AngelList, CoinList partner to help crypto startups raise and manage funds

TechCrunch

Exclusive: AngelList, CoinList partner to help crypto startups raise and manage funds |

Crypto is making such a big comeback that AngelList and CoinList are launching a way to help raise capital for crypto-specific founders using crypto

Crypto is making such a big comeback that AngelList and CoinList are launching a way to help raise capital for crypto-specific founders using crypto coins. They are teaming up to launch crypto special purpose vehicles (SPVs) and crypto roll-up vehicles (RUVs), the companies shared with TechCrunch exclusively on Wednesday. The partnership, they said, will give users a way “to raise with syndicates and manage crypto startup investments the crypto way.” Syndicates are a group of companies or individuals that work together to jointly manage a large financial transaction. AngelList said the users will be able to fund crypto SPVs in stablecoins — currently for a $0 fee. “Investors can fund with USDC, which is easier for crypto investors who don’t operate via banks,” said CoinList CEO Raghav Gulati. USDC is the term for a digital dollar, also known as a stablecoin, that can be redeemed 1:1 for U.S. dollars as it is pegged to the dollar. Tokens can be distributed in kind to LPs and are compatible with “many non-U.S. token issuers and investors.” An integration with CoinList’s software is “coming soon,” the companies said. “The model is significant because investors receive tokens once they are available, instead of receiving cash returns, which is aligned with the crypto ethos of stakeholder participation and self-ownership of assets,” Gulati told TechCrunch. The crypto roll-up vehicles are designed to collect investments that a founder has raised for a particular round. The advantage, the companies said, is that startups don’t have to worry about “managing compliance for many stakeholders” at an early stage. “Crypto startups often seek to bring on many angel investors. With RUVs, dozens of angels who need to sign paperwork, send money, and get proper reporting on an ongoing basis can do so with AngelList Crypto RUVs,” Gulati said. Crypto’s acceptance in the mainstream investor world where AngelList belongs wavered during crypto winter. That’s when all things Web3 fell out of favor and industry bigwigs like Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao were sentenced to jail. But between bitcoin hitting record highs and the Trump administration’s clear interest in it, crypto is poised to come back in vogue in broader tech circles. originally posted at

Stacker News

AngelList, CoinList partner to help crypto startups raise and manage funds \ stacker news

Crypto is making such a big comeback that AngelList and CoinList are launching a way to help raise capital for crypto-specific founders using crypt...

Google Fiber Blog: Las Vegas, get ready for your close-up

Fiber Blog

Google Fiber Blog: Las Vegas, get ready for your close-up

Las Vegas, get ready for lightning-fast internet as Google Fiber arrives to connect the city with ultra-speed broadband.

Network construction is officially underway in Las Vegas! We’ve broken ground on the west side of the city, with construction to follow in additional parts of Clark County next month.  Google Fiber announced agreements with both the City of Las Vegas and Clark County in 2024. Now that construction has officially begun, we will continue to work closely with the city and county to build our network while minimizing disruption to residents.  GFiber service will be available in parts of the metro area later this year. Nevada residents and business owners will be able to choose between Google Fiber’s plans with prices that haven’t changed since 2012 and speeds up to 8 gig. For updates on construction progress, products and availability, sign up here. We’re excited to be part of connecting this vibrant city. originally posted at

Stacker News

Google Fiber Blog: Las Vegas, get ready for your close-up \ stacker news

Network construction is officially underway in Las Vegas! We’ve broken ground on the west side of the city, with construction to follow in additi...

Convert Nostr nsec keys into mnemonic seed phrases

GitHub

GitHub - HumanjavaEnterprises/nostr-nsec-seedphrase: The nostr-nsec-seedphrase repository offers a TypeScript library that converts Nostr nsec keys into mnemonic seed phrases, enhancing the readability and management of keys within Nostr applications. This approach mirrors Bitcoin's use of seed phrases, emphasizing the importance of secure storage and careful handling of these keys.

The nostr-nsec-seedphrase repository offers a TypeScript library that converts Nostr nsec keys into mnemonic seed phrases, enhancing the readabilit...

The nostr-nsec-seedphrase repository offers a TypeScript library that converts Nostr nsec keys into mnemonic seed phrases, enhancing the readability and management of keys within Nostr applications. This approach mirrors Bitcoin's use of seed phrases, emphasizing the importance of secure storage and careful handling of these keys. originally posted at

Stacker News

Convert Nostr nsec keys into mnemonic seed phrases \ stacker news

The nostr-nsec-seedphrase repository offers a TypeScript library that converts Nostr nsec keys into mnemonic seed phrases, enhancing the readabilit...

I gave an AI agent edit access to my website

I gave an AI agent edit access to my website

Dries is the Founder and Project Lead of Drupal and the Co-founder and Executive Chair of Acquia.

I'm often asked, "Will AI agents replace digital marketers and site builders?". The answer is yes, at least for certain kinds of tasks. To explore this idea, I prototyped two AI agents to automate marketing tasks on my personal website. They update meta descriptions to improve SEO and optimize tags to improve content discovery. Watching the AI agents in action is incredible. In the video below, you'll see them effortlessly navigate my Drupal site — logging in, finding posts, and editing content. It's a glimpse into how AI could transform the role of digital marketers.  **The experiment** I built two AI agents to help optimize my blog posts. Here is how they work together: - Agent 1: Content analysis: This agent finds a blog post, reviews its content, and suggests improved summaries and tags to enhance SEO and increase discoverability. - Agent 2: Applying updates: After manual approval, this agent logs into the site and updates the summary and tags suggested by the first agent. - All of this could be done in one step, or with a single agent, but keeping a 'human-in-the-loop' is good for quality assurance. This was achieved with just 120 lines of Python code and a few hours of trial and error. As the video demonstrates, the code is approachable for developers with basic programming skills. The secret ingredient is the browser_use framework, which acts as a bridge between various LLMs and Playwright, a framework for browser automation and testing. **The magic and the reality check** What makes this exciting is the agent's ability to problem-solve. It's almost human-like. Watching the AI agents operate my site, I noticed they often face the same UX challenges as humans. It likely means that the more we simplify a CMS like Drupal for human users, the more accessible it becomes for AI agents. I find this link between human and AI usability both striking and thought-provoking. In the first part of the video, the agent was tasked with finding my DrupalCon Lille 2023 keynote. When scrolling through the blog section failed, it adapted by using Google search instead. In the second part of the video, it navigated Drupal's more complex UI elements, like auto-complete taxonomy fields, though it required one trial-and-error attempt. The results are incredible, but not flawless. I ran the agents multiple times, and while they performed well most of the time, they aren't reliable enough for production use. However, this field is evolving quickly, and agents like this could become highly reliable within a year or two. **Native agents versus explorer agents** In my mind, agents can be categorized as "explorer agents" or "native agents". I haven't seen these terms used before, so here is how I define them: Explorer agents: These agents operate across multiple websites. For example, an agent might use Google to search for a product, compare prices on different sites, and order the cheapest option. Native agents: These agents work within a specific site, directly integrating with the CMS to leverage its APIs and built-in features. The browser_use framework, in my view, is best suited for explorer agents. While it can be applied to a single website, as shown in my demo, it's not the most efficient approach. Native agents that directly interact with the CMS's APIs should be more effective. Rather than imitating human behavior to "search" for content, the agent could retrieve it directly through a single API call. It could then programmatically propose changes within a CMS-supported content editing workflow, complete with role-based permissions and moderation states I can also imagine a future where native agents and explorer agents work together (hybrid agents), combining the strengths of both approaches to unlock even greater opportunities. **Next steps** A next step for me is to build a similar solution using Drupal's AI agent capabilities. Drupal's native AI agents should make finding and updating content more efficiently. Of course, other digital marketing use cases might benefit from explorer agents. I'd be happy to explore these possibilities as well. Let me know if you have ideas. **Conclusions** Building an AI assistant to handle digital marketing tasks is no longer science fiction. It's clear that, soon, AI agents will be working alongside digital marketers and site builders. These tools are advancing rapidly and are surprisingly easy to create, even though they're not yet perfect. Their potential disruption is both exciting and hard to fully understand. As Drupal, we need to stay ahead by asking questions like: are we fully imagining the disruption AI could bring? The future is ours to shape, but we need to rise to the challenge. originally posted at

Stacker News

I gave an AI agent edit access to my website \ stacker news

I'm often asked, "Will AI agents replace digital marketers and site builders?". The answer is yes, at least for certain kinds of tasks. To explore ...

#Tornado sanctions suspended

GN Nostr. Catch you on the flip side.

The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall (2015)

WIRED

The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall

As Ross Ulbricht's online drug empire mushroomed, he became rich, arrogant, and sloppy. Meanwhile, the feds were closing in.

Part 1 here:

WIRED

The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 1

How a 29-year-old idealist built a global drug bazaar and became a murderous kingpin.

THE DESCENT WAS stunning. Chris Tarbell, a special agent from the New York FBI office, was in a window seat, watching a green anomaly in a sea of blue as it resolved into Iceland’s severe, beautiful landscape. On approach to Keflavík International Airport, he could now see the city of Reykjavik coming into view. And just beyond that, perched on the edge of a moss-covered lava field: the massive matte-white box that housed the Thor Data Center. That’s why Tarbell and two US attorneys had come all this way. Thor was the home of a computer with a very important IP address, one that Tarbell and his FBI colleagues had discovered back in New York—the hidden server for a vast online criminal enterprise called Silk Road. They’d been working on this case for months, as had federal agents across the country, in a wide-ranging digital manhunt for Dread Pirate Roberts: the mysterious proprietor of Silk Road, a clandestine online marketplace that functioned like an anonymous Amazon for criminal goods and services. Silk Road investigations had been launched by Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and the DEA office in Baltimore, where an agent named Carl Force had been working an undercover identity as a Silk Road smuggler for more than a year. Tarbell and his team—known as Cyber Squad 2 (or CY2 for short and “the Deuce” for fun)—were relative newcomers to the case. The other agencies had dismissed the FBI, partly because of interagency bluster and partly because the traditional agents who thought casework was all guns and grime and grit had no respect for the eggheads from cybercrime. But in the midst of this enormous law enforcement effort—mostly fruitless so far—Tarbell and CY2 had found the first promising lead in the case. Cybercrime agents spend a lot of time at their desks, and it was exciting to be in the field. Down below they could see Iceland’s fierce geology, all jutting rock built up from the water by volcanoes. Beneath the surrounding ocean are the massive cables that make the country an important location for web traffic; the island is nearly equidistant between North American and Europe, and its forbidding geography and climate reduce cooling costs and provide free geothermal power. One of the attorneys told Tarbell about Iceland’s tectonic forces—the North American and Eurasian plates, slowly tearing open a growing chasm. Really puts you in your place, Tarbell thought. originally posted at

Stacker News

deleted by author \ stacker news

deleted by author [3 comments]

A platform that moulds to your needs

A platform that moulds to your needs

Emacs users may be known for bringing in all sorts of diverse workflows into their beloved text editor. From the outside, I get how odd this may se...

Emacs users may be known for bringing in all sorts of diverse workflows into their beloved text editor. From the outside, I get how odd this may seem. We often treat our text editor as a platform of sorts to do our email, web browsing, calendars, project management, chat… the list goes on. Take email, as an example. Back in 2018 I thought "managing email from Emacs… surely that's crazy-talk", yet I gave it a try just in case. 7 years later and I never looked back. I still use the excellent mu4e client. As you become more accustomed to Emacs, you may find yourself wishing you could navigate other tasks just as efficiently. But this doesn't happen right away. The editor starts moulding to your needs, initially as you copy others's code/configurations, but this can only take you so far. Emacs truly does mould to your own needs, once you start learning a little elisp. When comparing elisp to modern languages, one may be tempted to dismiss it as a niche language from another era. While both of those things may be true, its moulding and glueing capabilities remain just as relevant and powerful today, even in the LLM era. Take a random workflow like extracting vocabulary from a Japanese class paper handout. While it may seem far-fetched for Emacs to handle this, it's actually fairly straightforward with a little elisp glue. Often, this consists of finding some crucial utilities and glueing them up.  originally posted at

Stacker News

A platform that moulds to your needs \ stacker news

Emacs users may be known for bringing in all sorts of diverse workflows into their beloved text editor. From the outside, I get how odd this may se...

Building a tiny Linux from scratch

Building a tiny Linux from scratch

Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!

Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop! Here’s what it looked like:  Let me tell you how I got there. I wanted to learn more about how the Linux kernel works, and what’s involved in booting it. So I set myself the goal to cobble together the bare neccessities required to boot into a working shell. In the end, I had a tiny Linux system with a size of 2.5 MB, which I could boot from a USB stick on my laptop! What you’ll get out of this article: - A better understanding of what happens when your computer boots Linux. - What terms like bzImage, initrd and UEFI mean. - Ideas for how to deal with the problems that I encountered. - And if you haven’t used Nix, it might be interesting to see how I used it to manage the tools and libraries I needed.  originally posted at

Stacker News

Building a tiny Linux from scratch \ stacker news

Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop! Here’s what it looked like: Let me tell you how I got there. I w...