Classy Ubuntu's snap
Snaps were invented to break down the system and annoy users make software easy to upgrade, mitigate dependency hell, and add some sort of placebo security layer.
This comment in the geth repo highlights one of the reasons why I hate Ubuntu Snap and why I switched from Ubuntu to Pop!OS and never looked back. Unfortunately, I'm still using Ubuntu at work, and these Snap issues persist, though to a lesser degree.
AI Mining
Infrastructure and AI democratization are still growing topics in the blockchain world. In March 2024, someone forked Bittensor and made Commune AI. Unlike Bittensor, they don't have as many subnets (and likely not as much competition), but the price of their token isn’t impressive—$0.3 COMAI vs. $600 TAO as of Oct 9.
Competition drives innovation, so I expect more forks to come.
YouTube is OK with Scam Promotion
That’s right: genuine DeFi projects aren’t allowed to be advertised, while scam tutorials are promoted just fine. The worst part is that I keep reporting them, yet I still see the same videos...
I keep seeing this type of crypto scam being promoted on YouTube.
Comments are a mixture of shilling scams and naive people hunting for free money.
The core of the Solidity scam code is pretty simple—user funds are sent to the contract and then forwarded to a destination. The destination address is computed across hundreds of lines in an obfuscated format. I imagine that, for someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at, the massive amount of code and binary operations might make it look like it's doing something meaningful (and surely developed by AI). Both start and withdraw functions do exactly the same.
Don’t run code you don’t understand, for God’s sake.
Goodbye Foursquare
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone—Foursquare (aka 4sq) has come to an end.
For many years, probably a decade, I was an everyday user of Foursquare (4sq)/Swarm. I believe I started my check-in journey back in 2008, so it’s about 16 years of app use—basically half of my life. Back then, there weren’t many privacy concerns, nor GDPR, and I really saw a future in LBS (Location-Based Services)—I even ended up working on a few startups in that industry.
Foursquare's decline began when they had the "brilliant" idea to split 4sq into two apps. Originally, 4sq was an app for check-ins and reviews—all in one. But hey, nobody is immune to bad product decisions.
To this day, I’ve been a relatively active user of Foursquare "City Guide," creating spots and leaving reviews/uploading pictures.
Struggle to Find a High-End Laptop
Unfortunately, even in 2024, not many high-end laptop options are available. Back in 2019, I was very disappointed that there were almost no laptops with 64GB RAM... and you’d be surprised that 4 years later, it’s still true. And it’s not like I’m looking for something low-end—it’s quite the opposite. Nobody seems to want to take my money, so I ended up adding more memory manually to my T480s.
The usual candidates are Lenovo (P, X1), System76, and... up until recently, Dell XPS. But that’s now out, as they replaced function buttons with a flat touch panel. :facepalm: The entire segment of developers who rely on Fn and blind typing got a slap in the face.
Whisper for Typing (Blogs and Posts)
I know Whisper has been around for a while, but it took me quite some time to find a good use case for it in personal use. In particular, Whisper can be used for simply writing notes locally on your computer without connecting to the internet. The fedirz/faster-whisper-server does a good job of wrapping the model API into HTTP and providing a basic granulo interface.
In fact, I see and use a lot of new technologies, but more often than not, I struggle to find a practical use case or a non-obvious business case.
