The Disappointing Tea.xyz
connortumbleson.com
connortumbleson.com
Mike McQuaid, Homebrew Project Leader and Homebrew maintainer for the last 15 years.
> Led by the creator of Homebrew Max Howell, tea is Homebrew’s spiritual successor.
It's worth noting the opposite direction: generally when an open-source project considers another to succeed it, it is noted on their homepage/GitHub repository. We (Homebrew) do not state Tea is a successor because, from our perspective, it is not.
In theory, a decentralized ledger of project contributions / owners is a good idea for distributing sponsorship dollars without a middleman controlling things.
In practice, the brand of crypto has gotten so bad that developers are far more likely to trust centralized mechanisms like GitHub's funding.yaml and associated partners.
And even if it would than the question of which chain is the right one comes up.
Did you know there are fake nfts and you hardly can see which ones are real?
You literally need an initial trust anchor like a project website with https to learn about it. What a wonderful irony.
No. Crypto lets you prove who wrote a small amount of data to the blockchain.
An ocean filled with fish poop…
It’s so great I can definitively verify that this ID is something… but that’s absolutely fucking pointless if I have no way to judge if the entity or entities controlling it, connected to it, supporting it, or even associated with it (to consider potential future actions)… the goal was noble but the implementation completely failed because to succeed would have required the participants to build anchors in the real world of verifiable identities… and for all the value people get from day to day use of cryptocurrencies… the biggest value of crypto was in staying as far away from the real world as possible allowing such things as drug purchases and international money laundering and illegal gambling at a level low enough to evade legal enforcement services coming after the players (since obviously if they could come after the casino/house they would since that’s where all the money is)
The folly of NFTs, energy footprint aside, is thinking that a well-written smart contract is all that's needed to stop counterfeits.
The important questions for you remain unanswered:
- Do I actually have the rights to sell you the thing I try to sell you?
- What do I actually sell you?
- Am I who I claim I am?
- etc.
NFTs are not answering any of these questions, they are the equivalent of an elaborate signature on the contract of the guy trying to sell you a bridge.
> Cryptography at least gives us a chance to verify someone's claims.
Has it a better track record at doing so that e.g. a notary?
If you can come up with a system where we could just all imagine up the same blockchain code, parameters, and have the code magically appear on our machines to run, that would be cool, but seems not really possible to me?
OTOH, what you can do with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is download the code, review it, see if you agree to the rules laid out in the code, and if so, run it, and participate.
If you don't have the technical knowledge to do this, like 99.99% of people, you can delegate that trust of verifying and explaining it, to someone of your choosing.
No-one is expecting on-chain ledgers to solve off-chain trust. What they can do is make the process more transperant, more decentralized, and give people a much wider choice. You might look at this as competition. Alternatively you might sit on hn and hope to get a job in ad-tech.
Let's repeat the basic fact: every crypto which uses a transaction fee is inherently a scam because it's a negative sum game. Everything else is bait to get you involved in the scam. There's nothing else.
Consider a team of people building a house. They have all sorts of things that need focus and work - planning the build, assembling resources, coordinating specialists and doing the actual construction.
Now, add a second team who don't understand anything about what the first team is doing, who the first team have to talk to every time they want to buy a pencil or screw.
How it is that anyone thinks this is a good way to do business is completely beyond me, and yet we have entire schools devoted to training people to do this.
The second group is the “thinkers”. They think for a living. They drink coffee and wear suits. They think things like, “that’s expensive,” sometimes.
The doers can’t think. The thinkers can’t do. By combining the two, we end up with a group who can neither think nor do.
As far as the forking issue, nothing really stops zero-effort forks from seeking compensation. Anyone could fork a project and replace all the donation links in the docs with their own. So if you do want to donate to a project, do a little research.
So then, reserve profit motives for things that need to be done, and for which you can tolerate mere adequacy. I want my garbageman to be motivated by profit, because society would collapse in a week without garbage collection. For things that need to be done well, there's no alternative other than finding someone who actually gives a shit regardless of the profit involved (which isn't to say that they must live in poverty, but rather that profit must be a secondary motivation rather than a primary one; find someone who wants to be doing the work even if they weren't getting paid).
On the margin, there may be many people working in, for example, finance who would make highly valuable contributions to open source projects if they were financially incentivized.
What is effectively being argued here is that we should oppose grass roots subsidy of important public work just because there was a specific incentive issue in a specific initiative. The code doesn't care why you wrote it. Maybe some bad code gets subsidized. That's ok - don't use it.
Very similar: some guy created a video and a lot of people submit useless PRs, except for a T-shirt instead of crypto.
EDIT: Except, Hacktoberfest ran since 2014 and there was never an issue before the video, which (unintentionally) brought it a lot more attention and gave a bad example of an “improvement”. Incentives can be good if designed and explained carefully.
Make of this what you will, but I call immediate scam.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220323005603/en/Tea...
> March 23, 2022
Looks like this is one of the last turds from the crypto diarrheafest making its way through the pipes. Good riddance.
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That fact paired with the fact that the guy behind Tea.xyz is the same as the guy behind Homebrew makes me _really_ distrust Homebrew going forward.
He's taking money from known crypto scammers to launch AI-generated nonsense (the pkgx nonsense from HN the other day) and abusive crypto-monetization patterns (this tea.xyz thing).
His biggest claim to fame was...a ripoff of the Arch User Repository, which is useful, sure, but not something that instills a lot of confidence in the "wants to promote himself off the back of others' work" aspect of his résumé thus far.
Gonna look into good alternatives to Homebrew.
Mike McQuaid, Homebrew Project Leader and Homebrew maintainer for the last 15 years.
Being VC backed means accepting an additional constraint: it has to be remotely controllable by a third party, and if the user revokes trust in that third party, it has to become useless. Otherwise there's nothing to own, nothing to leverage for a return on your investment.
That places some pretty severe limits on how trustworthy such a piece of software can be. There's tremendous value in getting the economics right, even if we haven't yet.
Kinda off-topic but when this happened it was the beginning of the end for my use of Keybase. Stopped using it entirely after the Zoom acquisition, and I'd used their chat very heavily early on -- but trust was lost.
They could say "People can contribute to a project by just staking tokens against a project" but staking tokens isn't a stream of new money. New money needs to be coming from somewhere.
Tokens can be created out of thin air, but money can't be.
It doesn't look good to me through a "game theory lens".
I thought we have learned from the crypto hype that stuff like tea.xyz and others in the crypto / blockchain nonsense space are setup for investors to dump tokens on others trying to make money out of it.
It is unfortunate that this is now targeting open source developers and it is even more disappointing that this is made from the creator of Homebrew.
Who is the customer of this and why?, there is still no use case at all. A solution in a perpetual search of a non existent problem.
Shame.
Max hasn’t been involved with Homebrew for over a decade.
imo that give them some more credibility or at least makes me think that they probably are well intentioned
I would say the opposite. Homebrew isn't a broadly well-respected project from a purely engineering perspective (i.e. by anyone who's engaged with it in earnest) - it gets contributions because it has user-capture / network effect, but there's a lot of contributors would would prefer to be publishing packages on a more nicely stewarded platform.
I used MacPorts for many years without many issues - only recently just started to get a little too frustrated with some new utils that were Homebrew-only & finally capitulated. So you can get very far with MacPorts (& it's a far better system than brew).
Be great to see something gain traction over Homebrew but I have a feeling many devs out there will only ever bother publishing on a single distribution platform for MacOS (whatever happens to be most popular).
Yes and no. It's certainly true of most packages but the smaller the package, the more likely it is that the distro package maintainer will be [a/the] maintainer of the original project, even with Debian.
The same is true of Homebrew, etc. - most of the package maintainers aren't the original project maintainers, which is ultimately why MacPorts support is so comprehensive despite not having anywhere near the same user capture as Homebrew. But the places you see frustrating gaps will always be at the edges, where it may be the original project creator creating a Homebrew package & no-one packaging it for anything else.
I install it on my Linux devices too. It allows me to easily install up-to-date versions of just about any software I care about.
It's clearly gained popularity for good reasons - it's an API that is very user-oriented, with reasonably good UX for most people. The downsides are mainly related to issues users don't see (i.e. security).
Mike McQuaid, Homebrew Project Leader and Homebrew maintainer for the last 15 years.
The OSS CV thing can be a double-edged sword for all involved parties.
Unfortunately, this isn’t true. The comment you’re replying to was in response to someone saying they’d reconsider using Homebrew now over this, and that sentiment has been common in social media.
Sry but if someone in 2024 still thinks web3 is an answer...
(of course, nothing to do with https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-bla... )