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Bunch

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In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, the need for innovative solutions to fix our fragmented internet has never been more apparent. On April 5th, I published a forward thinking article on Hackernoon titled "This Island Network thinks it can fix the internet - it might be right", which outlined our pioneering approach to reimagining internet infrastructure. Today, I'm excited to share a significant milestone in our journey toward creating a more decentralized, user centric web experience. "This Island Network thinks it can fix the internet - it might be right" Milestone Achieved: Membership Registration Opens New Horizons The recent launch of our membership registration system marks a pivotal moment for This Island Network. As announced on LinkedIn, this development is more than just a technical feature, it represents the foundation of our community driven approach to reimagining the internet. LinkedIn With our membership system now operational, we're implementing several key components that differentiate our vision: Decentralized Governance: Members have a direct voice in how the network evolves, moving away from the top down control that characterizes today's internet landscape.
Trusted Node Network: Each member contributes to a resilient infrastructure where data integrity and privacy are built into the foundation, not added as afterthoughts.
Pacific-Focused Solutions: As someone deeply invested in digital connectivity across Pacific Island nations, I've ensured our approach addresses the unique challenges faced by dispersed island communities. Decentralized Governance: Members have a direct voice in how the network evolves, moving away from the top down control that characterizes today's internet landscape. Decentralized Governance: Trusted Node Network: Each member contributes to a resilient infrastructure where data integrity and privacy are built into the foundation, not added as afterthoughts. Trusted Node Network: Pacific-Focused Solutions: As someone deeply invested in digital connectivity across Pacific Island nations, I've ensured our approach addresses the unique challenges faced by dispersed island communities. Pacific-Focused Solutions: Why Traditional Solutions Fall Short The current internet architecture, dominated by centralized platforms and services, continues to face growing challenges: Vulnerability to Outages: When major service providers experience downtime, entire regions lose connectivity.
Privacy Concerns: User data has become the product, with minimal transparency about how it's used.
Unequal Access: Remote and island communities often receive secondary consideration in infrastructure development. Vulnerability to Outages: When major service providers experience downtime, entire regions lose connectivity. Vulnerability to Outages: Privacy Concerns: User data has become the product, with minimal transparency about how it's used. Privacy Concerns: Unequal Access: Remote and island communities often receive secondary consideration in infrastructure development. Unequal Access: The This Island Network Difference What sets our approach apart is the focus on community ownership. Instead of treating users as passive consumers, This Island Network positions them as active participants in maintaining and evolving the infrastructure. Connectivity Best Practices: Ensuring Network Independence A cornerstone of our infrastructure strategy is following connectivity best practices for node operators. We recommend integrating high quality innovative LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellite internet solutions such as Starlink Kits for optimal DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) capability. Additionally, we're excited about the potential of Spacecoin's LEO satellite network as another promising option for future connectivity. These approaches liberate our network from the constraints of traditional internet service providers and gatekeepers. By implementing these connectivity best practices, our network: Bypasses Traditional Bottlenecks: Reduced reliance on legacy ISPs with their artificial limitations and throttling


Ensures Broader Coverage: Even remote islands can participate as full network members


Creates Resilience: A distributed connectivity system is inherently more resistant to outages and censorship


Enables Greater Autonomy: Each node becomes a sovereign point of access with enhanced independence from local infrastructure limitations Bypasses Traditional Bottlenecks: Reduced reliance on legacy ISPs with their artificial limitations and throttling Bypasses Traditional Bottlenecks: Reduced reliance on legacy ISPs with their artificial limitations and throttling Bypasses Traditional Bottlenecks: Ensures Broader Coverage: Even remote islands can participate as full network members Ensures Broader Coverage: Even remote islands can participate as full network members Ensures Broader Coverage: Creates Resilience: A distributed connectivity system is inherently more resistant to outages and censorship Creates Resilience: A distributed connectivity system is inherently more resistant to outages and censorship Creates Resilience: Enables Greater Autonomy: Each node becomes a sovereign point of access with enhanced independence from local infrastructure limitations Enables Greater Autonomy: Each node becomes a sovereign point of access with enhanced independence from local infrastructure limitations Enables Greater Autonomy: This hybrid approach—combining blockchain technology with advanced satellite internet connectivity creates a truly groundbreaking model for internet access that is particularly well suited to the geographic challenges of Pacific island communities. Our membership model creates economic incentives aligned with network health rather than data extraction. By distributing both responsibility and rewards, we're building a more resilient system that can adapt to the needs of diverse communities. Looking Forward: The Road Ahead As our membership base grows, we'll be implementing several key initiatives: Expanded Node Network: Increasing geographical distribution to enhance resilience


Developer Ecosystem: Supporting innovative applications built on our infrastructure


Educational Outreach: Ensuring communities understand how to leverage and contribute to the network Expanded Node Network: Increasing geographical distribution to enhance resilience Expanded Node Network: Increasing geographical distribution to enhance resilience Expanded Node Network: Developer Ecosystem: Supporting innovative applications built on our infrastructure Developer Ecosystem: Supporting innovative applications built on our infrastructure Developer Ecosystem: Educational Outreach: Ensuring communities understand how to leverage and contribute to the network Educational Outreach: Ensuring communities understand how to leverage and contribute to the network Educational Outreach: The membership registration milestone represents just the beginning. With each new member, This Island Network comes closer to realizing its vision of a truly community driven internet, one that serves the needs of people rather than corporations. We invite you to join us on this journey by registering as a member through our website https://www.pasifika.xyz/ and becoming part of the solution to fix today's internet challenges. Together, we're not just imagining a better internet, we're building it. https://www.pasifika.xyz/ Let's Go!

Can a Bunch of Islands Teach the World How to Fix the Internet?

The world of work is changing––rapidly. Thanks to the advent and rapid adoption of generative AI, tech stocks had a bumper 2023, with the share price of the Big Five ( , , , , and ) leaping by 60% from the start of that year. 2023 was also a , which saw its shares triple in price. Alphabet Amazon Apple Meta Microsoft smash success for chipmaker, Nvidia And while adoption isn’t even across the board yet, corporate America is sitting up and taking notice. At JPMorgan Chase, for example, the company said it had 600 machine-learning engineers, with AI working on more than 300 different internal applications. A recent found that 71% of C-suite leaders said that advancing their use of AI is either a high or medium priority for their organization, with 62% of executives noting that they are worried they’re not moving fast enough with AI. study from UKG That has led to some companies doing “AI washing”, aka exaggerating the amount of AI technology they use in their products or services. While some companies might not be entirely truthful about their motivations and use of artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies, what is increasingly true is that in an AI future, tech workers will need to upskill. The World Economic Forum (WEF) says that “the 2020s are becoming the decade of development for employees and employers in terms of skills and career progression”. Its most recent identified that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years, and six in 10 staff members will require training before 2027. Future of Jobs Report Upskilling for free Key skills to acquire will include new technology capabilities, but the WEF has also identified key human skills such as analytical and creative thinking, as well as resilience, flexibility and agility, motivation, and self-awareness. AKA, the things that artificial intelligence (so far) can’t do. If you’re thinking about some upskilling, then one great place to begin is (OCW) platform. MIT’s OpenCourseWare A free and open space to learn, OCW contains material from thousands of MIT courses across every MIT department and degree program, ranging from the introductory to the most advanced graduate level. Courses include a syllabus, instructional material (such as lecture notes or a reading list), and learning activities like assignments or exams. You can use all the courses at your own pace, and there is no enrollment fee or date to complete by––useful for those working in busy, pressurized roles. A huge range of computer science, engineering, and technology courses are available, across topics such as machine learning, generative AI, Python, deep learning, cognitive robotics, data science, and much more, all for free. If upskilling to get a new job is on your 2024 agenda, then the courses above are a great start. And your job hunt is made far easier too thanks to the . It contains thousands of interesting tech roles, like the three below. HackerNoon Job Board DataAnnotation is seeking a to train its AI chatbots to code. This flexible, part-time or full-time role allows you to choose the projects you want to work on, involves coming up with diverse problems and solutions for a coding chatbot, writing high-quality answers and code snippets, and evaluating the code quality produced by the AI model. You will need to be proficient in at least one programming language and able to solve coding problems (LeetCode, HackerRank). Software Developer Adobe is looking for a in San Jose. The salary range for this position is $135,200 - $250,900, and you will have either research or industry experience in building scalable data and ML platforms. In this role, you will have the opportunity to build a new GenAI foundation to change the creative landscape and will collaborate with data platform engineers and architects to seamlessly integrate low latency data pipelines into the ML platform for model training, as well as writing high quality, product level code that is easy to maintain and test following standard methodologies. Other tasks include designing and implementing reusable and scalable data-loading framework to support video and audio foundational model training in large-scale and distributed environments. Machine Learning Engineer Python programmers looking for a new role can consider this role at SAIC in Chantilly. You’ll be experienced, results-oriented, and mission-driven, with a specialized focus on data engineering in order to perform data model design, data formatting, and ETL development optimized for efficient storage, access, and computation in support of national security objectives. A solid understanding and experience with developing, automating, and enhancing all parts of the data pipeline to include ingestion, processing, storage, and exposing data for consumption is required, along with a focus on improving inefficient tooling and adopting new transformative technologies while maintaining operational continuity. Python Developer Want a great new tech role? Discover it now on the HackerNoon Job Board right By Kirstie McDermott

MIT Has Released a Bunch of Free Courses: Discover 5 To Boost Your Tech Career

এমআইটি একগুচ্ছ বিনামূল্যের কোর্স প্রকাশ করেছে: আপনার কারিগরি ক্যারিয়ারকে উন্নত করতে 5 আবিষ্কার করুন

Das MIT hat eine Reihe kostenloser Kurse veröffentlicht: Entdecken Sie 5, um Ihre Tech-Karriere voranzutreiben

El MIT ha lanzado una serie de cursos gratuitos: descubra 5 para impulsar su carrera tecnológica

Le MIT a publié un certain nombre de cours gratuits : découvrez-en 5 pour booster votre carrière technologique

एमआईटी ने कई मुफ्त पाठ्यक्रम जारी किए हैं: अपने तकनीकी करियर को बढ़ावा देने के लिए 5 पाठ्यक्रमों के बारे में जानें

MIT が無料コースを多数公開: テクノロジーのキャリアを伸ばす 5 つのコースをご紹介します

MIT가 다양한 무료 강좌를 출시했습니다: 기술 경력을 향상하는 5가지를 찾아보세요

O MIT lançou vários cursos gratuitos: descubra 5 para impulsionar sua carreira tecnológica

MIT выпустил несколько бесплатных курсов: откройте для себя 5, которые помогут улучшить вашу техническую карьеру

MIT Bir Çok Ücretsiz Kurs Yayımladı: Teknoloji Kariyerinizi Yükseltecek 5 Kursu Keşfedin

MIT đã phát hành một loạt khóa học miễn phí: Khám phá 5 khóa học để thúc đẩy sự nghiệp công nghệ của bạn

麻省理工学院发布了一系列免费课程：探索 5 门课程，助你提升科技职业生涯

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background. I come from Slovenia, a small village near Maribor. My education is in Electronics, and my work experience ranges from a market research agency, tourism sales agent to working in an IT company. After all that I started a small transport company focusing on light economic vehicles, both freight and passenger, so I drove cargo and people around and I also rented out the vans. But when I was a kid I wanted to be a biologist. What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do? So it’s called Shuttle Planet, I chose the name because I wanted it to reflect a wide coverage of transportation. The word “Shuttle” also means moving back and forth. So it’s an online marketplace, using demand-responsive transportation techniques, that aggregates scheduled transportation, or if none available aggregates the demand for it, which enables the creation of irregular scheduled transport based on the demand. Any transportation company can sign up and see unserved transport demand in its area. We don’t really set any terms on how they run their business, our primary goal is to help people get to places as cheap as possible (without compromising the quality of course), that’s all we really care about. What is the origin story? The idea came from when I had my small transport business. I was met with transport demand from my customers that was for low supply and demand areas or times, which got me thinking, a wider network of transportation companies and a channel capable of aggregating this demand would surely be able to supply most of this demand. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? A bunch of misfits I’d say. I love the fact that we’re all over the world, from Slovenia, UK, USA, India, and Japan, we’ve been working remotely from the start. Each of us complements the skills of the rest, the way it has to be done I guess. We’re all very committed to making it work, and don’t worry about funding much, really traction is far more important to us " ”. laughs If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? No idea, probably something with Biology or Tech. Or both!! At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics? Well, how much transport demand there is on the platform, how much of it gets interacted with by the supply side, and how much of it ultimately converts. We also pay close attention to the friction points of our UI/UX, because there is quite a process in establishing scheduled transportation and we have to avoid collapsing shared trips. We’re also focusing a lot on partnering with festival organizers, because’ we’re bootstrapped and we want to reach out to people that way, and our business model works great on high demand and supply areas as well. What’s most exciting about your traction to date? That people understand most of the product, that it is a marketplace, so most of the customer support messages and questions go to the actual transportation companies, not us. We are noticing that most people don’t understand that their demand actually establishes scheduled transport, like fixed-route buses and trains, and that this is possible to do anywhere as long as the demand is made obvious and interactable, at least on an irregular basis, if there’s enough demand. So we’re still going to have to work on that. What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why? I’m really looking forward to AVs, self-driving cars, this will make our job A LOT easier ( ). I’m not really worried about any technologies. Maybe “prolonging life” tech, which can in the far future divide society. But that’s a different topic. laughs What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform? Well, I remember getting an email for a competition a while back. Sounded interesting and useful, and seeing the website I immediately liked it because of the retro pixel look. What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself? Oh my, that’s a tough one. I was always very open-minded, there’s so much that I learned along the way, and without it, I’d be far worse and probably on a waaay different path. I’d say just keep going I guess and don’t let fear stop you too much, focus on the fact that every effect has a cause, find out what that cause is. What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing? How bad perceptions of differences in culture and society can slow down progress and put up unnecessary walls, if not approached with understanding and an open mind. I think everyone should travel as much as possible, see how kind people can be even if so different, and how we really want and strive for pretty much the same things. And in our globalized world, what a country does on the other side of the planet affects us too, we have to have open dialogue and work together on as many things as possible. Vote for Shuttle Planet for Startup of the Year, Chicago, Illinois

The Story of Shuttle Planet, Early Traction, and a Bunch of Misfits

is a visiting Scholar at , Honorary Associate Lecturer at , CSO at and long time . She kindly shared some of her time to type together. Here is our conversation: Dr. Amber Cazzell Stanford University of Queensland ERA Hacker Noon contributing writer I was reading and came across, It made me think, what is an existing and analogous relationship to human and the AI that human creates? Here are three options: human to child, human to dog, or human to car. David: your recent story “It is inevitable that in mediating social processes, AI must make ethical judgment calls. And it is also clear that AI simply reflects the values inherent in its datasets and imbued by its programmer.” Of those options, I think it’s most like a human to a car. The AI that we create is really a dumb tool, currently with no agency or moral responsibility of its own accord. Still, the tools are ethically relevant as soon as they are used. Is the car used to visit your sick grandma? Or is the car a weapon in a terror attack? Perhaps the car wasn’t being used as a weapon, but did accidentally kill someone in a collision. All these circumstances carry ethical implications. In the case of AI snafus, like Google’s labelling Black Americans “gorillas,” or word2vec propagating gender stereotypes, more often than not our use of the tool is accidentally causing harm. Amber: What’s scary and scandalous about this, is that we internet users continue refueling the cars with our data, but let tech monopolies drive the cars as they please. The dWeb may help AI ethics by putting us users behind the wheel, and letting us make those ethical judgment calls for ourselves. as “The proponents of the so-called decentralised web – or DWeb – want a new, better web where the entire planet’s population can communicate without having to rely on big companies that amass our data for profit and make it easier for governments to conduct surveillance.” To you, what is the dWeb? David: The Guardian defines it Trying to conceptualize the dWeb can really trip people up because it is so simple, that it’s easy to feel like you just don’t “get it,” like you’re missing something. But the reality is that the dWeb is a revisiting of the vintage internet in which the idea was simply to connect a bunch of computers around the globe. Originally, it was personal devices that served as the backbone of the internet. Way back in the day, if I wanted my files to be accessible online, I actually had to be logged online via dialup, so others could access those files from my personal computer. Amber: Fast forward, and we’ve witnessed the rise of server farms to uphold tremendous surveillance capitalism industries. In short, it’s rare that people store their own data and serve their own sites. They simply use Google search, Facebook, LinkedIn, have a Wordpress site, etc. It is true that these services each provided convenience in a way--they offered user experiences that we all enjoyed. The dWeb, however, is about bringing those same conveniences and user interface experiences together with that vintage internet under-the-hood. It’s about turning today’s average online consumer into the average online prosumer: one who creates bandwidth, storage, and computation as their devices connect to the web of everyone else's devices. Why and how would a decentralized internet be more sustainable than our current internet? David: The dWeb is more sustainable because it is more efficient. I mean this both in terms of hardware, and in economic terms. In terms of hardware, imagine if each of the devices that are lying dormant were suddenly to serve us bandwidth and store our files. We’re talking laptops, cell phones, smart fridges, old Xboxes, FitBits, SleepNumber beds (which are extremely disturbing in their surveillance BTW!). If all of these things connected online to serve our browsing and streaming and shopping experiences, their combined power would dwarf the resources of the tech monopolies. So we can add massive storage and computational power to the world, using what we already have lying around. Amber: But the dWeb is also more efficient in terms of economics. If we bring these devices online and encrypt our data such that only the people we want to access it can access it, the internet of things is sufficiently powerful to keep our information (think posts and sites) accessible to the right people even when our devices go offline. There’s no need to keep AWS on hand. Furthermore, since our data is safely encrypted, companies can’t mine it without our explicit permission. It’s a game-changer for tech companies which will have to pivot away from targeting ads. It will force companies to align their long-term incentives with their users in order to find a working business model. And that nonzero collaboration is simply more sustainable. How will dWeb merge social media and the rest of the web? David: It’s important to keep in mind how basic and natural the dWeb is. Amber: This question is sort of like asking, “how will your identity merge with the rest of your interactions in the world?” What is bizarre is not the merging of social media and the rest of the web, but rather the current system which somehow compartmentalizes our identity and relationships into just a handful of sites we call “social media.” Our relationships and our identities are the foundation from which we interact with and interpret the world. It is strange indeed that we need to set up profiles, import photos, and find friends every time we join a new social media site. There is no analogous process to this when we go to a party, arrive at work, or travel to a new destination. Our selves, and our memories and connections with others just show up with us. They are a fundamental part of us. We can’t leave home without them. The dWeb, likewise, means that each person is their own person and their own nexus of relationships--no need to log in, to create accounts, or to describe themselves. And this comes with a lot of cool perks that aren’t talked about much. In the real world, who we are and who we spend time with impacts more than who we share pictures and life updates with. Who we are and who we spend time with impacts our very worldviews. The dWeb is about so much more than privacy. It’s about pushing questions of “truth” and "fairness" back into the hands of average internet users, such that they and their trusted peers decipher the veracity of a news article, or choose how algorithms function and make decisions (in search, ads, health care, what have you). Twitter, an approximately , made waves by announcing the hiring of a to decentralize social media… I think the significant reaction to this 00.1% shift in their labor force either shows; a) users are now aware that social media is too centralized, and/or b) my newsfeeds’ are too bubbled and it really wasn’t big news. Twitter is brave to consider making “decentralized internet standard, like SMTP (email protocol)” but it has a chance to make the company itself less valuable. It’s funny to think about being a large enough company where 00.1% bets of resources are hedges against disruption by building the disruptor yourself. How do you think a decentralized social network would actually function? David: 5k person company 5 person team called BlueSky I think this is a savvy move for Twitter--although they aren’t pouring enough resources into it. In reality, they stand to make more money than before if they are able to become the first big mover of dWeb social media protocols. Although they cannot mine data in a decentralized setting (except for users who choose to share their keys with Twitter), they can make a boatload of money by pivoting to charge for bandwidth provision (sort of like a telecom company). Amber: In terms of look and feel, I imagine that at first decentralized social networks will look and feel nearly identical to their centralized versions. This has been the pattern so far for companies we work with like (decentralized YouTube) and (decentralized Reddit). As time goes on, and the alignment of incentives becomes old-hat, I expect social media, and the “rest” of the dWeb that its baked into, will begin to look notably different. dTube notabug Specifically, we will see more and more confidence intervals accompanying things like identities (is this the real Elon Musk?) and news articles (is this fake news?). These confidence intervals will be unique to each person, based on their social networks and their own specified settings online. Data mining will be done on a personal level, such that each person’s dWeb presence is calculating insights and making decisions on the basis of their own prior data, and the data of others who have shared with them (i.e. movie recommendations based on similar watch histories among friends rather than strangers). Advertising models will be flipped on their heads--such that users advertise to companies, rather than companies advertising to users. Audits of common protocols will be taken for granted, such that running a Google search will return not only results based on your own web of trust, but also information about how your search results would look different as you adopted larger or smaller pools of trust. Those are some of the things we would regularly see and interact with. All these changes would lead to shifts in ethical conversations about the internet, too. Privacy, for instance, would be a much smaller issue than it currently is, since data would be private by default. Conversations about algorithmic fairness would shift as well. Instead of us relying on one or two search algorithms as a whole, on the dWeb, we will choose which algorithms we want to rely on, and those algorithms will work within the parameters of our social networks to automate decisions. This means that users wield a lot of moral responsibility--what sorts of speech and images will they allow themselves to be exposed to? If they live in a particularly sexist bubble of the country, are they going to expand their webs of trust to counteract that bias? Are they okay consuming and sharing content which is protected by IP law, now that that government doesn’t have a way to know? It terms of algorithmic bias, do you think forcing social networks to go open source could have a larger impact than trying to have other decentralized social networks reach critical mass from the ground up?  It’s not mutually exclusive. But if I were trying to solve the problem of why is this in my newsfeed right now? I think reading how the existing code functions in laymen’s terms could be a more straightforward route to identifying algorithmic bias. David: I think that open-sourcing a code base is a step in the right direction. Still, just because the code is open-sourced doesn’t mean that the problems will indeed be fixed. Facebook, Google, Amazon--they all have their own agendas and interests to serve, so it is unlikely that they will immediately hop to correcting unfair algorithms in their systems. And their network effects are so large that people aren’t going to shift to a better codebase version overnight. Amber: More importantly, though, fairness in AI is an intractable problem, because ideas about what is fair vary widely. As , ideas of what is fair are algorithmically incompatible. It is akin to the tradeoff between distributive versus procedural justice. I’ve written before What is more fair: men and women must meet the same algorithmic decision thresholds? Or the algorithm’s predictive performance must be equal for men and women? You can’t have both. The dWeb takes a moral stance on this. It says: each person gets to choose which definition of fairness to implement, and under which circumstances. Open-sourcing Facebook and Google doesn’t accomplish that. What are future digital inflection points that when you see them live, you’ll think, “oh of course the web is decentralized now”? David: When Steve Jobs pushed the idea of a personal computer, people didn’t understand why anyone but corporations would need them. They already had typewriters and filing cabinets. The same thing is happening now with platforms. People don’t really understand why we’d want to be our own Twitter or Reddit, when we’ve already got a one-size-fits-all version we connect to via telecom monopolies. Amber: We are past the personal computing digital inflection point now, though I am not sure exactly where that inflection point happened. I presume that we’ll look back on the centralized web similarly--wondering why so few people saw the value of personal sovereignty--and all the personalized data science, privacy, algorithmic control, and truth-deciphering that goes with it. I’m of the mindset that personalized ads based on browsing history will decline in the long-term as privacy improves and users are treated with more decency. At Hacker Noon, we place based on relevancy to content (it’s a less creepy approach imho). I also believe people will always have a propensity against paywalls. So the future of advertising… how could a decentralized web be better for advertising? David: sponsors It’s fascinating to think about advertising on the dWeb. Shifts in advertising will most likely happen gradually. As data becomes more private, I think we’ll see content-relevant advertising like Hacker Noon’s increase again. Over the long term, however, the dWeb will likely flip advertising on its head--such that people are advertising their needs and desires to companies. For instance, a person who wishes to get in better shape may choose to share this fact publicly (in essence, advertise this goal to the world), and allow gyms, sporting leagues, and sporting goods stores to advertise products that nudge them in the right direction (and perhaps even get paid a small fee for receiving those ads). So instead of ads being targeted in a predatory way, we’ll target ourselves for ads by opting into ones we’ve chosen to aid us toward our goals rather than luring us into impulse buys. Amber: Very cool to think about users collecting your own referral fees for when they become leads for various goods and services. If you could make one thing about how the internet works illegal, what would it be? For reference, mine would be banning no reply email addresses. David: Amber: I would make it illegal for a corporation to take any action that they disallow their users from taking. For instance, a ruled that it was okay for people to scrape public-facing data off LinkedIn websites. I think this is progress, but needs to be taken further, and applied across all platforms. Currently, if you scrape data from social networks, they send a cease-and-desist letter claiming that you are violating terms of “authorized access.” The penalties for this sort of a ToS violation can be extremely high, including hefty fines and jail time in some cases. And yet, corporations seem to be able to scrape our data with ease and no apologies. I can’t remember the last time Google got my permission to scrape my personal website and add it to their search engine’s repository--can you? Why can’t I scrape “their” data, which is really “our” data? It’s a mechanism of monopoly maintenance. And, indeed, social media giants have sued multiple competitors out of business over just this issue. This sort of a double-standard should be illegal. recent court case with LinkedIn What are actionable and simple ways to be a more responsible internet user? David: This depends entirely on one’s ethical framework. My bias is that, while people are sometimes unsavory, I think humanity is on the whole good and should be autonomous. I also believe that information wants to be free. This optimism leads me to favor actions that support the dWeb, open-source software/hardware, and accessibility. Right now, many dWeb projects are clunky, slow, or inconvenient. Still, it’s easy to talk about the projects, and to support them. Tweet about BlueSky to spread awareness for dWeb perks and demand. Consider supporting dWeb projects on Patreon. As the projects get more palatable, try switching over so that some of these dWeb projects can get their numbers up and find venture capital. Some current decentralized social media platforms we work with are d.tube, notabug.io, and . In digital protest, find and use projects that encrypt data sent through centralized platforms (like the experiments we've done with and ), such that these centralized platforms get co-opted to the dWeb from the inside out. This has been most successful so far in dWeb-enthusiast subgroups of a couple hundred or so, who encrypt all data sent through a group page on centralized platforms. Start one! Amber: iris.to party.lol maskbook

dWeb at Large: “Simply Connect a Bunch of Computers Around the Globe” - Dr. Cazzell 

Serial entrepreneur had a huge frustration. Andrew Hoag At previous businesses he’d run, employee purchases were always a big struggle. Whenever one of his employees needed to buy something, he had to either hand over his credit card or convince the employee to file for reimbursement. Then there was all the work involved in keeping track of who bought what, why, when, etc. “I realized that, as an engineer, I have better tools to keep track of my source code than I do my money,” Andrew says. He decided to build a tool to fix the problem, and was born. Andrew describes it as a single sign-on for a company’s bank account. Teampay , he’d just raised $4 million between his pre-seed and seed rounds. Here are key lessons from Andrew’s fundraising journey. When we spoke What’s your SAFEst bet? As a serial entrepreneur, Andrew knows his way around convertible notes. For this venture, though, he chose to raise through a , or a simple agreement for future equity. SAFE He doesn’t have a hard and fast rule for when to use SAFE or a different approach. But for this company, he was looking for a clean, simple and quick investing strategy. That’s exactly what a SAFE offers. It’s effectively a contract to buy equity in a future round. “Two kinds of terms on a SAFE can come into play,” Andrew says. “One is basically that the investor wants a discount on the next round. That discount may come by saying that the SAFE will convert at a price no greater than X.” Alternately, a SAFE can have a ceiling called a , which ensures an investor’s money goes further in the next round. If the cap is placed at $7 million and you raise the following round at $10 million, the investor gets to buy his or her shares as if they had invested at a $7 million valuation. cap If a SAFE is raised when a company is valued at $10 million, and discount is 20 percent with no cap, investors get to buy in at the $8 million level. “The discount and the cap play into each other,” Andrew explains. “I think that’s a really important feature for entrepreneurs to understand, because investors understand it very well.” It pays to get your story right When Andrew started his pre-seed round, he only had a prototype and a PowerPoint to show investors. “This is one of those ‘don’t do what I do, but do what I say’ things,” he says. The issue wasn’t so much having an unfinished product as having an unrefined pitch, Andrew explains. “The first story we took to the market didn’t fully capture the vision.” He has helped other entrepreneurs tell their stories, but it still took him 14 months to get the story right for Teampay. “In the beginning you want to test the story, knowing it’s going to change, and simplify things,” he says. “What wins an investment deal are the slides you from the deck, not the slides you put in it.” remove Andrew also realized that the problem Teampay solves — managing employee purchases — might not be relatable for some VCs. But pitching VCs who have very little experience with a certain product is something many entrepreneurs face. That’s why it’s critical for founders to learn to communicate their company’s value proposition crisply and clearly. “We were not building a better mousetrap,” says Andrew. “We were getting rid of mouse traps all together. That’s really hard for people to understand if they’ve never had a mice problem. They haven’t had 200 people with multiple layers of delegation, sharing a corporate card attached to a clipboard and writing in what they bought.” One of Andrew’s potential investors was so inexperienced with company purchases that he dismissed Teampay as a solution for poorly run companies. But Andrew was confident he could find a language potential investors could understand. He did so through an analogy: “If you’re familiar with single sign on, you’re familiar with source code control. Yet none of them exist for a company’s money.” Those turned out to be the magic words for some investors. 4 tips on pitching When it comes to pitch structure, Andrew has strong opinions: 1. Keynote over PowerPoint. “Simply because it always looks better,” he says. 2. Tell a story with slide titles. Avoid building a series of slides with generic titles like: The Problem, The Solution, The Business Model. Instead, use the titles to tell a narrative. “There’s this technique of using the title of the slide to tell the main point, and then using the slide itself to list supporting data points,” he says. “It creates a really nice structure.” By doing it this way, investors are left with the impression of a full narrative built from the titles. Andrew says that you’ll know that you’re on the right track when you can read the story from the slide previews on the left side of the screen. 3. Have an answer for the question, “ why now?” “It’s important to be part of a trend,” says Andrew. “Especially if you’re doing something different. Why is this important now? What is going on? Then talk about your solution. Then talk about your product. Too many people spend five slides talking about the product. The product is not the business.” 4. Be selective on your slide content. Andrew recommends building an to your pitch, instead of trying to cram every detail into the slides. “Can you create a succinct story around why this is an obvious, inevitable change in the world?” Andrew asks. “Everything else is for backup.” exhaustive appendix Giving potential investors a fully-fleshed out appendix lets them ask more thoughtful questions. It ensures that you have all the details you need close at hand, without muddying the story. The only catch is that it might take a few meetings with investors for an entrepreneur to identify which questions to include in the appendix. When can you quit refining your pitch? Andrew says you’ll figure it out. “As a founder or an entrepreneur, you need to be constantly iterating your story, and constantly simplifying it. You’ll recognize when you get that ‘aha!’ moment.” Nathan Beckord is the CEO of Foundersuite.com , a software platform that has helped entrepreneurs raise over $1 billion in seed and venture capital since 2016. This article is based on an episode of Foundersuite’s How I Raised It podcast , a behind-the-scenes look at how startup founders have raised capital.

How a Bunch of Little Pitching Tweaks Helped This Founder Raise $4M For His Purchasing Software…

I don’t like bad apples in companies or on teams. They bring a negative attitude to the equation, they infect positive people with negative venom, and they destroy cultures slowly but surely. Typically they practice and create all five of the common dysfunctions of teams, and wreak havoc on small businesses around the country. So why do so many people “allow” and therefore “encourage” the bad apples? Because they simply don’t want to confront them, that’s why. company What do Bad apples do? They constantly create conflict among everyone. They constantly create doubt in the leader and the . organization They constantly make small digs toward others behind their back eroding trust. They allow and participate in the seven emotional cancers of comparing, complaining, contending, criticizing, contention, being cynical, and competing internally. They maliciously obey and set others up to fail. They let you down at the most in-opportune times costing you opportunity and time. They hurt your overall brand in the delivery and appearance of professionalism because they simply don’t care. When you have a bad apple on your team you spend more time soothing than you do selling. You spend more time massaging than coaching and you spend more time “walking on egg shells” vs. building a real culture. Bad apples “infect” the whole bunch slowly but surely and will ultimately destroy everything, including your profit margin or ability to win a championship. What do I do with my bad apples? Identify them fast and know this is a core values mis-alignment. What started off as hopeful will quickly turn disasterous. Address the unmet expectation and the attitude with specific corrections and time periods. Hold them accountable to what they said they would do when they were hired or joined the team. Where there are no consequences there is no change in behavior. Cut bait. Most don’t like turnover and say it has negative effects. I would tell you the opposite. If you have the wrong people know that there are the right people out there if you go looking for them. Don’t hold on to duds. Don’t allow this worry to prohibit you from taking action. Ask yourself why you are hiring all these “bad apples.” Most likely you are doing a poor job vetting the new people and are a quick start when it comes to just putting the wrong people on the bus and then trying to get them to be the right people. There’s a reason people constantly say “One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.” It’s because they can. I can’t tell you how many “bad apples” I see in companies that undermine, back stab, are ungrateful for their opportunities or take advantage of the company they work for. They suck the life out of all the hustlers and grinders. I say we take a stand against all of those that are under performing and get back to removing entitlement and restoring work ethic and team work. Will you address all the bad apples in your bunch or continue to allow them to erode your culture and potential? If you do, then this one is on you.

Shame on You for letting one BAD apple spoil the whole bunch

One Decision Tree Is a Risk—A Forest? That’s Smart Machine Learning

My most recent project was the Connect Four terminal game. You can check this out here if you want. This project was supposed to improve my TDD (Test-Driven Development) skills, as I had to write tests for every step. You can check this out here if you want. It was a loooong project, and in this article, I’m going to tell you why. The TDD Lessons Before the Project Before I got thrown into Connect Four, I had to go through a couple of lessons and exercises about TDD. These lessons were actually pretty interesting. They explained: How TDD works,


What it’s used for,


Its advantages and disadvantages. How TDD works, How TDD works, What it’s used for, What it’s used for, Its advantages and disadvantages. Its advantages and disadvantages. One thing I really liked is that The Odin Project doesn’t force us to use TDD, instead, it just teaches how it works in detail so we can decide for ourselves whether we want to use it or not. The principles of TDD were pretty clear to me from the start as The Odin Project explains them very clearly, and I was actually keen to try it out. But at the back of my mind, I was a bit worried that it might stretch the time spent on each project… and, well, I wasn’t exactly wrong. Starting the Project (And Why It Felt Hard at First) So, I finished all the necessary lessons and started working on Connect Four. At this stage in the Ruby course, the game itself wasn’t hard to implement. The problem was: I had to think about all the tests first before writing any actual code.


It was hard to wrap my head around this in the beginning. I had to think about all the tests first before writing any actual code. I had to think about all the tests first before writing any actual code. It was hard to wrap my head around this in the beginning. It was hard to wrap my head around this in the beginning. Even now, as I’m writing this article while working on the Chess game, it’s still a bit hard to remember all the RSpec syntax. Anyway! I quickly realized that the most important part of the process actually happens at the very beginning when thinking of test names. That was the crucial moment when I had to figure out: What is this test going to check?


What will the corresponding method actually do? What is this test going to check? What is this test going to check? What will the corresponding method actually do? What will the corresponding method actually do? Once I figured that out, I wrote the basic test of course, struggling with RSpec syntax for a long time. But then… BLINK - it’s green! Awesome. Now, I can move on to the next test and method. It took me some time I’d say around 3 weeks? Something like that. But I must admit, by the end of this project, I had a much better understanding of this whole TDD “magic”. The Moment It Clicked (Why TDD Is Worth It) I realized that my project was MUUUCH BETTER thought out. Less spaghetti code


Shorter, well-structured methods


Everything named properly Less spaghetti code Less spaghetti code Shorter, well-structured methods Shorter, well-structured methods Everything named properly Everything named properly On top of that, I noticed I wasn’t wasting another week fixing bugs or refactoring half my code because I didn’t plan it properly from the start. You know that moment when a tiny mistake messes up half your code, and you have to go back and rewrite a bunch of stuff? Yeah, that barely happened this time. Will I Keep Using TDD? Yes. I liked this project. I like TDD. And I’m definitely going to stick with it for my future projects. Less troubleshooting. Easier to understand the code when coming back later. Just write tests in plain English, and you instantly know what your program is supposed to do. It’s as simple as that. The hardest part of all this is definitely RSpec—it just takes time to get used to: Mocking
What to mock
When to mock Mocking What to mock When to mock But honestly? The only way to get better at this is to just keep practicing until it becomes second nature.

My Journey With the Connect Four Terminal Game

Building user interfaces is hard. Building nice interfaces is harder, and building exceptional ones is only achievable by the teams that have the best tooling. Today, we will talk about Storybook, one of the most essential tools in modern front-end development, and see how it helps us in building interfaces. Storybook UI Development Lifecycle Let’s do a small exercise and think about how to build the following interface: a to-do list page. It should allow users to view, create, modify and delete their to-dos. First, set things up: create an empty component and add it to the routing. Then wire the component to the API to be able to manage the to-dos. At this point, we can run the dev server, go to the new page, and finally start building it. First, set things up Now, build the thing: implement various component states. Every time we want to build a different state, we need to update the backend so that it returns correct data to the UI. For example, after building an empty state for the list, we need to create some todos so that we get them from the API and can build a non-empty state. Now, build the thing 🔍 Review Time After all the components are ready and tested, we either deploy our changes to a preview environment or merge and deploy to dev/prod under a feature flag to show to our team. Let’s say we got some feedback from the designers. They asked us to make some visual changes to both the empty and non-empty states of the todo list. Now, we delete all todos, tweak the empty state, create todos, and update the non-empty state. The design feedback is incorporated. We deployed the new version of the page and… found that we caused a regression in one of the states. What do we do? You got it. We will update the backend to return the necessary data and fix the issue. And we’re done - everything works this time. We ship our change and roll out the feature to customers. regression 🤔 Was There Anything to Improve? What we’ve done to build that page was reasonable - setup routing, manipulate the backend state to display what’s needed, review work with the team, incorporate the feedback. But along the way, we had to constantly use the backend API to manipulate the data. Want to work with an empty state? Delete all items. Want to get a non-empty state? Create items. Want to get a state with particular items on the list? Same story. We also introduced a regression in our simple dual-state page. Imagine what happens when you have not two but 10 states of your component. When you have to support every single edge case that can happen. Will you constantly update the data to switch to every state? How long will it take? Thankfully, Storybook helps with exactly that! Let’s see how. See it. Build it. Sorted. Storybook is a frontend development environment. It allows us to build components in isolation, mock hard-to-reach edge cases, write visual & interaction tests, and much more. Storybook 🏖️ Building in Isolation & API Mocking When building a component in storybook, we don’t have to add it to our application routing. In fact, we don’t have to run the app at all, bypassing the authorization and getting to the right page that renders the component. It saves seconds, but those seconds add up to a big waiting time. Since there is no app running, we don’t need to rely on a backend API. Instead, we create a set of mocked responses, such as when there is no data, when there is data, when there is a network error, etc. Then, for each state of the page we want to support, we render a component as a separate storybook page (also known as “story”) and specify what response that particular story should get. mocked responses (also known as “story”) It allows us to develop various states simultaneously without making any changes to the underlying data - everything is mocked and defined in the story itself. 🦾 Automated Testing Feels Much Easier If you tried to write tests for your UI components three years ago, it was probably quite a frustrating experience. Test runners like Vitest or Jest are great for business logic tests, but testing the visual components is a nightmare. Just compare these two screenshots of how the test error looks in Vitest and Storybook when an element you tried to query wasn't found. Vitest Storybook The difference is clear - it’s much harder for a human to parse 100 lines of HTML and understand why the query failed compared to seeing how the component was rendered in the real browser and finding the root cause. Additionally, with tools like storybook-addon-test-codegen, the time to write such tests goes down by an order of magnitude. Simply interact with your story, and the addon generates the test code for you. Copy-paste the generated code and the test is done! Now, if anyone breaks the component, they will know it immediately and won’t ship this broken component to customers. storybook-addon-test-codegen storybook-addon-test-codegen makes writing tests 20x faster! I wrote more about it here: https://maecapozzi.com/newsletter/82 20x faster! https://maecapozzi.com/newsletter/82 💅 Easy Peasy Design Reviews Does this sound familiar: building something for a long time, only to be asked to change a bunch of things? You wish you had shown the result of your work to stakeholders earlier to get some early feedback and keep the number of changes small. It’s easily achievable with Storybook. As you finish working on the stories, say, for one of the page components, put together a PR and deploy your storybook. Then, let your team see the piece that you build and comment solely on that. It will keep your PRs smaller (which is always a great thing), make incorporating the feedback faster, and reduce the mental complexity that you would otherwise have when shipping a big change. deploy your storybook 🕵️ Visual Tests With Chromatic Chromatic is a paid solution developed by the Storybook team. It screenshots your stories and compares them to their baselines (stories captured in the main branch). Whenever there is a change in any of the components, Chromatic highlights it and notifies the engineers. Chromatic main A person responsible for making the PR checks the diff to see if the change is intended or if it’s a UI regression. If the change is expected, they can accept it. If it’s not expected, they can safely fix it before the PR lands. Visual testing catches a lot of UI issues that would otherwise go to production unnoticed. not expected Chromatic snapshots are different from HTML snapshots. An HTML snapshot generated by expect(element).toMatchSnapshot() is a raw HTML that is not parseable by a human eye. Whereas a Chromatic snapshot is a screenshot of the component that preserves all the styles and truly displays what your users will see. Chromatic snapshots are different from HTML snapshots expect(element).toMatchSnapshot() Let’s summarize! Storybook improves UI development by allowing us to build components in isolation, eliminating the need to manipulate backend data for different states. It makes testing intuitive with visual comparisons instead of cryptic errors, streamlines design reviews through easy sharing, and catches regressions with tools like Chromatic. Storybook transforms UI development from a tedious process into an efficient workflow, helping teams create exceptional interfaces with less effort and frustration. Useful Resources: Storybook & their Component Tests Overview
Great guide on how to write component tests from Storybook team
Storybook Test Codegen Storybook & their Component Tests Overview Storybook Component Tests Overview Great guide on how to write component tests from Storybook team how to write component tests Storybook Test Codegen Storybook Test Codegen

Why Every Front-End Team Needs Storybook

The history of Upwork fee changes has been adjusted many times for inflation and alignment of the stars. My memory serves me right, as far back as the sliding fee structure in 2016. That was the year when connections were no longer free. You had to pay $0.15 to play on Upwork. Newbie freelancers were given a one-time allotment of 20 connects for free. The rising talent and the top-rated freelancers on Upwork were given a one-time allotment of 30 (60) connects as soon as they got their status badges. The bundle price for connects used to be like this: 10 for $1.50
20 for $3
40 for $6
60 for $9
80 for $12 10 for $1.50 20 for $3 40 for $6 60 for $9 80 for $12 “Before May 3, 2016, UpWork charged a flat rate of 10% on payments made to freelancers.” Then, in 2023, Upwork went back to a 10% flat fee. a flat rate of 10% In the meantime, new freelancers lost their welcome bunch of free connects. The bundle price stayed the same, more or less. Upwork Plus used to be $14.99, I think. Upwork 2025 Upwork 2025 The month of May is reserved for surprising and special announcements on Upwork. What’s that supposed to mean? Well, the client demand will determine where freelancers stand. It can be 0%, but it can also be 15%. Reddit has spoken about it: The mother of all Upwork questions that’s on every freelancer’s mind right now: Let’s see. “There are about 18 million freelancers on Upwork according to the last publicly available data.” There were “814,000 active clients on Upwork” in 2022. Here are the most interesting numbers according to Famewall dot io: 18 million freelancers on Upwork 814,000 active clients “Upwork has made $4.1 billion in gross services volume in 2023.”
“In 2023, Upwork had made $283.6 million in revenue from Employers all over the world.”
“Upwork made $566,623 million in 2022 according to the latest filings.” “Upwork has made $4.1 billion in gross services volume in 2023.” $4.1 billion “In 2023, Upwork had made $283.6 million in revenue from Employers all over the world.” “In 2023 $283.6 million “Upwork made $566,623 million in 2022 according to the latest filings.” $566,623 million 2022 How much does Upwork make from freelancers? “The total dollar value transacted through Upwork’s platform is called Gross Services Volume (GSV). GSV includes both client spend and additional fees charged for value-added services. Client spend—the total amount that clients spend on both Upwork’s marketplace offerings and its managed services offering—is the primary component of Upwork’s GSV. GSV also includes additional fees charged by Upwork for other services, such as freelancer withdrawals and foreign currency exchange.” Gross Services Volume (GSV) I went through the Upwork (UPWK) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript, and my head hurts. Numbers aren’t my forte. This makes the most sense to me: What about the clients’ service fees? I stumbled upon this article written by a client who hired 200+ freelancers on Upwork until 2022. What can I say? The next time I write about Upwork fee changes, I’d have to switch to an ebook format. this article written by a client

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