AOC' Ocasio-Cortez, a high-profile left-wing US politician, played 'Among US', the hot game of the moment, streaming live on Twitch. She got 440k viewers. Insert McLuhan/Baudrillard quote here. Link

#scripting

Demystifying the Merkle Tree. Quick question, can you think of something that's common amongst the implementation of Bitcoin, Git, IPFS, Ethereum, BitTorrent, and Cassandra/AWS DynamoDB? Yes, you’re right, Merkle Trees, thanks to Ralph Merkel patent expiring in 2002.

• Hash trees can be used to verify any kind of data stored, handled and transferred between computers. They can help ensure that data blocks received from other peers in a peer-to-peer network are received undamaged and unaltered, and even to check that the other peers do not lie and send fake blocks

• Recommended simple and slow Youtube walkthrough through Git Internals here Git Internals - How Git Works - Fear Not The SHA! (30min) that GUI only works when it all works. Forgive how old this video is to still mention “master” instead of “main”.

• How it’s simply applied to bitcoin mining Bitcoin 101 - Merkle Roots and Merkle Trees - Bitcoin Coding and Software - The Block Header (24min) aka just sha256 your pairs: 60 lines gist link in python

• And the whole journey of an IPFS file here on Medium (10min read) or here in 9mins. if you’re short on time.

Bonus: Difference between IFPS and Swarm

How Twitter got hacked earlier this year. Lots and lots of security best practices not being followed, partly because of lockdown (which makes me wonder how many other holes opened up in other companies in the rush to go remote). Link

#entrepreneurship

Snapchat clones Tiktok.

• With a music integration. Remember when Evan Spiegel complained about Facebook cloning Stories?

• In social, every new primitive gets copied everywhere - what matters is the network.

• Snap also had a blow-out quarter.

Link: Techcrunch Shares Explodes

Fortnite CTO Tim Sweeny discusses the economy of the metaverse.

Q: Is there anything that we need to be doing now regarding the big platforms?

A: You know have these intermediaries playing this big trick and they played it over and over and over. You signed up for a platform with really loose rules like when google play first launched as a service for installing software, you didn't have to use google payments. The same goes for Apple, after some years everybody thought they knew the rules, and bam now you have ads before searches and you owe 30%. What I’m really arguing for is several increments months over months, interconnections, social. Really about standards for interoperability. So developers can move from one supplier to the other without losing all of their work.

#crypto

People seem to be making a lot of money issuing blockchain-based collectibles or Non-Fungible Tokens.

• A year ago, the user numbers were truly tiny. Analysis on OpenSea's entire userbase found only 6000 accounts that were active and kinda valuable - of the 20k that were using OpenSea at the time. Since then, there really has been big growth, but the community is still reasonably small. Similarly, the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem has seen unparalleled growth in 2020, with Total Volume Locked (TVL) surging from 600 million USD to more than 6 billion USD, as of August 19, 2020.

• The explosion of Rarible (NFT art) has been interesting. Aside from having their own exchange, Rarible is also the top token on OpenSea right now. I definitely think this is an exciting development, but also want to take a step back. Digital art scarcity only matters if people care. Like "wowo you really have an original run banksy" — there needs to be places where such art can be viewed. This is where cryptovoxels, Decentraland (and partly the Webaverse) have found a substantial niche - as showcases and digital galleries. That's half of what makes Rarible work ultimately.

• Though, there are some people who think that like in real art, money laundering is a major issue. "Oh? Bitcoins from 2012? Nah, I lost all that trading art that didn't end up having any value". Digital art + crypto has upgraded some old methods.

• Obviously a big reason that NFT is blowing up now is the intersection of NFT and DeFi. Projects have started coming up where you can stake NFTs to earn ERC20s, or other NFTs. Then they usually have some method of incentivizing people to put money into uniswap pools, to reinforce their new token. Charged-Particles has dipped its toes in this as well, where Interest-bearing Non-Fungible Tokens (DeFi NFTs) are minted with an underlying asset and accrue interest over time, giving the Token a "Charge".

• However, this "NFTFi" craze has a fair bit of the scammy hallmark of the yield farming craze. Many projects are coming up that have no intention of being more than a pump and dump with some fancy new tokenomics designed to pump based on hype. This is definitely less ideal but there is some money to be made pumping one project after another, so people do. If you know about all the pumps, you can probably earn 0.5-1 eth per project just from airdrops and flash hype.

• Many projects are actively working on layer2. The eth scene was really hurt by the gas fees and Matic layer 2 has come out far ahead in crypto gaming. They are giving out 50k/month to projects, have working tech, provide lots of support. The next phase of crypto gaming will be really fast, cheap, user friendly. Some games will make it so transparent that non-crypto users can be onboarded quickly and easily.

• Though in a funny twist, OpenSea is now doing record volume. It seems like people are willing to value NFTs even higher than before, and pay the fees. But the aforementioned money laundry (and wash trading) may also play a role...

Anyway, so it's clear that NFT is going to be just as important as ERC20! The ecosystem is maturing fast, and bearing fruit.

Links: [CNN] The art world has a money laundering problem [Coindesk] Defi still needs a controversial Silk Road moment

JPMorgan creates a new unit for blockchain projects, says the technology is close to making money.

No wonder it makes money if they keep spoofing the market and having to pay $1 Billion for it.

Bonus: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/11474/is-there-a-table-of-evm-instructions-and-their-gas-costs

#memeology

#m3

M3 members are experimenting with open standards like WebXR and VRM. We want to build a long lasting foundation for the open Metaverse. Some of our followers call us the ‘Homebrew Computer Club of the Metaverse’.

This week we introduce you to the vprod of the NIFTIES. (Tools by Boomboxhead).

What’s crazy is this has all been made in real time, post prod was only intro/outro!
We have a few ideas on how to make it better and it keeps our minds bubbling:

• The models need some viseme to have a better tracking of who’s speaking.

• Streaming the camera POV to restream.io would be awesome.

• The sound would need to be spatialized relative to the camera (Shaw proposed to tink audio in prod tho we’ll take him on that)

• The green screen behind is super clever too with a lot of potential! I've wondered if it could realtime suggest clips related to the TTS of the participants to the "cameraman" that he would pick to project behind. Maybe it's all doable in webaverse (and you can rent the studio for some $MMM ?)

• The models would need some test/makeup zone before airing: The eyes or the models are an issue when they stick to unrelated objects/surfaces. And some don’t fit the chairs, oops.

• If you have other ideas, hit us up in discord!

Hot take of the week:

Second Life has existed forever, and nobody uses it to be their real world self. As much as that’s what rosedale envisioned and promoted at the start.

I don’t see people who value human interaction and look down on technology (in the way much of middle America does) suddenly adopting Facebook horizons. I think this tech is going to appeal to the people who it’s always appealed to, most of whom don’t want to be their shitty real life bodies.(edited)

Horizons is also just not good. Like, none of us are sitting around playing it.

Even if it sets the bar, the bar is far too low for what most people would need to start engaging regularly, like the OASIS. And there’s no way to make money in it.

I don’t see a world where Facebook’s VR offering isn’t the blackberry of the market in the long run. - @Shaw

You can also catch up with @bai on VoicesOfVR, chats about both the struggles and the benefits of building on top of the #WebXR platform, and the journey it took to get here. If you haven't checked out the FIVARS festival yet, I highly recommend giving it a look!

#events

M3 meeting Sunday 1 Nov 7pm? Ask on discord, Halloween vibes, and sharing WIP.

#art

https://www.boredpanda.com/lo-fi-hip-hop-study-girl-different-countries/

https://lensesforsnap.com/anime-distort-snapchat-lens-filter/

Join our Discord server and subscribe to the newsletter to participate in M3 regular meetings, where we will shape the future of spatial applications, and chat along with 1100+ constantly curious folks around tech, XR, and crypto.

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Thanks for reading! Got a scoop, interested in sponsoring the next newsletter? Catch us at hello@webaverse.com

Previous Edition: #004 Oct. 22 - Quest2 jailbreak, Filecoin tanking, Hacked by Comic Sans, Discord as Metaverse

The future is spatial, but it risks being owned by one or two companies. Webaverse brings together open standards like WebXR and distributed infrastructure for apps and virtual objects to be owned by users instead.

The webaverse team is currently working on an app demo release, and a whitepaper. Stay in touch with this newsletter to grasp more and more of the concepts of this incredible world, one email at a time.

#xr-hardware

The Quest 2 jailbreak adventure has begun. If privacy dies in VR, it dies in Real Life.

As people around the world are unboxing their early Christmas VR gifts, the lock-in implied by Facebook's mandatory login on the Quest2 has infuriated the community so much that a bounty starting at $5.000 snowballed to ~$30k in a blink of an eye.

• Even among the legitimate users sacrificing their privacy to FB, many got their device locked after trying to merge their oculus account or making a new one just to use their Q2.

• Some people were able to bypass the login using an old android app using an old oculus app version (ios v77) (unstable) + pi-hole to block FB validation domains.

• It took only 48 hours for someone to pop in like a flower and claim the price.

• Since then the discord locked in and the messages were cleared to protect the participants and the potential winner.

• He was directed to a team of security and legal professionals who can evaluate this claim and determine how to responsibly publish these findings.

• This locking move seems to be dragging everyone down as Microsoft just said it will now require a Microsoft account to enjoy Minecraft as well.

• Oddly enough, the overall moral panic seems to be receding regarding privacy issues at least in the UK.

  

Links:
The OG tweet [TheVerge] - Facebook is accidentally locking some users out of their new Oculus headsets [RoadToVr] Quest2 Teardown, what is it made of? [Deloitte UK Study] [Destructoid]Minecraft microsoft account

Bonus: Keep on your radar Wifi 6 & Quest 2

But the VR revolution is still hard to follow. What keeps virtual reality stuck in the future?

• The VR revolution has been 5 minutes away for 8 years.

• Part of the issue, paradoxically, is that VR technology keeps getting better, and less expensive. So there are too many generations of new products. Imagine a new Playstation every 3 months better than the previous one. So you’re then stuck in a “to buy or to wait for the next cycle of indecision”.
  A lot of people on the discord end up with a pile of headsets taking dust on their shelves.

• VR does not have a good solution to hair or makeup problems. Yes, a lot were reluctant to use the strap and crushing their hair.

• There just isn't a meaningful collection of experiences to keep most people coming back yet. And it’s hard to fit in the day-to-day lifestyle

  You're either playing arcade games for 2 weeks and putting it down or you're getting into social VR and never looking back - @Shaw

• Somewhat related Kindles had a 30% abandonment rate. And Ebooks have not taken over print. Something can look like the future if you work in tech but end up as a niche.

• Despite all that Gartner has updated their hype cycle, with new placements for AR, VR and MR with VR reaching the slope of enlightenment with AR & MR on its tail.

  

Link: What is gartner hype cycle What means AR MR XR?

Bonus: A mysterious HTC VR Headset appears in FCC Filings and 25 Years of Gartner Hype cycle

#webdev

We talked about it in the previous newsletter QUIC is now experimental in the newly released Node 15! That makes the webaverse builders happy as we believe that the web is the best application platform with Javascript as its best ecosystem.

• Unhandled rejections are now raised as exceptions by default. If there's any one issue you're going to run into that'll get you scratching your head, it's this one. --unhandled-rejections=warn will let you revert this change in the short term, if needed.

• AbortController is a way to signal cancellations in some Promise-based APIs. Time to easily kill those pending fetch without an additional package.

• According to Cloudflare V8 is not only one of the fastest implementations of JavaScript, but one of the fastest implementations of any dynamically-typed language, period.

• Due to the immense amount of work that has gone into optimizing V8, it outperforms just about any popular server programming language with the possible exceptions of C/C++, Rust, and Go.

• As an odd-numbered version of Node, Node 15 will not become a LTS release eventually in the way that Node 14 is. Be aware of this if considering Node 15 for production use, as you'll be forced to upgrade in mid 2021 when maintenance releases cease.

• So if you want an easy maintenance life, stick with (or migrate to) Node 14 for production in the short term, or be prepared for more frequent upgrades if you move to 15.

Bonus: Neon bindings wants you to superpower your node with the power of Rust. And very closely Wasmerio wants to become the webassembly (WASM) package runner.

#m3

M3 members are experimenting with open standards like WebXR and VRM. We want to build a long lasting foundation for the open Metaverse. Some of our followers call us the ‘Homebrew Computer Club of the Metaverse’.

M3 finds a token name: After looking at $PIE, $HONY, mac and cheese (?), $FLAN, the Teletubbies and a pineapple they finally settled on a TEST run with a delicious 🥧$MMM deployed on uniswap seemingly without troubles. The final token will mainly support decentralized trading & perks for the webaverse.
[Discord]

From the Hubs Archive room this week:

Avaer talks about Liquid Work on what’s coming up in 2021 [Youtube]:

• Big Idea: Discord IS the current metaverse.

• Favorite Quote:
  “I can pull stuff out of my inventory and hand it over to you guys and it’s a one second transaction that is gonna work on top of all the existing virtual worlds”

• Big Concept: We can move ERC's across worlds, we can move files across browsers, we can move avatars across monoverses.

NFT Hub wants to be a centralized “Guilds Hub” to solve the “What’s going on today in the NFT world”. And halt the fact that everyone wants to be king in their own castle… and cut the noise at the same it. Then also a token. Ambitious since it revolves on community driven and no capital yet. [Youtube]

Hot takes of the week:

DEFI is the adtech of crypto, turn people into numbers and run algo bidding to skim value from them - @Avaer

Decentraland is an awareness campaign, albeit an expensive one. - @Jin

If I was a billionaire I'd buy your whole network just to prove that it takes one son of a billionaire to come in and buy every asset and resell it for 5% more. I could hire a team to help me build a network to control your whole economy from my phone. So now you have a Webaverse but 1/3rd of it is Shawtown. Forever. - @Shaw [Discord]

It's clear that if we could all just hang out in the metaverse, our basic needs were met, and we met some societal expectation of being productive / contributing meaningfully but it was fairly open ended to our own interests, everyone would be a lot happier. There is a way to synthesize it though, which is to give people the feeling that they are part of something bigger, and that their actions contribute meaningfully to the world for everyone. And if you fail they will always eventually rise against you, like in Second Life, when the community realizes that they aren't building something bigger, they're just the customer. - @Shaw

Honorable mentions: A bit after its release on Steam, and some lovely reviews, Metachromium (MC) gets some spotlight during VRARA Seattle (40min mark for demo). Mainly used to get cross-worlds multi-apps.

• Some M3 members (and namely @jaredmonkey from the above video) are working on a free & open source branch that we will all be able to maintain together in the W3C. Pretty cool!

• They’re trying hard on the rebase to upstream (of chromium). It's going to take a while since their last diff was 14 million lines of code changes.

#crypto

Is Bitcoin holiday moon starting?

• PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network. PayPal's service does not allow bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to be withdrawn or deposited.

• Once you buy the coins, they stay in your account until you sell. You own the Cryptocurrency you buy on PayPal but will not be provided with a private key.

• Will Stripe FOMO and follow up on this after they folded up on crypto in 2018?

Links: Coindesk Article on the Paypal Move Ending Bitcoin Support (2018) Stripe No withdrawals

Meanwhile Filecoin ($FIL) searches itself around 20$ after a 200$ peak right after its launch on Oct. 19

• Filecoin is a decentralized storage network on top of the InterPlanetary File System (a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to make the web faster, safer, and more open)

• The token sale ultimately raised over $200 million, the largest ICO to that point.

• Some claims that FIL devs had disregarded the rules by dumping 1.5 million tokens.

Links: Filecoin.io Dumping Allegations

#graphics

Mind blowing Fovea detector: Look at any specific point and you should clearly see the extent of your fovea (the stars only seem to be rotating in a small circle at the center of your vision). Move your head back and forth to see it grow/shrink.

Link: ShaderToy

#scripting

There goes this month Halloween scare 🎃. Chrome 0-Day in the wild. Update now!

This one seems to steem from Truetype. Causing a heap overflow.

• In theory you could get hacked just visiting a website (or an iframe), or an ads, that would use a crafted “font.ttf” and do something like:

<style>
    @font-face {
        font-family: "pwnfont";
        src: url(font.ttf) format("truetype");
    }

    html,body {
        font-family: pwnfont;
    }
</style>

#memeology

This newsletter is carefully picked from the content of Webaverse community on Discord and Twitter. Join our Discord server to share and discuss the future of spatial applications or follow @webmixedreality on Twitter.

Subscribe now

#webdev

Safari late to the graphics party

While other major browser teams release experimental support for WebGPU, this week the Safari team released a preview build with WebGL2 support. Come on Apple, you can do it!

Our WebGL2 implementation is in good enough shape that we should enable it by default for broader testing. - Dean Jackson

• Safari WebGL compute support efforts has been “halted”, because WebGPU is better and “around the corner”. Chrome and Firefox support it since… 2017.

• WebGPU is an emerging API that provides access to the graphics and computing capabilities of hardware on the web.

• A few years ago, Google was actively working towards their own low level GPU API, but abandoned the effort to back Vulkan.

• Few really love Vulkan, but Yet Another API with marginal advantages on one platform would not be a positive.

• Shame they broke Web Audio at the same time.

Links: Webkit.org Webkit.org (2) Vulkan WebGL2 In Firefox (2017)

Avaer ELI5 on YJS from the previous newsletter.

It lets you send some binaries in whatever order and clients automatically sync
The price is some overhead in storage, but less than you'd think
It uses lamport timestamps to garbage collect tombstones/irrelevant data due to clients syncing.
You don't need any authority, it's just magically eventually consistent
We're using it to synchronize multi-app state
And it turns out to be fast enough for realtime

MDN Compatibility Report of this year is out

• The MDN Browser Compatibility Report attempts to identify specific issues causing a lot of frustration for building the web, and what could be done to improve the situation.

• Safari being that high on the 'platforms that cause issues' is spot on (it ought to be first place really)

• Flex > Grid, and many other stats

  

Links: The Report (PDF)

Chrome is deploying HTTP/3

• HTTP/1 from the late 90's (ascii over TCP), thereafter patched with HTTP/1.1 for many parallel TCP connections (JS, imgs.. etc) was better but ineffective because TCP connections are slow to start and were kept open for a very short time. So it was wasteful. Plus you were limited to ~6 requests to the same hostname inflight at the same time.

• HTTP/2 specs (binary multiplexed over TCP) shipped in 2015 with streams, so all the workarounds were put inside the protocol. The request could now flow from one TCP connection into streams, but repairing the TCP was costly.

• QUIC experiments started with google deploying HTTP2 over UDP in 2013, and then bringing it to the IETF in 2015, birthing the current QUIC working group

• Faster Handshakes, more efficient packets retries: QUIC Uses UDP like TCP uses IP.

• QUIC Streams: Many logical flows within a single connection similar to HTTP2 but at the transport layer.

• A whole other load of other protocols are lurking (HTTP worked as the first), waiting for QUIC to be rolled out to piggyback on the application protocol (WebRTC / DNS)

• So HTTP/3 (binary over multiplexed QUIC) is simply the HTTP protocol over QUIC.

• The biggest advantage of QUIC is how much more sense it makes for wireless communications and mobile devices. Mobile networks break TCP connections all the time, it just violates too many useful assumptions of TCP.

• It handles congestion control slightly differently since it can estimate the Round Trip Time more accurately, but it’s essentially the same ACK based mechanism that TCP uses. But watch out it will consume more CPU % on your web server.

  

Links: Chromium.org Youtube on HTTP3 (40min) by the creator of CURL, check at 30min for the 8 biggest challenges Github - QUIC and Nodejs

Bonus: A GPT-3 bot posted comments on Reddit for a week and no one noticed

#gaming

Roblox plans its IPO

Like mentioned in last week newsletter, don’t forget Roblox!

I said if we build this thing and we own it, we will have total control over reliability and performance and based on my experience, having control over those things will create more trust and create more end-user stickiness where end-user growth should move up and to the right
- Dan Williams. VP of Corporate + Production Engineering

• U.S. consumer spending on video gaming hit a record $11.6 billion in the second quarter, up 30% on the year-ago period

• Gets 5% of the press of Fortnite or Minecraft, probably has more MAUs than the former and almost as many as the latter.

• 3 years ago, it was only a single data center in Chicago all running nonvirtualized servers (and Microsoft Windows Server operating system, yes, that was going to hurt them hard in licensing fees) that the company used to run its bare metal servers.. The same year they decided to port their renderer to Metal seeing that the GL market on iOS kept shrinking. The only hurdle was getting their shaders to compile.

• They then focused on PoPs (points of presence): presence at the edge is essential for a gaming platform where users expect near-instantaneous response while playing. And are still trying to move to microservices.

• One year after Roblox owned 100% of its server capacity, meeting one of its major goals to control its own destiny.

• Their MAUs grew from 64 million in Q4 2017 to over 150 million in July
  

Links: Techcrunch Roblox swap to Metal

Activision: They can’t play other games if they don’t have room for them

Apple VS Epic

• Epic Denied Preliminary Injunction for Fortnite, but Apple Can't Block Unreal

• The judge has proposed the temporary compromise that Apple allow Fortnite onto the store while Epic pays into an escrow — which Epic has refused.

• The 30% escrow offer I think misses the point for both Epic and Apple. Because while both want the money, Apple's entire argument is predicated on the "privacy and safety" of only going through their payment processing, whilst Epic's entire argument is predicated on that requirement being monopolistic and unfair and that third party processors must be allowed.

Links: TheVerge MacRumors

Bonuses:

MiHoYo has Already Grossed Over $100 Million in Genshin Impact Earnings Grossing over $100m, Genshin Impact recoups development costs in two weeks

Bots hunting bots on TF2

Collisions in Processing.js

Fortnite Concerts in VR?

#scripting

Did you know your printer tracked you?

• Many printers use this, printing faint yellow dots in a grid pattern on printed documents as a form of steganography, encoding metadata about the document into its hard-copy output.

• You can see the dots on color prints from machines made by Xerox, Canon, and other manufacturers the dots are yellow, less than one millimeter in diameter, and are typically repeated over each page of a document. In order to see the pattern, you need a blue light, a magnifying glass, or a microscope.

• Armed with this evidence, the NSA was able to quickly determine who had leaked a document by checking audit logs.

Links: Wikipedia How a few yellow dots burned the Intercept’s NSA leaker Also works for 3D printers Tool List of printers

Bonuses:

Why you shouldn't try mozilla hubs on docker

#memeology

#events

Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories. October 7th – November 2nd 2020 (by our beloved @bai)

Link: Fivars.net

Untitled NFT Hackathon goes on for two more weeks. Some ideas were actually discussed during our #M3 meeting, and an event is planned

Link: Medium

Bonus: MagicalCrypto tour of their hubs space - Oct 16 9am PT

#entrepreneurship

Bleeding edge tech means you’ll be bleeding to death

• Sales are hard and if you want to make it 10X harder, try selling something nobody knows anything about. Like literally nothing. 

• When you're trying to drag your zombie-death startup from the crypts of hell and into the light, there are so many things to stress about. Your messaging, positioning, pricing, product, customers, sales, employees—literally everything. But when you're building something truly new, there is an additional poisonous leach that creeps into your brain and plants its ugly seed: doubt.

• We've been told a narrative that sounds great and inspires, but it's not based in facts. Bleeding edge is a myth that fucks up your chances of success.

Links: Contrast.app

In tough economic times, few customers want to be innovators if they can help it. Pricing your product right will help you bear through being stuck with non sustainable packs of visionarries

#m3

M3 members are experimenting with open standards like WebXR and VRM. We want to build a long lasting foundation for the open Metaverse. Some of our followers call us the ‘Homebrew Computer Club of the Metaverse’.

• Regular meetings to discuss and present our ideas, and be held to accountable progress on them.

• Research events that serve as both learning and promotion of our ideas.

• Producing clear communications of our ideas, in the form of videos, blog posts, social media activity, and so on.

• Fundraising work, including Github Sponsors/Patreon/Venture Capital, where having capital available helps the group's goals.

• Organization and coordination of presentations with other leaders who do not necessarily share our views.

• Managing minutiae, such as the Github organization, Discord channels, video transcriptions, etc

[READ THE CHARTER]

Randomly from M3 this week:

• Avaer builds a Decentraland loader [Link] and Crytovoxels [Link] and then a retroarch emulator [Link] all on WebXR

• Contribute to the draft of Metafactory x M3 (or peek at it) [Link]

• Jin buys a Voxel front store (and wants the the amazon prime of ethereum) [Link][Discord]

This newsletter is carefully picked from the content of Webaverse community on Discord and Twitter. Join our Discord server to share and discuss the future of spatial applications or follow @webmixedreality on Twitter.

Subscribe now

#webdev

Google Wave engineer admits modern CRDT beats OT.

In distributed computing, a conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT, not to confuse with cryptodaily token) is a data structure which can be replicated across multiple computers in a network, where the replicas can be updated independently and concurrently without coordination between the replicas, and where it is always mathematically possible to resolve inconsistencies that might come up

• Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types or CRDT vs Operational Transforms (OT) are some of the big acronyms you will see popping left and right during the collaboration era. The untold hero of the multi-user edits history and merging.

• Used by Figma, Whimsical, and a lot of collaborative software.

• I recommend implementing them for the fun of it. But don't put anything you write into production until you can leave a randomized test suite running overnight without errors.

• Concurrency is a really broad problem space with a million applications, but not real-time editing of an indeterminate data object. Concurrent modification of a row in a database is a perfect example of a deeply complex problem that 99% of us don't really need to understand beyond how to use the API. If you know how to commit a transaction, you don't need to read the thousands of dissertations on how to process them optimally.

Links: Intro to CRDT with Figma CRDT vs OT The JS CRDT framework CRDT & Serverless at Edge , Youtube (CRDT for Mortals)

Webaverse, sure, but first the premises of the metaverse.

The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet.

• HTTP encourages hypercentralization & centralized servers disconnect people. It’s expensive to scale content. This needs to change if we want to have a fighting chance of keeping the internet open and free.

• Control: Large companies build walled gardens that require developers to submit a complete version of their VR app for approval to be listed in the app store. Governments and corporations alike exploit the centralized model for spying on us, monetizing our data, and blocking access to any content that represents a threat to them.

• Dead links: Locations are centralized servers that can go down. The older a site is the more likely it is to eventually 404.

• Lack of Interoperability: VR is exploding but applications still need a standard that can let them talk to each other.

• Can and will use the CRDT from above

Links: Metaverse keypoints Metaverse Layers

#gaming

Genshin Impact: Breath of the Waifu.

• What a cross-platform VRM world with nice shaders could be.

• Beautiful OSTs and free to play gameplay: Your account and characters cannot play cross regions (EU->US). PS4 is locked in while PC and Android are swappable to continue your game.

• The reddit memes are worth riding the early wave.

Links: Mihoyo

Epic leads a funding round of $15 million in Core

• Core is a new platform aiming to be the YouTube of game development, with a total of $60M of funding.

• Continuing after the acquisition of superawesome.

• In just a few weeks, more than 150 games were released, totaling hundreds of hours of D&D gameplay for players to enjoy. Presented at last week’s PAX Online, presented by a celebrity panel of D&D legends.

• (Manti)Core also recently announced an early $1 Million Creator Payouts Pilot Program as part of a plan to build a new creative economy for creators. ($3 per daily player). For a creator that has 500 unique users log into their games every day (they do not need to be the same players) the creator could receive $1,500 after the end of the month. If the average is 1,000 users, the creator could receive $3,000.

Links: The Verge D&D Contest 3$ Per player Don’t forget roblox(1) Don’t forget roblox (2)

#development

Is it the last phase of the desktops wars?

• Fascinating insight about how Desktop is becoming Linux, maybe Monado will make a lot of sense soon

• The article mentions “PC volume sales continue to fall off” which seems to be backed by a 45% drop in 10years is forecasted (also experimented the google results duality when I searched for it [1]

• New Windows is mostly a Linux kernel

• There’s an old-Windows emulation over it, but Edge and the rest of the Windows user-land utilities don’t use the emulation.

• The emulation layer is there for games and other legacy third-party software.

[1] “As we all know reality depends on your google history” @Avaer

Links: iBiblio

#design

• The best keyboard virtualization on the web [Link]

• Because who needs to go outside [Link]

#memeology

Link: explainer

#events

Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories. October 7th – November 2nd 2020

Link: Fivars.net

#entrepreneurship

Don’t expect balance from very talented people. People who are exceptionally good at one thing tend to be exceptionally bad at another, due to overconfidence and mental bandwidth taken up by the exceptional skill. Skills also have two sides: No one should be shocked when people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you don’t like.

Link: Collaborativefund.com

First hires and the engineering gene pool. Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players; B players hire C. players; and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to Z. players. Long article, I suggest skimming through.

• Successful startups seldom follow their original plans. The early team not only determines how the usual risks are handled but also evolves the plans to better utilize their opportunities and to address and redefine their risks continuously

• Do not become an echo chamber

Links: Khoslaventures.com

Venture Capitalists and tech genders. That’s the one of the topics Alex Kantrowitz tackles.

“Oh, but if we do that we’d lose every deal to Sequoia.”

• He introduces the notion of Tech Paradigm. One example of that is that we in tech are the attackers. “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to be in the navy.” But what do you when the pirates run the most valuable companies in the world and have more power than the navy does? Well, then all of a sudden, you’re the admiral.

• On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. And that’s the indifference norms things. And I think that’s why tech has been so blind about sexism and racism and all other forms of discrimination because it just doesn’t compute. It’s like, “Well, aren’t that person’s fingers typing on the keyboard the same as mine?”

• And so, there’s this great complexity when you just open up the aperture and look. And so I wish that I felt that more from the leadership of the social media companies and they’ve created something so big and so complex that it’s not Zuck knows the answer. It’s not like it’s like, “Oh, just do X and he can figure it out.” It’s hard. We don’t know as a society how to deal with this new tornado that we’ve unleashed.

• Also goes in hand with reputation riding from CollaborativeFund above

Links: Medium (Skip first half)

#m3

• M3 thinks about buying a cryptovoxel parcel for friends and visitors. [Link]

• When they will ask where the M3 satellite originated. [Link]

• Estimate your visible traversable space from a video feed [Link]

• WebXR<->GPUBindings Proposal [Link]

• The MetaFactory gives M3 a shoutout [Link]

This newsletter is carefully picked from the content of Webaverse community on Discord and Twitter. Join our Discord server to share and discuss the future of spatial applications or follow @webmixedreality on Twitter.

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uMatrix gets archived. Another well-used software dies from lack of will of the dev and no successor, umatrix the point-and-click matrix-based firewall, with many privacy-enhancing tools A good lesson in there about a transfer of the repo being used to ends the author didn't want, so he's not repeating the same mistake and just killing it. The past project was the notorious uBlock.
Links: YC

Firefox bleeding cash. Mainly in execs salaries year over year while usage drops. Hurtful metrics after the massive layoff. The infamous graph has made the rounds displaying a steep 85% usage drop over 10 years.
Links: Graph

ffmpeg gets a WASM version. The cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video is now crossing all the way to the browser, powered by web assembly. It might not be fully ready yet from the look of the issues.
Links: Github

#gaming

Skyrim is now Microsoft. This is quite a monopoly Microsoft is building among today's most loved game franchises and publishers, and I'm not convinced of the long-term benefits of such an arrangement. “The big winners today are our fans” they say, but the $7.5B in cash says otherwise. That being said MS has been overall a good parent company for gaming IPs.
Links: Press Release 5min video explaining why by Video Game Story Time

Amazon announces its cloud gaming service. For $5.99 per month - 4K/60FPS for selected titles, PC, Mac, iOS (Android later), more than 100 games available all that powered by AWS plus some Twitch integration. Stadiaws they say. Quick reminder that the company is also working on a massively multiplayer game called New World
but it failed to impress the top Twitch streamers and has been delayed into 2021.
Links: TheVerge

Epic Games buys superawesome, with the purpose of making the internet safer for kids. A good step towards targeting done right-er-ish.
Additionally Epic Games, Spotify, and Tile form 'Coalition for App fairness' to 'fight back' against Apple. The coalition is based in Washington D.C. and Brussels, and aims to lead legal and regulatory changes with regards to what it says are three key issues; "anti-competitive policies," "30 percent app tax," and "no consumer freedom." It also includes the demands that "no developer should be required to use an app store exclusively," "every developer should always have access to app stores," "every developer should always have the right to communicate directly with its user through its app,"
Links: Twitter The Verge

#scripting

Talking to Unity in Typescript. Without the C# hassle.
Links: Tencent Github

#design

The winamp skin museum. A mountain of great work, used as well on archive.org, all the audio collections now have a little llama you can click which launches WebAmp and you can select from any of these skins.
Links: Webamp.org

Food for thought: Avaer wants lighter signups

I hate accounts, I want to just seed a mnemonic with a brain wallet which is the truest of security which no account org can ban
I just want logins to be lightweight, biometrics aren't the contents of the mind so aren't really secure, I was thinking a gesture mnemo.

Link: Discord

#modeling

@dankvr/jin mods craftopia. Never able to stop his fingers from coding something XR related our beloved Jin implanted himself into Craftopia. Showing off the insane capabilities and closeness you can feel when a game lets you import your own avatar to be the hero.
He also highlights an interesting Decentraland feature that restricted access to some areas by avatar wearables and reconciles with his primal self in primitier.
Links: Craftopia Restricted Binance Area Primitier

Contribute to virtual nature. One plant at a time.
Links: Twitter

#projects

@Rainwolf uploads himself to VRoid Hub. He probably already left all the rights to his model somewhere between blender and Mozilla hubs anyways.
Links: Vroid Hub More cuteness

A VRM converter for VRChat. Grab it while it’s hot. Plus a complete PDF, step by step on how to take your avatar with you.
Links: Github Google Drive PDF

Create music visualizations in Three.js. Dynamic gradients and depth playing together with a sprinkle of shader cream.
Links: Github

The trap license. Roko’s basilisc license flavored.
Links: Github Roko's Basilisc

#events

NFT Hackathon. Untitled is a virtual hackathon that looks to bring the entire NFT community together to share ideas, and experiment on new builds ~
When: Probably around Sept 24 - Oct 04
Links: Medium

#memeology

Why communication is important in software development
Links: Twitter

#hn-comments

Anarchists and EA games. According to @bai, there’s two kinds of anarchists, those who are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced t that kind and the "I want to do WHATEVER THE FUCK I WANT 🤘🤪🤘" kind
Links: YC Discord

#videos

David Bowie and the impact of the Internet in 1999: Youtube (6min)
Less philosophical but as much interesting: VR Hybrid Locomotion (15min)

#m3

Royalties, royalties, royalties. A New M3 Meetup took place on Sep 22, with @rookiebleu at the camera.

“I don’t think that the key ingredient here is having a hundred people but this is not necessarily why people come to these experiences. XR is a very personal experience between people instead of a party with a thousand people” - @Avaer

#entrepreneurship

If Kanye went to YC.
Links: Twitter

#tech

Taming the long tail. Building accurate machine learning systems is not an easy feat.
Links: VentureBeat

#metachromium

#crypto

Why NFTs are an incredible new creative medium. A token for a unique digital artwork, that can then be traded as one sees fit. However many people are still intimidated by blockchain technology, and how it fits physical arts.
Links: CoinTelegraph

#xr-hardware

Did your HP Reverb G2 ship? Eye, Mouth, & Face-tracking. IPD adjustment ranges from 60mm to 68mm, an oval shape (very similar to that of Index), softer and wider foam (spreads the pressure on your face over a wider area) and the face gasket is now magnetic. Sounds great!
Link: Twitter

#vprod

Nvidia Broadcast App. Impressive video, removing a blow dryer 🌬 and a keyboard noise completely, incoming or outcoming. Sadly you would need any NVIDIA GeForce RTX, TITAN RTX or Quadro RTX GPU since it’s using their dedicated Tensor Core AI processors to help the app’s AI networks run in real-time.
Links: Youtube (3min)

This newsletter is carefully picked from the content of Webaverse community on Discord and Twitter. Join our Discord server to share and discuss the future of spatial applications or follow @webmixedreality on Twitter.

Subscribe now