two AI researchers are now funded by Solana
Hey folks, it’s been a wild week. Ralph Wiggum has finally crossed the chasm and folks are starting to grasp that software development is now dead as software development can now be done whilst you sleep for $10.42/hr. Software Engineering is alive and well but the skills needed now are the same, yet different.
don't use the plugin - learn the theory instead!
ghuntley
An upcoming post will be going into the changes of unit dynamics but if you want a sneak preview to my thinking here see these two videos:
but for now, I’m going to be recapping something else that was quite extraordinary that happened in my life.
I am now a walking, talking, financial instrument, an underlying. You see when Ralph started to cross the chasm a whole bunch of people started speculating on me on the Solana crypto currency network.
This entire idea was wild and I initially rejected it - quite publicly I may add - it was a gut reaction part because my inbox was blowing up from people i didn’t know; acting in ways that tripped my radar of “this is scammy behavior" and I had lived through the NFT days five years ago.
heck, I even sat down with Coffezilla
but within the pile of DM's that were stacking up were was was one person who caught my attention.
It was this conversation which completely changed my mind about what is going on - folks who had cryptocurrency are looking for genuine people who are doing good things out there in the world and the idea of accelerating these people through funding via cryptocurrency is something they want to do.
at first I ignored these messages but I looked up who they were coming from, their background and started opening up.
as I had lived through the NFT craze - I already had a wallet (and a ENS!) but still had concerns - you see I have perhaps as much trust issues as the average crypto currency holder.
Geoffrey Huntley
the conversation progressed and I came to understand indeed people are sick of the scammers and I was hesitant to be open to the idea that indeed a new form of creator funding dynamics was happening and I am in fact patient zero!
They suggested I catch up with the founder of BAGS and after a zoom call with them I came away with the following feelings after opening up with the following statement:
I have to believe you (BAGS) are trying to create something great here and that you need me as much as I need you. If you did anything untoward then you would be infact damaging your own reputation and business.
So, this really is a letter to the people who are having fun with the idea of turning me into a walking, talking meme that they can speculate on as for whom am I to judge as as a couple months ago I work in the high frequency trading domain. For all I know my co-workers are the ones who are trading me as an asset as a gag.
There’s so much I’ll never be able to share - prop shops are secretive. It creates somewhat of a divide between how much I can publicly talk about in the realm of AI and teach. It’s a fine balance that causes me much internal friction.
but maybe, just maybe perhaps this creator economy on the Solana network is real as I’m now staring at $300,000 in my physical bank account in under seven days which is enough of a safety net in case things ever go balls up.
So it has me thinking. Whilst I could literally throw out a tweet right now and be drowning in opportunities if such a thing was to occur...
What if instead we have the perfect recipe in the making for truly independent research that’s published open/freely in the making and all I needed to was open up and communicate with you? I've already got venture capitalists chasing me left right and center for meetings but heading down that path would likely result in the same scenario that I'm in right now: conflicted. I am an old-school hippie hacker that deeply believes that knowledge should be free.
Sorry for calling you a bunch of degens. Thank you for your support.
Here’s the next steps and commitments:
- I am now redirecting my earnings/fees to buy $RALPH as a way to say thank you to those who got in early and to improve the pool liquidity.
- The $RALPH coin is the official and only coin that I support. Please cease creating other coins and please note if you do create them I will claim them so that I can buy more $RALPH.
- Clarity as to what loom is in an upcoming post - it’s bigger than gas town folks. I’m rethinking the last fourty years of software engineering and rebuilding the whole damn stack as something that can be self-hosted on-prem. For readers who know me - Loom used to be known as Pherrit. Loom is pherrit folks. Over the last year I've rebuilt the concept many times in different languages (and even streamed it live on Youtube) but now the models are really good so it's time to build. At this stage I have:
- A fully functional source code host which replicates GitHub but it uses JJ as the baseline source control primitive but has backwards compatibility to Git - in loom speak it's called "spool". Spool is whatever I want it to be - by freeing myself from topics of group think and backwards compatibility I'll be able to explore topics such as virtual filesystems (think replicating google piper or meta's monoke) as a form to provide context for agents (ie. think BEADS by Yeggie).
- A fully functional implementation of GitHub Codespaces and sand boxing primitives so that weavers can run in the background on remote secure infrastructure (think similar to Daytona/E2B or OpenAI Codex) that uses spiffe://.
- A fully functional audit system/data source which can be used as loopback sources to drive agents via eBPF.
- A partially functional implementation of Sourcegraph Amp 😎 as a weaver ("agent")
- A partially functional implementation of Posthog analytics so that agents ("weavers") are driven by through product telemetry and in time drive autonomous ralph loops to improve product outcomes.
- A partially functional implementation of Launchdarkly so that agents ("weavers") can autonomously release features into production via feature flags/experiments.
It’s at this point where I explain what the heck is going on. In short there’s this new platform called BAGS which had designed contracts on the SOL network where market making fees are redirected to the creator.
The more people speculate on the underlying (me) doing something cool the more fees that are collected by the platform. In my particular case 99% of fees are redirected to me and I’m now using it to buy.
This is in no ways financial advice or solicitation dear reader - cryptocurrency is volatile and I completely understand if it’s not for you. If you want to support me directly please consider subscribing to my newsletter as a paid reader - all those funds go directly to me.
The intention of this post is to recap what the heck is going on and to extend an invitation to other open source developers or researchers that if this happens to you - i’m happy to sit down on a call and explain it all.
Until next time - thanks for reading,
Geoff.
Disclaimer: $RALPH is a memecoin created to celebrate the Ralph Wiggum Technique and AI development culture. The token was created and is operated by BagsApp. Geoffrey Huntley did not deploy the smart contract and has no control over it. Always do your own research before investing. Crypto is volatile—only invest what you can afford to lose. This is not financial advice. Not affiliated with Anthropic, Ralph Wiggum, or 20th Century Fox.