When I first started learning Solana, one of the biggest questions I had was: "If there are no usernames or passwords, how does the blockchain know who I am?" As a Web2 developer, I was used to creating accounts with an email address, choosing a password, and relying on a company to manage my identity. After spending several days learning Solana, I realized blockchain approaches identity in a completely different way. Identity in Web2 Think about all the accounts you have today. GitHub Gmail Facebook LinkedIn Your bank Every service asks you to create another account. Each company stores your username and password in its own database. Your identity exists because they say it exists. If they suspend your account or delete it, your access disappears. In other words, your identity is owned by the platform. Identity on Solana On Solana there are no usernames. There are no passwords. There isn't even an account registration page. Instead, your identity begins with one thing: A cryptographic keypair. A keypair consists of: A Public Key A Private Key When I generated my first wallet using the Solana CLI, I immediately had a new blockchain identity. For example: Public Key: AxfVXDX7jsCw7vSnwut9hA7oX4UykE3ZeiNF6cxCKvpf This public key becomes my wallet address. Anyone can send tokens to it. Anyone can view its transactions. But nobody can spend funds from it. Why? Because only I possess the private key. Think of SSH Keys The easiest comparison for Web2 developers is SSH. When connecting to a Linux server: the server knows your public key you prove ownership using your private key Solana works almost exactly the same way. Except instead of logging into one server... you're interacting with an entire blockchain. Every transaction I make is digitally signed using my private key. Validators verify the signature before accepting the transaction. No password is ever transmitted. No administrator approves my login. The mathematics prove my identity. Why Wallets Matter One thing I f

Run a LangGraph agent long enough and the model call stops being your bottleneck. The plumbing takes over. Every step, the graph serializes its state to a checkpoint so you can resume, replay, or recover. LangGraph does that with Python's deepcopy . For a small dict that is fine. For a 250KB agent state with nested messages, tool outputs, and accumulated context, deepcopy is brutally slow, and you pay it on every single step of a long run. So I built fast-langgraph : a set of Rust accelerators for the hot paths in LangGraph, packaged as drop-in components that keep full API compatibility. Lead with the numbers, including the ones that hurt Here is what the Rust paths actually buy you, measured against the Python equivalents: Operation Speedup Where Complex checkpoint (250KB) 737x faster than deepcopy Large agent state Complex checkpoint (35KB) 178x faster Medium state Sustained state updates 13-46x Long-running graphs, many steps LLM response caching 10x at 90% hit rate Repeated prompts, RAG End-to-end graph execution 2-3x Production workloads with checkpointing And the automatic mode, the one that needs zero code changes, lands around 2.8x for a typical invocation. Now the honest part. These are not "Rust is faster at everything" numbers. The checkpoint speedup scales with state size. It is a serialization story. For a small, flat dict, Python's built-in dict is implemented in C and already fast. Rust does not win there, and the README says so plainly. The 737x is a large complex-state number, not a headline you get on a toy graph. The core idea: reimplement the critical paths, keep the API LangGraph is good. I did not want to fork it or replace it. I wanted to swap out the three operations that dominate a real workload: Checkpoint serialization. deepcopy on complex nested state is the single biggest cost in a long run. Rust does a structured serialize instead. State management at scale. High-frequency updates accumulate overhead. A Rust merge path handles append-h

If you're a music maker of a certain age, then you probably once dabbled with a pirated copy of a little app called Fruity Loops. These days it's called FL Studio, and Constantin Koehncke, is the man responsible for shepherding the pioneering digital audio workstation (DAW) through the modern age. As CEO of Image Line, […]

If you’re the type of person who could always use a little extra positive affirmation, or you have a weakness for weird gadgets, the Talking Flower might be of interest. I’m only kind of serious. The toy is based on a character from Super Mario Bros. Wonder that guides Mario through levels with quippy, whimsical […]

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb will head the UAP Science Advisory Council established by the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and "the intelligence community." The Council will provide scientific reports and advice to the UAP Governing Board, in an effort to "resolve the nature of UAP," or […]

ChatGPT is hiring a dedicated product manager to build experiences for families, caregivers, and older adults, according to a job posting.

Google is now deleting all accounts that do not, and have never had, phone numbers associated with them if they haven't logged in within a year or so. "Urgent: Sign in to your Google Account if you want to keep it" But then it doesn't matter if you log in with the correct username and password and receive the PIN via your email. This is isn't enough. Unless a phone number is somehow added to the account one gets, "You can’t recover your account at this time because Google doesn’t have enough inf

A roundup of recent reviews published by Engadget.

Your photos don't have to go home, but they can't stay here.

Toni Schneider, who took over after Jay Graber stepped down, is now Bluesky's official CEO.