Please excuse any grammatical errors. I used a tool to generate the transcript and haven’t had a chance to read through it yet. ✔️
Maybe you’ve heard or maybe you haven’t, but there is ongoing drama in the crypto space. Not even necessarily drama, just mind-blowing behavior from Logan Paul to SPF with FTX. All of this has reminded me of a topic I’ve wanted to make a video on: NFTs are not what they seem. These are photos I printed on a Kodak printer at CVS, but they’re being sold as NFTs. There’s a big misconception that when you buy an NFT, you’re buying the artwork, but that’s not true. The blockchain only confirms that you own the NFT, not the artwork. I heard someone say before that when you buy an NFT, you’re just buying a URL, but I never looked into it further. So today, we’re going to look into what you actually get when you purchase an NFT. I would say NFTs are the low point of crypto, but then something else happens and we reach a new low.
This is OpenSea, an NFT marketplace, likely the most popular one out there. For our example, let’s search for a popular project such as Board AB Yacht Club. Here are the current NFTs that are up for sale. Let’s pick one of these as an example; they just get worse and worse the more you scroll. So let’s go with this one. On this page, if we scroll down and go to the details section, from here, we can see the contract that is actually tied to this NFT. Let’s go ahead and open this in a new tab. This takes us to Etherscan. On this page, we want to go to the contract. This is the actual code that the contract is comprised of. We want to go to read contract. And on this page, we want to look for a function called token URI. We can see here number 20, token URI. Inside of here, we want to take the token ID from open C 3559. Put that in that box. Select query. Now we are presented with a string that contains an IPFS address. IPFS stands for Interplanetary File System. If you’ve ever heard of BitTorrent and how it works, IPFS is similar. You have a network comprised of nodes, which are just individuals, servers, or companies running this IPFS software. These nodes can talk to one another. If you’re a node on the network and you request an IPFS URL, you’ll ask a nearby peer if they know who has this content. That peer will say yes, I know who does and provide the node with the content. It’s a decentralized way to store files and share information.
And that’s what we see here. This is the IPFS URL. You can’t just go there in your browser, it doesn’t work. So instead, we’re going to use an IPFS gateway. There are public ones available, a popular one is ipfs.io/ipfs. And then we follow that with the string that we found on etherscan.io. Now when we load this, the reply we get is JSON. And what we can see here is we have an image, with a URL that is tied to it, and then some metadata about the image. This is the data that is tied to the NFT that is purchased when it’s bought. And this is the image that you actually get. Again, it’s another IPFS URL. Now, if we go to this, we can see the image. The image is not actually on the blockchain, it’s not there for people to see. It’s just this JSON data that has the image URL that you can access on the interplanetary file system. Someone has that image hosted there, but it may not be there forever. Sometimes the image just disappears after the sale. You’re not purchasing any rights or anything like that. You’re just purchasing this JSON data that has some metadata attached to it, some attributes, and a pointer to a URL. As we saw here, this is going for over $100,000. All that you get is a record on the blockchain that says you purchased this.
To the defenders of NFTs, I know there are different ways to host these files that are more resilient and reliable. But that takes us back to the initial question of what you get when you buy an NFT. To me, this is much different from what I initially thought NFTs were and how they were marketed and promoted. So, this is not glamorous by any means. But I think the story we were told about NFTs is a lot more glamorous than what you’re actually getting. So, the moral of the story is, don’t pay six figures for some NFT that an influencer promoted so they can make a quick buck off their fan base.
]]>/usrPlease excuse any grammatical errors. I used a tool to generate the transcript and haven’t had a chance to read through it yet.
GitHub is a hosting service for software projects. And on each GitHub project, there is a tab for issues, where users or the developers themselves can open up anything that might be an issue with the project. Not typically, the Issues tab has a place where useful discussions take place. And other times it’s a source of entertainment. So today, I’ll be sharing my five favorite GitHub issues that I found over the years. So let’s start with number five. The first issue is for a project called Neo fetch. It is a command line system information tool basically displays information about your system, the OS kernel uptime, the issue that was opened was titled at Neo fetch is not displaying the weight of my computer as a possible for Neo displaying the weight of my computer can see the comments and what ask your kitchen scale. So, I don’t know if this person was serious when they open this issue. But as you could expect from the internet, comical replies ensued. This is really good idea, weight and volume are always hard to measure would be really useful. One could see the current weight of their laptop, depending on the battery percentage. So reading the thread, there was actually some pretty decent suggestions besides the funny ones. Since they are scraping hardware information about the computer, someone suggested that once the hardware information was determined, they could scrape publicly available information for the weight of different components. Either way, that being said this was not implemented, but nevertheless, still pretty funny.
Coming in at number four is a project called the liftoff. Se CLI for creating and configuring new Xcode projects. This one’s a good reminder why recruiters should not chime in on GitHub issue threads. So if we take a look at the issue that was opened, it was added support for the new launch screen. xiv files. Okay, fair enough. You know, some regular discussion not convinced this should be the default. If we keep scrolling down, right at this point, there used to be some comments here that were deleted by the initial author. Thankfully, someone on the internet took some screenshots, we can see here a post from a recruiter, notice that you guys have been so active in iOS development would really like your input about this position I’m currently trying to fill the company is asking for iOS developers with a strong lamp background, we can see the first comment that came in by lamp background, do you mean writing flashlight app specifically? A little bit further down, I meant LAMP stack. If you don’t know what lamp stands for, it stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, which is a typical software stack or was a typical software stack that was used, just a quick way to refer to it. But obviously, the recruiter made a typo with lamp background, I wrote a really strong web flashlight app, I could probably port that to iOS. It really just took off pretty quick. We can see here the recruiter was a little bit salty about the comments. Oh, great, funny, but not really helpful. And then still posted the entire job description. But then a little bit further down and start getting pretty interesting. We have a stack of lamps, some more lamps, literal stack of lamps. You gotta love it when people give some additional context on images. The senior lamp developer above is mentoring the junior lamp, very touching. This is a funny one to read through. And as always, the links will be down below in the description in case you want to read through these threads yourself, which I suggest you do. They’re pretty entertaining. So what can we learn from this, if you’re a technical recruiter, you should probably stay out of the GitHub issues. Because if you make one mistake, you will be eaten alive by everyone else in there.
On to number three. This is for something called twine, which is utilities for interacting with pi pi. This one’s pretty straightforward. If we go to the issue, the individual said I had some trouble using twine to upload a package to testify pi i tried like this. They put the details what else happened? And then scrolling down a little bit further, we get a comment. Were you able to resolve the issue? And then the original poster said, No, I decided I don’t care. So not really much to it, but just the tone of the original person straightforward to the point. And you know, they didn’t figure it out because they don’t care. I feel like we can all learn something from this. Sometimes in life, there are tasks or problems that just aren’t worth it. So sometimes you need to decide that you just don’t care.
So moving on to number two actually had a pretty difficult time deciding on what should be first and second place. But ultimately, I decided on setting Bumblebee which is now old and abandon as second place. But if we go to the issue that occurred with this install script does RM dash RF slash user for Ubuntu? So if we go down to the details for this issue, I want you to note just how many reactions are on this and how many comments were actually left. So the initial report says an extra space at line 351. So if you’re familiar with Linux at all, RM what that is used for is removing or deleting files or folders. The our flag specified here that means a recursive and so if you have a folder inside have a folder. It’ll remove everything after that recursively and the F flag that stands for force. So that means you will not be prompted for any confirmation on what you want to remove in the mistake in the code was that there was this extra space here between slash user and slash lib. So instead of actually removing the X Org, at the end of the path here, since there was a file here, what happened instead is that the slash user directory was completely removed. When this was run. We can see here totally cool, dude, this script deletes everything under slash user, I just had to reinstall Linux on my PC to recover. So yes, one single space caused quite a bit of issue. And if we see the response from the developer, well, first we have another person who yes, this happened to me as well. developer on the project, fixed it. And then the comment, giant bug causing slash user to be deleted. So sorry, if we scroll down a little bit further, we get some more information on why this mistake was made. Yeah, I was very tired that night. And then there’s some comments. This is from the initial person that reported it. Get some good humor laughing about it. Poor guy. Nice. You’re famous. So I like this one, especially give this man a round of applause. His styling caused the Linux to commit die. This is the power of Linux, this whole issue actually reminds me of this meme. Hey, can I uninstall edge? No, you’ll break your system. I’m going to uninstall the bootloader, your system will break sudo. I’m going to uninstall the bootloader. Go ahead. Gotta love the power of Linux and what it will let you do.
Now that brings us to number one, which I think is well timed for this time of the year, as you will see why shortly. This is for Visual Studio Code, which is a popular source code editor by Microsoft, the issue that we’re looking at is a blend of humor and drama to each their own in their own opinions. But this was for Santa hat on vs. Code insiders and pushing a religion is very offensive to me. So yes, this you can read over what’s going on here. If we scroll down further. The issue was, is that on VS code, they added a Santa hat to the settings logo. And this was not taken kindly by some people. Apparently, the developers actually removed it very quickly. But then what ensued was a storm of comments on this related issue. There were more comments on the original issue in the past, but they’d been deleted at this point. The linked issue is the actual response from the Microsoft team. I’m pretty sure this turned into a rather large PR nightmare for them. They even had the lock the repository. This one always makes me laugh, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a detailed response from Microsoft on anything. They went into quite a bit of detail. They even added updates because of the response. They got the background. What happened gave more details on the situation. This one got out of control for them real quick from a very simple change. But if you’re looking for a thread full of humor and drama, then I think this one would make for a good read. There’s a lot going on here. Probably my favorite comments on this issue was where someone took Octocat, which is the GitHub logo, put a Santa hat on it and a dreidel in its hand. I don’t really have much more to say about this issue, as I don’t want to get into this topic on my YouTube channel. Either way, still a piece of history to me at least that wraps up the list and this year, so merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanzaa. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.
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