sprig VS Nova

Blot is completely open source (hardware and software). You can find the GitHub here: https://github.com/hackclub/blot

I spent the last year building Blot with teenagers in the Hack Club community including but not limited to B (age 19), Henry (15), Kai (17), Shawn (18), Hugo (15), Ella (19) and Bright (15).

At Hack Club we’re working on building a new model for public education through open source projects. We believe people learn best by building things they care about and sharing those things with others. We want to support motivated teenagers around the world to pursue technology this way. That’s why we created the “You Ship, We Ship” model. We build online creative coding environments that are gateways to other subjects in technology. When teenagers create projects with our tools and share them publicly we send them more creative material. At the end of 2022 we released our first “You Ship, We Ship” project: Sprig.

Sprig is a microworld for making tile games, when you share your game we send you the hardware to build a handheld gaming console that can play that game. https://github.com/hackclub/sprig

Today we are releasing our newest “You Ship, We Ship”: Blot. Create a program that generates line art and we’ll send you a robot that can draw that art in real life. We hope Blot will encourage people to explore the beauty of programming and be a gateway to digital fabrication. Nothing feels more magic to me than writing an incantation on a computer that can materialize into a real thing that you can hold in your hands. I hope to share that magic with you through Blot.

Everything is free and open source so anyone is welcome to use the editor, submit to the gallery, or build a Blot machine. You have to be a teenager for us to send you a machine for free though.

I’m excited to see what people make! Enjoy.

If you want to learn more about Hack Club you can check out this short documentary we made about our 2023 summer hackathon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1s5HqSqKi0

It appears the project hasn't optimized for production (yet?). For now, I can't help but think it may be possible to cobble together a Sprig using inexpensive Pi Pico HATs and 3D printing. Here's the schematic:

https://github.com/hackclub/sprig/blob/main/docs/GROWING_A_S...

Hack Club | Full-time, Part-time or Contract | ONSITE | Vermont, US | https://hackclub.com

Hello friends,

I come from the game dev world where I led the team on the Crash Bandicoot reboot trilogy and helped ship two of the Destiny 2 expansions. I’m now building out a team here at Hack Club that will make inspiring technical and creative projects with and for thousands of the most technical teenagers you’ll probably ever meet.

In the past 3 months, we’ve shipped an open source game console ( https://github.com/hackclub/sprig ) that you can only get by building a game for it, a guide to assembly language that’s now the 4th most popular GitHub repo written in assembly ( https://github.com/hackclub/some-assembly-required ), and a teaser for a game we're producing about love and graphing (https://hack.af/sr ).

For this role, I’m looking for a technical partner-in-crime with a few notches in your belt.

JOB DESCRIP/APPLY: https://hiring.hackclub.com/26020 or email [email protected]

In the past 3 months, we’ve shipped an open source game console that you can only get by building a game for it, a guide to assembly language that’s now the 4th most popular GitHub repo written in assembly, and a teaser for a game about love and graphing.

Lurk Lab @ Protocol Labs | Multiple Positions | REMOTE | Full-time

Lurk Lab is building Lurk (https://github.com/lurk-lang), a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zk-SNARKs. Lurk implements a minimal Lisp whose program executions can be proved in zero-knowledge, yielding succinct proofs that are concretely small and fast to verify. Lurk uses a Rust implementation (https://github.com/lurk-lang/lurk-rs) for expression evaluation, proving, and verification, with Nova (https://github.com/microsoft/Nova/) as its proving backend. Because Lurk is Turing-complete, it can be used to make and prove arbitrary computational claims (within resource limits).

We are looking for strong cryptography engineers, researchers, functional programming language specialists, applications developers, and start-up leaders/web3 entrepreneurs who want to build next-generation SNARK technology.

Ideal candidates will be knowledgeable about the state of the art in zero-knowledge proofs and (if looking for an engineering position) strong in Rust.

We are specifically hiring for:

- Rust Cryptography Engineers

Lurk Lab is building Lurk (https://github.com/lurk-lang), a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zk-SNARKs. Lurk implements a minimal Lisp whose program executions can be proved in zero-knowledge, yielding succinct proofs that are concretely small and fast to verify. Lurk uses a Rust implementation (https://github.com/lurk-lang/lurk-rs) for expression evaluation, proving, and verification, with Nova (https://github.com/microsoft/Nova/) as its proving backend. Because Lurk is Turing-complete, it can be used to make and prove arbitrary computational claims (within resource limits).

We are looking for strong cryptography engineers, researchers, documentation specialists, applications developers, and start-up leaders/web3 entrepreneurs who want to build next-generation SNARK technology. Relevant programming languages include Rust, Lisp, and (less significantly) WASM.

We are hiring for:

- Rust Cryptography Engineers, https://grnh.se/d94e94ec4us

- Software Engineers for Lurk Application Development, https://grnh.se/de7e82424us

- Documentation Engineer, https://grnh.se/10e2ca4d4us

- Start-up operator / business lead (currently unlisted, email [email protected] with CV and a brief cover letter describing your experience driving the business end of deep technical projects in the web3 space)

Lurk Lab @ Protocol Labs | Multiple Positions | REMOTE | Full-time contract-to-hire

Lurk Lab is building Lurk (https://github.com/lurk-lang), a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zk-SNARKs. Lurk implements a minimal Lisp whose program executions can be proved in zero-knowledge, yielding succinct proofs that are concretely small and fast to verify. Lurk uses a Rust implementation (https://github.com/lurk-lang/lurk-rs) for expression evaluation, proving, and verification, with Nova (https://github.com/microsoft/Nova/) as its proving backend. Because Lurk is Turing-complete, it can be used to make and prove arbitrary computational claims (within resource limits).

We are looking for strong cryptography engineers, researchers, documentation specialists, applications developers, and start-up leaders/web3 entrepreneurs who want to build next-generation SNARK technology. Relevant programming languages include Rust, Lisp, and (less significantly) WASM.

We are hiring for:

- Rust Cryptography Engineers, https://grnh.se/d94e94ec4us

There's been a lot of VDF progress. The new design is Sloth + SNARKs (specifically Nova with GPU-accelerated MSMs). We will have an end-to-end demo of a CPU-based VDF in a few weeks, and the first VDF ASICs test samples (12nm GlobalFoundries) will be produced in December 2022.

Arkworks isn't really addressing the core of what Lurk provides. In theory, we could use Arkworks to implement a backend — but we are targeting Nova (https://github.com/microsoft/Nova), and I don't think Arkworks supports Nova currently. So the part we are building from scratch (the language itself) is at a higher level of abstraction. We like Nova's characteristics and are actively helping with aspects of its implementation so we can use it as soon as possible.

Nova. Recursive SNARKs without trusted setup.