blueski

pragmatic criticism of the current state of NFTs that have nothing to do with the concept of NFTs.

Which NFTs include a central authority able to re-issue my ticket if I lose it, address mis-representation by sellers, give refunds if the performance doesn't happen, etc? Isn't that lack of a central authority - and its attendant downsides - core to the medium?

Non NFT tickets fluctuate wildly in price.

Which non NFT tickets have fluctuated like Bored Ape NFTs this year, and which are highly susceptible to market sentiment for the entire ticketing medium?

What are you still having trouble with at this point:

Trying to understand how many people I respect have such enthusiasm for a medium which appears to have many downsides vs the status quo - and not yet a killer app like e.g. Gmail, Maps, Facebook to justify the Web2->Web3 transition. No doubt I'm missing something, just trying to understand what.

There's been enthusiasm for smart contracts for 5+ years, but which mainstream consumer or B2B apps have yet implemented them for non-speculation use cases?

How would it be progress for the New York Times to restrict access to quality journalism - or for Soho House to expose its future cash flows to extreme market volatility?

I don't really consider it solved, has Ticketmaster solved festival passes in a way everyone likes?

I hate Ticketmaster as much as the next guy, but had a fine experience with the resellers (e.g. StubHub) which offer many things NFTs do not - like customer service (with an actual phone number), a centralized record if I lose my ticket, refunds if the seller mis-represents, no requirement to buy an asset that will likely fluctuate wildly in price, and transaction fees likely lower than gas fees. Not sold on giving up those benefits.

If you want to pretend to own something valuable or be part of a community you can still do that. I don't really understand what that means to you. I guess that's a good follow up question, what does that mean to you?

I haven't been part of one of these communities, so hard to comment on the value of being a true member or just appearing to be one. If Bored Apes lost 99% of their value, would the community remain equally rich and engaged? What do they truly have in common?

If NYTimes stopped making infinite memberships, paid monthly, and instead limited it to, say, 100,000 memberships and some of their operation was funded by a portion of royalties when one of the membership was traded, what would the memberships cost?

I'm skeptical limiting access to quality journalism and inflating the price can really be counted as a good use case. For a Soho House membership, I'd much prefer to pay a monthly rate based on what I'm receiving - rather than speculate that (a) they'll continue improving the offer, such that the value of my token will increase; (b) the broader NFT market won't crash.

Soho House's financial team would also likely want to project their earnings next year without making assumptions around sustained interest in NFTs.

But do digital goods in games really justify the Web2 -> Web3 iteration? Compared to Web2 bringing us Gmail, Maps, Facebook etc, feels a little anemic so far.

"physical clubs and events that require users to prove provenance for access"

Feels like the "access to physical events" problem was solved before NFTs.

The "right click and save as" "screenshot" and "twitter photo" people would not have access.

But per original question - if I wanted to use any Bored Ape as my Twitter photo, is there anything stopping me?

Take your point re: additional digital goods being delivered on chain, just feels a little anemic vs the richness of everything else available for free (or behind a membership) online. If users didn't care primarily about price appreciation, not sure whether that part would be exciting.

Maybe it requires the collector gene to be enthused? If so, can these kinds of Web3 applications ever go mainstream as Web2 apps?

Which stand the best chance of going mainstream, with those who don't care about the underlying technology or price speculation?

Limiting ourselves to the digital world - does ownership of an NFT give me any more rights to experience or enjoy a piece of work than a non-owner? If someone else wanted to use my Bored Ape as their Twitter photo, could I stop them?

Feels a little different, in that I'd then have a fine art print to put on my wall and enjoy. In this case I have a string of characters on a hard drive. If I didn't care only about price appreciation, why would I pick the latter?

In what sense do the purchasers of your NFTs have "ownership" of your work - what could they do with it that I could not, and how is this legally enforced? If NFTv2 comes out in a year with 10x the financial rewards, will you commit to not offering the same pieces again?

I'd argue the exponential growth curves for Gmail, Maps, and Facebook (with no financial reward for the user) suggests there was a good appreciation of the utility. When will get an equivalent Web3 app that isn't predominantly driven by price speculation? What will this look like?

In what sense would I "own" the art? Do I have more rights over it than anyone else - and if so, how are these legally enforced? What prevents the artist from minting a different type of NFT (or whatever comes next) on that same artwork?

Partially agree - but people have been excited about e.g. smart contracts for the last ~5 years, yet which consumer or B2B apps are using them now? When Web2 came along, Gmail, Maps and Facebook were immediately exciting and obviously better than what came before. How much longer do we need to wait for those Web3 killer apps, that appeal to users who aren't purely in it for token price speculation?

I want to be excited about Web3 and feel I'm missing something, given how many smart minds are. But every time someone talks about NFTs on a podcast I feel there are many questions not answered.

For example - Kevin Rose has minted 1000 NFT's for "membership" of his podcast VIP group. Users had to pay ~3 ETH (~$12k) for each one - but he hasn't yet told them what the benefits of holding will be, when they'll come, and how long they'll be offered for.

As a user, I might be prepared to pay a membership for these benefits (being able to cancel any time) - but why would I risk $12k up front, having no idea what I'm getting? What incentive does he have to offer beyond the bare minimum to sustain his reputation?

The only way it makes sense is if it's about pure price speculation. Can anyone enlighten me on how this is progress?

As someone who works in tech and enjoys the outdoors (mainly hiking and biking, meaning I'm looking for sunny/temperate weather year round) I haven't found many better options than the Bay Area. Visited Miami and Austin in the last year, but the Summer temperatures are stifling and there's not the same wealth of natural beauty on their doorstep - Portland is great, but the grey skies would eventually wear me down.

I'd love to find somewhere more affordable but San Francisco still checks a lot of boxes. Where else to consider?

Where have you moved? Do you like it better?

You say in another post you spent only a year in SF?

Any suggestions for ebike-friendly bike directions? Less need to route around hills and more accurate journey time estimates would be useful.

Zumper | San Francisco, CA + Providence, RI | Engineering, Product, Design, Sales

Zumper is building the future of apartment rentals, making renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. We've just raised a $60M series D, and are now the largest privately held rental marketplace in the US (one in three Americans will use us this year). We're proud to be one of Inc Magazine's "Best Places to Work" and have a solid technology stack + lots of interesting problems to work on at scale.

Open roles: https://www.zumper.com/jobs

But my understanding is that Kittyhawk etc are (at least in part) creating a new market of single-person "quick hops" within cities or metropolitan areas, displacing ground transport. Not only would this increase energy use per mile for existing trips, it could lead to a lot of new ones (e.g. making it viable to commute from far flung locations). This ramp in energy use for personal convenience seems problematic.

Thanks for putting this together! I've wondered before if Kittyhawk and other flying car companies count as climate-saving organizations. Flying small personal aircraft will always use vastly more energy per mile than vehicles that can roll along the ground - and even if there are no emissions in flight, the energy cost and likely emissions of making the batteries and equipment will be non-negligible.

Some XBox and PS4 games support keyboard and mouse. I don't think this is much of a differentiator for/against Stadia.

The cheapest way to do it is buying a secondhand XBox/PS4/Switch + games for very little on Craigslist, and putting it back on there when you get bored (if that's within 6 months, I'd be surprised if you lost much). Or just keeping it and enjoying no input lag, no requirement for a subscription, no chance of the manufacturer bricking the device in future, and a huge secondhand market for games. Unless I really want to play games on something other than my TV or a handheld device (Switch), can't see why I'd take the more expensive and laggy Stadia option.

Our Google Maps bill went from ~$100k per year to $380k per year as a result of these changes. Needless to say, we're moving over to Mapbox.

What Google seems to miss is how this will affect customers' receptiveness to other Google products in the long-term. Having pulled the rug from under us once, there's no way we could consider e.g. a migration to Cloud in case the same happened again (where moving to a different provider would be far more painful).

I dislike it because it slows my consumption of the map; annoying while walking, possibly dangerous while driving. We're all accustomed to reading lines of text in their entirety, which results in endless repetition here. Training the eye to look only between one set of red dots may be possible, but I doubt it would ever be as effortless as reading a discrete word with whitespace around it. I do agree every road should be labeled when there's space - perhaps even at regular intervals when there's space, but making the labeling continuous is counterproductive.

Apart from being easy to consume, the map tiles must also be in sync with the company's brand and design ethos. Its hard to imagine Apple's minimalist aesthetic delivering these tiles.

Unless you count the hundreds of engineers and multiple offices Google has in SF.

I understand iOS7 will govern abuse/excessive background fetching. But seems unfortunate it can't cater for legitimate scheduled background fetching - e.g. updating all my podcasts every day at 8am. In this case my phone would be plugged in anyway, so the battery concern is moot - there are other cases where I'd accept a substantial battery drain to run a process I've approved.

From other comments it sounds like iOS might figure out I like to listen to podcasts en route to work and learn to pre-fetch. But I don't want to rely on it noticing this or wait for it to learn.

I have a mix of Android and iOS and it's for this use case that Android handles all my podcasts.

This worked for me:

Once the phone is in your basket, hit tab until the focus is on the proceed button. Then hold enter until finally it succeeds (took about 30s for me).

Now just a "6-7 week" wait for delivery. In other words, the phone can no longer be given as a Christmas present. Disastrous launch all round.

The S3 and Note 2 have a Samsung-tweaked version of Android. These amount to some different apps, slightly altered UI and in the case of the Note 2 some tweaks to accommodate the stylus.

It's not bad, but most prefer stock Android for the crispness of the UI, lack of bloat and fastest OS upgrades (they come direct from Google without delay while Samsung/another third party adapts their stuff).

I had the Note 2 briefly - it's a powerhouse but ultimately decided it was too big for my taste (5.5" screen vs 4.7" on the S3/Nexus 4). It needs two hands to operate most of the time and the screen is the same resolution as the S3 so you're only gaining in size, not detail. In the end I was happy to come back to my Galaxy Nexus.

The Nexus 4 runs stock Android and is the same size as the S3. It's also cheaper and faster. I'd say it's the clear choice right now.

Discussion of the official announcement here: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4411536

I did this last time around. A guy had to come to my house, lay cable and leave a box under my TV - only so I could take it all back a month later. Comcast have have spammed me with roughly two "come back" letters a month ever since.

It blows my mind that in 2012 NBC won't take my money to let me watch this online. Presumably they think it's enough to make me buy a cable subscription. They're wrong. I just searched around and watched a glitchy pirated feed - wishing all the time they'd let me pay them $5-$10 for the real thing.

Beautifully done. Just discovered you can zoom in by double clicking.