The Hub ep12 Tuesday Feb 4, 2025 with @dylsteck.eth and @nounishprof

gm gm and welcome everyone to the twelfth episode of the hub a farcaster developer focused podcast here on the gm farcaster network gm nanesh professor how are you

awesome yes no it's great to be here with you thank you for taking the time it's good to to go over everything feels like things are slowly starting to pick up on the forecast system oh big time yeah

it's funny they had said to they had said on the dev call that today would be the release date for one of the things we'll go over later i don't know if it actually will but if so that would be quite exciting and relevant to pretty much any everyone on farcaster i would say

for you amazing well we have two really excite actually the everything today is pretty exciting we have a couple really exciting pieces of news first though so i've been working very closely with emma who has been leading things for farcon nyc we're very happy to announce that applications are open i will just very quickly run through everything so that there is no sort of confusion there's not a crazy amount to go through but so we have farcon nyc and we also have a builder's day so essentially thursday we have two main days the first day thursday may 1 is builder's day you could think of builder's day as a mini dev day with anne varun and the merkel team some little workshops and then a twenty four hour far hack afterwards so that builders day is a little bit more kind of curated that's like the first day and then the friday is the means summit kinda like last year and i think a a one like small little anecdote here is part of the reason we chose this was we felt that last year there there were some people who maybe wanted to hack but they were also like going to side events in the weekend and there was some overlap that got in the way and we felt that this year we could have one day that's like very intentional for this builder stuff and a hackathon as well give people space to go to the summit and give people space to go to everything they could be shaping up that weekend so really just trying to like learn from past experiences and make sure that what we're offering on all events is like the most tailored it can be to people

thank you no that was really great that was such a highlight how how all of that came together and without sharing too much i think the way that we've organized the schedule this year makes it so that that moment of the nontechnical community being that excited about what the developers are building as well is just gonna like come together even more so like it's definitely something that we're optimizing for so really excited for that and everything will be even more organized like we have new version of far hack software that will work as a d two frame by then so it

for developers and people to to vote and stuff so a lot of cool stuff

yes yeah horse facts literally

we had i don't it must have started at night but i remember like room at that venue and it was where like all the judges were and like i brought up jason from moxie who was like he was like leading all of the judges in this room like organizing because we had a time crunch

or building the frame and then i go up and jason's like the voting's done and horstax is like the frame is done and i'm like no way like it was came together that quickly but

i wish i just had a chance right now up those stairs like

so excited yes really exciting cool alright well to close the loop on this really quickly i'll just go over the ticket process so if you go to my cast or mscast it has both the link to this farcom page where we talk about the tickets as well as the d form the d form is the main place you should think about we just have one application for everything and on the application you can denote do you wanna go to the summit do you wanna go to builder's day both and then all of that information it is quite straightforward i would definitely say i would like fill out the information if you wanna be like recognized even more that you're like a person and part of the the community but fully up to your own discretion so really quickly we have the builders day which we are prioritizing more so like technical developers although as nanis professor said we're working on other ways to kinda share the experience with others the event is free but we have a two week fifty dollar deposit that's a % refundable kind of more more of an incentive to make sure that because it is more of a limited event like having the space with the merkle team especially that you're actually going to attend and i think similarly for the summit you know kinda like last year we'll we'll have this rolling process at a certain point we will send more information out and you will know your status and at that point you will be able to go to somewhere for your tickets where you will have this like soulbound nft as your ticket for either the summit or the builders day so make sure to just come to farcon.myc/tickets if you are confused at all on the process we also have a pretty lengthy description on the d form and as i said before the d form is the one place that you need to go we don't have separate you know things and also the thing i'll say is please do not flood myself or emma's direct tasks if you have any other questions you could email i believe it's tickets@farcon.myc so definitely send all your questions there although i'd like to think that the application form is pretty straightforward and we're gonna be as transparent as possible and also as quick as possible in terms of you know timelines and turning things over

no it's a good thing to shout out yeah

yeah % no i mean it's good that the like people shout things like that out when it actually serves like a real utility for them and it has that utility that another tool doesn't have and i don't know of another forms tool that has farcaster sign in and export data so he goes and they seem to be moving pretty quick to the deform team

yeah for sure for sure cool alright well another one they're they're all like pretty pretty decent size

today yeah yeah so amazing yesterday if you haven't been following team warp cast has been working on snapchain the way you can think of snapchain is like a social blockchain that replaces hubs and moves some of the complexity of like certain things being on hubs certain things being on chain certain things being on hubs but very complicated to interact with essentially just all moving to this blockchain like network that is more built for farcaster and has a lot of the underlying infrastructure that you would want to scale to the amount of like messages and throughput that farcaster wants to and they have been working on this test net for a couple of months now it went live yesterday at four i guess that's specific over 20,000 blocks have been produced with a million messages processed off the go a little bit more into what exactly they're doing right now but it seems like they're mirroring over like a hub live data to this new snapchane to see what that process would look like and the part that i thought was very neat was saying it's hard to understate how big of a deal this is that sanjay dynamite who is a a dt and cassie researched designed and implemented a novel social blockchain in less than six months processing real live data which might be a new world record which i think just comes to show again how crap this merkel team is and how many advancements they're making on all different sides of the stack whether it's on the hub or its performance in the network or in the app itself and on the client side there's a lot of really cool stuff they're doing that i bet is up there with some of the top non crypto startups amazing huge props to them

yeah and i mean i i i'll i'll i'll look a little more into as they gear up for a launch the way they make it seem is that moving it over isn't really gonna have a user effect like hopefully you should kinda just drop it in in this yeah as long as all these tests are working i think where we're gonna see it is that it might make certain things that have been annoying in the future like signer management or multiple different apps that aren't work cast being able to connect accounts whether they were created in work cast or not like all of these signer and storage operations i think will potentially get easier because you'll essentially move all of the logic to that to this like blockchain this the snapchain essentially instead of this system which is like a little bit more like janky or all over the place because it's not an official blockchain because they have like the hub and on chain and all these all these different pieces together that hopefully they should be able to use more like standard standard primitives to make that easier and i remember as well that in the past they had said something about read and write hubs if they're moving to snapchain i don't know if that's still something they're doing but if they do partition snapchains or hubs or whatever so that most of them are read i think also hopefully that will make it even easier and cheaper for anyone to ingest farcaster data which is the vast majority of what people are doing in most cases so whether that's you wanna make an app you wanna train data you wanna get your own personal data i think hopefully we'll make that a lot easier to to get but in terms of you're just using warpcast i don't think there's going to be an immediate effect other than hopefully the data from warpcast and other clients syncs a little bit faster because it has like traditional blockchain data resolving mechanisms

yeah so very excited to see this kudos if you are working on this monitoring it anything like that but very exciting wherever you are in forecaster another small little thing to call out is they're accelerating even more it seemed like they accepted new offers maybe even on the back end or seem like that's what they've been looking for so good job merkle podcast they've been killing it with the bull posting on twitter as well if you haven't seen

yeah whoever the intern is i know they should give the intern a raise

oh no she really looks super non crossover

alright well another thing is last week was the biweekly dev call which goes over over some really cool stuff that we haven't shared yet but we can definitely go over right now because it was a pretty big one so the thing that i had said that they were targeting to launch today which we still could because it's loading like 7am on the on the west coast

you never know is they are building a wallet it is essentially an an embedded wallet we don't know the inner workings we don't know from a developer standpoint what you can actually access although i'd like to think that you can access stuff and that they're gonna build this with v two frames in mind probably like yeah that's that's only one caveat i would give before going into this is if you're a developer i would highly expect that the thing they're gonna do first is just build this into v two frames instead of giving you some sort of sdk to control the entire wallet because v two frames is where they wanna push you anyways there's already wallet connection so we'll just make it easy for them to like prepopulate that wallet somehow but the idea they were going over is that you'll have this embedded wallet it will make it really easy to use frames and apps without having to to go back and forth they are doing an internal beta we even saw some screenshot from dan's warpcast where it has the little wallet icon we were asking people ask me if they wanted to try it out i don't know if they actually did end up doing

okay alright well that's that's good to know i mean i would i wouldn't be surprised if it's out sometime this week maybe next week yeah they also said something about potentially using warp cast rewards to encourage people to fund the wallet more like

that yeah yeah

i also wanted to from the developer perspective is there anything like oh so there are certain you know like things in the warp cast ui you can call i wonder if like for example in a v two frame can pull up that little model that like shows you someone else's account i wonder

because because with the funding with the rewards they're trying to like the reason they wanna do that is they want those wallets funded so that those wallets can be used by like v two frame developers so when you flip it the other way and give developers rewards for figuring out mechanisms in their v two frames for funding the wallet

be interesting

yeah cool cool so we will see what's going on there but i think that will be very exciting it'll be very big news when that comes out i'm sure everyone will be talking about it on x as well

from the social perspective there's a couple different things so for the we'll just go off this list actually for the rewards program it seems like they are increasing the rewards there's a broader user set last week and they're trying to kinda find the right balance i think for that one it seems

the world may never know i don't know

or warpcast data science team knows exactly okay in terms of invites they're launching three invites to users in the definitely not fme category i forget where but oh so they were talking about like reducing sign up costs and like one thing i'll talk about is they're basically saying that if they can continue reducing how cheap they get sign up costs and if they can continue to monitor the nonbot users which they're getting a lot better at then the majority of those non bot users can essentially be given free accounts which i think is very exciting and we personally i think know a decent number of people who interact with real people and i don't think if this happened there would be an overnight influx but i think there is this compounding effect where if it did happen it would really help in many scenarios where you're meeting someone you're at a conference whatever the scenario may be and you really wanna onboard that person with right free invites with channel with wallet with all of these built in legos i think that'd be a lot better so exciting to see where that goes yeah another small one if you wanna warpcast q '4 grant they're doing the payouts through github grants or sponsorship so you should have gotten a oh direct cast from varun and they'll be setting it up this week we got a very small one for farhax so very appreciative of that from from broadcast and then a lot of really really great projects that deserve it got some like recaster bounty caster lot a lot of cool projects so huge shout out everyone

for sure for sure but over overall like i'd i'd know like like the the people who i saw who are at the top i was like they definitely deserve that

yeah yeah okay cool so let's see on the protocol side the snapchane they're doing the testing that's really exciting they're reducing sign ups as we just spoke about there's some spam detection stuff and they're working on the storage units and the snap change is gonna like make all of that easier it's gonna like alleviate a lot of these these different problems so they're doing some early research and they're turning direct cast into an open protocol but they did not really talk about that much on the on the call so i would assume that that's kind of backlog with everything going on right now and then they also said some stuff about signing with farcaster farcaster connect but again like that's another thing where moving all of that to snapchane is gonna make it easier and then some stuff with labels i know that they released the labels for like their spam dataset or how they how they mark spam users

so that's really helpful

download this data and see for any fid and there's this other fip which i did not read but i think it's similar it's about like adding these labels at a protocol level of

of spam or not so i definitely i definitely support it i have to read through this but i

yeah or to like share information like oh like minar said something like this user is spammy or whatever

cool alright let's see what else oh i think that's it but that was a pretty good protocol meeting or overview i think the wallet is probably the most exciting one or the biggest one but lot lot of cool stuff going on as always

yes yeah yeah yeah

it looks like what's going on here is this is this person like local yeah computer like they have a firewall set up on their computer and then they have like family devices a home lab it's like how they're like partitioning the wireless within their house

yeah venice and perplexity both hosted in the us i've also tried the non us hosted one but i've

yeah but it's really good and also there's some really like sure there's an entire debate over like are all the facts of the headlines true of like how much cheaper it was trained for or whatever like it's a whole other convo but there are definitely some really unique like training methods in their white paper that may have gotten them to this point and the reasoning like when you see i know there's like o one which is a reasoning model but that seems to me more of like a summary of what it's doing like okay i'll do this then i'll do that but for some reason the r one the deep seek reasoning like seems more like a human would actually be reasoning or laying it out and it's quite in-depth like it will think for like two and a half minutes sometimes so it it it's it's pretty good and it's quite cheap to use

i think so they're like they're like distilled the they like distilled the data where you can like take outputs from different models or like take public outputs from the model that aren't against the copyright like licensing and they like wrote new like they wrote new processes for certain things like for certain training processes they wrote the functions in a new way that was like less memory intensive and then there are certain there's like this language called nvidia cuda and it's like how you interface with the nvidia boards for like certain parts of the process and most everyone just like writes in that language like a proprietary nvidia language and they wrote around it in c like writing like a bare metal like how you like talk directly to the chip

or i don't i don't know

be a lot yeah

tech channel there's a h 100 restriction yeah i mean they could have also found some sort of way to get around it there are allegations that maybe they did or they're using like singapore as a way to get the the chips there but definitely a wake up call to us companies and i definitely recommend trying it out on like perplexity and i think if anything it'll just push these models like chad gpt just launched their new models and that assistant the new deep research thing looks pretty impressive then it will go and research for like two hours on your behalf

we have a small little hour of critical reasoning that we can offer to the world here

exactly

working on

yes oh so so this isn't a code like coder thing or farcaster thing per se but i was thinking about this and i'm curious what your thoughts are so sure there's there's streamyard there's there's like all of these different tools like a riverside whatever from managing calls that happen over zoom whatever but then i'm watching like all in podcast and their their thing is just a screen recording of zoom and you see the little green bubble around the zoom whatever and i'm surprised that with so many people using their webcam and doing online shows and whatever that there isn't software that is not just transforming it like streamyard is doing right now but making it look like we are on television you know

i feel like put a lot into that and they plan to eat denver for like an entire year

yeah

my best small trick so far has been that now the built in camera with apple has these backgrounds so i have this permanent blue background so whenever i have a messy room or something it's just it's just consistent someone was like why do you have that i was like it's just good for for anything no no weird lighting or anything like that

oh nice yeah

it's a good addition

yeah alright well i'll have i have two actually two more things i could show one thing i'll show is personal so i've been still on the side kinda working on like a the ground complexity like tool for ai so i can show it live i have now farcaster apps indexed so i can say like what's moshicam and it should give us some information here in a second on moshicam and you can go

yeah

you see like supercast so right now it's just like a list and i might put it out there so other people can submit their apps but the like the two things i'm working on are one is like a little profile mode so almost like my own mini version of agents so like profiles for different apps or protocols like there's a farcaster one bounty caster clankr and then the second thing is indexing data that is around the protocol but isn't on the protocol so things like episodes of podcasts for the hub and gm farcaster farcaster apps and companies different things that you may be asking for just to like give it higher priority when you're searching for it so that like the actual knowledge base of cortex is like very centered on things you wanna know about farcaster love it or you could even ask something like how do i get started on farcaster and it should be able to like not just answer that via casts but via like actual rooted information you know

i know i know

i know we have to see if there's some sort of collab there where maybe i could like tag the bot here or something

yeah and then the other thing that i wanted to show was a very cool company got acquired by coinbase shout out a spindle yeah which it was building like on chain ads network and i know antonio was building he was like kick starting ads at facebook base in particular has made a couple different acquisitions recently and jesse made this cool video on it i can find in the show notes on like how they're bringing all these teams together to kinda just like have the super team for base and i can vouch and say that like all the teams i've seen them acquire have really great builders and so we'll be seeing this and and congrats it's always a a good moment i remember i was actually interning at a vc firm at the time chapter one that was leading the seed round for spindle when they were first coming out so it's fun to see all the way from seed to to acquisition

without any shade to those people i almost wanna send a notification that tells me are they gonna cast again sort of thing or like hey like we told you this person casted again in a while and then we haven't seen them in six months sorry our bad

yeah oh that's like the intern the intern notifications from the intern hey intern here yeah we saw you a week ago

not bad

dan if you're listening

alright well tori had some oh

i don't

and i don't

yeah if i'm if i understand correctly i think it's like how everything that happens for you to get to a transaction in web three like all of the prop like i don't think it's like on chain ads in this or like on chain in the in the sense of that it's like you interacted with this contract then that then that and then this router or something i think it's more so what are like the web two steps you're getting to the web three action like i clicked the link on twitter i went to a website and then i purchased this nft or whatever and they're probably just doing that through like good old link tracking but i never actually used the the product that's kinda just what i saw but i know antonio's been like doing this forever so i trust him

and then in terms of the onboarding data

i think the labels that they published are labels on a per user basis i don't think it's onboarding i know separately they have this new onboarding flow where you choose categories and it recommends channels but i don't fully know how that works and i don't think any of that data is is public so in terms of onboarding what you could do is you could check for new users from that list i don't know how often they're updating it so if anything i think maybe a more helpful place will be seeing like are there discrepancies in the labeling or is there a different type of labeling or another labeling source like i think another thing they're looking for is other people can offer their own version of the labeling if it follows the same format like warpcast can keep their own record of what they believe they are can other people and they can all check others and they can all be of this same type so you could definitely check that out as well

cool alright well this has been a really great episode thank you again nanish proff for joining me here thank you to everyone for joining us in chat of course and have a great rest of your tuesday we'll see you next time

thank you see you