"The Merge, the long-awaited switchover from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, went off without a hitch, and Ethereum is now running on 99.5% less energy and with a 90% lower inflation rate."

"The Surge"

"The Surge refers to a surge in Ethereum’s computing capacity using Sharding technology."

"By scaling out through sharding, Ethereum can increase its computing power without increasing the computational demands on stakers."

"you could split that database horizontally into five shards, each with 200,000 rows, so you can process the information using five separate machines. That’s called “scaling out.”"

"The challenge is how to do this while maintaining Ethereum’s security and composability. The best strategies for achieving that are still being debated, but you’ll likely see pieces of it come together in future EIPs like 4844"

"The Verge"

"With a full sharding implementation, that state could start growing at 10s of Terabytes per year, which would soon make it prohibitively expensive to maintain a record of it on every validator."

"To run a validator, you must maintain access to the full Ethereum “state,” the historical record of everything that’s happened on the chain."

"the solution is to figure out how to move toward stateless network validation so that the processing power can increase and the size of the historical record can swell without bogging down every validator connected to the network."

"The core step for achieving this is to shift from the current Merkle-tree-based validation to a newer concept called “Verkle Trees.” Verkle trees dramatically compress the amount of data required to prove the validity of a block based on historical data"

"If a tree contains a billion pieces of data, making a proof in a traditional binary Merkle tree would require about 1 kilobyte, but in a Verkle tree the proof would be less than 150 bytes - a reduction sufficient to make stateless clients finally viable in practice. - Vitalik Buterin"

"The Purge"

"The first version of this is to cut down the length of historical data that needs to be maintained by execution clients to one year instead of needing the full history."

"The Splurge"

"Most of these are also very technical focused and will increase the performance of the chain but won’t likely be noticed by the users of the network."

"As the current Optimistic Rollups and ZK-Rollups improve, we should see significantly more new and interesting tools and apps to try launching there."

"Always consider the context. Everything is a part of a system, and you can get into trouble by only considering things in isolation."

"Use rules for novices, intuition for experts. This is one of the core principles of the Dreyfus skill model."

"Step away from the keyboard from time to time to solve hard problems, you need the space to let your background processes figure out the problems you’re encountering."

"Change your viewpoint to solve the problem: look at it in reverse, exaggerate it to the extreme, change your point of reference."

"Trust intuition, but verify."

"Uncorrected problems that you’re aware of only get worse. Fix them as soon as possible."

"The rule of three: If you can’t think of three ways a plan can go wrong or three different solution to a problem, then you haven’t thought about it hard enough."

"we need to develop an intuitive understanding of our skills, expose ourselves to a broad swath of information about the skill, and constantly push ourselves to improve."

"For at least twelve years, you’re trained to regurgitate and apply information that’s pre-packaged for you but never trained to find that information on your own."

"The sandbox method is an ongoing process for self-education, based on the latest scientific research on how we learn and how we process information."

"The sandbox lets you explore, experiment, and fail, without staking your entire future, savings, or reputation on it. It’s an ideal environment for rapid learning."

"If you don’t have an easy way to practice whatever you’re trying to learn and to put your work out in the world as you’re going, then you’ll learn much slower and have a harder time getting feedback."

"if you can get over that latent fear and start sharing what you’re working on with the community around your skill, you’ll advance much faster and make useful connections along the way."

"In the beginning, the best kind of information to look for is recipes. Clear ways of using the skill that you can immediately incorporate into your sandbox and try out."

"The easiest way to find these is to simply Google “how to do X” or “how to learn X” or “how to get better at X.” You’ll typically find a good article, discussion on Reddit, or related question on Quora that you can dig through to get started."

"Check out highly viewed YouTube channels for skills you’re trying to learn, and look at free university recordings and TED talks if you want to learn a subject. In many cases, these freely distributed courses are the best resources out there."

"As you’re learning, take notes on everything so you can refer back to them later."

"You should also consider publishing your notes as you go (as I do with books I read) since that forces you to clarify your understanding and articulate it in a way that other people will understand."

"The ineffective practice that most people engage in is called “naive practice,” named by Anders Ericsson in his book Peak. Naive practice is how most people trick themselves into thinking their practicing, while really, they aren’t learning anything."

"you have to incorporate the elements of purposeful and deliberate practice to make sure that you’re truly learning while you’re practicing."

"You can learn a lot on your own, but without a coach, mentor, or tool to provide feedback, you’ll get stuck eventually. Or, worse, you might keep ingraining bad technique, making it harder to unlearn later."

"the best form of feedback is always a coach, tutor, or mentor who already knows how to do what you’re trying to learn. They’ll be able to provide the most targeted feedback, and if they’re good, they’ll be able to preempt your plateaus and give you ideas about how you can design your learning program to avoid them."

"What Toyota realized was that by creating cars just in time, they could move faster, respond to market changes quicker, and only make cars that they knew they needed."

"There’s an important distinction here between tactical knowledge (e.g. how to do search engine optimization), and philosophical knowledge (e.g. understanding our tendency towards biased thinking). The first, tactical knowledge, is what we’re concerned with overdosing on."

"Conventional wisdom says that you should follow what people in your industry are talking about tactics-wise, but it’s just noise. You should have the strategy and tactics that you’re working on, and then you should execute on them."

"the more frequently a site publishes about tactics (marketing, personal finance, weight loss, etc.), the less you should listen to it."

"You don’t need an entire site on lasting longer in bed or water fasting, you just need one or a couple really good articles."

"A safer bet is to see what content has stood the test of time, following the Lindy Rule. Anything that has been around for 50 years will probably be around for another 50 years, but something that’s been around a few days has no proof of staying power."

"Any time you’re doing something that feels productive but doesn’t directly impact your most important goal, you’re being fauxductive. That includes bingeing on just in case knowledge, as well as checking email, reading the news, trying productivity tools, organizing your desktop, etc."

"If it doesn’t answer a specific question you’re currently asking, cover philosophical knowledge, or entertain you, then don’t read it."

"“It is better to know how to learn than to know.” – Dr. Seuss"

"If this sounds like “guess and check,” the process that some teacher probably told you was “bad” at some point, that’s because it is guess and check. And it’s a magnitudes better method than expecting to know the solution to your problems beforehand."

"Instead, we need to develop an intuitive understanding of our skills, expose ourselves to a broad swath of information about the skill, and constantly push ourselves to improve."

"Step 1: Build Your Sandbox"

"Before doing any research on how to do, or how to better do, what you want to learn, you need to create an environment to practice it in."

"Low cost or free: so you don’t delay in starting"

"Putting your work out there when you’re a novice is scary, but it will train you to get comfortable with having people see your creative projects before they’re perfect and before you’re an expert."

"Step 2: Research"

"To continue expanding the borders of your sandbox, the extent of the skill that you can practice and apply, you’ll need to do a certain amount of research."

"In the beginning, the best kind of information to look for is recipes."

"At least one person I’ve spoken with taught himself how to program primarily through textbooks until he knew enough to figure out problems on his own using StackOverflow and the debugger."

"Whatever you’re trying to learn, books are a great resource to start with since they’re generally more vetted and edited than what you can find online."

"And Take Notes!"

"It helps you remember everything, too, by building up a “personal wiki” in the words of Andy Hunt."

"Step 3: Implement and Practice"

"The problem is that in this kind of “practice,” you’re not challenging yourself."

"Honestly assess your limits to figure out where you need to improve"

"Step 4: Get Feedback"

"Continue the Self-Education Loop"

"Troubleshooting"

"Life doesn’t make sense. But it’s helpful to pretend it does."

"I read at some point that your statistical odds of getting caught driving drunk are so low, given how many people do it, that you could drive across the country and back completely sloshed, and you most likely would not get pulled over."

"“…fiction must make more sense than real life if general readers are to find it credible. So, for example, in real life someone may fall ill for no apparent reason and with no evident cause. In fiction, the character would have to be seen depressed about recent developments and tired from overwork.”"

"Everything that happens in a story must have a cause. And every cause worth including in the story must have an effect. Another version of this rule is “Chekhov’s Gun”:"

"""One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep."""

"Real life doesn’t follow this rule. That’s why we like stories; they make more sense than real life."

"The answers are obvious, yet we often fail to see these blind spots in our lives. So I like the “what happens to your character” exercise because it helps get through two mental hurdles:"

"First, we often think we can cheat the system. And that assumption can lead to life’s hardest lessons."

"We love hearing about people who beat the game because it provides some hope that maybe we don’t have to do the things we don’t want to do."

"We can see they’re trying to cheat the system. To have their cake and eat it too. Or that they’re lying to themselves. Seeing those behaviors in ourselves is more challenging."

"The second hurdle it helps with is recognizing the best parts of life are often hidden behind great efforts."

"We often know exactly what we need to do to get the results we want. The problem is taking those first hard steps in that direction."