User friendliness. I’ve seen several less-technical people able to quickly access, create, and understand “llms.txt”.

It’s not ideal but representative of the tension between user experience and technical correctness.

>less-technical people able to quickly access

Why would somebody even want to access that file? It doesn't make any sense to make that more user friendly, it's for LLMs.

This was mostly funded by Zcash Community Grants. Good things can come from crypto R&D.

Pecunia non olet

I think perhaps cryptocurrency is worse than selling urine for its chemical properties, but the principle applies, money is just money

Cable failed at millennial+ user experience.

Many on-demand viewing experiences still play ads through atrocious “cable box apps.”

Entrenched cable bureaucracy disrupted by app culture. For the better.

Netflix also will some day be disrupted, as the wheel turns.

We deserve to divorce the content from the service. Can you even purchase Netflix content?

I’ve just gone cold turkey from watching any streaming tv or movies until the situation improves. Blu Ray works better than ever.

I'm regularly a bit surprised at how many people don't even consider purchasing a la carte content or Blu Rays. For films it's often a pretty reasonable option for occasional viewing.

What does a hard copy of a movie cost these days? $20? That’s a month of one platform. How many times can you rewatch Iron Man in 31 days?

I loved my AstroCam as a kid. I think dad and I tried six launches. When a photo finally came out it was the best day. Thank you for sharing, a great reminder of how far we’ve come. Also of how short attention span has eroded patience during many of today’s prescribed “STEM” activities.

This happened to me in college. They never refunded my $7k balance. It was devastating to me at the time. The experience has played no small role in me becoming a cryptocurrency believer and advocate for the unbanked.

Yep, they took $3,800 from me. Nearly took another $2,400 but I was able to refund that to the sender before they stole it all.

See also Obscura's approach of QUIC bridges to Mullvad as a privacy layer: https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/

Easier: I can earn or spend real money 24/7 without anyone’s permission, at any age, in any location.

Faster: Payments settle lightning fast compared to ACH/Wires, permanently and internationally.

Better: I don’t need anyone’s approval to be “banked” and I don’t have to operate in fear of clawbacks. Programs are the ultimate unbanked, and that’s the “agentic economy” that is emerging.

Please forgive my pushback but:

No third party: Almost certainly as a user there are still third parties involved, this isn't (AFAICS and based on other discussions) a user facing chain (edit: correction, they do say the chain is public, but here I really mean user facing value: you aren't minting stablecoins, you have to get them from somewhere). At "envisioned" transaction rates you would in practice not be syncing the chain and interacting with it yourself in any meaningful way.

Settlement: chain settlement is different from financial settlement. Between clearing ends there will still need to be sufficient demonstration of KYC, exchange of some form of actual holdings and so on. Typically the attraction of /to stablecoins is that they're used to perform transactions ahead of movement of actualizable value in target currencies. A possible alternative model is that all invested parties sink actual value into a global sink fund backing the stablecoin that is sufficiently protected to ensure that it does not devalue. In practice organizations almost certainly aren't going to part with wealth on those volumes and will operate secondary private exchange markets and settlement in bulk to escape concerns of short term loss, leverage, inflation and many other dynamics.

At minimum all of these rules should be inflation-adjusted.

I’ve been curious to try starting an Aftok: https://aftok.com/

Perhaps the author would consider open sourcing if they received financial compensation for their work to date? Crowdfunding or retroactive grants can liberate code.

Context: a big chunk of my 2024 income was from grant money to build open source software that I may have tried to monetize otherwise. It’s possible.

Are there any must-know options for receiving grants?