A lot of this work was done by Walter |2| Costinak. He was an absolute legend and he's still doing a bit of design work today. I know because he did the branding for my last company and product. I worked with him a lot at Gathering of Developers back in the day. Together we rebuilt the website for Take 2 Games and they used our work for well over decade before doing a redesign. If you like this style, I recommend you reach out to him. Here's his website:
We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:
- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information
- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups
- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings
- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged
Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.
Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible. Because that's what everyone else is doing. With Bitcoin, you now exactly what your costs are and what your yields are. There's a clear threshold, when power in an area becomes too expensive there's no reason left to mine.
AI, on the other hand, is a bet on the future - infinite gains. No matter how much power costs, it's worth it to keep using as much as possible. We can't know how much power AI uses. Unlike Bitcoin, there aren't any metrics from which to extrapolate. But we do know that AI uses more power than Bitcoin already. We just have no idea how much more.
Again shenanigans. This is an arguing technique from the bitcoin maximalists who would proclaim something to be false when a google search would show otherwise.
You've drank some kind of kool-aid. You've been gaslit. Don't do it to the rest of us.
Oh I've been a decentralist long before anyone coined the term "Bitcoin Maximalist". I've been watching haters whine and complain the whole time. Speaking of google searches, you could have easily looked up the use of hyrdro power yourself and found that it's a common practice.
Speaking of, I just did a Google search asking if we know how much power AI is using and this was the AI response: "It is difficult to determine the exact amount of power AI is using because most leading AI companies do not disclose specific data"
It doesn't matter how much you hate Bitcoin, it's here and it's not going away. You should probably get over it.
> What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.
WTF? Hydro is rarely wasted because it's so dispatchable. Typically, it can only happen during high water seasons. Same for the gas power plants.
> Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible.
An interesting point is that any nation state or corporation can focus resources on either AI or BTC, but not both at the same time. BTC is a sure bet in the long run while AI is potentially capable of delivering a faster ROI with no hard guarantees. As BTC FOMO hits every country on Earth it's likely that AI will take a 100+ year backseat to massive state sponsored BTC operations. It's not hard to imagine a situation where governments restrict AI HW manufacture and limit electricity for AI as a means of supporting the national BTC effort.
And don't discount the negative sentiment around bitcoin as the nest of types that deserve to be completely wrecked financially, because they add no value to society, as in a Ponzi scheme. It seems inevitable to me this scheme is going to end some day and nobody is going to give a damn. It'll be the "Good Riddance Coin", filled with negative sentiment.
The good that BTC will do in the long run is worth the investment. Civilization getting out from under fiat currencies - once and for all - is a massive step in the right direction.
What is the next best alternative to throw support behind? I did a very shallow search and the forks of Firefox I found don't appear to be actively maintained.
I have been not happy about it up until this post. While reading the article, I thought about it differently.
What Firefox provides today isn't drawing in new users. Those of us who use Firefox do so for a number of reasons related to privacy or security or what not.
I simultaneously like being able to use ChatGPT to look stuff up and I hate that I'm feeding the machine a profile of me. I don't use ChatGPT nearly as much anymore mostly because of that sick feeling I get in my stomach knowing whatever I tell it will absolutely be abused in some way some how.
Nobody is building a very good "thing" that lets you use AI services with a solid layer of protection. That is a new market that deserves a product. I'm not saying that I think putting AI in Firefox is a good idea. Just that I can finally see the motivation.
Personally, I think the "solution" should be some kind of stand alone product that maybe has integrations into Firefox if you have both of them installed. Keep it in it's own cage. Make the only possibility of it existing on my system be me choosing to install a specific app. And if I'm going to do that, let me also use it outside of Firefox if I want.
But at least now I see a reason for what seems like such a bone headed decision.
I’ve never understood why Firefox doesn’t just make an extension with first-party support, instead of bloating their browser with gimmicks that a large cohort of users don’t want, and that probably shouldn’t be included by default at this point anyway. Or, shit, they came up with “Focus” for a “privacy browser”, do that and leave Firefox alone. Better yet, implement any of the litany of fixes and features your users actually requested.
This gets off topic of Firefox, but I don't see how any middleware can address your concern.
It is the very information you feed to the AI to get results that is in danger. No matter how you mask some metadata or account info, the actual in-band content is a problem.
The only solution is self-hosting of a model so the input and output cannot be monitored. And this also means running it offline, since a "black box" model that can do RAG or MCP or anything like that could also use covert channels to leak the information you are trying to control.
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?
https://2design.org/
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