- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Who’d have thought BoredApe NFTs would be such an actual eyesore?
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Shit, this isn’t really that funny when you find out what happened. Welder’s Eye can make you permanently blind.
Some ApeFest attendees posted on X (formerly Twitter) after seeking medical attention, with one person reporting that they had been diagnosed with Photokeratitis — aka, “welder’s eye,” a condition caused by unprotected exposure to ultraviolet radiation — and another saying the issue was a result of UV from the stage lights, leading to speculation that the injuries were caused by improper lighting used at the event.
“I woke up at 04:00 and couldn’t see anymore,” said @CryptoJune777. “Had so much pain and my whole skin is burned. Needed to go to the hospital.”
I’ve experienced this, though I aquired it the old school way; from welding.
Mine was luckily a minor case and went away in a day. Quite literally feels like you have sand in your eyes. Moved from safety squints to welding mask after that.
When I took welding shop class in high school, our shop teacher literally called it “sand eye” when he explained why wearing a welding mask was not optional in his shop or in general while welding. Sure enough, there was that one kid who thought he could get by with his squints while teach wasn’t looking… He was out for days with sand eye and had quite the cautionary tale to share when he returned. Everyone got downright religious about the welding masks after that.
It would be nice if we as a species could get from one generation to the next without needing to see an example of every failure first hand.
The smart ones can
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I wish. But the wilful ignorance and deliberate belligerence of their parents would prevent you from showing such useful gore to their crotch smear.
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Thank you for saying this, it’s what I was coming here to do.
I was laughing, until I read the article. It’s fucking horrifying. Schadenfreude should be proportional.
NFT morons losing their money? Hilarious.
Losing their eyesight? Not funny. Not proportional. Just horrific.
Now, if the Nazi fetishizing scam artist asshats that run Bored Ape were blinded by the light at their own convention? That, in my view, would be proportional Schadenfreude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photokeratitis
Healing is usually rapid (24–72 hours) if the injury source is removed.
So… it’s unlikely to be permanent blindness, just temporary eye pain. I feel pretty OK at laughing at them for that.
They used UV sterilization bulbs as lighting for a convention. It does not sound like a quick flash of an ARC or TIG welder.
There is also a broad range of medium to long term effects that aren’t just temporary inconvenience, and permanent blindness.
But yeah man, you do you. My comment was simply my own perspective. I’m not here to moralize about what you should, or shouldn’t feel.
UV-C depending on intensity and exposure time will eventually permanently damage vision.
I mean, basic, boring, red light, depending on intensity and exposure time will eventually permanently disable vision too.
That’s true, but more of a risk with UV, if only because you can’t see the full intensity while looking at it, and your pupils might expand because of low visible light
nazi fetishizing?
not doubting you, but… go on…
You can do your own searches if you want a surface level dive into it, or you can dive all the way in with Philion’s excellent video on the topic.
Shit hurts. It feels like you have sand in your eye. For days.
Thin slices of raw potato on your eyes helps.
blockchain verified proof that you own a link to the location of some unique slices of raw potato is as good if not better
Something can be both sad and funny.
Like it really sucks for the victims but it’s also darkly hilarious that every single time these libertariany scammy I’m smarter than everyone types do a thing they get an abject lesson in why communities have like safety rules and “red tape”.
This is such a good way of putting it. Yes it’s fucked up, but man it’s also funny as shit.
Karma’s a bitch with a sense of humour
what are you going on about libertarianism? this group is almost certainly not libertarian, they are more hypebeast/streetwear adjacent.
If they were libertarians they would sue the event so much that this never happens again. Unfortunately, this happens at nightclubs too.
You’d think they were already blind with all a crappy art they are shilling for
“art”
what the actual fuck
As a former welder, I’ve had arc-eye and it’s really unpleasant - like someone put sand in my eyes and I couldn’t get it out.
However, it heals pretty quickly, so I’m gonna carry on thinking this is pretty funny.
On job sites they told me that it was permanent, were they fucking with me?
Welding arcs can make you permanently blind.
I mean, it worked right?
Yeah, they were. However, getting grinding sparks in your eye and letting them sit there for 24 hours because you thought it was just a bit of arc eye is a little more permanent, and you get told off by the nurse at the eye hospital while she’s picking rust off your eyeball.
This is false, you can go permanently blind from exposure to high intensity ionizing radiation, which is produced by welding equipment.
You’d have to be staring right at it for a protracted length of time. By the same token you can go blind staring at the sun.
By the same token you can go blind staring at the sun.
Which is why nobody does it…
Infrared light of welding can permanently damage the retina, UV the lens.
I suppose it’s recoverable on low intensity, but they had to scale up the warning because of “manly job dudes” who ignore safety precautions all the time.
Depends if it burned the retina too
“All 5 attendees were treated on scene. Paramedics were originally very concerned about brain damage but were relieved when they saw the name of the event. ‘Can’t fry an egg that’s not there,’ stated one.”
the event’s DJ later discovering lighting used mainly for disinfection purposes had been installed at the venue
idiots
This was referring to a different event at a different venue. While it seems likely that they made the same mistake, it’s best we wait for more info before jumping to conclusions.
Similar symptoms, which include sunburn and waking up to severe, burning eye pain, were reported in 2017 by partygoers who attended a Hypebeast event at The Landmark commercial complex also in Hong Kong, with the event’s DJ later discovering lighting used mainly for disinfection purposes had been installed at the venue. The Landmark venue did not feature on the ApeFest event plan, and the two incidents appear unrelated.
Good news everyone! You have been permanently disinfected!
You’ll never see another germ!
Read the full paragraph:
Similar symptoms, which include sunburn and waking up to severe, burning eye pain, were reported in 2017 by partygoers who attended a Hypebeast event at The Landmark commercial complex also in Hong Kong, with the event’s DJ later discovering lighting used mainly for disinfection purposes had been installed at the venue. The Landmark venue did not feature on the ApeFest event plan, and the two incidents appear unrelated.
Yuga Labs says it’s currently investigating reports of impeded vision and skin/eye injuries believed to be caused by unprotected exposure to UV lights during ApeFest 2023.
Jesus Christ.
Anyway, I’m… Actually somewhat impressed they’re still having Monkey PNG meetups. I kind of assumed every NFT was a scam but this one is just a very expensive buy-in to a cryptonerd club, I guess.
I also kinda figured the people who are into the Monkey PNGs aren’t exactly the ones who go to meetups
I think it’s more that they tend not to get invited to non-monkey PNG meetups. Possibly in part due to their habit of turning any meetup into a monkey PNG one.
Have to go out there and put in the work to proselytize their Lord and Savior Blockchain.
Blockchain and NFT are not synonymous. All Camrys are cars but not all cars are Camrys.
Eh, the relationship isn’t quite the same as that one.
It’s more like the relationship between a video game framework and a video game. Pygame, Unity, or Godot are not games you can play; they’re tools for programmers to build games with.
Similarly, blockchain is a technology for implementing scams; NFTs are one specific scam.
Similarly, blockchain is a technology for implementing scams
By that logic the US dollar is a means for facilitating crime. It’s certainly used for that, a lot, but that isn’t what it is for. A blockchain is for keeping an immutable and verifiable record by way of cryptography. That there are a lot of scams doesn’t change what it is.
By that logic the US dollar is a means for facilitating crime.
See, the difference is that dollars have legitimate uses.
As does Blockchain, which is widely used for such purposes already.
Yeah, you’re hating for the sake of hating with no clue why. I’m just going to go ahead and block you, kthxbye.
blockchain is a technology for implementing scams; NFTs are one specific scam.
No. Blockchain is a technology where you generate a hash of an event that happened - e.g. garage door opened at 7:00am, and then you hash another event - garage door closed at 7:02am, continue doing that for years, hundreds of thousands of garage door movements, and just by looking at the last hash in the event chain, you can verify, in less than a millisecond, that two copies of the blockchain are identical (e.g. the working data set and a backup copy of it).
It’s just a simple and efficient data integrity checker and it’s shit for scams - because there’s no way to hide your tracks when the feds investigate you… as Sam Bankman-Fried just learned.
Pretty soon the scammers will realise they’re better off with cash and paper books which can easily be doctored (or simply misplaced - “sorry your honor, we can’t find records for July 2021 anywhere!”).
Yep. It’s hard to feel sorry for anyone who got grifted, who knew that buying the equivalent of a graffiti’d up CVS receipt would turn out to be worthless.
Bullshit and horseshit are different, but they’re both shit.
It’s all the same to the cryptobros
Sure they are, they’re just always nervous Chris Hansen is going to be there already.
I kind of assumed every NFT was a scam
This one hasn’t yet proven that it isn’t, just that the people who bought in had a lot of disposable income to begin with.
Sunken cost fallacy at this point. They have to keep believing it’s a thing otherwise they have to face the reality that they were duped.
Or the opposite, they know it’s dropping like a stone so they try to keep it relevant for potential buyers to offload it to?
Sunk cost, I guess. A lot of people in the crypto industry are still here because they don’t want to admit that they were wrong about it.
NFTs have a number of interesting legitimate use cases. Jpeg pump-and-dumps are, however, not one of them.
The thing about the jpg ones is that the jpgs can’t be stored in the blockchain, so what is actually stored is a URL to some server (and that URL endpoint could be redirected elsewhere, the server could go offline, etc).
The other major use case I see touted is “own your game objects and bring your objects to different games” but 1) why would a company spend resources supporting an object they did not sell you and 2) could this not be handled more simply on e.g. Steam? (yes, locked into a service, but that’s just the way the industry is and I don’t see why it’s worth the time and effort for them to change that)
I do see how potentially a blockchain that stored actual data, e.g. some JSON, could be of more use. However, I struggle to find cases where just a regular database wouldn’t be more practical. I guess it would be limited to cases where auditability and visibility of changes are topmost concerns, and where it’s important that anyone can have a local backup copy at any time.
If you have some examples of where this technology could be one of the best solutions, I’d love to hear them. The blockchain does fascinate me but I feel like it’s often a solution in search of a problem rather than the other way around.
Blockchains can absolutely store a jpeg. There’s no data size or format limit on an entry.
They chose not to store it.
Oh, fascinating! I wonder if it’s more concerns about the size of the blockchain itself then. I had assumed, clearly incorrectly, that it was a platform limitation itself. This makes the ways NFTs have been implemented even dumber. 🙃
It’s just impractical and expensive to store more than a Textstring in a Blockchain, because everytime the Blockchain is updated with new data, you have to send a copy to all the other databases that share this Blockchain. This will get very resource heavy I’d you get 100000 10MB files each day and must keep them in sync with 200 other databases, who also received a similar amount of data from different users.
This makes the ways NFTs have been implemented even dumber. 🙃
… No. Think about it for more than a second before assuming it was done in a stupid way. If you have to update with an image each time it’s updated you’re going to run out of storage everywhere and overload networks.
I have an example but it’s not necessarily the best and most practical solution, it’s just one very good solution to a problem that not everyone experiences, so it’s generally shot down as unnecessary.
In countries where buying a car or house involves an asynchronous exchange of money and keys or signing of documents, with all the trust issues involved, having an NFT represent ownership (which requires recognition and acceptance by the state) is a perfect use case, where you transfer ownership and receive payment in one atomic operation.
In countries
In countries… so you’re already under the country’s legal system, so there’s no need for a blockchain. You can just use an ownership database maintained by the country. Blockchain offers nothing at all of value in that situation.
which requires recognition and acceptance by the state
Exactly why blockchain is pointless. Blockchain, if it has any value, is in that it is a distributed ledger that is not subject to any state’s laws. That’s great if you want to have a monetary system that no country can control, but of course that also means that no country can help you in a dispute over who owns something. In a cryptocurrency / blockchain world, there’s no appealing to the state, but also no recognition or acceptance by the state.
Yep, I knew you would show up.
You have obviously never sold a car or a house in a country where you have to trust that the cash the buyer is giving you is not counterfeit, or if using a bank transfer, that they will actually make the transfer once you signed away your ownership. You’re privileged to be able to trust your fellow american (I guess you’re from the US) and your legal system.
You can just use an ownership database maintained by the country
The blockchain would be the ownership database maintained by the country. The key is the atomic exchange of money for ownership. In case you don’t know what I mean by “atomic”, I mean that the two operations cannot be done separately: either the ownership and the money are both transferred, or none are. Which solves the problem that you apparently don’t have but many others less privileged do.
Smart contracts are the most obvious. There are a lot of applications. Like jungle said, it’s a good fit for ESCROW-type asset exchanges, but also for recurring transactions like royalty payments or dividends.
Your gaming asset example is also a valuable use. While industry inertia is indeed a relevant factor, consider: why would a company spend resources creating an object if it’s cheaper to support the framework for customers to supply their own? There’s a break-even point where it’s more profitable to outsource asset-creation and trim your staff. What’s better is the nerds who care about that sorta thing spend a lot on games.
And there are certainly others, cases where transparency is a topmost concern. Gaming seems like a fantastic proving ground for the technology: customers expect excellence, it’s a thriving and diverse market, but ultimately, a failure of the technology won’t have serious consequences in the grand scheme. If it proves secure in that arena, it might be a useful technology to incorporate into more serious applications.
Regardless of what you think of NFTs, somebody needs to held accountable for this. It could happen at any show or production. Someone clearly chose the Aliexpress special over safety. This is one of those things where fundamental trust in public infrastructure engineering is destroyed.
Right? I don’t know anything about Welder’s Eye, but I know ultraviolet light is invisible to humans, so I’d imagine that most people present wouldn’t notice anything wrong until hours later. Once you know this can happen, you just have to trust that all the places you go aren’t putting your health at risk. Insane.
Once you know this can happen, you just have to trust that all the places you go aren’t putting your health at risk.
Libertarian Jesus will somehow figure out how to handle that.
I knew this could happen. Result is that I don’t go to events when I think the organizer is grossly incompetent.
Happens at nightclubs too
Though I’d say that this is completely on brand. Goes and does something without understanding exactly what they are doing, causing damage to others who had even less of an idea of what’s going on.
And a chance someone actually knew exactly what they were doing and did it to deliberately fuck over the attendees.
The funniest thing is the embeded tweet in the article that still has a stupid boredape avatar, has the “i simp for elon” blue checkmark, and the classic “[username].eth” username so you know they are really fun at parties while they try to grift their friends and family
Cryptobros are such a strange cult
If people who bought some pictures are renderd blind at a party about those pictures, that irony would be so perfect.
Imagine buying NFTs and then going blind.
But they didn’t buy pictures… They bought receipts with URLs that direct to copies of pictures that they have no actionable rights on.
It’s funny how many people think an nft is owning the image, but you don’t even have that. You have a link to an image.
It’s literally not even that. You don’t own that link. There’s a notice on a public board that has both the link “This is the property of [yourname]”.
NFTs are like those late-night commercials for star naming “registries”. They have their own Access database of non-legally-binding names that people have given to stars. You can pay to be on the list and get a paper certificate that no one gives a shit about.
By the way there are (estimates vary) thousands of stars in the observable universe for every grain on earth, just as there are essentially infinite NFTs.
That’s not true. At least in the case of BAYC the terms of use even give you a commercial license: iii. Commercial Use. Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you an unlimited, worldwide license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art for the purpose of creating derivative works based upon the Art (“Commercial Use”).
However you feel about NFTs… this is horrifying for the people who were there. They’ve been in some cases blinded by this absurd level of incompetence.
They’ve been in some cases blinded by this absurd level of incompetence.
Just as they were to the stupidity of NFTs?
Zing. You made the joke.
The suffering of others brings me no joy, but it does sometimes bring me amusement.
For anyone confused by the low-hanging-fruit NFT comments that don’t actually talk about what actually happened: The event was in Hong Kong and
here’s my speculative opinion about what the likely cause of the burns was:
UV disinfectant lights, accidentally used by ignorant, budget-conscious event lighting staff.
I like that you came to set the record straight, then just guessed. Confidence is sexy.
The article also came to no conclusion, though they did point to an event that also happened in 2017 where this happened and the culprit was… what I “guessed”. I’m sexy and I know it. 😜
Yeah above commenter is just making shit up, that was a different event
Far more likely they just used ordinary stage lights where “huh, if I set channel 4 to full intensity I get a pretty purple, lets use that one”. The manual probably included a safety warning with specs like “21.7 mW/cm² at 5cm and 8.9 mW/cm² at 25cm distance”… but who reads the manual? And even if they did would they know what those numbers mean?
What it means is a “safe” exposure time of about 11 seconds (per day)… and that’s if you only have one of them. They might’ve had 20. And by the way I took that number from real equipment you can buy for events like this one. Professional operators would be very careful using them.
Pro tip from someone who works in the industry: if you see the white or fluorescent colours glow really bright… get the fuck out of the room unless you have absolute faith in the OH&S chops of the venue and lighting operator.
I’ve never encountered lights that don’t have UV filters in them.
There’s no way to control the UV filter via DMX/Artnet/sACN. It’s a fixed dichroic filter in front of the discharge lamp. It’s an extremely cheap filter, as well, so I doubt it would be excluded from cheapo knock-off brand lights.
Certainly on any light available in the US and EU. It just won’t get certified for sale.Besides which, I haven’t used a discharge lamp in years. It’s all LED now, even the cheap stuff.
There is no way “set channel 4 to full” would disable any safety features in a moving light that would allow it to output damaging UV light. And the only other way it would hurt someone is if it was focussed on them, and they actively stared into it. Like, staring at the sun kind of level of staring at a light.
So, get rid of that “ordinary stage lights” pish.
This is absolutely a case of “we should get UV lights”. And instead of getting safe UV cannons for fun florescent paints, they got UV disinfectant lights. Probably still makes florescent paints glow, but it’s the wider band UV stuff designed to kill biological cells (ie disinfect). Which is exactly what it did to people’s skin and retina.
Nice. Thanks for the insight.
I work in the film industry side of lighting and we use HMI’s all the time (sometimes without the UV protective glass if the gaffer is a cowboy…). I’ve never really run into this with theatrical/event lights when we do use them…but then again you seem to know about situations like this.
There are so many old gaffers who have cataracts now because of all of those years looking directly into the hot spot of a carbon arc.
You’re probably correctly blaming the board while I think it was Aliexpress lights with actual UV emitters.
No, some event organizers will absolutely use disinfection lights because they’re pretty. I found the bigclive video where he talks about that happening at a Hong Kong fashion show.
That’s not actually true, if you read the article more closely that’s referring to a different event where disinfectant lights were used. Not at this event.
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UV disinfectant lights were likely used by ignorant, frugal event lighting staff.
That’s some really low tier event planning. That would be like if you went paintballing and the owner included a few live hand grenades amongst the paint ones. It’s almost impressive how badly they fucked up.
Atleast the onion writers get a break from writing headlines. Job is done for em already.
It’s more like using some “long distance extra penetrating paintballs” instead of the usual bursting paintballs.
It’s most likely “let’s get UV lights for fluorescent paints and stuff”.
Except getting disinfecting UV lights (probably popularised due to COVID) instead of safe UV Cannons.
This isn’t even the first time this has happened. bigclive talked about how event organizers at a fashion show setup disinfectant lights for the pretty purple light. One of the attendees figured out what happened quickly the next morning and rushed to the venue to take pictures before the lights were thrown out.
New DRM tech prevents safe viewing without express written consent from the owner.
I have a feeling the internet is going really enjoy sharing the “Crypto fans have eyes burned by NFTs” headlines. It’s a perfect storm of schadenfreude
It is perfect. I feel bad for these idiots, but not quite bad enough to manage not to laugh at them.
“‘I woke up at 04:00 and couldn’t see anymore,’ said @CryptoJune777.”
The guy with the red cap ape profile picture casually asking if anyone else ended up in the ER.
crypto_birb thanking for “great apefest logistics”, while encouraging his peers to seek medical attention ASAP.
Comedy gold.
I usually consider “great logistics” and causing a medical emergency to be mutually exclusive.
Web 3 is Going Just Great had a fun take on this. They showed one of the monkey images with laser eyes and said “All this time I thought the lasers were going in the other direction”.
schadenfreude
Damn I just learned this word today from the latest Tom Scott video. Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in action.
You guys know that bug when lemmy throws a 2 year old post into your feed? That’s what I thought happened when I saw this post. Huh.
Who would go to this?
Presumably people who bought NFTs. If you’re going to trick yourself into thinking your dumb, AI-generated piece of shitty “art” was a worthwhile investment, you might as well enjoy the perks of being in such an exclusive, stupid club.
They weren’t even AI generated. Is there a AI generated at least they’d be unique from each other, there were a series of randomly lead images. It wasn’t AI that made them, it was basically just a bunch of if statements.
AI generated NFTs would also be pointless because anyone could get them or something very similar by giving the same prompt to an AI but at least they’d have some merit, at least they would be interesting.
The “AI” image generators aren’t real AI, they’re just called that…
the “I” in “AI” is not real intelligence either
Well theoretically AI may exist. We just don’t have it yet. Current image generators and LLM are called that but they ain’t it…
How are they not intelligent? You are able to put in arbitrary prompts and its able to return an image constructed to your specifications. Seems you are being pedantic
In my language the ability to abstract is part of the definition of intelligence and that’s something no current “AI” can do. To be considered intelligent the program would have to be able to derive solutions for previously unknown problems from it’s current knowledge only.
There’s a distinction between intelligence and sentience.
The stuff impressing people right now only has a tiny short term memory and no way of really transferring that short term memory to long term memory, so it’s definitely not something you can characterise as sentience.
It is definitely intelligence, though, since it can draw from a very large pretrained set of knowledge with deep relational connections.
Yeah procedurally generated would be the correct description.
But the end result is kinda the same, it’s a lot of similar images generated with little effort.
basically just a bunch of if statements
ah, totally different from LLMs then…
I mean, at a certain point, everything in computers comes down to getting stuff from memory and running a bunch of if statements on it.
it’s just a party lol who doesn’t like parties
The enjoyment of going to parties typically relies on the attendees of the party and how much you like or dislike them. This specific party is full of people who bought monkey JPEGs and turned them into their entire personality. So, presumably, I would not like this party.
The incurably stupid and grifters.
I dislike NFTs as much as the next person but this is messed up. Even worse that it isn’t the first time. And how the heck did they get their hands on germicidal UV lamps without being aware of the difference, and the safety concerns?
Well their corneas are now free of germs
This happens at nightclubs too. Why I always look away from blue/purple lights.
Aren’t germicidal lamps specifically UV-C waves or something? How cheap do you have to be to buy these lamps instead of safer lights. Or even use the cheap lights but install the proper light filters on them, they’re just thin tinted plastic sheets.
How on earth do you accidentally buy medical grade lighting? Like it must have been really expensive and no one at any point that “why are these light bulbs so expensive”. Also, why didn’t the shipping company think it was weird that a hospitality venue they wanted hundreds and hundreds of medical decontamination lights?
And presumably electricians fitted them and their non-standard design didn’t raise any eyebrows?
Literally everyone involved in this story is a massive idiot.
UV-c lights are actually much cheaper than UV black lights as they don’t require the phosphor coating required to block the harmful frequencies. On top of that there was a flood of UV-c bulbs onto the market from the pandemic.
What really should have tipped them off that they are using bulbs is that UV-c bulbs emit a more blue color whereas black lights emit a purple color. Or the wierd smell emitting from the ozone coming off the bulbs.
Yep, UV-C LEDs are insanely cheap. I bought dozens on eBay a few years ago.
Like it must have been really expensive and no one at any point that “why are these light bulbs so expensive”.
We’re talking about people who have absurd amounts of money. I know a rich guy and he doesn’t even blink at spending $10k+ on some things. It’s just inconsequential.
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“Says on the box ‘may cause skin to peel’, these should be good.”
