Good morning everyone and welcome to another Inspiration Friday! This week is all technological articles so it might be a bit dry if that’s not your thing, haha! Though one of them does involve Facebook and who doesn’t love Facebook, lol? Anyways, let’s jump on in!
Facebook is back online after a massive outage that also took down Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/4/22708989/instagram-facebook-outage-messenger-whatsapp-error
I’m sure you all heard about or experienced the Facebook outage last week. If you didn’t, then good for you! That means you probably were out enjoying life rather than being consumed by social media. I for one was pretty proud of myself, I found out the next day scrolling through Twitter rather than when it was down, which means I wasn’t on Facebook or Instagram that whole day. Though, maybe that’s not much to be proud of either, haha.
Anyways, if you didn’t know, Facebook and all their services were down for 6 hours! This is the longest outage since 2019. That’s crazy to me! Even their internal tools were down; engineers were forced to use Zoom and Google Docs to communicate.
The interesting thing to me is apparently this outage occurred the day after a Facebook employee whistelblew on some of FB’s internal issues. According to the whistleblower, Facebook’s algorithms are setup to actually promote hate speech if it’s “popular” hate speech. If I understand what they were saying.
Since then Mark Zuckerberg has, of course, renounced this claim as being ridiculous. I think it’s still quite a peculiar coincidence that this pretty heavy acusation came just a day before a massive outage that we have gotten no further details on...
Solana Taps Into Arweave for Decentralized Storage
https://decrypt.co/50718/solana-taps-into-arweave-for-decentralized-storage
I think I’ve mentioned Solana before. If not, a quick recap: it’s another blockchain used for smart contracts. Smart contracts are the new fancy term for programs that run on a decentralized blockchain. So instead of writing code that runs on a server, you write a smart contract that runs on a blockchain.
Solana is by far the fastest blockchain yet, which is really cool! I’m playing around with some development on Solana to learn and perhaps create a cool dApp (decentralized app) as they call it.
This article was cool because with most things in blockchain (and life) there are tradeoffs. They may be the fastest, but this creates other problems. One of which is storage.
Introducing Arweave, a blockchain created specifically for permanent storage. According to them, 20% of all data stored on the internet has been lost due to lack of storage.They want to be the solution to that issuefor web 3.0.
Solana has announced they are going to create a bridge with Arweave. So when people create these decentralized applications that run super fast on Solana, they can ustilize Arweave for any permanent data storage they need. It’s really really cool stuff!
How crypto enables economic freedom
https://blog.coinbase.com/how-crypto-enables-economic-freedom-7dee35d8f0e0
I have begun to really love Coinbase. They are doing some cool stuff as you’ll see in a second. This article comes from their CEO about how crypto technologies are going to help create economic freedom for the whole world.
Tha’ts like the whole mission behind Coinbase actually. If everyone has a currency they can use that isn’t controlled by a company, government, or any particular entity, then they are now free from any corruption, inflation, or any of the other issues with the current financial systems.
I’m sure we’ll see other problems and face them as they come, though. After all, we live in a broken and imperfect world.
But still, I think it’s a really cool mission and this article helped shed a light on how crypto can actually accomplish it.
Coinbase NFT is coming soon: join the waitlist today for early access
Another cool thing Coinbase is rolling out are NFTs! I’m actually not sure what all this is going to entail, but I’m super excited to see what happens.
I’m already on the waiting list to get access. If you want to joining the waiting list out of your own curiosity then feel free to use this link:
https://coinbase.com/nft/announce/1PJ1D7
Anyways, that’s about it for this week! Hope y’all enjoyed and have a wonderful weekend!