Zaskoda

The game I made in high school is up there. You need to hit ctrl-f12 about 4 times for it to run at a reasonable speed.

https://archive.org/details/bob_and_his_amazing_journey_home

This sorta thing would mean the world to me and my team at our little bootstrapped startup. We may go broke before we turn revenue and we're now blowing enough smoke in front of mirrors to get VC funding.

> The design of blockchain, is that as more coins are mined, you need more computing power just to get smaller amounts of blockchain.

I find this article a little tough to take because of sentences like this one. I think it could have used a bit more proof reading.

Ok then, what's the viable alternative?

In my humble opinion, SPAs are not the fundamental mistakes. SPAs are applications. There's nothing wrong with having applications. The mistake was not maintaining a distinction between applications and content. The difference between a static document, a collection of hypertext documents, and a web application is very blurry. If it were less blurry, there would have been things we would have been able to do that we are not currently able to do.

My first trip to Alaska, I ended up on the beach at fish camp. Bald Eagles everywhere. I was sorta taken by how real Bald Eagles just weren't as majestic as the ones I saw in all those car commercials. To be honest, they were borderline annoying.

I think that, some day, money might be good enough that there can be micro-economies around side projects without bringing in all of the bloat, complexity, and expectations around current software revenue models. In my imagination, it would be less than project developers "charge" and more than users are able to easily "give" something back - even if just a little bit.

I saw this first hand last Spring when I was visiting family in Mexico. One of my sister's friends there is a web developer and we really hit it off. A native born Mexican, he told me about how he works for a tech company out of Utah, but through a locally owned company. He then went on to explain that this is the nature of his entire company and that this is a popular trend in the industry there. I honestly couldn't be happier for them, not sure he could have made that good of a living doing only local work.

I've read some assertions that it would have popped already if not for the federal reserve buying assets and keeping borrowing cheap, suggesting that the fed's actions are ultimately inflating it bigger and bigger.

In the existing state of things, you can get involved in a community that "air drops" a token, you can run a network node, you can play a P2E game, or you can sell NFTs that don't mint until sold. But this is super early. "Who Owns The Future" describes a model of revenue sharing that will require extremely cheap micro transactions.

You can't provide services for free without exploiting people. I recommend reading "Who Owns The Future" for a for discussion on inclusion.

You're forgetting about the part where the same system can provide those people with an income. Excluding people from the global financial system, imo, is the opposite of where we should be headed. The notion of paying people for their contribution to the network, no matter how small, is discussed in "Who Owns The Future"

There's basically one protocol that constitutes the web, http.

Perhaps you mean World Wide Web. ;-)

I've been building for the Web since 1994. I advocate for Web 3.

IMO, pay with money. End of story. Expecting services for free got is into this horrible advertising model that turned us into the product rather than customers. There are people promoting gasless, free to use chains. That model is flawed. Financial incentives is what finally made decentralized networks a real thing. For a good explanation as to where we're going with this, read "Who Owns The Future."

I have gone down the play-to-earn rabbit hole in an unexpected way.

In 2017 I started learning about Ethereum. Once I understood it as a virtual machine, the idea hit me that one could build a game. About that time, CryptoKitties hit and became an example of what could be built. Shortly late, a tutorial called CryptoZombies helped teach "a way" to build crypto collectable style games on distributed virtual machines like Ethereum.

Like many people, I went through the tutorial and I started working on my own game. A big difference between myself and many others is that many others only slightly deviated from the CryptoKitties formula. The inspiration for my game, Orbiter 8, came from an old BBS game, so I deviated a lot.

I worked on Orbiter 8 for a couple of years and released two demos before I bothered with ERC20/ERC721 interfaces. The game concept has an in-game currency and ownable assets so I created interfaces making those things tradable outside of the game. This was sort of a no-brainer. By using ERC721, I can use open markets like OpenSea to trade my game assets as NFTs. By using ERC20 I can put the in-game currency on SushiSwap and let the public trade the currency as they wish.

I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation. But for all intents and purposes, the emerging model is a pretty decent Play2Earn model.

Most games are about progression. You typically "grind" in any game to acquire better items and stats. The only step to make any of these games P2E is to allow those things to be traded on open markets. So if you build a game natively on one of these networks, P2E is an extremely natural emergence.

> Hierarchies work because they allow someone close to the work to take a very deep, detail-oriented view, while allowing others to operate at broader, higher layer of abstraction.

I almost never see this happen in real life. Maybe for a little while when a team first starts to establish hierarchies. But it always degrades, in my experience, until there exists an middle layer of management that only serves to slow down productivity. If you want to find out what's going wrong in any large corporate minded software studio, the managers will never give you the correct answer. Go ask the thought workers in the trenches as they typically understand why productivity drops off a cliff. When you have a brilliant visionary at the "broader, higher layer of abstraction" with the productive members of the team reporting directly, magic CAN happen. But largely, "managers" and similar roles are useless bloat. Same goes for the PM/producer type roles. I have a friend who started a game development studio a few years ago and committed to NEVER hiring a producer. It was bold. It's going really well and I think he's totally on to something. IMO, you can build better teams without those roles involved at all.

This piece seems to use "decentralized" and "distributed" interchangeably. These are not entirely the same concept.

> Where to even begin with this? First of all, many local governments in the U.S. already have public databases of who owns what land. This is a problem that can be solved with a SQLite database, it doesn't need a blockchain.

I believe you're missing the opportunity that exists for automation. That database is heavily guarded by layers of human administration. I can't sell you my land without involving a bunch of humans who interpret contracts and push buttons. In a world where land ownership were recognized by tokens on a distributed ledger, buying and selling land no longer requires the overhead of all that administration.

NFTs or whatever we call them in the long run will probably be important. I started working on an Ethereum game dApp in 2017. My NFTs are actual assets in a game that also runs on-chain. By following the ERC721 standard, I don't have to build a marketplace for my game assets. Gamers can just use any marketplace they like. I'm also going to have an ERC20 token that is just the in-game currency. It doesn't have to be ERC20 but by following the standard, again, I get the benefit of being able to trade the currency using most wallets. We're definitely heading towards a new kind of ecosystem where the concept of tokens are going to play a huge role. But I think we're also still pretty early in the cycle of innovation. Exciting times imho.

I recently had to decide between using Canvas or SVG on a project involving animation in the browser. I wanted to use a reactive framework (VueJS to be specific) and went with SVG for that reason. Pieces of the overall image are stored as Vue components. Animations become as simple as vue bindings in an element. A comparative Canvas build out would have been considerably more complex making it more difficult to manage. The trade off was performance loss. You can only manipulate so many pieces of an SVG before you get a drop in framerate. But, for my project, the reduction in code complexity seemed worth it.

I feel like the author here really misses what makes this movement in technology interesting, and that is evident in the title. Blockchain is not the innovation, distributed ledgers are. Blockchain is just one component in one formula that made it work. When you take DLT as the focus, you can examine how disruptive the technology CAN be on traditional ledger systems that require enormous amounts of human energy to maintain. And those who maintain these systems tend to take advantage of those systems. There's so much to be gained by automating away many of the traditional roles banks play.

One handy thing about Bitcoin and systems like it is that, by creating digital money systems, the industry is funding itself which will hopefully lead to the rapid evolution of technologies within the space. There are hard problems to solve, but enormous incentives to solve those problems.

I took a similar feeling away from this comment. It reads like someone who feels the need to defend a top down model of control. In my experience, these models are really more about perception management and creating the illusion of productivity while a lot of developer talent under their umbrella is wasted. I might be a bit jaded, but I honestly think a lot of the popular "agile" methodologies of today are directly responsible for the commonality of software bugs and glitches in production code. Most devs today will never get to experience a feeling of ownership over the technology they ultimately produce.

I volunteered for a non-profit where we had a model of "accountability" that worked very much this way. Leads weren't told how to do it, they were just given the accountability of making sure it was done and the autonomy to decide how it happened. If a lead quit, that accountability fell to that lead's lead. This led all the way up to the President of the org who would be accountable for everything should everyone quit. It worked fabulously well. We were all volunteers (~250 members). The closest thing I've seen to this in the paid professional world is the holacracy model of business organization. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to convince my current company to grow this way and now we swim through a deep pile of jira tasks, assigning them out to devs one by one with nobody having a clear sense of ownership of anything ever.

I was wondering the same as I have an SSD I used as an external usb drive that has stopped working. I've never heard of a drive getting bricked much less there being a way to resolve it. I was assuming a permanent hardware failure of some kind.

I have a 1987 Econoline modified for offroading. Previous models had the engine inside. Subsequent models had the engine entirely in front. But the generation I have split the difference with a short, downward sloping hood.

For this reason and many more - ever since Tesla announced their SUV, I have wished that someone in the EV space would consider this era of van when building anything meant to appeal to overlanding. Despite the many many issues, the design has excellent approach and departure angles, extremely good utility, has the same footprint of a full sized truck, and (for many reasons) has been a favorite for aftermarket conversion for a long time (see Sportsmobile or any of dozens of RV builders). Professional conversion companies and hobbyist like myself spend a lot of time building electrical systems into these vans to make them into better campers. Unlike your average truck owner (farmer, rancher, contractor, etc), the entire van-building niche would embrace a solid EV alternative.

I would gladly pay $17 a year for a non-ad driven version of Facebook.

If this were the limit of the value per user, they would have offered a subscription service long ago. Something is missing from your model.

Sort of. We do have unique problems to solve given the nature of our products. But to some degree, you are correct. We would have eventually done it to scale, but right now we did it to survive.

Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our automation program. We did in months what we had originally planned to do in years. As we are able to open our operations center further, it's clear that we'll be providing fewer jobs than we did before. At least some part of that is the result of automation. I can't help but think this same pattern is playing out at other companies right now.