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Karaoke enthusiast, master gardener, 2-acre amateur homesteader in the Sierras, atheist, feminist, book lover, farm kid, terrible skier. Software engineer and consultant. Past: engineering lead on Agoric's smart contract framework.


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  1. January 08, 2024

    Back in October, I had the opportunity to speak at Qcon SF on combating AI-generated fake images, as part of a fantastic track including Ryan Dahl (creator of Node.js) and Miško Hevery (creator of Angular.) The talk explored my work with Starling Lab. Rather than trying to detect AI-generated photos by various means, a more promising approach is to preemptively timestamp real images and their metadata.

  2. December 31, 2023

    Recently I came across a puzzling fact: the International Criminal Court hashes electronic evidence with MD5, even though MD5 is badly broken. So, why are lawyers using broken, outdated technology? The answer involves the common law system, cultural isolation, and a single man named Don L. Lewis.

  3. June 06, 2022

    Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, and Vitalik Buterin argue that we should create non-transferable, initially public, “soulbound” tokens to represent commitments, credentials, and affiliations. This is a bad idea. Instead, we should make off-chain statements digitally signed with Ethereum private keys.

  4. June 05, 2018

    “Smart contracts aren’t legal contracts,” they say. They’re right. But that’s missing the point.

  5. May 09, 2018

    New technologies might help integrate communities living under local, customary property law into the global economy.

  6. February 13, 2018

    Blockchain technology and other advances help expand our ability to make enforceable agreements without the state.

© 2024 Kate Sills