I disagree. Sort of. I agree that the things you listed like altcoins and stablecoins and NFTs aren't that valuable.
Note: I hate using the word "blockchain" to describe these decentralized networks hosting distributed ledgers, but it seem to be the word most people recognize. With that in mind:
Bitcoin was a first generation blockchain technology. It's the gold backed standard that supports the rest of the ecosystem and it always will be. That network should never do anything but be money.
Ethereum and all of the networks that replicate what it does are second generation blockchain technologies. They generalize what blockchain does to the degree that we can write arbitrary programs. It is a global decentralized computer, albeit a rather limited one. People use them mostly for finance because people have no idea what else to do with them.
Third generation networks are on the way. My favorite example is Polkadot and what Gavin is doing with JAM. This brings us a bit closer to what "Web3" was supposed to be about. JAM is something new, something different, upon which you can run all kinds of blockchain networks. Very few people understand how Ethereum works or how to use it. JAM is even more difficult to get your head around. But it is a radical paradigm changing technology.
The noise of altcoins and NFTs is the result of hype and greed. It overshadows Web3. It makes it nearly impossible for anyone working on Web3 tech to get any kind of coherent messaging out to the masses. And it will be that way for a while. But not forever.
All this to say that it's not wasted effort and it's not a dead end. It's just that what is valuable in the scene is almost impossible to see due to the overwhelming hype and nonsense.
Web3 is dead, because the VC valuation multiplier switched from "blockchain-native" to having an "AI story", so startups don't have to pretend to care about data-sovereignty anymore.
Developers want to use Postgres, not a distributed ledger. And most end users don't really care about data-sovereignty. If I thought a significant percentage of my app's users did, I would much rather rewrite to conform to ATProto than touch anything on the blockchain.
There's a lot of talk these days about the enshitification of the Internet. What I rarely see mentioned is that the Internet's first steps towards enshitification started when we attached the banking system to the Internet.
Before you could make transactions online, if your infrastructure was hacked, it was your fault and your responsibility to implement better security. But once money was involved, you could complain to the police about a hack and involve the authorities - because now actual property was involved. This changed everything.
This was also about the time we started seeing spam, scams, and other negativity suddenly spring up. It's hard to believe that we used to post to usenet with our email addresses publicly exposed... and never worry about being added to a spam list.
Money attracted bad actors to the Internet. Bitcoin was money from the start. So of course the whole cryptocurrency scene is a magnet for bad actors - like we've never seen before. This was inevitable. And 95% of the cryptocurrency scene are some flavor of bad actors.
But Bitcoin mostly sits outside of the legal frameworks of the world. So it's much harder to call the authorities when your cryptocurrency is stolen. You can. It happens. But not much. And for this reason, the only path forward for this new technology/money is right through the middle of the hoard of bad actors. That means we have to create technological and social solutions for security instead of relying on the monopoly of violence (the police) to protect us.
The bad acts and just general greed in the scene are holding it back. But this is, unfortunately, necessary. This is a wall of resistance that has to be pushed through for a better tomorrow. It's part of the process.
The future that decentralized technology will bring us will be different from whatever we are imagining now. But we still have to keep imagining and building. Because even though it will be different than the fantasy, its still the right direction.
> I also don't really care if the content is chronological
Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It depends on the content. And that's one thing I've longed to see solved in RSS feed readers as well as podcasts. However, I have not been able to imagine a UX that solves my problems, so there's that.
I am resisting the urge to detail my insane story with my most recent Dell XPS purchase. Long story short, I will never again buy a Dell laptop. I went months without my machine during a critical time. I kept getting it back in worse shape than it was before I sent it for repair. After months of pure insanity, I just accepted that I'll never have a properly function touchpad again. At least they finally got a working motherboard put in it. I'm feeling waves of rage and anger just thinking back to what they put me through. Never again. I won't even accept a Dell as a work laptop again. Never.
Its such a contrast to the Dell I used to know. Back in 2012 I had the hard drive in my Dell laptop sale and had the Dell small business service contract and they sent out a guy to replace it that afternoon, right there in front of me in the office. I was without my machine for 4 hours. That is what Dell used to be like.
I guess they don't find enough profit in this? TBH I'm OK to pay say 4,000 CAD + for a top tier, 64GB mobile workstation (don't care about video card, Arc is good enough), and +500 CAD for a 10-year care. And I don't even need someone to come over to my home. As long as I can mail or drop to some place I'm fine.
The problem today is -- even with a similar price point (like top tier Dell mobile workstation does cost 3,000+ CAD), I'm not sure how long it lasts. It could be 5 years, it could be 5 months, I have no confidence in it.
That's indeed a bit on the premium side. Back then GBPCAD is about 1.6, so 2,400 CAD and 160 for 2-year support. That's like roughly my monthly net income back in 2018 (just got into IT).
About six months ago I had a Dell Optiplex motherboard fail and they attempted to schedule a tech to come out the following day. I was not available for that and scheduled it a few days later but they did make as full of an effort as can be reasonably expected to make it happen within one business day.
The default warranty on at least the Optiplex line is one year of next business day service and upgrading to three years is cheap. I've never had a situation where same day service was worth the extra cost but it is an option.
I had the same experience in 2021 when the mobo died on a laptop that I bought slightly less than a year before. I was bothered by the failure but understand sometimes things just break. The service quality was good.
I'm not dealing with the scale other people are in here. We should take the ancedotes of personal laptops with a grain of salt. Anyone pushing the scale that Dell does will have incidents where service runs totally off the rails. I don't know how they stack up at scale but I'm reading this thread with interest. When I'm due for a laptop upgrade Dell will still be in the running but right now Framework might be the one to get my business.
When I bought my XPS 15 in 2023, I got the "extended care" package (name may differ). Last year I had an issue with the graphics card no longer being detected, and they sent someone over to replace the mobo two days later. Support was very good.
No power issues and such either, but I don't run Windows on it. Only problem I notice is audible whine coming from the speakers when charging and doing GPU work, like scrolling.
That's really sad. Where are you located if I may ask? Some other commenters mentioned that Dell care is not great outside of the US (I'm in Canada so concerned).
Sort of? My thoughts are that there's something of an AI arms race and the US doesn't want to lose that race to another country... so if the AI bubble pops too fiercely, there may likely be some form of intervention. And any time the government intervenes, all bets are off the table. Who knows what they will do and what the impact will be.
I can see them intervening to preserve AI R&D of some sort, but many of the current companies are running consumer oriented products. Why care if some AI art generation website goes bust?
The little robot was heavily inspired by Wall-E. He'll play around when he's bored. If you play music, he'll dance. And, at least for a while, they had Alexa baked in so you could "ask" Vector to do all the things Alexa does like playing music or turning off the lights.
Vector wasn't without flaws. The Alexa integration was a tad janky. And while Vector was pretty good at detecting his environment, his sensors would occasionally fail and he'd roll off the end of the desk and hit the floor. For me, this damaged the screen which made impossible to read the codes from the device necessary to sync it with services.
But there was enough there that worked to really get the vision across. After playing with Vector for a while, I believe the first in-home robot to see major success will be more of pet and less of a helper. Vector's playful personality was a key thing that made him unique. I believe that there are not technological challenges left to solve to build an amazing consumer product - it's just a matter of putting all the right pieces together to build something crazy appealing.
Since you mentioned hackathons - A few years ago I was working on a game for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and I ended up going to EthDenver. While there, I discovered a rich and vibrant hackathon scene with a lot of monetary prizes. The hackathons were often for various blockchain platforms and, thus, those prizes were generally awarded in whatever cryptocurrency was native to that platform. From their point of view, it was a smart move. They create a network, retain a huge block of pre-minted currency, establish a market price, and then give out that currency as hackathon awards. As a competitor, you can cash you winnings in right away, so it works well enough. A friend and I cleared almost $30k one year in various contests. Unfortunately, winning a hackathon was often more about creating something that would make for good marketing buzz rather than creating something truly novel or even useful. And, frankly, the actual quality of your execution rarely mattered. We lost one contest where we had a fully working prototype deployed and live but lost to teams with ideas that sounded fun but were technically unfeasible. Still, if you're willing to play the game, it seems there's money to be made. My friend and I have since moved on and have not continued to participate - but it sure made for fun memories.
Note: I hate using the word "blockchain" to describe these decentralized networks hosting distributed ledgers, but it seem to be the word most people recognize. With that in mind:
Bitcoin was a first generation blockchain technology. It's the gold backed standard that supports the rest of the ecosystem and it always will be. That network should never do anything but be money.
Ethereum and all of the networks that replicate what it does are second generation blockchain technologies. They generalize what blockchain does to the degree that we can write arbitrary programs. It is a global decentralized computer, albeit a rather limited one. People use them mostly for finance because people have no idea what else to do with them.
Third generation networks are on the way. My favorite example is Polkadot and what Gavin is doing with JAM. This brings us a bit closer to what "Web3" was supposed to be about. JAM is something new, something different, upon which you can run all kinds of blockchain networks. Very few people understand how Ethereum works or how to use it. JAM is even more difficult to get your head around. But it is a radical paradigm changing technology.
The noise of altcoins and NFTs is the result of hype and greed. It overshadows Web3. It makes it nearly impossible for anyone working on Web3 tech to get any kind of coherent messaging out to the masses. And it will be that way for a while. But not forever.
All this to say that it's not wasted effort and it's not a dead end. It's just that what is valuable in the scene is almost impossible to see due to the overwhelming hype and nonsense.
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