Month 6 no coffee!
During New Years I reported that I had stopped drinking caffeine, and more specifically coffee. I've actually been carrying on this abstinence for pretty much half a year now, which if I'm being honest is surprising. I've tried to kick the habit before and always tend to "relapse" back into it. I've been able to avoid the daily routine of it for so long that I haven't even had any cravings for the stuff in months.
Sure, I'll still drink an ice tea once at a while, but the ritual of waking up in the morning and loading up on black coffee seems to be over. It's a nice cycle to break because my tolerance would just go up and up and I'd just keep drinking more and more until I felt terrible and would inevitably go cold turkey again to restart the process. No longer.
I'm not sure how coffee affects the rest of the world but it's absolutely not even worth drinking on a personal level. It does not wake me up. It does not allow me to focus. It's basically just a compulsive addiction, albeit a very socially acceptable one. Coffee has done me no favors and I'm glad to leave it behind.
Hive rebrand?
I've been seeing some chatter regarding the topic of changing the name of Hive to something that is less ambiguous and easier to find on a search engine. Makes sense I guess. I thought it was weird that the name was chosen so quickly in the first place without any kind of community discussion, but also back then the name itself wasn't exactly the highest priority in that type of emergency situation.
I remember back in those days the name floating around in my brain off the top of my head was Hydra. It made sense to give a decentralized network the title of a many-headed beast that couldn't be killed by chopping off a single head. Hail Hydra! Of course those are also the bad guy Nazis in Captain America so they can't always be winners from every angle!
Still I think this community focuses on things that maybe don't matter as much as we think they do. Something tells me Hive not getting a constant inflow of new users has very little to with branding and a lot more to do with a lack of utility. What's a new user going to do here, especially at a time like this in the middle of a bear market? Start blogging and maybe if they keep at it for a couple years and get lucky they'll be like me and make a good $5-$10 a post? That's not exactly a selling point.
The world is full of people that want to work for a fair wage. That becomes more and more true every year as a lot of the good jobs continue to be automated out of existence, assuming you live in a country that ever had good jobs in the first place. I've said this a dozen times already: but if Hive could pay people even $5/hour this place would have gone viral years ago. Such things are much easier said than done it would seem.
And I'm not even talking about the reward pool right now. The only way to guarantee wages like that is to have a sustainable business model that actually makes more money than it expends. If everyone attempts to make money in the same exact way that job becomes crowded with a yield of forever diminishing returns. I was hoping there's be over a dozen ways to earn money on Hive by now, but there isn't. If there was we certainly would not be on the backfoot by any measure.
The greater market says get ready for more pain.
I've been vocal about the market crashing soon, and it's basically started on the exact day of the New Moon. Another hilarious win for the moon cycles I guess. We are now trading below the MA(25) and testing support at the bottom of the liquidity void. Of course any price above $72k is actually pretty good as I have no complaints when we trade between the averages (bullish). I simply expect more number go down until September.
Again, these bear markets tend to crash three times and we've only done it twice. A similar crash as the one in November or February puts us right around $50k which would make a lot of sense for that type of pico bottom we are accustomed to given the four year cycle. I imagine I'll be looking to x10 long if we manage to be that low at the end of September. Honestly I might through it an x10 no matter what the price is. I'm pretty convinced we only have to suffer a year of this nonsense before blue skies return.
Should I blog less and code more?
I see so many testimonials that claim that AI is insanely good at coding now. I personally haven't tested them out for over a year so it feels like I'm missing out. Psychologically it's difficult for me to break into that kind of work because it's such an overwhelming commitment, but perhaps that's no longer true with all these badass models doing a bunch of the heavy lifting. I'm sure I'm overthinking this way too much and I should just stop thinking and start tinkering. Classic mistake.
It's great if you don't know how to code. If you're already a dev it sort of helps speed up some issues, but it's far from perfect and you have to hold its hand a lot, particularly if you're not building a fresh app and are using legacy code.
Can it whip up a good website quickly? Hell yeah. Can it set up a complex project? Sort of, eventually, if you know how to design it correctly and keep it within those guidelines.
Where it really shines seems to be converting one language to another, debugging, and boilerplate work that just kinda sucks to do.
Caveat being, I'm mostly talking about the AI software regular folks have access to.
Most of this goes out the window if you're using Cursor. That fuckin thing is amazing. Not perfect, but way less of a problem than all the other "leading" coding AI solutions. ...And it costs a small fortune as a result.