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Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

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Re: Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

#321

Post by endgame »

hannasanarion wrote: post #278
endgame wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why I think the cryptobro angle is relevant to the story That's an interesting perspective, and reminds me a bit of the "libertarian paradise" at the end of http://bitsim.beepboopbitcoin.com/ . But the fact that it's framed more as a dunk than as genuine sympathy for those affected reminds me of other anti-crypto reporting like "Line Go Up" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g ). Which makes it real…

Helping people get out is not the only purpose for media about a thing. Informing people who aren't in it is also legitimate news, and can be important if the people outside need to know what's going on inside so that they don't get taken in in the first place.

That does not require dunking on those who got sucked in.

Re: Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

#322

Post by neilv »

asadotzler wrote: post #308
neilv wrote: post #281

This is horrible. I hope they all recover fully and quickly. And that there's some kind of lesson learned by everyone in a position to prevent it from happening again.

Yeah, maybe don't put your health and safety in the hands of hucksters and charlatans.

I've been criticizing "crypto" as much as almost anyone, but blaming the victim of eye damage at an event doesn't seem appropriate.

Re: Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

#323

Post by CoastalCoder »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #269

Normally HN is HN. In these comments HN is Reddit: cheap sarcastic “haha I’m smart they’re dumb” jokes. Very little curiosity or intriguing anecdotes, just “I was smart enough to identify NFTs were a scam from the get-go, so now enjoy your eye damage losers”. It’s a cheap way to feel good about oneself, but it makes us look like what our detractors say we look like.

Sadly I agree. Poor @dang is probably looking forward to the end of this work shift.

Re: Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

#324

Post by plagiarist »

djur wrote: post #313
ericflo wrote: post #279

If you read this article and it gave you pleasure, examine those feelings. I find the generally schadenfreudic reaction to be disgusting. These people just wanted to get together to talk about something they enjoy and you don't.

It's a wonder that there isn't more sympathy for a group of people who say "have fun staying poor" so often they started using an acronym for it.

I think it's funny to see smug people lose money but I don't think it's funny if they are seriously injured and possibly permanently disabled.

Re: Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

#325

Post by hnfong »

eru wrote: post #306
rainsford wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would actually tend to agree. I think the organizers deserve all the scorn and dunking in the world, but I'm less comfortable about that framing for those impacted. "Conference organized by the monkey JPG people" should be a major red flag, but it wasn't a red flag for the target audience for probably the same reason "monkey JPG" wasn't in the first place. Similar to the Fyre Festival, the real villains are the sca…

NFTs, and even monkey JPG NFTs, are perfectly sensible when viewed as art projects. (Not as finance: financially, monkey JPG NFTs are rather silly.) And by 'sensible' I mean sensible compared to weird things other people either do for art or spend money on for art. Compare eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art (and that's far from the most egregious corner).

Arguably Christie's (the auction house) invented the concept of NFT before there were NFTs.

I mean, the value of art may be undervalued by society in general, but paintings that sell for hundreds of millions of dollars is just insane. The art collectors are just using art pieces in the same way crypto folks are using NFTs. The only apparent difference is that there's no physical object for NFTs, but the physical object was never the main value proposition for traditional high value art anyway.

Re: Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

#326

Post by samtho »

dylan604 wrote: post #155
IvyMike wrote: post #58

I learned last night that there are low-cost cards that test for UVC exposure; here is an example: https://www.amazon.com/QuantaDose-Light-Power-Visibility-Tec... They are usually used to verify that a purported UVC lamp is working, rather than working as a measure of protecting your eyesight, but maybe I should start bringing one of these to any concerts I go to.

I'm thinking UV safety glasses too. If you attend with one of these cards, you've already been subjected to them too. At least with glasses, you can have some protection. Unless you're going to wears these over your eyes as protection

The point, I'm assuming, would be to simply leave if those things indicate there is a lot of UV present. I certainly would not hang around regardless of adequate protection.

Re: Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

#327

Post by astrange »

southerntofu wrote: post #171
astrange wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like a way to trick farmers into producing food for you even though you don't right that second have something they want.

I don't think that's it. They have to do it because they themselves have bills to pay. However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt. So it's not exactly a facilitator of mutually-beneficial transactions, but rather a pyramid scheme. Who will profit from the food sale? The middlemen. Who will profit from the little money that the farm…

Farmers didn't have bills to pay prior to the invention of bills though; some of them were subsistence farmers, some ran on IOUs, and some were slaves.

> However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt.

Median family farmer in the US is a millionaire (or their household is anyway). You're thinking of farmworkers.

> Who will profit from the little money that the farmer pockets? Banks, Monsanto, etc..

This is 70s New Leftism "evil corporations" thought, but it's a bad approach. Small business owners (petit bourgeois / local gentry) are more evil than corporations. Farmers, who are largely a kind of landlord, extra so.

For instance, the reason factory farms took over poultry in the US is that chickens were originally not valuable because there wasn't a market for chicken meat for the longest time. So the farmers left it to their wives to run.

Once it became popular, all the farmers sold their businesses to the factory farms, because having no business was less embarrassing than letting a woman run one.

Re: Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

#328

Post by [deleted] »

bethekind wrote: post #101

TLDR; Basically too much UV light resulted in people getting skin burns and burned, red eyes The likely cause imo? Someone bought/used UVB fluorescent tubes/lights (~200nm) instead of LED UVA (~400nm) as blacklights . They're cheaper, brighter and have a stronger effect. Unprotected skin/eyes can feel the difference in I don't think these were UVC, since the UV light affects DNA in a logarithmic scale. UVC is soooo m…

[deleted]

Re: Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

#329

Post by meowface »

eru wrote: post #306
rainsford wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would actually tend to agree. I think the organizers deserve all the scorn and dunking in the world, but I'm less comfortable about that framing for those impacted. "Conference organized by the monkey JPG people" should be a major red flag, but it wasn't a red flag for the target audience for probably the same reason "monkey JPG" wasn't in the first place. Similar to the Fyre Festival, the real villains are the sca…

NFTs, and even monkey JPG NFTs, are perfectly sensible when viewed as art projects. (Not as finance: financially, monkey JPG NFTs are rather silly.) And by 'sensible' I mean sensible compared to weird things other people either do for art or spend money on for art. Compare eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art (and that's far from the most egregious corner).

I disagree. They're generally not intended as art or consumed as art. Performance art, modern art, post-modern art, avant-garde art - while not always to everyone's taste - is usually intended in a purely artistic sense. (And in my opinion much of it actually is good. Jackson Pollock was regarded as nonsense or non-art and still is by many but he's one of my favorites, for example.)

NFTs that start themselves as NFTs, like Bored Ape NFTs, are a solely financial product intended to convey status and something to eventually be pawned off to others for a profit. It's a market, not an art community. Not all artists who sell things they make as NFTs necessarily fit this mold, but things like Bored Apes definitely do.

Re: Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss

#330

Post by TaylorAlexander »

thrwy_918 wrote: post #316
matteoraso wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, NFTs technically have nothing to do with images, or files at all. The way it works is that you write a random string and save it on a blockchain, which becomes the NFT. From there, you can use a lookup table to map the NFT to a URL that links to an image that's stored on the owner's server. NFTs are truly the worst of all grifts.

AFAIK it is often perfectly possible to actually encode image data on-chain, it is just much more expensive (and much less common as a result)

Perhaps but the standard NFT is a URL encoded in the chain. Yes this is as absurd as it sounds.
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