The difference here though is that web 3 really is just 'technical details' to most people. PC's had potential, they were getting cheaper, faster, and more software was being written for them every day. People could play video games, and show off to their friends. Web 3 has none of that, it's all just technical details that 90% of the population doesn't care about one bit.
That may not be the selling point you think it is, since most people are not creators looking to monetize their content. Your statement then sounds like: "Envision web3: your opportunity to pay to visit any website!"
Most people are sick of ads and would happily pay 1/10 a cent to read a quality article, especially if the process was frictionless.
And most creators would love to keep their content open for everyone, but not have icky ads cluttering up their content.
I think you are underestimating how much micropayments will iron out a lot of problems for a lot of people.
Host your own scrapbook page (er, Facebook) for penny's without ads, tracking, manipulative promotion of content... People lose sight of the fact that Facebooks massive server farms are not really there to serve little posts, but to track and make predictions about people.
Those are just two ways
Another is people learning to support many causes they believe in with very small regular donations. I would voluntarily pay 1/10 cent for every wikipedia page I looked at, or 10 cents a week. Doesn't seem like much but that's $5.20 a year painlessly given.
Enough people do that and they could stop their annual funding drive.
They would also have just got an even clearer incentive to up the quality and usefulness of what they do. Greater efforts resulting in greater donations directly.
> Most people are sick of ads and would happily pay 1/10 a cent to read a quality article, especially if the process was frictionless.
I don't know that an article is quality until I am done reading it. I already paid for my ISP, my electricity, and my computer equipment. I'm spending my finite amount of time reading it. Why would I pay extra for the privilege? Unless I will materially gain from reading it, i.e. "here's a discount code for your next month's ISP bill", I'm just gambling 1/10th of a cent that I might get some sort of emotional contentment reading an article.
Even if the content of the article is good, what if the presentation sucks making it physically difficult to read. For my 1/10th of a cent am I getting an easily accessible form of the content? If I want to read the content again will I have to pay another 1/10th of a cent? If my 1/10th of a cent for a single page view or a full read of the content, if the host breaks up an article over multiple pages am I paying for each one? Can I freely download and use the content within the bounds of Fair Use? What are the full terms of my transaction?
While you're trying to make the case for some trivial amount of money, if everyone is asking for a trivial amount of money then in aggregate it's no longer a trivial amount for users. If I can't get a refund if an article sucks then I am not interested. If a website has to potentially give refunds to users then they won't be interested.
Even with micro-transaction payments websites have the same perverse incentives to get traffic as ones that run advertisements. The more traffic they get the more money they make. Content producers will also eventually require some sort of onerous DRM to make sure that every single view of some bit of content is paid for with a micro-transaction.
This will fail for the same reason other attempts at stimulating micropayments has.
People are used to accessing text and video on the web for free. You and I may have a paid subscription to a Patreon or newspaper, but in both cases we are not paying piecemeal.
Micropayments need to be frictionless. If a 1 cent payment requires more than 1 cent of a persons time, it is not a workable system.
Many people would love to auto pay 1 or 2 cents a page view, to no longer see ads.
It might take a while, but I think eventually most people not in financial hardship will be happy to do that. (And people in financial hardship are not the best people to put ads in front of.)
This is the problem here. What kind of lay people care about this at all? I'm having a hard time being convinced myself, and I could not imagine trying to get 90% of the population remotely excited about this. There's nothing new for them, like you said, no killer app.
What's interesting is PBS is much less aligned with the federal government than most private media outlets, to put it nicely. Not sure how that's happened.
Location: Austin, Texas
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Proficient in React, JavaScript, Typescript, React Native. I have launched over 16 full stack projects using React/RN you can find here: https://andrewtateyoung.com/projects. Proficient in Python, Selenium, Beautiful Soup, Stripe (Connect especially), AWS (EC2, Route53, Lambda, S3, Dynamo, Cloudfront, etc.), Redux, GraphQL, Heroku, Kotlin (Android apps) SQL, Mongodb, and Firebase. I’m familiar with Java / Spring, Golang, and Cpp.
Résumé/CV: I’m recently out of University, and our team was funded by Tyler Cowen / Peter Thiel to build a company that didn’t scale. Since then I’ve been looking for full time opportunities. I’ve been programming for a long time and I take pride in my work. Gladly share resume on request.
Email: [email protected]
Interested in any junior full stack, front end, QA openings, but open to other offers as well. Fully willing to move and work wherever and for whoever if the opportunity is right.
Out of curiosity, how would you view a younger candidate (myself) who dropped out of a similar T40 school junior year with a boatload of personal projects / companies under his belt?
I've had some success, and reached quite a few people, but I'm realizing I may need to settle down at a company sometime soon. I don't want to look unhirable (like OP, in my opinion) but just someone whose genuinely burned out of really trying to make a startup work, and is now ready to settle down in a junior position, and has the ability to do so. Thanks!
It's tough to read too much into this single paragraph. I think the key is why you dropped out of school. You need to have a narrative.
1. "I had some promising personal projects, so I quit during my 3rd year of school to launch one of them. I did {X,Y,Z} but ultimately couldn't turn the corner to profitability so I shut down / failed spectacularly. Now it's time to get my feet under me and learn proper engineering for a few years before I try again." --> This is a good story, but needs to be backed up by data regarding your startup failure.
OR
2. "I was tired of school and quit. I had a bunch of personal projects going and hoped to start one of them into a company but none of them really went anywhere." --> This is a bad story. If this is your situation, you may need to suck it up and go back to school to finish your degree. Otherwise you'll need to be incredibly honest with the interviewer about why dropping out was a bad decision.
OR
3. "I had to drop out of school for <personal reasons>. I've done a bunch of personal projects, so I have the passion and basic technical competence to succeed. I'd like to eventually finish my degree someday." (<--Note: doesn't matter if this is really true) "My focus now is to really engage somewhere for a few years to prove my worth and learn from other smart people." --> Another good story. Shows humility.
Your biggest risk here will be overplaying your past projects. From a Hiring Manager perspective they're interesting technical toys like a university project, but since they didn't go anywhere they don't mean that much. Not fair, but true. Also: stay FAR AWAY from the word "burnout", because this telegraphs "I have issues and won't be able to do my job."
Communicating that you made a mistake and now want to learn in a better environment for a few years helps de-risk you to the hiring manager and shows good self-awareness.
Ah thanks for the reply, and yeah that makes sense. I don't believe it was a mistake as of now, but let me tell my story a bit better:
I got funded by Tyler Cowen / Peter Thiel @ EV and some angels for my first real company (can't link here), and while it wasn't required, I was making quite a bit of money so I left school. (I had a 3.98 my first 2 years in dual Comp Sci / Physics before, so I left with a 3.35 GPA after tanking junior year due to the company)
The unit metrics didn't end up working out, so i've been working on various products since with ~10k users on my previous one. (On my profile, if you care) It's a social app without huge growth though, so i'm not optimistic.
I have one more company i'm building with a friend now in a regulated space before I start recruiting. If this doesn't work out, I need to focus my energy on recruiting for a space i'm passionate about. I've built and launched over 20 websites and IOS / Android apps, and i'm the fastest React / React Native developer I know.
Would that sound batshit insane to recruiters, or someone perhaps worth picking up? I've also done a SE internship at a F400, tutored Engineering Physics, and done some freelancing w/ a 5.00 rating on Upwork if that matters. Thanks.
Ok cool. With this write-up, you de-risked one area and added risk in a second area.
GOOD: High GPA, got funded, ambitious, quit school for valid and rational reasons. I'm excited to hire you.
BAD: Startup didn't work, I worked on some other ones, trying one more time before I get a normal job. Now I'm concerned that (a) you think you're hot shiz and won't accept an entry-level dev role and/or won't be willing to put the effort into that role, or (b) you think you're mid-level but can't pass the hiring bar due to team (not technical) deficiencies, or (c) you'll be awesome but bounce out to a new adventure in ~9 months.
I don't know you, and it's quite possible that you're brilliant with a steep growth curve and huge upside potential. And it's possible (maybe even likely!) that you'll be unhappy in any job and just need to keep pursuing your own thing. Awesome. But if you want a "normal job" I recommend shifting your approach slightly:
Remember that a hiring manager wants a person who can (1) do the job, (2) not cause problems, (3) stick around. You've got #1 nailed, #2 is an open question, and #3 is a big risk in my mind. So I'd suggest starting by making a personal choice regarding your next career stage and then actively believing and selling that vision. So if you decide that you want to work for a while, figure out what you want to get out of that time and push that narrative. Example:
"I got funded by... <rest of your credentials here>. I tried a few other ventures but failed to get traction. I've decided that for my next career stage, I need to spend some time working with other more experienced engineers to learn {large scale engineering, team dynamics, product prioritization, leadership, etc etc whatever}." --> With this narrative you're a very attractive candidate. A good manager will know that you're not signing on forever, but will throw challenging projects your way in the hopes that rapid growth will convince you to stick around for 2-3 years.
Note that your history of scrappy risk-taking will probably play better at smaller earlier stage companies.
Just a suggestion, complete your degree even if it takes you years to do so. Consider continuing to take classes. I worked early in my 20s was doing undergrad simultaneously. It became exhausting and also wanted to have a free social life. I started making enough money and didn't feel the degree was actively helping me at the time. I'm glad I took the break I did, I think I needed it. Then I continued after a two years break and competed the degree p/t in the course of the next few years. Interesting CS courses and the slower volume made it for an even greater experience, I could enjoy taking 2 classes a semester while having a social life too. The college diploma may seem like a dead weight as it's not a bid deal as Undergrad education is not what it used to be but it is a clear differentiator in obtaining a job, if you and a potential candidate have similar skills, the one with the degree would get an advantage. Good luck!
'A group of Stanford researchers has hacked Moderna’s messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine for the novel coronavirus, Motherboard first reported on Monday, and published its entire genetic sequence on the open-source code repository Github.'
What does "hacked" mean here? The article makes it sound like this wasn't something illegal:
> Fire and Shoura told Motherboard that they had received permission from the FDA to collect scraps of vaccines that wouldn’t have otherwise been used from empty vials and that they’d notified Moderna in advance of their plans to publish the sequence without receiving any objection in turn.
Also:
> The research team told Motherboard that they didn’t “reverse engineer” the vaccine, they simply “posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021.”
I'm not familiar enough with how these sequences to work to understand what's being discussed. Is it simply that they took a sample of the vaccine and studied its composition using some standard machine/process?
I've always wondered, why do these software engineers take such risks building and setting up these illegal marketplaces? I mean, are you really going to make that much more than you would as a regular software engineer at a company?
Most definitely a lot more than a regular software engineer. Alexandre Cazes was estimated to have a net worth of at least USD 23 mil, and that's a conservative estimate. This would all be in cryptocurrencies of course and you would have to find a way to money launder these assets.
Another thing to consider is that many of these guys live in countries with cost of living much cheaper than USA (not even talking about Bay Area), Cazes himself was living in Thailand.
Alexandre Cazes is an interesting case that basically never gets mentioned in these threads.
It's questionable whether he was doing it alone or even the head operator. But apparently it's all case closed now with no Dread Pirate Roberts type sensational court cases or extradition trial.
Also which country had him executed? I'm very certain it wasn't Thailand.
It's very lucrative and the competition is pretty inept so expectations are low. You can retire to thailand off the residuals. If you're a 20 year old who isn't looking forward to decades of corporate work that might not sound bad.
This was something that always boggled my mind how inept these guys sometimes were. In this business your life literally (and I mean literally) depends on good security and they would make some really rookie mistakes.
It's human. Mistakes can sometimes be really subtle and require only a moment's inattention but sound REALLY dumb when you look at it in fundamental terms.
Christ, trained CIA field agents with funding and support staff have made some really stupid mistakes en par. Things like being tracked by metadata from not turning off their cell phone because they thought a chip bag was a good enough faraday cage. Ostensibly it sounds dumb, but that might have only been one time for 20 minutes or something that allowed the Italian investigators to connect the dots.
Perfect security for a short time period with one incident is actually still really hard. When you make it a lifestyle going on for months/years, it's nearly impossible.
Many many CIA agents sent into China have disappeared. If an agency with the greatest set of resources on earth are getting busted regularly what hope does the average Joe software engineer have.
CIA Agents and CIA Assets are 2 completely different thing. A CIA Agent (or spy) goes into a region and recruits Assets. Assets are just normal people with no extra training, but happen to be in a position that informs them on things the CIA (or any spy agency) wants to know. An Asset could literally be the Janitor at some place that has some happenings that the CIA wants to know more about, such as a Research Lab or a local Newspaper.
Assets have no special training and routinely put their lives on the line anywhere in the world they live and are recruited.
Yup. Agents usually have diplomatic cover. Unless they commit an egregious crime, they’re usually just kicked out of the country.
That’s not to say their identity is always kept secret, however. They are often discovered and only expelled at a later date when a message needs to be sent.
Proper air gap maintained religiously should be able to solve a lot of problems in cyber crime. After all, we still interface with computers through meat and bones.
Yes, it's just the maintaining it religiously part that's surprisngly hard.
Like, things and emergencies come up just like they do in a normal business but you have to go all the way back into secure mode to address them.
That process takes time and effort. Cleaning runs to location where you connect, switching hardware, activating all the vpn chains or tor connection, etc etc. Coordinating occasional OTP key exchanges, time/location randomization, etc. ...you didn't slip up and get lazy with the entropy generating your "secure" encryption key did you? You have to find drop shipping locations and those expire or go wrong.
Or there was a car at location X which is a choke point that is technically on your list of triggers for counter surveillance but it's 7PM on a Friday and that cute girl you're supposed to meet is waiting. Do you assume the worst and burn everything, re-do your secure connection point or just ignore it and go through your usual process since 99/100 it's likely to be a false alarm? Or hey, the delivery guy was a day late on the 1-day shipping you used to limit the time frame the agencies could use to get a warrant, and now it's outside your predetermined acceptable window. Do you have the discipline to take the loss and refuse the package?
You get the idea. It's exhausting and people make one stupid mistake and get called out on the internet for being a moron.
State actors (officials) even acting internationally (outside jurisdiction), tend to have a high level of immunity from legal sanction. Independent and non-state actors less so.
The CIA agent might blow cover or case but usually gets out alive and remains free. The DarkNet criminal, not so much.
One reason they are inept is those guys usually end up doing all the work themselves, for security reasons (you won't tell random people "hey I will run a drug empire, will you help me?").
So there is a lot to do when you need to build the platform yourself from the ground up; plus, you need to spend a lot of time on moderation and spammers and attackers; and, you need to make the platform easy to use, which sometimes goes against security; read any forum for darknet markets and people always struggle with basic PGP usage. (PGP is used for encryption in darknet markets; Signal-like protocols leak way too much metadata.)
Also, people that are good at infosec will not start doing this risky stuff, as they can do something better.
There used to be a market that required PGP in all messages, and users hated that, from what I remember.
I no longer visit forums for this stuff, but look up "dred", darknet market forum.
I always wondered, why are none of the darknets operated from some "rogue state" (like North Korea) or militia-controlled areas, like FARC in Colombia. Or by actual mafias in Russia or Ukraine. But I guess even they are not that dumb and focus on what they know how to do, rather than branching into darknet.
All it takes is one rookie mistake and it wipes out the other 99.9% perfect. Yes, there are guys and girls that can do 100% of what you need to run a darknet market perfectly, but they are typically in very high demand on the employment market, so their acceptable risk to reward ratio makes participation in criminal conspiracies very unlikely. So crime naturally selects for half-asses.
Well there are three classes really. (1) Criminals who got caught. (2) Crimes that were obviously committed, but were never solved. (3) And crimes that were performed so well that we don't even know they happened.
I think you would be very hard-pressed to create a large scale drug marketplace in category 3. Thus we can look at ratio of 1 and 2, to see how clever criminals are.
Samuel Little is a perfect example of some one category 3, that was eventually caught...
He was charged with 4 counts of murder in 2013, but in 2018 he was connected to a murder in Texas. Further investigations connected him to over 50 murders over almost 40 years, but he claims 93. The police hadn't connected ANY of the murders until he was picked up on narcotics charges and his DNA matched a bunch of cases in LA. He'd been in and out of jail 26 times between '61 and '75 for lessor charges, and was even charged with murder in '82, but was acquitted.
It was Category 3 enough that they never connected all the murders together until he told them... We didn't know he was a serial killer, and we didn't know that there WAS a serial killer running around.
Some people can’t make a stable living in regular jobs, so they resort to some form of crime. And it takes very little to add “Anybody can make money on the internet. Zuck did it and he’s a dropout.” and “Drugs make money” together.
Six figure (albeit lower end of that, and without RSUs) SWE jobs exist in quantity all over the U.S. There isn't a single state where you shouldn't expect to be getting a six figure salary with no more than 5 years working experience as an SWE - and I think saying even 5 years is generous.
I think it probably comes down to a combination of Ego and/or Thrill. They think they are too smart to get caught and they get a thrill out of outsmarting people (until they're not).
Whenever I see this it makes me think that making money by breaking the law is like playing a video game on cheat mode. Nearly anybody can make money illegally, but the consequences don't usually outweigh the benefits. So, it's almost pointless. The game that is much more gratifying is making lots of money by playing the game on hard mode.
I'm not sure if this was your implication (I may be reading too far into your relatively succinct comment), but I don't think most "criminals" do crimes because they explicitly want to break the law. I would imagine that there are about as many potential reasons for doing things that happen to be against the law as there are for doing things that don't happen to be against the law.
I'm not even all that sure what qualifies someone to be considered a "criminal." Is it simply breaking the law, which virtually everyone has done at some point? Is it getting caught committing a criminal act? Getting caught committing a felony-level offense? Is someone who smokes cannabis in Kansas (illegal) a criminal, but not someone who smokes cannabis across the state border with Colorado (legal)? What if the smoker from Kansas crosses the border into Colorado - are they no longer a criminal? What if the smoker from Colorado smoked cannabis before it became legal to so - did they stop being a criminal when cannabis was legalized? What if the smoker from Colorado walks across the border into Kansas - are they a criminal for having smoked cannabis in Colorado, given that doing so is illegal in Kansas? This list could continue, but it's probably already bordering on pedantic... Point being, if breaking the law is all it takes to be considered a criminal, aren't we all criminals?
Criminals will do crime. The thing that always buffles me is WHO buys heroin, cocaine, weed, etc. over the internet.. Aren't they scared that DHL, FedEx, USPS will scan/sniff the packages? Or they use "Drug delivery express"?
Or they buy online and they meet someone in a parking lot for the pick-up? Why not buy then and there then?
As we see in the movies, most drug trafficking is a drive-by thing.. is it not?
I don't think there are "criminals" as a type of person like "musicians", who are just compelled to do crime because there's an inner force that just makes their toe tap a certain way.
Maybe some small fraction, I guess.
But I think the majority of criminals are simply rational actors, who look at the incentives and the odds, assess them (sometimes wrongly), and do what seems sensible to achieve their goals. The goal is not "do crime", the goal is "make money" and the environment is structured such that crime makes money.
Having drugs sent to you is not proof that you bought them. I mean, it'd be too easy to blackmail someone if I could just send you a 'package' and then drop a tip @OurFriendsInBlue, no?
That said, if you keep getting busted with marching powder in your magazines, at some point people will stop accepting that excuse ;)
Having drugs sent to you is evidence you bought them. Maybe not conclusive evidence by itself, but certainly good evidence. Almost certainly there would be corroborating evidence such as drugs paraphernalia, financial transactions, positive blood test, internet history, etc
You are unlikely to get caught because you are unlikely to have the package intercepted. If it is, you should expect to be convicted.
My question/wondering was on: why the hell would someone buy drugs online, and how to they accept the risk on consuming these when they arrive. Buying an iPhone cable online is a risk I can accept. Buying heroin online (I don't do drugs) it goes beyond me on the risk acceptance of such deed.
I get it that darkweb has a scoring system like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, but heroin? Cocaine? Weed?
It is not about "police can't charge you" it is about "who the hell is going to inject something that was bought on the darkweb in their veins??
What goes through their mind? I assume not much since these are people who buy heroin, online.. so that answers my question.
Well it's a direct market, customer service is king.
The sellers cannot really move their 'brand' from one market to another. An opportunist could reserve their username on another market, and users know that anyone could be behind that new account. They don't trust the name, only the reviews you have on your particular market.
What I want to say is that the reputation of their anonymous brand is worth something, because they can't take it somewhere in a hurry and takes time to build (if you build it legitimately, it always seems easy to cheat with a bot).
Reviews from other users, (who also have a visible reputation, to combat botting), are taken seriously. The markets themselves provide escrow, if you screw your users and don't have a high standing you're likely won't be receiving payment.
This incentivizes sellers to provide a high level of customer service.
"So, in order to attract customers in this high stakes and very competitive situation, you need the highest possible rating."[0]
"This may help to explain why drugs bought on the dark web tend to be much purer than drugs bought on the street. "[0]
> The sellers cannot really move their 'brand' from one market to another. An opportunist could reserve their username on another market, and users know that anyone could be behind that new account. They don't trust the name, only the reviews you have on your particular market.
Sellers can move their brand across markets with a different username because they would still have the same PGP key. There's even a search engine to find the same vendor on multiple markets by looking them up by their PGP key.
> My question/wondering was on: why the hell would someone buy drugs online, and how to they accept the risk on consuming these when they arrive.
The alternative is buying them in person, where the dealer you have worked with for years may have been flipped last week.
And it's not like injecting something you bought from your dealer doesn't have similar risk factors. Why do you think overdoses have been skyrocketing over the past decade?
The amount of fentanyl and similar compounds on the street sounds just awful now. I can't imagine buying an E in the club or wherever from a stranger in this day and age.
Low level purchasers don’t seem to be targeted in these busts. They are after the suppliers. The risk of buying from a darknet market is probably lower than buying from a local dealer, especially for a consumer who doesn’t have any connections. You could go looking for someone dealing on the street, but you won’t know if their stuff has five star reviews. Or you might just get mugged.
Not something I have firsthand experience of, but I believe that the sellers are rated in part on the quality of their delivery. It comes through regular post to the buyers door. But that’s no implication of crime so as a regular consumer it’s fairly safe.
Aside from that, the quality of Darknet drugs is significantly better than street drugs. The drugs people (used to) buy on the street have been through a lot of hands and there’s often little substance left at the end. Also, who you going to complain to? At least with a marketplace, sellers are looking for good ratings. It’s also a lot cheaper. I’ve heard nothing but good reports from people buying online.
>>> I mean, are you really going to make that much more than you would as a regular software engineer at a company?
Hell yeah.
I mean, what companies could they possibly work for? Google? Accenture?
These only have offices in a handful of cities across the planet. You have zero job prospects as a software engineer as a person living in countryside Asia or Latin America or even Europe outside of metro areas. You might as well try to build your own web business.
Not everyone focuses solely on cash in life, and for some the thought of becoming a 'regular software engineer at a company' might be existentially boring.
This is the reason my regular dealer sold various items when I was in college.
He figured he had the rest of his life to be boring, but the excitement of dealing was too tempting right now to turn down. I'm betting a lot of the people running these sorts of things are in that area; it's just too interesting to try and too much adrenaline at times.
Also, are you named after just general detritus, or the Pratchett character?
ha, I quite like the idea of General Detritus! Just detritus generally. It's strange for me as I've been using it for so long now, my mind skips a beat and I feel like I've had a post update whenever I come across the word IRL :)
I've actually just picked up my first ever Pratchett - "Small Gods" - after having somehow avoided reading him for the past 30 years!
"Detritus was the first troll member of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch..." - I'll look forward to that, thanks!
I blame ageism in Tech. Where else should we go except jumping the Ättestupa[1][2] /s :-)
I guess everyone is different, but if you read the story behind Paul LeRoux[3] there is a lot more to becoming a criminal (including personal hardship and a pre-existing proneness for Denning Kruger - which seems more rampant in our field than anywhere else). And like learning vi / emacs it's actually really hard, so once you get very good in this it's hard to stop
(I'm trying too hard to be funny and understand my analogy sounds ludicrous but there are psychological concepts at work which connect difficulty/struggle of a task with whether we can identify with what we are doing and if it fulfills us. Ofc there is also that who else would do this kind of work if not a software/security engineer.)
I think you answered your own question as I am pretty sure they really do get paid that much more. The same thinking goes into starting a business or becoming self-employed. The people I have met doing those for longer than a year seem to make more than the people working full time jobs.
