There are 3 main ways to make money via social streaming: advertisement, shopping, and donation.
I found the last one particularly interesting as it involves more direct personal connections and thus scales less massively than the first two.
2021-06-18
Social streaming
2021-03-22
NFT art
Some information that I have found helpful in understanding the recent NFT art phenomena.
A good NPR podcast introducing NFT.
NFT is obviously not the first asset bubble.
Beeple’s 69-million NFT, and why the buyer thought it is worth the price.
Aaron Hertzmann’s article about the similarities and differences between traditional and NFT arts.
An NFT is essentially a URL and the block-chain does not store the artwork itself.
As expected, one of the major NFT art exchanges may have security issues, even though their system does not seem to be compromised.
The auction process may be off the blockchain but with reduced computation and energy consumption.
2021-02-14
Bumble
This video of an interview with the Bumble founder reminds me that the service/mission is often much more important than the technology for starting up a company.
2021-02-12
The takeout economy
Ordering stuff online with a click of button can be convenient, but there are potential consequences to our society (e.g., restaurants and gig workers) and environment (e.g., packaging and shipping).
After learning about the charge from a food delivery (tech ?) company during a restaurant takeout, I now try to directly order from local restaurants to build direct connections and bypass these middlemen who can better help the discovery of new restaurants and these dark kitchens that do not want to bother with services and deliveries.
2020-12-31
Install IPA file on iOS devices
After hours experimenting with macOS VM I found that I can install .ipa files on an iPad from a Windows machine (e.g., AnyTrans).
2020-10-21
What can be quantified can also be automated
If the productivity of certain types of works can be quantified, it can also be optimized and thus automated.
Instead of performance evaluation, such measures are better used for identifying repetitive tasks potential for automation.
To achieve human-level intelligence, we probably need an AI framework very different from existing rule-based (e.g., Minsky) and data-driven (e.g., current ML) approaches.
2020-04-15
Electric power flow
After installing Tesla solar panel and power-wall last month, I have been watching the daily power flows among the grid, solar, home, and battery with intrigue.
With weather forecast, I can imagine programming the electric system to optimize the schedules of home appliance usage (e.g., laundry when the sun is bright) and charging from the grid (e.g., backup for an incoming power outage).
2020-04-04
Virtual machines
When I was a grad student at Stanford I thought the idea of virtual machines was entirely crazy. And then came cloud computing.
This CACM article nicely summarized the background story.
2018-12-11
Lytro
The light field camera is a beautiful technology, but consumers find it no more useful than 360 imaging.
