Even the best known NFT brand can't escape the effects of a collapsing industry. Yuga Labs, the company behind the blue-chip Bored Apes NFTs and related collections, and the acquirers of collections including CryptoPunks, has announced that it will be joining the many other companies in the crypto world performing layoffs. They did not disclose how many employees would be losing their jobs.

"It's a challenging time, not only for our industry but also for the global economy," wrote Yuga Labs CEO, apparently hoping that people ignorant to the past year of disaster across the NFT industry might be willing to attribute Yuga Labs' struggles to macroeconomic forces and not the implosion of the crypto — and particularly NFT — world.

• "Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Creator Yuga Labs Confirms Layoffs" , Decrypt

I see that one of those reactionary YAGNI articles is making the rounds. Most of these articles focus on the technologies themselves and forget that the developers behind them or using them are curious, enthusiastic and often extremely competent. There's a lot to criticize about "hype" cycles, but technology itself ain't it.

What is worth criticizing in "hype" cycles is that systemic misaligned incentives—a result of both market pressure and the way to have a successful career within company structures—lead to baroque software stacks of dubious quality and not lean, successful and elegant products.

What actually sucks is getting told to use "AI" for no good reason because someone wants to score a checkbox for Q3; because company culture and structure don't allow people to push back against CTOs and CEOs pushing some product because they read their vendor's whitepaper; because sales is incentivized to pump grandiose nonsense about half-finished technology. All of this leads to products designed as a side-effect of playing a game no-one has any actual stake in, instead of being designed around users and then taking the time to make properly technical decisions.

In defense of novel stacks

Postgres, HTML and raw Javascript are not the best choices-touting them as the end-all be-all of pragmatism is reactionary at its core. Taking that logic to its extreme, we would still write FORTRAN on mainframes. Node.js was invented for a valid reason and has obviously led to an explosion of great software; so did react; microservices power some of the largest companies in the world. It's knowing and respecting and exploring and inventing and taking these alternatives seriously that allows one to decide that Postgres, HTML and raw Javascript are the better choices, sometimes.

XML in particular is a rich stack that is constantly being reinvented with each new serialization format (JSON has json-schema, JQ, some half-assed steaming parsers, JSON-LD, I could go on forever...). Similarly, you can't fault the Javascript ecosystem which overall is one of the most developer-centric ecosystems I know for the quirks of the Javascript language, because pretty much all technical decisions that were made, starting with Brendan Eich's decision to whip it out in a week, were defendable and competent decisions.

Just have fun and be open

So please, developers, don't think that YAGNI and minimalism is somehow "better" or "more competent" than exploring and playing and building things like mongoDB or serverless or AI or typescript or rust or single-page applications.

Explore, build, use, reuse, contribute, rewrite, package, play with all these technologies, because that is how we actually make progress in our field and how one becomes a better engineer.

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

If mindlessly browsing the internet is your preferred way to combat boredom and waste time, the indie app makers behind to-do list app Clear and game Heads Up have a new product you’ll want to try: Web Roulette, a mobile web browser app for iOS built for the short attention spans of the TikTok era. With the debut version out now, you can add your favorite websites or choose from its suggestions, then swipe through the sites to see what’s new or shake the app for a surprise webpage when boredom strikes.

The team says the idea initially struck them as something of a joke. But they soon realized the idea of a ‘swipeable,’ shakable web browser that delivered our daily hits of dopamine may actually have merit.

“I mean, this is actually how I spend much of my time browsing the web — I bounce back and forth mindlessly and semi-randomly between my favorite sites, hoping for something fresh. Maybe there’s something here?,” explains Impending founder and designer Phill Ryu.

I’ve been beta testing Web Roulette for a week or two and it’s just plain dumb fun. In the early days of the App Store (and before that, the early days of the web), it was common for people to come up with a dumb fun idea that could be made in a week or two. Web Roulette exemplifies that ethos. It’s not useful, per se, but it’s not useless either. But it’s mainly just fun. I’m so glad to see that coming back.

See also: This fun launch video on TikTok — interrupted by a special guest. And this tweet with a sketch of the team’s original concept. I love comparing “here’s the napkin sketch of the original idea to the shipping product.

Fuck being productive.

I decided to go easy on my self about being "productive".

I'm already working full time from 6:30 to 18:30 everyday and I've got only like 3 hours for myself after work.

I've been trying to be productive in that 3 hours like learning new stuff, studying coding, learning new languages etc but it just is not working because my brain is already kinda dead after hours and hours of translation work all day.

And.. You know... I also need some recreation like playing video games, having time with my wife or friends, reading a book I like or watching stuff.

Until now, I was feeling guilty all the time because I was not able to do anything productive after work and it was eating my brain. I was torturing myself, lol.

The dilemma is that while not doing any productive stuff, I was also not doing any recreation stuff(hobbies etc) either. Because I was feeling so guilty thinking "I SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING SOME PRODUCTIVE SHIT INSTEAD OF DOING THIS, THIS IS WRONG!".

But that's enough. I won't do this anymore. Instead, going to listen to my body and soul. We're not robots and we don't have to be productive everyday or all the time.

From now on, at least for awhile, I'm going to try to be sure that I enjoy and have rest in my fucking non-work time.

in my experience, the majority of people in the world do not look at systems, only the immediate happenstance. even people whose job descriptions are “build and maintain this large, complicated system” are usually unwilling or unable to look at a system as a whole, but must instead look at each individual part as if it was a discrete thing, leading to the kinds of technology and organizational failures we’re all so familiar with. you can show them things like “How Complex Systems Fail” and it will have absolutely no effect because they simply cannot model a system in their minds

this doesn’t appear to have anything to do with being neurodivergent vs being neurotypical, being from a technical background, etc. it’s a specific kind of intelligence that isn’t even necessarily tied to memory, but is closed related to problem-solving. it feels like it should be related to spatial awareness but it isn’t; I’ve known a number of people who are terrible at directions and are completely lost trying to interpret maps, but who are otherwise quite capable of modeling (for example) a complicated social structure in their heads. it’s entirely disconnected from math, too

as our world becomes more reliant on huge, interconnected, complicated systems, more and more people are just going to end up completely lost because they are either incapable of modeling a system, have never been taught how to do so, or find it in their best economic interest to simply ignore everything outside of their immediate perceptions

as to why it seems like it’s just your friends and close acquaintances who can see the flaws in the machinery, I think there’s two possibilities:

1. queer folks tend to be able to break out of simplistic, “this is how things are” viewpoints, for obvious reasons. clearly there are exceptions, and being very wealthy means you can simply buy yourself the world you want instead of figuring out how it works, but being able to realize that you are not what your label says you are requires a bare minimum capability to understand that the map is not the territory

2. the kinds of people you (and I) like to talk to and hang out with are people who are not dumb as a box of hair, so there’s some selection for minimal comprehension going on here as well. after a certain age, you’ve filtered out all the dumbasses you used to hang out with just because you shared hobbies

the downside of being able to model complicated systems is that the world is even more terrible due to it being understandable. “horrors beyond your comprehension” are mild compared to the horrors you can understand but cannot fix. being able to look at the food you eat and understand what had to happen for it to arrive on your table is not a blessing in the world we live in

this was longer than intended

Ross A. Lincoln, reporting for The Wrap:

In financial documents filed Friday, Roku disclosed that it had approximately $487 million held by Silicon Valley Bank, the Northern California financial powerhouse that failed this week, sending shockwaves throughout the region’s economy.

That number, Roku says, represents approximately 26% of its cash and cash equivalents, and the company will be able meet its pending financial obligations for at least “the next 12 months and beyond.”

From Roku’s filing, linked above:

The Company’s deposits with SVB are largely uninsured. At this time, the Company does not know to what extent the Company will be able to recover its cash on deposit at SVB.