alanfalcon

Are you trying to suggest that Cryptokitties aren’t meaningful? Blasphemy :-)

Yeah. Even ones you may not think about. http://teamcoco.com/video/ismo-01-22-18

So I’m not the person who posted the code, but I don’t think I really understand what you mean but I want to learn from it. Can you explain what it would mean in practical/layman terms to resume his work better?

Thank you (and GP!) I know what I’ll be doing for the next 90 minutes.

A little faith in humanity and in your ability to judge character. If you’re absolutely paranoid about this sort of thing, how do you even use a public restroom? How do you know your own house doesn’t have cameras watching you? Even James Bond lets his guard down now and then.

Very nice idea but it took me far too long to find the YOU ARE HERE circle that presumably corresponds to the detail circle. There should be some clear obvious connecting element so I can find YOU ARE HERE much more easily. Good luck with this!

I love this imagery. Probably what Neal Stephenson was going for in Reamde, though your simple analogy resonates with me more.

“Stocks”

That’s such an unfortunate metaphor for crypto.

Thanks! Definitely using this in my current project. Sorry to my users in advance.

We designers must all be like Tron: fight for the user!

Surely this has more to do with ETH’s very fast block time than the increased block size in a vacuum?

That is, I don’t see how these same issues that are affecting blocks that come every ~15s can be used to draw a conclusion about a system whose blocks come every ~ten minutes.

Brilliant. Definitely interested to see how this space evolves! Metamask is a great first step to helping bring wallets to the masses in the web browser, and it continues to improve, but it certainly isn't what a mainstream web wallet extension will look like in a couple years.

The "no secrets on the blockchain" aspect has already played out in subtly interesting ways in Cryptokitties. I have a tool that lets me see in a moment whether a given account has gained or lost money, and how much, and how much they were willing to spend. The marketplace is a completely open book, with real time sales data and a full history. You can't breed kitties in secret in pursuit of a particular breed. You can't (easily) buy out all of a given trait on the marketplace to create a false sense of high demand. And yes, you can see the entire kitty inventory of any other CK player.

The smart contract that performs these actions still exists and anyone can (and some people like me do) interact with it without touching the website UI / front end. The pictures of kitties are easily recreated once you have all the secrets of the genome, which we do (well, there could be more secrets but we could recreate the ones we know about which is all we can/could care about). The legal aspect of that latter part is murky but the CK devs promise they are working to clarify despite the complexity of this new space.

Yeah the game would lose 99.9% of its potential userbase without the front end, but if the remaining 0.1% wanted to build a new web interface we could and the game could go on. This may seem similar to spinning up a legacy WoW server, but the difference here is that we’d still have our own actual kitties and no be able to cheat the system so the game integrity remains in the blockchain version.

Addictive personalities can be good and can be evil. I have one and I’m usually okay at recognizing that and when it’s kicking in and not losing self control, but I’ve never had an opportunity to easily spend my cryptocurrency before and so I completely let myself fool myself about what I was doing when CK launched. I fell into a cycle of buying and breeding kitties at market rates, not wanting to sell them, finding “great deals” on the marketplace, buying and breeding those... Of course the “great deals” were really a crashing market after an unsustainable bubble right at launch. I was destroyed by incorrect mental pricing models and easy access to a source of funds. And what’s more, those funds were internet magical funny money that I’d gotten for free anyway, so it was really hard for me to see spending $40 worth of Ether as losing out on the opportunity to buy $40 worth of real world goods. And when the thought crossed my mind, I hand waved it away with the thought that I could always sell the kitties and get my ETH back, with no critical thinking attached.

All of which begs the question, why am I a fan of the game? There’s the fact that I feel now like I’ve invested a couple grand in the game ... but that’s my irrational brain again. Some slightly more rational reasons include that working with the community to crack the genome and build tools to help make smart breeding and buying/selling choices has been a ton of fun and very educational. Also just deep diving into the game mechanics in a way I couldn’t have truly appreciated from the outside looking in has been a revelation: many people complain that this is not much of a “game,” and of course they’re right, but there’s still a ton of careful consideration that went into developing each aspect of what exists, including how new genes are gated through release of new kitties and a breeding algorithm with special mutations that require particular gene pairs to breed. And then there are fancies, which a cat becomes when it meets certain minimum requirements such as being Cloudwhite, with a Scarlet pattern, and having a beard along with a hidden “wild” trait: all of which, when combined on the same kitty, produces a (relatively) valuable Santaclaws kitty.

Also, I really don’t need a new crappy old car. I’ve already got one of those. And man those kitties really are adorable sometimes.

I'm little afraid of all the CryptoKitties clonies that this will cause to come into existence, but it's pretty easy to spot the low effort cash grab ponzies and to see that CryptoKitties itself has a ton of thought and effort (and talent/money) behind it [I'm obsessed, feel free to ask me all your CK questions, like "why did you use all your Ether buying pictures of cats instead of a used car?].

Anyway, this is incredible.

The creator isn’t simply an amateur coder, it’s a team of real coders working on a program originally conceived by Colbert and an amateur coder.

Oh man have I got some spreadsheets I’d love to throw this tool at.

No. I’d get dizzy real fast if that very natural association between movement and perception were suddenly reversed though. (Somehow that didn’t happen when I started using natural scrolling, only when trying to go back from it.)

See what happens when people use en dashes when they mean to use em dashes? Total chaos!

Sure, they can (but should they?)

I had to program this and other special characters—notably •, ™, and ®—as an autohotkey script on my work PC. I was going insane. I already had autohotkey going to reverse the direction of Windows’ stubbon backwards scroll anyway. (Once I used so-called “natural scrolling” for a week it became impossible to understand why anyone would choose anything else.)

That selfsame teacher admonished me for turning in a creative writing assignment with single sentence paragraphs in dialog: “Paragraphs consist of a topic sentence, supporting arguments, and a concluding statement,” she insisted. I looked up at her, “But... books—!” She wouldn’t have it. “When you write a 40,000 word novel you can use one sentence paragraphs.” So, 19 years later, I did.

My sixth grade teacher cured me of this right quick. “Pick up a book,” she said, “—go on.” I did so. I looked up at her but she just looked back down at me. I opened the book. I looked at the spacing. I closed the book, looked back up at my teacher and said, simply, “I see.”

Ugh—and to think that extra effort had to be put in place to allow that to happen, too.

As evidenced by the Mozilla announcement.

Maybe. But their own hardware will also be slower, no?

Hardware wallet or bust right now, right? Use a private key that has never touched the internet?

That’s why the grandparent said “and/or” there, with a bit of humor attached I imagine.