"Blockchain" today has VERY little to do with what the pioneers had in mind. Something that belonged to ALL of us has now almost been mostly co-opted. Crypto bros and obnoxious spending were never the goals. This video is just as relevant as ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKHsJHzBen8

NO ONE CARES if your product or service 'integrates blockchain' just like no one cares if your website uses any given middleware. Either your product is good and gets traction, or it's not and it will fail. This was true 8 years ago and still is today.

Use Blockchain if it adds to your offering, not as a marketing ploy. I'm afraid if things do not change, if we don't stop seeing shitty "games" that are evident scams with billion-dollar valuations just because of "blockchain", then the bubble will (and should) pop. 

I've been warning people for years now so this will be the LAST time. We are entering a phase where the security of the networks is being speculated on through POS derivatives. This could mark the beginning of the end of a well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided adventure.

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/stephantual/3HEgQRU

Pleasantly surprised by the large French 🇫🇷 representation in projects dedicated to a free, libre and decentralized Internet.
Standing out was Deuxfleurs, a French privacy suite offering Garage, Bottin, Tricot, and Diplonat accessible at https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/. 

Deuxfleurs include an S3-compatible object store for small self-hosted geo-distributed deployments and exposing your public services in a dynamic environment. They also offer a cloud-native LDAP server backed alongside Garage, an open-source distributed storage service.

Another is https://libreon.fr, which offers FLOSS with 0 data exploitation, without ads and without tracking. From Visio (Meet), text collab (Bin), File Sharing (Lufi), and even a meeting organizer, they have a heavy focus on browser-based P2P encryption.

Finally, https://framasoft.org/en/ is unavoidable in the decentralized space as it offers a viable alternative to GSuite for individuals: Forms, Calendar, Chat, and Documents, these guys have been around for a while and are going from strength to strength.

This led me to discover the worthwhile https://www.chatons.org. This collective aims to bring together structures offering free, ethical and decentralized online services. They maintain an excellent directory of decentralized/federated services at https://www.chatons.org/search/by-service

Note: Freedom isn't free - these organizations barely clock a few hundred bucks a month in donations despite having demonstrated a capability to release professional, user-friendly, secure software for years. Please consider supporting them financially!

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/stephantual/PkrwJla

2 years ago, @Deepmind released the amazing AlphaFold. Many wondered how it would impact impacts @foldingathome  - it didn't. Protein folding is far more complex than you can imagine, and what FaH does covers elements that AF doesn't. 

The exact details were covered by Greg Bowman in the following article: https://foldingathome.org/2020/12/08/protein-folding-and-related-problems-remain-unsolved-despite-alphafolds-advance/?lng=en-US. However, even Greg forgot to point out the most important difference between the two!

Folding at Home is *community-driven* and here to stay as long as the community feels rewarded for its altruism, while the other is a vanity project that can have its plug pulled at any time should the exec at Deepmind decide it's too expensive!

Decentralized, or at least distributed AI with a reward mechanism attached is much needed indeed, something that would combine the benefits of BOINC and Gridcoin as part of one single installer! ⚠️ 

@gensynai looks like it could be that 'all-in-one' solution. It inherits all the benefits of the blockchain AND solves the pressing issue of AI companies dictating what can or cannot be done on their platform (as well as vendor locking, censorship resistance, and much more).

For the curious, their site is at https://www.gensyn.ai and their lite paper at https://docs.gensyn.ai/litepaper/

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/stephantual/Os6yDT5