i’ve been using it (with a stt->prompt->response->tts loop) for chinese practice and it is very good. being able to say “role play a market” and drop into it and switch mid sentence between languages when i get stuck and it just works it out and helps is amazing. i still think a human tutor is required for foundations but gpt is very helpful for practice.
I think playing with money systems, ideas of value etc is interesting. The average contribution was about $50 - so like a kickstarter for a fan club.
and no, the plan is not to burn the book. there is an ongoing joke by a few people in the dao. but they do not represent the majority and the aims of the dao explicitly are to do with the preservation and protection of the book. so thats not going to happen.
but people arent actually interested in conversation here. hn hates crypto. we get it. people hating something they arent a part of and dont understand. But we are still going to have fun and make things, and the good vibes win in the end.
Or maybe it is simply a group of people who love jodos vision for dune. the idea of a film as a guiding prophet, visions of a flowing creative universe. and we want to play with that.
so we raised a bunch of funds and bought a cool book. now we are making an animation. we've been discussing ideas like sending funds to the makers of Jodorowskys Dune documentary which didnt even break even, as a way of thanking them too.
y'know, playing in the way we were taught, as hackers, as kids who grew up on the internet. To go out and do things, make things. hang out with our friends.
but hn would rather take a few snippets, call us all scammers and frauds, and hate on us.
but whatever.. we're gonna keep having fun ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
nft financial speculation is not the problem, it is a symptom.
you dont hate non fungible tokens, you hate the abusive financial system that we all live under.
the funny thing is that p2p programmable money databases and things like nfts could offer us something different. it does seem that a lot of attention (and vc money) goes to people rebuilding existing things 'but on blockchain'. but there is a lot of interesting anti-speculation crypto protocols/standards being built too -> things like circles ubi.
"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away." - Stuart Brand
as the article mentioned, web3 was a term coined back in 2014. It was very much a reaction to "web2.0" silicon valley years which was probably felt a lot stronger back then.
the term flew under the radar for a while, but the past six months people suddenly got annoyed by it.
Running nodes is pretty easy with setups like DappNode. Full eth nodes arent that big, i synced a new one in a couple of days last week onto an old ssd.
Most heavy contract data is stored offchain on ipfs, so you can just pin the stuff you are interested in.
Where i would agree is indexing/searching lots of data is a pain. You cant just give an address and get a list of tokens associated with it, you have to call every token and get its balance. It makes sense, but its annoying, and is why opensea api is so popular for nfts. But i have hope with services like TheGraph growing that search and index also has distributed and resilient design and we become less dependant on one endpoint api.
imo these nfts that are "host it on an endpoint on our apache server" will die away as their fragility fails them. its mostly quick-buck thinking.
yes you can do a bad job with your nft contract and not think about metadata location etc. but you could also do a good job (ipfs/arweave). There are plenty that will last as long as the chain they are on with no problems.
Opensea shooting themselves in the foot. But its ok Zora and Foundation and others are stepping up and leading the way.
I kind of agree in some ways but i think he underplays the critical point that you have an option for voice and exit from the forming centralising forces (which do get established because people like convenience/reliability/familiarity) without sacrificing your data or belongings, you can leave without losses. That is a critical difference.
His nft is delisted from a platform and his wallet calls the api of that platform. That sucks, up till now we have "too bad you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone". But that isn't the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work with anyone who calls it. He can still get all the data, there are other wallets, you can run them in your terminal if you like, or you can set your metamask to use your own - or someone elses - node (instead of infura). There is a choice. There are things like TheGraph making distributed indexers/search engines and something like that will replace opensea as the main nft api (if they arent building it themselves).
Add to this the more recent developments of light clients, which are coming along great and which allow us to run in-app/in-browser direct connections to the chain for calls/transactions without needing infura or a third party node.
> Personally, I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going, and this won’t just be a blip. If that’s the case, it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency.
Absolutely agree. there are a lot of people in this space who have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives pursuing their interests in it, and they will. It isn't going away and we should engage with making it as good as we can. Will it be a big thing in ten years? who knows, I can say that everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea, but now they are reality. What will we see in the next 5?
We can absolutely bring better privacy too. Layers like aztec are working on exactly that, and zero knowledge proofs and other forms of commitments (sismo) are exploring how to do that. I think a lot of people in the space follow the ideal of "privacy for the individual, transparency for the institutions". We will get there.
> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.
i sort of agree with this, we can accept that full nodes will be ran be organisations, businesses, and nerdy individuals who also have their own funkwhale instances and homelabs. those commited to the ideals -> same as home email servers or mastodon communities.
but we can also find ways to distribute infrastructure to bring resilience to those who dont think much about these things and just want to use an app. (again with things like light clients replacing api calls to third parties). so that we care for the non-committed users and make sure the points of fragility are lessened as much as we can.
I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer "i'll be a web3 dev for a day" overview and response. So it reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of smackdown, which isn't helpful either.
I'd be much more interested in his thoughts on Whisper/Waku and messaging protocols, tradeoffs in validity/volition/optimistic rollups, distributed indexers, etc. He is smart enough and involved in similar things to just take that extra step to the dev forums and discussions and maybe give meaningful, helpful critique. I'm not sure what response he is expecting tbh?
The rest on gold rush and money i don't have much to say on, but mass speculation and desperation to make money is, imo, a symptom of the abusive system of work and finance that we are all forced into and everyone wants to escape. That didnt just appear with crypto/nfts. So sure, people are using something because they are making money and might not actually care about the details and the ethics - but we are also building a free(libre) opensource p2p programmable value network, and there are lots of people who also think that is amazing and worth indicating as different from the current stacks with the 'web3' tag.
Raised Catholic, but never seriously and after high school the only churches i attended were for weddings and funerals. But at some point in my twenties i lost a close friend, had some weird experiences of suffering and bliss and acceptance. Then started reading all over the place to try understand my experiences. I found the tao to be very helpful, and thomas mertons writing also very helpful. I often come back to his writing on desert mystics to start the day. And I always allow myself the time to watch the sunlight glinting off the leaves of the trees outside my window.