Clicked for me when I realised HN is compromised of the few for whom web2 has served quite nicely, so it's unsurprising that talk of web3 is received about as well as a brick through the Google bus window
Yeah it kind of makes sense why so many on HN hate it. Most of them are heavily entrenched in existing structures where friction for finance or regulatory capture are "working" well for them.
I hate it because from everything I see it's 1% useful idiots/fellow travelers (otherwise very smart folks, just like the original fellow travelers were!) swamped by 99% crooks that want to con simple people.
But hey, I hope they prove me wrong. I could use better financial tech, that's for sure.
I have always followed a lot of generative artists on Twitter. Never have I see so many creatives I follow prospering at once, mostly thanks to the Tezos ecosystem.
The buyers seem happy to support the artists. The artists seem happy to receive this support. For all the cries of it being a scam/ponzi, I'm not quite sure who the victim is meant to be here - at least within this rather specific niche.
I think most of the ire towards NFTs and the greater cryptocurrency space in general is misattributed to the technology instead of the human behavior (specifically the audacious and immoral) that influences some of how it has been used. When people think about the cryptocurrency space, nobody actually cares about developers, they care about the scams and the insufferable cryptobros and their memes which dominate every headline and every large social space related cryptocurrencies.
The real headline most of these criticisms related to is probably closer to how deplorable people will act when they are capable of separating themselves from the costs and responsibilities of their actions.
I've yet to see that come up as an issue within this niche - it's mostly code based work, so a certain tolerance for forking/remixing is baked in. Unsurprisingly, highly derivative work doesn't raise much interest.
I'm deep in the generative art NFT thing too, and I've seen it come up a couple of times.
In a couple of cases algorithms have been outright copied and used for new projects. Personally I believe that's wrong and people shouldn't do it. Definitely would not buy any such work.
There's also been a few cases where some code is clearly based on other code, and some artists get mad about that. For myself, this feels a lot less clear cut, and I might consider some such art if I felt it was novel enough.
Sure, but you probably weren't trying to sell those copies to unsuspecting buyers, pretending you had the rights to do so, and giving nothing to the artist. That's the scummy part.
I have always followed a lot of tulip growers. Never have I see so many gardeners I follow prospering at once, mostly thanks to the tulip ecosystem.
The buyers seem happy to support the growers. The growers seem happy to receive this support. For all the cries of it being a bubble, I'm not quite sure who the victim is meant to be here - at least within this rather specific niche.
Witty, but ignores the artist <-> artwork <-> fan relationship dynamic that is at play here. To me the scene feels closer to a platform like Bandcamp than it does the more speculative world of Opensea.
Sorry what's the difference between the "artist <-> artwork <-> fan relationship dynamic" and the "grower <-> tulip <-> enthusiast relationship dynamic"?
I mean, maybe the original tulip buyers were doing so as they got genuine satisfaction out of supporting the growers themselves (ie their primary reason for buying was patronage rather than speculation), but that would be quite an amendment to the standard narrative
I don't think it's necessarily a concentrated effort on behalf of any one entity - anecdotally it just seems to be the new buzzword marketing departments have latched onto now that pitching blockchain/NFTs alone doesn't cut it anymore. Without checking, it wouldn't surprise me if Clubhouse is 50% "how to BUILD your BRAND in the METAVERSE" right now, even if nobody can quite pin down what it means, what it will be, or where it will come from
Okay, let me preface with an apology. The parent comment received the brunt of my ire and I feel that's inappropriate as no one person deserves that as my angst is more directed to the fundamental system architecture and not the surrounding commentary.
at_19, sorry for the rebuke and the sarcasm.
That being said.
Metaverses are great.
I think there is an underpinning philosophical element to these discussion around aggregate universes that needs to be addressed.
My particular disdain is targeted at Fortnite.
Some of my disdain can be summarized via the Folding Ideas essay [1].
My disdain may or not be intrinsically linked to the ideals of capitalism, for which I think there is a larger discussion to be had. I believe, by all interpretation, Fortnite is a vehicle solely for capitalist ideals and doesn't allow room for alternative economic models (including capitalist synergies).
This, in concert with its branding (a childrens' game) is problematic for me.
Fortnite, in its essence, is an anarcho-capitalist model. The literal goal of any drop is zero sum by nature. Kill everyone else -> read kill as not literally kill, but subsume their resources and remove players so that one dominant entity can capture resources.
Part of the core gameplay is leveraging resources "enemies" have already obtained, mechanical efficiency, and coordination (if not solo-queued) against "the others".
The game, by its mechanics, is troublesome to me. This is not to mention the pure pay-to-win psychological manifest of their online store (which the video essay details). In short, the community forms their opinions based on the amount of capital a player had -> allowing the player to purchase skin-du-jour and enable a perception of higher status. The logic follows that a player with a newer and rarer skin *must* be more talented and mechanically efficient.
That is the summary of my angst whenever this subject is brought up. I'm not convinced that the thrust of any multi-m/b/illion dollar company when talking about the "multiverse" is anything other than a shallow ideological vector aligning with their checkbook.
I am convinced in the Minecraft and Roblox arguments as they have incredible creative power, systemically, although the same argument can be applied selectively. They are not adversarial by nature, however mini-games do exist within their ethos that push this ideology.
I think that it's frustrating to see any backing without challenging the long-term psychological effects of seeking mechanically derivative ideologies of one, possibly reductive (in implementation, not practice), line of economic philosophy.
I genuinely hope that covers the groundwork.
Once again, I'm sorry your comment caught my ire.
I suppose, personally, that I am jaded to the argument at its core, and very passionate about how those vectors are exposed.
To leave with you with some substance:
My ideal "Metaverse" is one unbounded by isolated cultural norms, and may actually be present in our lives today. I can see nothing good coming from an Epic Metaverse, but I see indie hackers using 3-d printing and free STL files making amazing robots. I see people designing in FOSS for those particular files that they can't find online. I see people developing completely OSS games in FOSS game engines so that someone might have entertainment free of charge. Maybe they will morph their own game? The metaverse is already here, and pushing shared brain farms is not something which I will back down from.
I am increasingly defensive as this argument arises because I see no implementation in which capitalist capture (the system which enables creators and both isolates them to that system) can have any real benefit as a shared experience. It's possible but not beneficial.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. There's only so much I can fit here, but I'm happy to expand if you need more context.
Totally agree - just watched a bit on Youtube out of nostalgia, and was taken aback by the charm of it for sure. There's a restraint that I don't think I appreciated when I was watching it as a young teenager - it's defined as much by the the places that it doesn't go (that other shows did, as you say) than the places that it does
Indeed, even with edgy "out there" content it is important to have "restraint" like you said...someone with a vision of what the product will be.
This can also be seen in the Trailer Park Boys TV show. Seasons 1-7 under the direction of Mike Clattenburg do have a lot of swearing and dirty jokes, but it is always genuinely good humor, or serving plot and character development maybe. I'm sure I don't describe it well, but "I know it when I see it."[0] The following seasons with other directing/production have lost that tact and restraint; like they just call someone 5-6 dirty words in a row, funny only for the shock value of the words. Not funny.
>The lucky buyer went home with a certificate of authenticity and a set of instructions: the work, per Garau, must be exhibited in a private house in a roughly five-by-five-foot space free of obstruction.
There's some precedent here - the 'set-of-instructions-as-art-object' goes back at least the 70s (maybe earlier, not sure when Sol Lewitt first started doing them for his wall drawings [1], or if he was even the first), often used by conceptual artists as a tool to monetize/distribute (and institutions/patrons to support) an otherwise unmonetizable or undistributable practice. Kind of a retro move now in the age of NFTs and Patreon, but there's a history to it, even if this is probably one of the least interesting examples it I've seen
Isn’t that the same as a company logo with instructions about minimum space to other elements and color of the background? How does it help with monetization?
It just means there's a physical artefact - the value becomes attached the piece of paper with the instructions on, as that can then be used to manifest "legitimate" performances/installations of the work (eg in a museum, or wherever)
I don't know. This was an interesting read for me because I recently had an experience that was largely the opposite.
I made a game using free time after work that ended up being featured on most of the big mobile gaming sites, as well as within the App Store itself (on the top banner of the Games bit). It didn't make lifechanging amount of money by any stretch (per hour I think would have just about broken minimum wage by now), but a decent amount considering it was something I was doing for fun. The experience has made me very excited to a) continue to update this one and b) get started on my next game project, which I think has the potential to reach more people. Or at the very least, turn out to be more interesting.
If starting from nothing I think it's all down to either having a snappy and unique concept, and/or a snappy and unique visual style. The best bit is that neither of these things necessarily require lots of time to pull off, just luck (or whatever it is). I have no industry connections whatsoever and zero ad budget, but if you do something that hasn't quite been seen before, and that people/sites will have fun writing/talking about, it can get you a foot in the door. Maybe I'm being too optimistic and underestimating how lucky I got!
I think your postmortem would be more interesting to read about than ops, frankly. It reads like the writer not only was expecting a larger degree of success for a not-so-interesting and expensive-to-make game, it also seems like he never found a group of people which enjoyed playing it.
In your case, it sounds like you would've been fine without external validation, invested not a huge amount of money into the project, and we're focused primarily on fun.
>The actual artwork on a piece of paper will typically be lower fidelity than a digital version of it, and paper degrades faster than CD-roms.
I think the post does a nice job of countering this; a physical object will always contain much more information (in the Shannonian sense) than any digital alternative could, and that goes far beyond things like DPI.
Which is to say that it will contain more noise. The digital equivalent will be more faithful in recording deliberate details, which is surely the part that's art.
Their stuff is good. Here in the UK every supermarket chain now has their own vegan ranges putting out stuff almost (admittedly not quite) as good, priced very competitively. Even a couple of years ago that simply wasn't case.
Random stray thought I had earlier is how interesting things are going to be when we move further away from emulating existing meat products, and become more comfortable eating plant-based stuff that doesn't necessarily resemble (or have names that are a play on) anything else in nature, in the same way Pepsi is just Pepsi. I'd love to take a peak at what menus are gonna look like in 20 years, assuming this shift is the real deal. Are we gonna have to memorise a slapstick sounding list of dozens of engineered protein sources to get by? (Oomph, tofurky, shroomdog... and of course, quorn! etc)
That reminds me of a certain college campus food service that signed an exclusive contract with Coke.
Coke brand milk.
Coke brand grade D but edible meat (we found the box in the dumpster).
Hell, they even f———ed up the soft drinks because they had hyper-optimized machines that mixed corn syrup, citric acid, flavor, co2 and water on site. The mix, and therefore PH, was frequently so far off that students would fall ill for 4-8 hours with convulsive stomach cramps and miss class about once a week. In fairness, it was still better than the milk.
So. Much. Food. Poisoning.
Decades later, I’m still boycotting those ^{+$&@! $@&&}^+# &@$@&s!
I’m suspicious that it might not be the mixing itself that the machine is doing that’s the problem, if it’s causing that, but dirty lines adding bacteria and poisonous chemicals (not talking about HFCS, think motor oil) to the mix.
Most fountains don’t trust the operator to mix the citric acid and corn syrup as two separate streams from the other ingredients. (At least they didn’t at the time. The big computerized ones might do that these days; but those are probably self calibrating.)
A bit of a grim point, but the timing is also right in that the majority of staff are currently WFH, removing much of the potential for any violent protest/retaliation at their offices. Maybe being naive but I wonder how much this has been a consideration in the past.
I'd agree with this, as someone that is doing this (though have no intention to leave my job). WFH has made it easier than ever to find the time, which admittedly isn't easy, but turning it into a grand life decision does make for a convenient excuse to put off just sitting down and starting it
