"Thanks for great apefest logistiscs guys @yugalabs & @BoredApeYC. Incredible event and met plenty of amazing people. Still, as dozens of others, I’ve almost lost sight this night."
I mean, c'mon. "Thanks, incredible event, it almost blinded me"?
Crypto on the whole is a scene where Sam Bankman-Fried was considered very smart while he was busy conducting the most inept financial crimes in modern history. The bar is low indeed.
We - humans - could have had digital money - fast and fee-less, micro-transactions, decentralization, secure, anti-spam. Everything Bitcoin claimed to want to be.
Instead we - the tech community - got smug about scams. People here get smug even toward the victims of scams.
The attitude has been 'Who gives a flying fuck about the details of any crypto tech, or the potential of digital money'. 'It's all a scam, so I don't have to learn anything about it'.
The baby got thrown out with the bathwater.
The people working on actually good crypto have nothing to do with SBF. The only way in which they're affected by this is the extent to which they get tarred with the same brush.
Edit: Y'all proving my point. You really don't see that? ... Look at how many of these responses lack table-stakes domain knowledge, missed the point, lack all imagination, and yet have a condescending tone. It's wild.
Mmm. Maybe. It's still not clear to me that you can have a decentralized, P2P verification network that can handle anywhere near worldwide transaction volume.
It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy".
A decentralized P2P verification network is not hard. What's hard is building a global consensus to order these transactions, and there's not really a satisfying solution to that problem.
> It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy".
The same could be said about cash but that's an important aspect of life. Whether we're talking about drugs (like cannabis or shrooms) or getting an abortion, there's quite a few things you may not like to be confronted about by your local police.
Sure, but that's true also with cryptocurrencies. You can make donations to non-profits / free-software with them, or acquire hosting services (web/dns/vps/vpn). I don't think technology is neutral in the general sense, but money (whether cash of cryptocurrencies), much like a pen and paper, is the kind of tool you can use for the best and worst purposes and there's not any way to change short of an orwellian dystopia.
To a much lesser degree. I wouldn't be able to use cryptocurrencies for any of the things I use cash for.
But that wasn't what was being asserted. The original assertion was "It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy"."
The same thing cannot be said of cash.
(I don't agree with the assertion I quoted, to be clear. Aside from buying illegal goods, it's good for evading banking regulations and fees, but that's neither here nor there.)
the two core, dare i say intrinsic, values of cryptocurrency are 1) immutable, public ledger requiring no single point of authority and 2) that authority having zero bias or regulatory oversight on any transaction outside of its protocol.
1's value being a traceable permanent record and 2's value is no direct stepping in between a transaction or control over a holding.
both of those, to many skeptics, are actually negatives and give more control and power to sovereign entities, not less.
i am not including the pseudoanonymity of it for two reasons, 1) depending on the crypto, currently the level of sophistication to transact in a manner that any given address cannot personally identify you requires massive amounts of personal responsibility / knowledge and most importantly to most people, effort and 2) because the major way the current digital fiat channels handle the transaction volumes that they do is that they're built on a foundation of authentication linking to personal identification, and so the theorycraft of "sure it has a huge ecological footprint but it could replace the many-many-many times larger ecoprint of the entire fiat banking system" is disingenuous to me because in order to actually replicate that, any main network would be a duplicate of the current authentications backed by men with guns, it would just allow that sidechannel of p2p to have it's wild west.
i do find it a touch humorous that those who want to shatter the fiat-police complex are quick to engage the legal system to protect and recoup from bad actors.
Wait till you realize that any form of money is a scam designed to extort riches from the poorest producers and make those riches climb the social pyramid. Tongue in cheek comment of course, but that's an argument that can be defended.
I don't think that's it. They have to do it because they themselves have bills to pay. However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt. So it's not exactly a facilitator of mutually-beneficial transactions, but rather a pyramid scheme. Who will profit from the food sale? The middlemen. Who will profit from the little money that the farmer pockets? Banks, Monsanto, etc..
astrange had the right context but characterized it not-so-correctly. Modern agriculture's origin involved power structures where farmers were forced to be unable to be self-reliant, and would instead trade their crops at a market to get the other things they needed. The powers that be then had a nice, centralized place to take their cut and exchanges to offramp goods into currency. we're seeing it all over again with crypto via fiat reliance
Farmers didn't have bills to pay prior to the invention of bills though; some of them were subsistence farmers, some ran on IOUs, and some were slaves.
> However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt.
Median family farmer in the US is a millionaire (or their household is anyway). You're thinking of farmworkers.
> Who will profit from the little money that the farmer pockets? Banks, Monsanto, etc..
This is 70s New Leftism "evil corporations" thought, but it's a bad approach. Small business owners (petit bourgeois / local gentry) are more evil than corporations. Farmers, who are largely a kind of landlord, extra so.
For instance, the reason factory farms took over poultry in the US is that chickens were originally not valuable because there wasn't a market for chicken meat for the longest time. So the farmers left it to their wives to run.
Once it became popular, all the farmers sold their businesses to the factory farms, because having no business was less embarrassing than letting a woman run one.
Fast and fee-less? Does that work on a distributed ledger? Is there some magic I’m missing to make consensus quick and cheap?
Micro-transactions were never going to be feasible considering gas fees required to run a sufficiently secure blockchain app.
Decentralized? I’m still confused. Has anyone actually solved the Oracle problem with crypto? How are we actually getting decentralization?
Anti-spam??????? Ok that’s literally just crazy talk right? In what way does crypto have anything to do with spam? Afaict everything crypto-related still requires an email address to sign up if that’s what you mean.
Block lattice tech has been around for seven years. All your points would be answered by looking into it - it's not a secret.
Eg, Nano uses it. It's been working, efficient, safe, fast (<1 second) and completely fee-less, for seven years now. The entire network could run on a single windmill.
It's tending toward decentralization because there's no mining, no staking, and there was a genuinely fair distribution.
Fee-less transactions come with bad actors spamming the network with microscopic transactions, like a DDOS. So, Nano uses a 'bucket' system to keep things moving.
Tbh, this is exactly what I mean - all of this ought to be well known. People in general have a massive blind spot on what money actually is, and a weird reluctance to discuss what it could be. We're talking about all the crypto that doesn't work, so much so that people don't even know there's good and working crypto right now. We're talking about the scammers, instead of the people doing cool things without seeking glory for it.
Nano is a great example against your point as well.
Its design flaw is the ORV system requiring someone who just wants the elevator pitch and their life to be wildly more efficient via using digital currency that's faster, safer, cheaper than their debit card having to educate themselves on what-even-is an ORV, how does the voting work, how do you know what a good representative is, and so on. And, as with a lot of the cryptos working on different vectors of what efficiency means, it's also its strength. It's, you know, how it's fast.
So yes, o boy, if people just adopted it, informed themselves about it, and used it in volume "phase 2" could commence and as with crypto it comes in the form of major traffic revealing scalability necessities. Unfortunately who is going to do that to see in X years what the issues are, when there are the grandfather cryptos that do what they do and work how they work (sidestepping the "how they were meant to work/layer2 protocols don't count/cup of coffee as priority or no" dramatics).
And so its largest general population adoption, friction creating flaw is that people do not want to be their own bank. This is absolutely where the smugness from the tech sector comes from regarding the unwashed masses clicking excel macros from email scammers and uninformed people not having a functioning BS-detector and opting in to be the greater fool because they know there is bound to be many more greater fools than themselves.
The other bit that was omitted in your "we fixate on bitcoin and nfts and failures and dismiss the advancements smugly" is how many more declared-better-than cryptos have there been that didn't even make it to the scalability discussion that mature cryptos have and have modified and built systems around the transaction issues?
Case in point, you say "genuinely fair distribution" but that's a massive *citation needed. Back to genpop, they will never think it is fair if they didn't know about it and someone they consider their peer was able to obtain it with relatively less work or cost than they'd have to right now.
One of the key features of bitcoin (and maybe a small handful others) were that there was no ICO, and no opportunity to be unfair past you were either there and aware or you weren't. Now that more people are aware of the space in general, you cannot simply flip the switch without bad actors doing their thing. That era will never happen again, it was those people (or mmm intel agencies) at the forefront of dropping the tech in the wild interacting with it.
That said, there-and-aware with those early cryptos had a relatively massive near decade-long runway. I honestly would not know where to begin with assessing all cryptos around in 2020 to form an opinion on viability for 2030. Those good ol' days had what, 6-12 to sort out and work on?
Between 2018 and 2022 there are around 1,000 dead cryptos alone. I don't have the time to parse them all out and barely have the knowledge to assert that one that is dead should not be and has something worth pursuing.
I don't want my jadedness of being in the space for 15+ years at this point to lead me by the nose, but my bias would definitely be "if it was worth pursuing, one of the big ones' communities would pursue it as it means more value and a better product" (conspiracies about new world order digi-currency agenda aside).
Case in point, NFTs. Those in the know understand the potential value of an NFT and how they're not just "goofy internet jpgs" and have built in versions of systems accomodating them, or, you know, let parallel tech be the guinea pig. I can see use cases for them regarding licensing, but I can also see very little incentive for any entity to lose their centralized power to accomodate a tech that directly usurps it over time.
> Its design flaw is the ORV system requiring someone who just wants the elevator pitch and their life to be wildly more efficient via using digital currency that's faster, safer, cheaper than their debit card having to educate themselves on what-even-is an ORV, how does the voting work, how do you know what a good representative is, and so on.
It doesn't though. It requires installing a wallet app.
> And so its largest general population adoption, friction creating flaw is that people do not want to be their own bank
Maybe you didn't see that story here yesterday about banks simply closing people's accounts for no reason. Maybe you missed Mastercard and Visa blocking Wikileaks and OnlyFans payments. Maybe you missed the bank bailouts, and the housing crisis, and the Epstein funding, and the Panama papers, etc.
If you've ever seen a bank run, you know that there are times when people absolutely do want to be their own bank.
> my bias would definitely be "if it was worth pursuing, one of the big ones' communities would pursue it as it means more value and a better product"
That's not how a status quo works. When you talk about digital cash, you're stepping on some very sensitive and powerful toes, conspiracy or no.
> I can also see very little incentive for any entity to lose their centralized power to accomodate a tech that directly usurps it over time.
Well now you've hit the nail on the head. Fortunately, accommodation might not be a requirement to success.
Block lattice is IMO far too unwieldy to use, and is useless for decentralization unless the system you're making payments on is actually yours, meaning you can't use it for real-world payments.
Also, still nothing solves the oracle problem. Any form of crypto does nothing for any transaction that doesn't purely take place in digital space. This really is never the case, even when people claim it is. People always use the "NFTs could be used for concert tickets" example, but when it comes down to it, the venue still has to physically let you in.
Same with DNS. Sure, you could have a record put on a blockchain, but somewhere down the road, you're gonna have to be routed through a DNS server owned by someone, and the decision to use a decentralized record is purely theirs. At some point, there's some centralized entity that needs to be trusted or regulated.
As long as the thing being bought/sold with crypto can't be decentralized (nearly everything), you're still kicking the centralization can down the road, and spending a whole bunch of time and energy doing it.
... It involves scanning a QR code and clicking confirm. It's faster and easier than using a credit card, and uses a tenth of the energy.
> is useless for decentralization unless the system you're making payments on is actually yours
No idea where you got that idea, but it's very silly. You've missed the first principles of cyrpto payments somehow.
> still nothing solves the oracle problem
And cash does? Did Nano claim to solve it? Did I?
>you're still kicking the centralization can down the road
I don't think you understand what 'decentralization' means in the context of crypto. I'm a little curious why you feel qualified to talk authoritatively about this topic?
> It involves scanning a QR code and clicking confirm
> No idea where you got that idea…
Block lattice relies on private ledgers owned by the 2 parties of a transaction. It then consolidates those ledgers which is how it saves energy. If you’re giving someone else access to change that ledger, it’s no more decentralized than cash.
> And cash does?
Cash doesn’t, but it also doesn’t claim to provide decentralization or enforce contracts without state involvement. The entire purpose of crypto is to remove state involvement from contracts, which it fails to do.
When will the cryptocurrency promoters understand that society doesn't want decentralization? People don't want scammers going around taking people's money without recourse, causing a burden on everyone else. They have explicitly entrusted governments to claw back ill-gotten gains. It is just a matter of time until regulations on on-ramps and off-ramps hits cryptocurrencies to the point where they have all the same regulatory costs as centralized ledgers with the additional computational cost of decentralized ledgers.
To be fair, that was a very tiny baby in the tub. Maybe in theory crypto could have been a perfect system, but in practice humans are flawed. It was doomed.
It is horrible that these folks lost their vision. They didn't deserve that. Even in the context of crypto apes. It's easy (but boring) to make fun of them-- again humans are flawed.
I see your point, and you honestly have one. However, nothing in this world works solely based on logic.
How many times have we heard xyz was the more optimal choice but abc won out. It’s because trust and perception are the other equally important dimensions.
That said, North America isn’t the only market for crypto. There are many thriving economies in the world with a broken currency. Argentina, to name one, is constantly weighing down by hyperinflation but the sheer grit and talent of locals is keeping the country relevant. Argentinians are always looking for ways to save their earnings without losing to inflation.
All that to say, there are still “real” problems waiting to be solved for which crypto can be a solution. In the west though, if it ain’t broke - you know the rest.
It isn't just the tech illuminati who associate Bitcoin with scams. Everyone in our neighborhood now knows that it's a regular occurrence for older people to get emergency calls from the "gas company" and rush to the corner store's Bitcoin kiosk so they can pay and not get their gas shut off.They then realize it was a scam and post on Nextdoor, Facebook, etc. While I know that cryptocurrency is not a scam, and while I know that such scams pre-exist Bitcoin, that is absolutely the perception that it's getting in our community amongst non-tech people.
Your edit, BTW, is interesting. You tar all the responses with the same brush, "missed the point", "lack all imagination", and then accuse them of having a condescending tone? Do you have a sense there might be a two way street? While you do have a point, there's a lot of reasons why human dishonesty, e.g. scamming, prevents us from having a great many nice things that we could otherwise have.
There are regulations on that stuff in some countries. A friend of mine is in lighting and says their company generally avoids lasers due to the hassle of compliance.
- Laser projector must be mounted and have the lowest point on the beam at least 10 fee above the floor and 10 feet horizontally from anywhere a person could go -- this is why many laser shows just do "laser sky" effects that are just projecting wide horizontal lines even though they can do up/down effects as well
- beam must be terminated into something non-reflective -- can't shoot it off into the sky
- absolutely no scanning the audience -- again, the lowest point of the beam has to be at least 10ft above the floor
Related standards:
- ANSI Z136.1* ‘Safe Use of Lasers’ (currently available, but general for all laser use)
- ANSI Z136.10* (to be published shortly, but specifically covers laser light show safety)
https://www.lasershowsafety.info/us-laws.html has more info including some about how to possibly do audience scanning with special equipment, but you can see from all of these rules why it's a lot easier to just avoid lasers for events and clubs. Pyrotechnics are a lot of red tape too.
in optical research you typically end your beam into a beam dump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_dump
IIUC at CERN it's basically a big chunk of graphite that heats up a bunch when you drain your beam into it.
To a broad degree, the industry self-regulates and comes up with its own safety mechanisms, guidelines, hardware and software controls, etc.
I used to be a member of ILDA [1], which developed a number of the protocols, serialization formats, and safety measures. They'll certify hardware and operators, and they'll kick out members that engage in crowd scanning. They don't really have much of an enforcement mechanism, though.
In the US, the FDA and FAA have regulations on laser displays [2]. You're supposed to apply for variance, but many smaller venues and operators skip this outright.
It can be incredibly dangerous if care isn't taken. These multi-watt lasers can easily burn holes into things, with your tissues being among the easiest.
These folks were clearly crowd scanning at eye level.
I’m surprised they didn’t stuff the room with paid actors. The closest tangible value to NFTs is that they grant membership to an exclusive social club.
Sadly, they don’t need to. The people who actually buy into this are so stup*d that it’s not worth spending a penny more than a lousy eyes blinding “party”
They do this with Discords and bots to make interest look high, I can't believe they didn't think to do it with an in person event. Actors must be a bigger pain to get than bots?
Imagine going to the event and all you have to look at for the entire show is hideous monkey "art". If this is what the people like then maybe they didn't deserve to have eyes in the first place.
If you know something bad has happened, you want to word your public statements in such a way that you beat out the bad news to the top search of Google at least, to minimize the attention given to that issue.
Boris Johnson using search terms to try and hide the "Bus" incident back during Brexit.
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The #1 goal is to do it in such a way that confuses and befuddles those not-in-the-know (Oh, its just the CEO being quirky... they'll brush it off). But of course, you still want to accomplish the goal and make a news-statement with the largest amount of reach such that you beat the "real news" event on the top search of Google/Facebook/other social media.
It often sounds like gobbytygook, because it is. You're just word-vomiting into the wild trying to shove search terms to the top of Google / other search engines... but in a way that no one realizes why those words are related.
Remember when Musk called some guy in Thailand a 'pedophile' for no reason at all, and it immediately became international news with those keywords. That was so quirky!!
Wow, someone I (somewhat) know in person featured on HN.
I haven't heard from him in a long while (and even then, he was a friend of a friend who happened to show up from time to time). Then, he got lucky publishing Bitcoin prophecies that were accurate enough to gather significant following. A shovel shop in the times of gold rush kind of thing.
Now from what I see on his Instagram, he seems to be living in Dubai and his life consists of fine dining, driving fast cars and attending crypto conferences. Never in my life will I understand why this kind of life is something that people pursue.
Cheap blue LEDs will leak the dangerous parts of the UV spectrum. I've had projects hit import snags in the EU because they got spot checked - the overseas contract manufacturer used parts which were out of spec.
It’s not much brighter than usual, but it’s UVC, a higher frequency/shorter wavelength than what we are used to on the surface of the Earth. UVC reacts with (di-)oxygen to make ozone, so it’s blocked by the ozone layer. The smell is very distinct and it burns eyes and skin readily.
I wonder how much they charged and made in ticket revenue. They couldn't even hire stage and lighting professionals to determine the right amount of UV and lighting at a conference hosting hundreds or thousands of folks?!?!
> On social media, some suspect photokeratitis — damage to the eye caused by UV exposure. If that’s what caused the Apes’ agony, they likely won’t be blind forever: it’s a temporary condition. People usually get it from being in bright sunlight and snow for too long, and not at concerts, which typically have stage managers and lighting professionals who understand how to safely set up a show.
In bright snow your pupils are super small as the brightness is constant. At a night show your pupils are dilated in let in maximum light intermittent if exposure in these circumstances could be quite different in terms of short/long term damage
oof, yeah those were powerful UV-C disinfecting bulbs. I've got half a dozen Elektralite eyeBall UV fixtures that I use for parties in conjunction with other lights, which are 18x3w 385nm UV LEDs per fixture. I don't stare directly into them as they're pretty intense, but they're still firmly in UV-A territory and don't hurt your eyes. They do light up anything fluorescent super bright though!
So now when I go to a place with blacklights, how do I know someone didn't get confused (or is just ignorant) and used bulbs that can burn my eyes? Thanks.
If the blacklights are LEDs they are UV-A and safe. UV-C LEDs exist, but they are so expensive noone would make a stage lighting fixture out of them.
If they are fluorescent tubes that look kinda purple, black or really deep blue when off, they are UV-A and safe. These tubes use a phosphor to convert UV-C light to UV-A light and are made of wood's glass to filter out all but that UV-A light.
If they are fluorescent tubes that are clear, they are UV-C and unsafe.
Theres a third type that uses phosphor and regular glass that emits UV-A and some white light, but those are almost never seen in stage lighting fixtures.
There are also UV-A arc lamps like the Wildfire IronArc series, which are safe as long as they have the dark purple wood's glass filter installed on them (these lamps do not ship without such a filter, but sometimes you encounter used ones that the filter was broken in or otherwise removed).
“About 2,250 people attended the Saturday evening party at a cruise terminal, said organiser Yuga Labs, one of the pioneers in this market. Since then, more than a dozen have posted on social media complaining of a burning sensation in the eyes and sometimes also impaired vision.”
Honestly that’s a lot more proud Bored Ape bagholders than I would have guessed. But what do I know — maybe Beanie Baby meet-ups also pull crowds of thousands.
Everybody in crypto is so honest and the numbers they love to tout are always real, so I don’t see any reason to be so cynical. Unless of course one is a fiat-blinded NPC sheep who hates disruptive innovation and wants to kill the children in Africa and El Salvador who are being rescued from poverty by the limitless power of blockchain energy.
This isn't even sarcasm, this is just collecting various actual statements in one location. I know I have been called genocidal for expressing an opinion that we should maybe run medical studies prior to massive ivermectin doses for everyone in the third world. Same energy.
I was curious when I heard the initial reports so I went looking for pics on Twitter — the ones I found looked absolutely nothing like the 2,500 attendees and more like 250..
That's about the attendance of an average furry convention (or roughly one NordicFuzzCon) where the A/V crew will know what they're doing with the lights. Questionable ideas and their events and services struggle to attract competent staff for some reason. They're always getting hacked or melting faces.
I help run an anime con with, uh, 15 times this reported attendance. The most important thing is to keep your competent volunteers entertained so they're happy to run a rave one weekend a year that doesn't blind anyone.
We'll know the furry and anime communities are finally back together after decades apart once a cosplayer and a fursuiter go head to head with Caramelldansen and Hamster Dance at Floor Wars.
We (furry con A/V) care a lot about safety, so there's no way you'd see UV-C lamps at a furry con dance. We also measure sound levels and keep them in check, have free water stations around the room, have medical trained security staff around, keep an eye on the crowd, etc.
According to the Zeke Faux book "Number Go Up", one needs to "own" a Bored Ape YC NFT to be admitted. The author had to pay $20,000 for one of these in order to gain admission to this event.
Unfortunately no, like a sunburn sometimes you don't feel it until later. This can also happen when hiking across snow covered plains under clear very bright skies. It's called snow blindness.
As a kid (~6 years old), I once tried to look at the sun for as long as possible, competing against myself. Luckily, I didn't do any noticeable damage, but I feel like someone should have told me about UV radiation and the damage it can cause to the retina.
A couple of years ago, I had a mishap with a moderately powerful laser, meant for engraving, grazing quickly across my left eye (I was wearing appropriate eye protection).
It wasn't until the next day that it started feeling like someone poured sand in it. It took a few days to return to normal.
Appropriate eye protection does not provide 100% protection. Outside of a welder's helmet, maybe, even the best eye protection won't stop a reasonably powerful laser beam directed straight into your eye. It will reduce its intensity, though. The main benefit of wearing it is that even the diffuse, scattered light bouncing off of the walls is hazardous, and the eye protection stops that. Without it, you couldn't safely be in the same room as an operating laser even if the beam never comes near you.
If I had not been wearing it, there is an excellent chance that I would have suffered permanent vision damage. The eye protection I wore did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Its like a sunburn blister. Takes a while to develop, usually whilst you're asleep. When you wake up, you open your eyes and rip the blisters open. I'm told it feels like hot sand being poured in your eyes at that point. Definitely one to avoid!
That's the big danger with solar eclipses. It's not bright enough to hurt at the time. The damage only starts to become apparent after a few hours or the next day.
When I went to see a total eclipse I was surprised that even a tiny slit of the sun was still hard to look at. Not sure why anyone would try to stare at that.
galileo (the galileo) used to stare at the sun for extended periods of time (without a telescope), to the point he could identify sunspots. But IIUC he looked at it near the horizon when it's attenuated by more atmosphere.
It's like a sunburn. The radiation damages the DNA of the cells. DNA damage like that triggers a cellular self-destruct mechanism. It's a cancer-prevention mechanism. So over the next few days as the skin or corneal cells start to go through their normal replication cycle, the DNA damage is discovered and causes those cells to die off. This causes an injury just like if another mechanism like heat or chemical damage, had killed those cells. Inflammation, oozing, pain, scarring.
Given the.. qualities.. of people involved in the NFT space the organizers probably bought a bunch of UV-C lamps off alibaba because they were cheap and looked cool-- doing absolutely no research and with no regard for others.
I think that is 100% true. I had a friend keep his grow lights on a little too long, a little too often, because they looked cool. I got instant migraines when I walked in his room.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect the average guy to know how to tell whether a UV bulb is safe (regular non-quartz glass helps a lot) or that dangerous ones are sold without warnings.
If you're talking about old-school fluorescent-tube black lights, the bulb type designation will have a -BLB suffix, like F15T8-BLB for a typical 15-watt tube, as well as a visibly dark phosphor. A germicidal tube would be G15T8, and have a clear quartz envelope with no phosphor coating.
The "average guy" shouldn't be doing technical stage production.
You hire trained professionals for this kind of thing. There are literally entire companies who specialize in putting together these kinds of events safely, every single day.
A professional stage lighting designer or theatrical electrician would absolutely know that this is a risk.
Yup, never ever buy lasers / UV light equipment from Amazon. Shit's dangerous and they don't go through any real regulation.
You often get class 3B lasers being sold as 3R which is extremely dangerous. I opted to pay a lot more for a green laser for astronomy purposes on a legit website then buy dirt cheap on Amazon because I don't want to blind/injure myself or others.
It's the kind of thing a competent A/V staffer would think of because the event's insurance would have required more credible sourcing. Given the nature of the crowd, I wouldn't be surprised to learn they had no legal support or insurance.
They were neat tchotchkes for a bit, but they just kept making absurd quantities of them, and for increasingly irrelevant side characters. There are currently over 15,000 different figures. Plus I think people are losing their appetite for "collectibles" that are just mass produced plastic.
If I remember correctly, your eyes don’t adjust to black light the same it would as full spectrum, and will stay mostly dilated as if it were in the dark. This can increase the chances of photokeratitis, or basically sunburn on the eyes with high powered shows like this.
Similar to the effect of wearing one earplug or one headphone/IEM: when one ear is exposed to much louder sound than the other, the combined exposure across both ears doesn't trigger the natural protective mechanism [0] to the degree that it would be triggered if that same level of exposure was applied to both ears, so the one ear gets totally wrecked. Also not a doctor and would appreciate a counterpoint from anyone who knows this to be a myth.
People love laughing at people they think are below them. In the current political climate, pretty much all of the groups that were laughed at are protected now and deriding them is uncouth. Thankfully, it will always be okay to laugh at stupid people but only in specific contexts.
For several years, anyone who pointed out problematic or criminal aspects of crypto were subject to a torrent of abuse from the people you are identifying as the victims.
Fools alone, maybe deserving of some sympathy. Greedy get-rich-quick fools who derided everyone not participating in the scam, nah, no sympathy from me, none at all.
What is this horrible suffering people had to endure?
IMO, it was basically all self inflicted anguish due to "someone else is wrong on the internet" syndrome.
If someone wants to gamble their money away, you don't have to care. If they want to talk about it, you don't have to listen.
People act like living in a world with people who act differently was some kind of ordeal. they have totally lost the ability to not engage with topics they don't enjoy, and then take joy in the pain of others.
People making those jokes can’t see how disgusting that behavior is. It is like they were blinded by the bright lights of cynicism. When I look into these people’s souls it is like staring into a vast black abyss.
Really? These grifters have stolen millions from innocent patsies all while clogging social media with scams and arrogant “stay poor” memes and directed billions of VC funding into creating useless tools to facilitate the scams. And we’re disgusting for maybe thinking maybe karma had something todo with this?
I feel sorry for the attendees (though as noted their suffering is temporary, and they were probably drawn by the lure of easy money). I'm delighted about the organizers' further loss of reputation and likely legal troubles.
After I learned that NFTs were essentially just signed git commits, I wrote them off as a hilarious grift. I feel bad for the people that were injured, so here's my advice: run away from NFTs and crypto. RUN AWAY!
essentially. a whole industry cropped up around hosting them, which mostly defeats the point
there are a lot of NFTs that are better implementations, the primary improvement being that there is no external hosting and they build the visual data into the smart contract function for a renderer to interpret
Ive done a lot with SVGs that way. others upload dependendies like three.js on the blockchain in other smart contracts, so when called they can return into yours and you have more sophisticated renders
I think artblocks does something like that, not sure
Most of the financial sector NFTs have an onchain svg too, like all the Uniswap liquidity pools
first movers are often poorer implementations of the technology, its up to the consumers to discern and if they dont then there is no incentive to act differently
No, NFTs technically have nothing to do with images, or files at all. The way it works is that you write a random string and save it on a blockchain, which becomes the NFT. From there, you can use a lookup table to map the NFT to a URL that links to an image that's stored on the owner's server. NFTs are truly the worst of all grifts.
It seems to me that cryptocoin adjacent things somehow attract well meaning people who just don't understand what parts of the technology are critical to its functionality. Maybe they understand one use case for a signature but don't really understand what signature is and more importantly what it isn't.
And sadly enough - several cryptocoins themselves are also this way.
I used to think cryptocoins were truly revolutionary. But the tech space is so rife with abuse, theft, scams that it doesn't feel worth it.
> you write a random string and save it on a blockchain, which becomes the NFT. From there, you can use a lookup table to map the NFT to a URL that links to an image that's stored on the owner's server
The way which they are mapped to images vary from NFT to NFT.
But let's look at Bored Ape Yacht Club specifically.
This contract is responsible for minting all of the original Bored Ape NFTs
Click on "contract". And then click "read contract".
Scroll down. There is a method named "tokenURI". It takes an integer as parameter. Let's query it with value "1337" (the id of the bored ape we are interested in knowing about).
Notice that because I added the same file to my local ipfs, it got the same id as it had when I retrieved it.
QmWjXFUVNjavM4hDzXeQYGXGCXjV86mP7kPEaTeP5bohae
So, IPFS doesn't even require that the file is indefinitely pinned.
And if I have a public node, others can now once again retrieve the file using the same known id.
The person that re-adds it doesn't have to (nor can) specify the id of the file; that's calculated from the hash of it.
(Although, IPFS does also have a way to serve mutable data, so in those cases the id is not calculated directly from just a hash. But in the case of the image we looked at here we see that it was.)
The difference between needing to pin forever and merely needing to have a copy of the same file somewhere outside of IPFS which is then re-added to IPFS and gets the same ID is a fine distinction perhaps, but still an important one IMO.
And I think that even if all of the IPFS nodes that currently have a copy of the Bored Apes would go offline, there is probably someone out there who would notice that and for whatever reason be motivated to make all of the apes available again on IPFS with their same original id's that they had by re-adding the original files.
Right, it's like a torrent in that way. I have dozens of torrents where I am waiting for that one guy to -- bless his soul -- open up his torrent client and seed the last 14 bytes.
I guess the best thing to do if you own an Ape is to store the image on your HDD and put a copy in a safe-deposit box, and then pin it yourself whenever you can.
As mentioned though, it varies between different NFT projects. Some NFT projects lazily use Google Drive links etc instead. And then the files in the Google Drive could later be modified or deleted.
What baffling is how did they get this popular ? Plenty of stupid things to go around, why this specific one? Who was the marketing genius that convinced a critical mass to buy something worse than sand in the middle of the desert.
At a first level, similar phenomenon to why trading cards or any other collectible fads have their periods of excitement. Is digital beanie babies at all surprising?
Then there were also folks who wanted to use them as an open standard for, like, "metaverse assets" and whatnot. And while there are many different ways to solve that technically, you also have the blockchain proponents looking for any problem that blockchain can solve... So there is the added energy from that synergy as well.
Then I believe there are fairly serious businesses looking at NFTs for things like digital albums sales (or other ways to cultivate and monetize parasocial relationships) while disintermediating the traditional platforms.
My opinion, I am not an expert by any means, I have only read the bitcoin whitepaper and written some very trivial blockchains to further my own understanding:
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are impressive novel technology, they suit how they are used and work as a fungible token/currency. The underlying tech is impressive, like cryptography, and cannot (backdoors excepted) be broken for its intended purpose. Smart people who understand it recognized the potential and validity of the technology, and so it grew organically and became the phenomenon it is today. There is no technical gotcha, scams are another topic.
The general public's exposure was much more surface level and occurred after the tech had grown organically among technical folks. Now you pay with your CC on a familiar looking website, to buy something everyone says has value. It seems normal, and although you don't understand the underlying tech, you trust it is valuable. Lots of people get rich, lots of people lose money, but BTC remains valuable and the market remains. My elderly mother who is not technically literate is asking me how to invest.
After that, the general public has been conditioned to expect blockchain adjacent tech to be legitimate, they are feeling like they missed the gold rush but there is a new gold rush! NFTs! This time we skip the organic growth of a novel technology, adopted by smart people who understand the underlying tech. Now it is inorganic growth exploiting the crypto hype and pushed by hustlers. There is a legitimate use case for artists but that isn't what is driving the new mania.
This time there are massive technical gotchas (you have a link to a .jpg hosted on a server or servers, you don't own the copyright to anything). People find this out after the hype and massive adoption, if BTC never worked for its purpose it wouldn't have grown organically. NFTs have skipped that. There are torrents with every NFT pulled from these servers to highlight the lack of ownership, of technical control, I can't torrent your Bitcoins but I can download your stoned apes.
This is a long opinion, but it's why I think you see people find out after the fact just how flaky NFTs are.
The use-case may be valid but the implementation doesn't necessarily facilitate it.
I'm stating in the first quote that there is an idea of artists selling their work, but that isn't what is driving the accelerated adoption.
In the second quote I point out some of the technical deficiencies, it is supposed to contrast the first. It doesn't reconcile.
The comment chain is on the topic of why these technical deficiencies are news to so many people, my opinion is that we skipped the scrutiny that BTC experienced and we experienced a gold rush.
It could be. I don't know about the ERC for NFTs and I can't be bothered to read it, but in theory just store the IPFS address for the image.
In reality though it is an implementation detail. An NFT is just a coloured coin, and derives it's value from someone else thinking they can buy it and sell it on to someone else / OR some kind of bragging rights value, i.e. I can afford $100k on X useless thing (e.g. watch, gold plated iPhone etc.) so therefore I am rich.
It’s typically an IPFS hash of an image that is stored on the blockchain, rather than a mutable URL. Some generative artworks will even store all of their code on-chain.
Ultimately, the chain is meant to be a ledger of transactions (like a decentralized Christie’s auction house maintaining provenance), not a storage layer.
Yep, git is essentially a blockchain. NFTs but also all cryptocurrency transactions are essentially git commits containing a digital signature from the owner (to prove ownership), what the owner is transacting, and the public key of the receiver. Sometimes it is a bit more complicated, there may be some instructions others than "I am A, send the X to B", but that's the idea.
The big difference between git and a blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum is how you do "pull requests". On git, usually, there is a designated central repository that is controlled by project maintainers, and when you submit a pull request, they check it, merge it to central, and others get it back from here.
With blockchains, there is no designated central repository, to merge a pull request, you have to win a sort of lottery, commonly by reversing a crypto hash (mining). The more invested you are into the system, the higher the odds. If you win, you show it to the the world, do the merge, and everyone pulls from you. By randomly selecting who does the pull among the most invested limits the chance of one bad actor ruining the system for everyone. In case of a conflict, the branch with the most commits wins, because that's the one with the most "lottery winners" and therefore the most likely to be the right one. To encourage others to merge that pull request, there is usually a reward for those who do (transaction fees).
Technically, it is very sound, just like git is, in a sense. The "proof-of-work" lottery is wasteful in electricity though, and of course, what you do with it is another matter. Just like git can be used for good (ex: linux) or for bad (ex: developing malware).
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/crypto_birb/status/1721222853394121193
"Thanks for great apefest logistiscs guys @yugalabs & @BoredApeYC. Incredible event and met plenty of amazing people. Still, as dozens of others, I’ve almost lost sight this night."
I mean, c'mon. "Thanks, incredible event, it almost blinded me"?
You don't understand how loyal his followers are.
Instead we - the tech community - got smug about scams. People here get smug even toward the victims of scams.
The attitude has been 'Who gives a flying fuck about the details of any crypto tech, or the potential of digital money'. 'It's all a scam, so I don't have to learn anything about it'.
The baby got thrown out with the bathwater.
The people working on actually good crypto have nothing to do with SBF. The only way in which they're affected by this is the extent to which they get tarred with the same brush.
Edit: Y'all proving my point. You really don't see that? ... Look at how many of these responses lack table-stakes domain knowledge, missed the point, lack all imagination, and yet have a condescending tone. It's wild.
It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy".
> It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy".
The same could be said about cash but that's an important aspect of life. Whether we're talking about drugs (like cannabis or shrooms) or getting an abortion, there's quite a few things you may not like to be confronted about by your local police.
But there are a ton of very obvious uses for cash aside from for things that are illegal. I use it every single day.
To a much lesser degree. I wouldn't be able to use cryptocurrencies for any of the things I use cash for.
But that wasn't what was being asserted. The original assertion was "It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy"."
The same thing cannot be said of cash.
(I don't agree with the assertion I quoted, to be clear. Aside from buying illegal goods, it's good for evading banking regulations and fees, but that's neither here nor there.)
1's value being a traceable permanent record and 2's value is no direct stepping in between a transaction or control over a holding.
both of those, to many skeptics, are actually negatives and give more control and power to sovereign entities, not less.
i am not including the pseudoanonymity of it for two reasons, 1) depending on the crypto, currently the level of sophistication to transact in a manner that any given address cannot personally identify you requires massive amounts of personal responsibility / knowledge and most importantly to most people, effort and 2) because the major way the current digital fiat channels handle the transaction volumes that they do is that they're built on a foundation of authentication linking to personal identification, and so the theorycraft of "sure it has a huge ecological footprint but it could replace the many-many-many times larger ecoprint of the entire fiat banking system" is disingenuous to me because in order to actually replicate that, any main network would be a duplicate of the current authentications backed by men with guns, it would just allow that sidechannel of p2p to have it's wild west.
i do find it a touch humorous that those who want to shatter the fiat-police complex are quick to engage the legal system to protect and recoup from bad actors.
> However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt.
Median family farmer in the US is a millionaire (or their household is anyway). You're thinking of farmworkers.
> Who will profit from the little money that the farmer pockets? Banks, Monsanto, etc..
This is 70s New Leftism "evil corporations" thought, but it's a bad approach. Small business owners (petit bourgeois / local gentry) are more evil than corporations. Farmers, who are largely a kind of landlord, extra so.
For instance, the reason factory farms took over poultry in the US is that chickens were originally not valuable because there wasn't a market for chicken meat for the longest time. So the farmers left it to their wives to run.
Once it became popular, all the farmers sold their businesses to the factory farms, because having no business was less embarrassing than letting a woman run one.
Micro-transactions were never going to be feasible considering gas fees required to run a sufficiently secure blockchain app.
Decentralized? I’m still confused. Has anyone actually solved the Oracle problem with crypto? How are we actually getting decentralization?
Anti-spam??????? Ok that’s literally just crazy talk right? In what way does crypto have anything to do with spam? Afaict everything crypto-related still requires an email address to sign up if that’s what you mean.
Eg, Nano uses it. It's been working, efficient, safe, fast (<1 second) and completely fee-less, for seven years now. The entire network could run on a single windmill.
It's tending toward decentralization because there's no mining, no staking, and there was a genuinely fair distribution.
Fee-less transactions come with bad actors spamming the network with microscopic transactions, like a DDOS. So, Nano uses a 'bucket' system to keep things moving.
Tbh, this is exactly what I mean - all of this ought to be well known. People in general have a massive blind spot on what money actually is, and a weird reluctance to discuss what it could be. We're talking about all the crypto that doesn't work, so much so that people don't even know there's good and working crypto right now. We're talking about the scammers, instead of the people doing cool things without seeking glory for it.
Its design flaw is the ORV system requiring someone who just wants the elevator pitch and their life to be wildly more efficient via using digital currency that's faster, safer, cheaper than their debit card having to educate themselves on what-even-is an ORV, how does the voting work, how do you know what a good representative is, and so on. And, as with a lot of the cryptos working on different vectors of what efficiency means, it's also its strength. It's, you know, how it's fast.
So yes, o boy, if people just adopted it, informed themselves about it, and used it in volume "phase 2" could commence and as with crypto it comes in the form of major traffic revealing scalability necessities. Unfortunately who is going to do that to see in X years what the issues are, when there are the grandfather cryptos that do what they do and work how they work (sidestepping the "how they were meant to work/layer2 protocols don't count/cup of coffee as priority or no" dramatics).
And so its largest general population adoption, friction creating flaw is that people do not want to be their own bank. This is absolutely where the smugness from the tech sector comes from regarding the unwashed masses clicking excel macros from email scammers and uninformed people not having a functioning BS-detector and opting in to be the greater fool because they know there is bound to be many more greater fools than themselves.
The other bit that was omitted in your "we fixate on bitcoin and nfts and failures and dismiss the advancements smugly" is how many more declared-better-than cryptos have there been that didn't even make it to the scalability discussion that mature cryptos have and have modified and built systems around the transaction issues?
Case in point, you say "genuinely fair distribution" but that's a massive *citation needed. Back to genpop, they will never think it is fair if they didn't know about it and someone they consider their peer was able to obtain it with relatively less work or cost than they'd have to right now.
One of the key features of bitcoin (and maybe a small handful others) were that there was no ICO, and no opportunity to be unfair past you were either there and aware or you weren't. Now that more people are aware of the space in general, you cannot simply flip the switch without bad actors doing their thing. That era will never happen again, it was those people (or mmm intel agencies) at the forefront of dropping the tech in the wild interacting with it.
That said, there-and-aware with those early cryptos had a relatively massive near decade-long runway. I honestly would not know where to begin with assessing all cryptos around in 2020 to form an opinion on viability for 2030. Those good ol' days had what, 6-12 to sort out and work on?
Between 2018 and 2022 there are around 1,000 dead cryptos alone. I don't have the time to parse them all out and barely have the knowledge to assert that one that is dead should not be and has something worth pursuing.
I don't want my jadedness of being in the space for 15+ years at this point to lead me by the nose, but my bias would definitely be "if it was worth pursuing, one of the big ones' communities would pursue it as it means more value and a better product" (conspiracies about new world order digi-currency agenda aside).
Case in point, NFTs. Those in the know understand the potential value of an NFT and how they're not just "goofy internet jpgs" and have built in versions of systems accomodating them, or, you know, let parallel tech be the guinea pig. I can see use cases for them regarding licensing, but I can also see very little incentive for any entity to lose their centralized power to accomodate a tech that directly usurps it over time.
It doesn't though. It requires installing a wallet app.
> And so its largest general population adoption, friction creating flaw is that people do not want to be their own bank
Maybe you didn't see that story here yesterday about banks simply closing people's accounts for no reason. Maybe you missed Mastercard and Visa blocking Wikileaks and OnlyFans payments. Maybe you missed the bank bailouts, and the housing crisis, and the Epstein funding, and the Panama papers, etc.
If you've ever seen a bank run, you know that there are times when people absolutely do want to be their own bank.
> my bias would definitely be "if it was worth pursuing, one of the big ones' communities would pursue it as it means more value and a better product"
That's not how a status quo works. When you talk about digital cash, you're stepping on some very sensitive and powerful toes, conspiracy or no.
> I can also see very little incentive for any entity to lose their centralized power to accomodate a tech that directly usurps it over time.
Well now you've hit the nail on the head. Fortunately, accommodation might not be a requirement to success.
Also, still nothing solves the oracle problem. Any form of crypto does nothing for any transaction that doesn't purely take place in digital space. This really is never the case, even when people claim it is. People always use the "NFTs could be used for concert tickets" example, but when it comes down to it, the venue still has to physically let you in.
Same with DNS. Sure, you could have a record put on a blockchain, but somewhere down the road, you're gonna have to be routed through a DNS server owned by someone, and the decision to use a decentralized record is purely theirs. At some point, there's some centralized entity that needs to be trusted or regulated.
As long as the thing being bought/sold with crypto can't be decentralized (nearly everything), you're still kicking the centralization can down the road, and spending a whole bunch of time and energy doing it.
... It involves scanning a QR code and clicking confirm. It's faster and easier than using a credit card, and uses a tenth of the energy.
> is useless for decentralization unless the system you're making payments on is actually yours
No idea where you got that idea, but it's very silly. You've missed the first principles of cyrpto payments somehow.
> still nothing solves the oracle problem
And cash does? Did Nano claim to solve it? Did I?
>you're still kicking the centralization can down the road
I don't think you understand what 'decentralization' means in the context of crypto. I'm a little curious why you feel qualified to talk authoritatively about this topic?
Block lattice relies on private ledgers owned by the 2 parties of a transaction. It then consolidates those ledgers which is how it saves energy. If you’re giving someone else access to change that ledger, it’s no more decentralized than cash.
> And cash does?
Cash doesn’t, but it also doesn’t claim to provide decentralization or enforce contracts without state involvement. The entire purpose of crypto is to remove state involvement from contracts, which it fails to do.
It is horrible that these folks lost their vision. They didn't deserve that. Even in the context of crypto apes. It's easy (but boring) to make fun of them-- again humans are flawed.
How many times have we heard xyz was the more optimal choice but abc won out. It’s because trust and perception are the other equally important dimensions.
That said, North America isn’t the only market for crypto. There are many thriving economies in the world with a broken currency. Argentina, to name one, is constantly weighing down by hyperinflation but the sheer grit and talent of locals is keeping the country relevant. Argentinians are always looking for ways to save their earnings without losing to inflation.
All that to say, there are still “real” problems waiting to be solved for which crypto can be a solution. In the west though, if it ain’t broke - you know the rest.
Your edit, BTW, is interesting. You tar all the responses with the same brush, "missed the point", "lack all imagination", and then accuse them of having a condescending tone? Do you have a sense there might be a two way street? While you do have a point, there's a lot of reasons why human dishonesty, e.g. scamming, prevents us from having a great many nice things that we could otherwise have.
Also possible candidates:
A few watts short of a lightbulb.
Their lights are on but nobody’s home.
On the light related ones, I only know "they are not lights" which is a bit to bare bones to my taste, but works well in french
Did you too learned that one in the related thread on /r/France last year[1]? Or was it something that you heard IRL?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/uhazwh/connaissezvo...
carving an L in their forehead
> I mean, c'mon. "Thanks, incredible event, it almost blinded me"?
Seems like an event to keep these crypto / nft bag holders blind to their losses and to encourage them to keep buying worthless jpegs.
https://twitter.com/slandermepls/status/1721352598945677544
I used to be a member of ILDA [1], which developed a number of the protocols, serialization formats, and safety measures. They'll certify hardware and operators, and they'll kick out members that engage in crowd scanning. They don't really have much of an enforcement mechanism, though.
In the US, the FDA and FAA have regulations on laser displays [2]. You're supposed to apply for variance, but many smaller venues and operators skip this outright.
It can be incredibly dangerous if care isn't taken. These multi-watt lasers can easily burn holes into things, with your tissues being among the easiest.
These folks were clearly crowd scanning at eye level.
[1] https://www.ilda.com
[2] https://www.lasershowsafety.info/us-laws.html
"visionary revolution, it's the future, it will change everything, also it absolutely ruined me!"
If you know something bad has happened, you want to word your public statements in such a way that you beat out the bad news to the top search of Google at least, to minimize the attention given to that issue.
Ex: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1465838829370228737
This Elon Musk tweet coincided to help SEO-fight against a Whistleblower claim.
Ex2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122806
Boris Johnson using search terms to try and hide the "Bus" incident back during Brexit.
-----------
The #1 goal is to do it in such a way that confuses and befuddles those not-in-the-know (Oh, its just the CEO being quirky... they'll brush it off). But of course, you still want to accomplish the goal and make a news-statement with the largest amount of reach such that you beat the "real news" event on the top search of Google/Facebook/other social media.
It often sounds like gobbytygook, because it is. You're just word-vomiting into the wild trying to shove search terms to the top of Google / other search engines... but in a way that no one realizes why those words are related.
I haven't heard from him in a long while (and even then, he was a friend of a friend who happened to show up from time to time). Then, he got lucky publishing Bitcoin prophecies that were accurate enough to gather significant following. A shovel shop in the times of gold rush kind of thing.
Now from what I see on his Instagram, he seems to be living in Dubai and his life consists of fine dining, driving fast cars and attending crypto conferences. Never in my life will I understand why this kind of life is something that people pursue.
> On social media, some suspect photokeratitis — damage to the eye caused by UV exposure. If that’s what caused the Apes’ agony, they likely won’t be blind forever: it’s a temporary condition. People usually get it from being in bright sunlight and snow for too long, and not at concerts, which typically have stage managers and lighting professionals who understand how to safely set up a show.
https://wwd.com/eye/parties/hypebeast-party-uv-lights-injuri...
So now when I go to a place with blacklights, how do I know someone didn't get confused (or is just ignorant) and used bulbs that can burn my eyes? Thanks.
If they are fluorescent tubes that look kinda purple, black or really deep blue when off, they are UV-A and safe. These tubes use a phosphor to convert UV-C light to UV-A light and are made of wood's glass to filter out all but that UV-A light.
If they are fluorescent tubes that are clear, they are UV-C and unsafe.
Theres a third type that uses phosphor and regular glass that emits UV-A and some white light, but those are almost never seen in stage lighting fixtures.
There are also UV-A arc lamps like the Wildfire IronArc series, which are safe as long as they have the dark purple wood's glass filter installed on them (these lamps do not ship without such a filter, but sometimes you encounter used ones that the filter was broken in or otherwise removed).
UVC will break O2 into two Oxygen atoms, which then combine with other O2 to form O3, ozone.
“About 2,250 people attended the Saturday evening party at a cruise terminal, said organiser Yuga Labs, one of the pioneers in this market. Since then, more than a dozen have posted on social media complaining of a burning sensation in the eyes and sometimes also impaired vision.”
Honestly that’s a lot more proud Bored Ape bagholders than I would have guessed. But what do I know — maybe Beanie Baby meet-ups also pull crowds of thousands.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/fe9a3fa3-edfc-41df-a333-1f91e6248...
(Sorry, couldn't resist the pun. No actual offense intended.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMmGSsy7IEo
The breakdown of locals vs people that flew in would be revealing. e.g. passionate owners vs cryto-casual hongkongers looking for a party.
It also appears[1] that the party was after an open day of sorts, and you could buy tickets[2] for the open day and party for 388HK$ (about $50 US).
It is a little hard to tell exactly what the open house included and whether it gave access to the event that had the problem, so I could be wrong.
[1] https://www.artazine.com/news/apefest-2023-nft-bored-ape-yac... [2] https://openhouse.boredapeyachtclub.com/
Took me a second but I got it
Looks almost exclusively male to me.
I think the point here is also that this was supposed to be a social event and a party.
I used to organize "Beanie Fairs" (which were scams).
Can confirm attendance of thousands.
It wasn't until the next day that it started feeling like someone poured sand in it. It took a few days to return to normal.
If I had not been wearing it, there is an excellent chance that I would have suffered permanent vision damage. The eye protection I wore did exactly what it was supposed to do.
UV-C is used to sterilize stuff since it damages DNA/RNA. It's toxic to plants too.
All bets are off if you're using LEDs.
You hire trained professionals for this kind of thing. There are literally entire companies who specialize in putting together these kinds of events safely, every single day.
A professional stage lighting designer or theatrical electrician would absolutely know that this is a risk.
You often get class 3B lasers being sold as 3R which is extremely dangerous. I opted to pay a lot more for a green laser for astronomy purposes on a legit website then buy dirt cheap on Amazon because I don't want to blind/injure myself or others.
I am obviously not a dr
[0] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Sound/protect.htm...
Disclaimer: I don’t own NFTs.
Its called Schadenfreude and tbh the amount of NFT or Crypto scams, garbage and co people had to endure the last years is horrendes.
Its one thing to state in a comment that you shouldn't use NFT or crypto, but unfortunate we are not discussing banning them activly.
But I do not think fools should suffer vision damage, or that they deserve harm on them.
IMO, it was basically all self inflicted anguish due to "someone else is wrong on the internet" syndrome.
If someone wants to gamble their money away, you don't have to care. If they want to talk about it, you don't have to listen.
People act like living in a world with people who act differently was some kind of ordeal. they have totally lost the ability to not engage with topics they don't enjoy, and then take joy in the pain of others.
Lots and lots of people didn't just lose 'play money'
Er... might of worked. A lot of light can come in around the sides of normal glasses. so it would depend how the uv was reaching the eye.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate
So basically ipfs won?! or lost?!
there are a lot of NFTs that are better implementations, the primary improvement being that there is no external hosting and they build the visual data into the smart contract function for a renderer to interpret
Ive done a lot with SVGs that way. others upload dependendies like three.js on the blockchain in other smart contracts, so when called they can return into yours and you have more sophisticated renders
I think artblocks does something like that, not sure
Most of the financial sector NFTs have an onchain svg too, like all the Uniswap liquidity pools
first movers are often poorer implementations of the technology, its up to the consumers to discern and if they dont then there is no incentive to act differently
Do you have resources for someone that only know the basics of cryptocurrencies and blockchains ?
https://scaffoldeth.io/
But rather, a signed receipt that says you paid for the nft.
And sadly enough - several cryptocoins themselves are also this way.
I used to think cryptocoins were truly revolutionary. But the tech space is so rife with abuse, theft, scams that it doesn't feel worth it.
if you're an actual believer in NFTs, isn't that kind of the point?
The way which they are mapped to images vary from NFT to NFT.
But let's look at Bored Ape Yacht Club specifically.
Collection https://opensea.io/collection/boredapeyachtclub
Pick a random bored ape. For example #1337.
https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061...
From there we can see the bored ape Ethereum "smart contract"
https://etherscan.io/address/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118...
This contract is responsible for minting all of the original Bored Ape NFTs
Click on "contract". And then click "read contract".
Scroll down. There is a method named "tokenURI". It takes an integer as parameter. Let's query it with value "1337" (the id of the bored ape we are interested in knowing about).
Result:
ipfs://QmeSjSinHpPnmXmspMjwiXyN6zS4E9zccariGR3jxcaWtq/1337
Let's visit that URL via an IPFS gateway.
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmeSjSinHpPnmXmspMjwiXyN6zS...
It contains JSON data.
We make note of the IPFS URL for the image from here.ipfs://QmWjXFUVNjavM4hDzXeQYGXGCXjV86mP7kPEaTeP5bohae
And visit that one via our chosen IPFS gateway.
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmWjXFUVNjavM4hDzXeQYGXGCXj...
So there you have it. Via the Bored Ape smart contract we retrieved the JSON data and image file for Bored Ape #1337 from IPFS.
So having saved that file offline on my harddrive, I can later re-add it to IPFS.
Notice that because I added the same file to my local ipfs, it got the same id as it had when I retrieved it.QmWjXFUVNjavM4hDzXeQYGXGCXjV86mP7kPEaTeP5bohae
So, IPFS doesn't even require that the file is indefinitely pinned.
And if I have a public node, others can now once again retrieve the file using the same known id.
The person that re-adds it doesn't have to (nor can) specify the id of the file; that's calculated from the hash of it.
(Although, IPFS does also have a way to serve mutable data, so in those cases the id is not calculated directly from just a hash. But in the case of the image we looked at here we see that it was.)
The difference between needing to pin forever and merely needing to have a copy of the same file somewhere outside of IPFS which is then re-added to IPFS and gets the same ID is a fine distinction perhaps, but still an important one IMO.
And I think that even if all of the IPFS nodes that currently have a copy of the Bored Apes would go offline, there is probably someone out there who would notice that and for whatever reason be motivated to make all of the apes available again on IPFS with their same original id's that they had by re-adding the original files.
I guess the best thing to do if you own an Ape is to store the image on your HDD and put a copy in a safe-deposit box, and then pin it yourself whenever you can.
See for example https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?tech=nft&id=goblintown-nft-ima...
> Goblintown NFT images all changed to an illustrated middle finger in protest about royalties
We knew NFTs were stupid... we just couldn't comprehend how incredibly stupid they actually are.
Then there were also folks who wanted to use them as an open standard for, like, "metaverse assets" and whatnot. And while there are many different ways to solve that technically, you also have the blockchain proponents looking for any problem that blockchain can solve... So there is the added energy from that synergy as well.
Then I believe there are fairly serious businesses looking at NFTs for things like digital albums sales (or other ways to cultivate and monetize parasocial relationships) while disintermediating the traditional platforms.
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are impressive novel technology, they suit how they are used and work as a fungible token/currency. The underlying tech is impressive, like cryptography, and cannot (backdoors excepted) be broken for its intended purpose. Smart people who understand it recognized the potential and validity of the technology, and so it grew organically and became the phenomenon it is today. There is no technical gotcha, scams are another topic.
The general public's exposure was much more surface level and occurred after the tech had grown organically among technical folks. Now you pay with your CC on a familiar looking website, to buy something everyone says has value. It seems normal, and although you don't understand the underlying tech, you trust it is valuable. Lots of people get rich, lots of people lose money, but BTC remains valuable and the market remains. My elderly mother who is not technically literate is asking me how to invest.
After that, the general public has been conditioned to expect blockchain adjacent tech to be legitimate, they are feeling like they missed the gold rush but there is a new gold rush! NFTs! This time we skip the organic growth of a novel technology, adopted by smart people who understand the underlying tech. Now it is inorganic growth exploiting the crypto hype and pushed by hustlers. There is a legitimate use case for artists but that isn't what is driving the new mania.
This time there are massive technical gotchas (you have a link to a .jpg hosted on a server or servers, you don't own the copyright to anything). People find this out after the hype and massive adoption, if BTC never worked for its purpose it wouldn't have grown organically. NFTs have skipped that. There are torrents with every NFT pulled from these servers to highlight the lack of ownership, of technical control, I can't torrent your Bitcoins but I can download your stoned apes.
This is a long opinion, but it's why I think you see people find out after the fact just how flaky NFTs are.
> This time there are massive technical gotchas (you have a link to a .jpg hosted on a server or servers, you don't own the copyright to anything).
It sounds like you've reconciled this, I'm curious how?
I'm stating in the first quote that there is an idea of artists selling their work, but that isn't what is driving the accelerated adoption.
In the second quote I point out some of the technical deficiencies, it is supposed to contrast the first. It doesn't reconcile.
The comment chain is on the topic of why these technical deficiencies are news to so many people, my opinion is that we skipped the scrutiny that BTC experienced and we experienced a gold rush.
In reality though it is an implementation detail. An NFT is just a coloured coin, and derives it's value from someone else thinking they can buy it and sell it on to someone else / OR some kind of bragging rights value, i.e. I can afford $100k on X useless thing (e.g. watch, gold plated iPhone etc.) so therefore I am rich.
Pretty sure the X useless thing was $44 billion.
Ultimately, the chain is meant to be a ledger of transactions (like a decentralized Christie’s auction house maintaining provenance), not a storage layer.
The big difference between git and a blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum is how you do "pull requests". On git, usually, there is a designated central repository that is controlled by project maintainers, and when you submit a pull request, they check it, merge it to central, and others get it back from here.
With blockchains, there is no designated central repository, to merge a pull request, you have to win a sort of lottery, commonly by reversing a crypto hash (mining). The more invested you are into the system, the higher the odds. If you win, you show it to the the world, do the merge, and everyone pulls from you. By randomly selecting who does the pull among the most invested limits the chance of one bad actor ruining the system for everyone. In case of a conflict, the branch with the most commits wins, because that's the one with the most "lottery winners" and therefore the most likely to be the right one. To encourage others to merge that pull request, there is usually a reward for those who do (transaction fees).
Technically, it is very sound, just like git is, in a sense. The "proof-of-work" lottery is wasteful in electricity though, and of course, what you do with it is another matter. Just like git can be used for good (ex: linux) or for bad (ex: developing malware).