The tea.xyz protocol first earned an entry on Web3 is Going Just Great in late February, when their plan to reward open source software contributors resulted in crypto enthusiasts with no intention of participating in OSS opening endless pull requests to claim ownership of prominent OSS projects. This spam was disruptive to said projects, whose (usually volunteer) maintainers had to figure out what was going on and then try to stop the spammy PRs.Max Howell, the creator of tea.xyz (and creator of homebrew, though he's no longer involved), seemed apologetic, and promised to make changes to the protocol to stop this spammy behavior.Now, deprived of that avenue, people are just creating massive waves of empty software packages, with nothing other than a "teafile" with their crypto wallet address for rewards, and submitting them to package managers like NPM and RubyGems.This spam prompted a blog post from RubyGems, who wrote that they had to devote time to strengthening limits on package publishing and "ensuring [accounts] didn't disrupt the community further."Security researchers at Phylum also wrote up the protocol's impact on the JavaScript world, which has seen as many as 7x as many packages published on NPM as previous daily averages. "Automated sustained spamming of this volume for months on end is rare and does nothing but cause heavy strain on the ecosystem itself, degrading the performance of the ecosystem for genuine users and straining open source security researchers," they wrote.
who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do
MAX HOWELL is a legendary open source developer. Creator of Homebrew, used by tens of millions of developer around the world. Founder of tea protocol a decentralized technology protocol that enables open source developers to be rewarded for their software contributions for the benefit of all humanity. He is known for his careful approach to software development that results in delightful products that solve their niches perfectly.
what a fucking metric. I’m a lot closer to being a legendary open source developer than I thought.
Max Howell draws back the curtain on the reality that artificial super intelligence will be here sooner than we think, and shares his approach to thinking about how it might impact our future. Max Howell has a master’s degree in chemistry, but after a year in the profession, abandoned it upon realizing chemistry is “super boring”. He began exploring open source coding. After working at Last.fm, then TweetDeck, Howell created Homebrew, an open source software manager that is today used by about 50 million people. He also authored a tweet about the interview process in the software industry that has been viewed more than 3 million times. Last year, he and his wife started a mobile app development company in Savannah.
Wait, the dude wrote that about himself? Jesus fucking christ, I wouldn’t hire him for anything just based on that. “Hello, I am Max Howell and I have a LEGENDARILY giant dick that pleases multitudes.” Get the Howell outta here.
I will quote the entirety of Max’s website here:
what a fucking metric. I’m a lot closer to being a legendary open source developer than I thought.
also I found his TED talk on AGI while I was looking that up:
Wait, the dude wrote that about himself? Jesus fucking christ, I wouldn’t hire him for anything just based on that. “Hello, I am Max Howell and I have a LEGENDARILY giant dick that pleases multitudes.” Get the Howell outta here.
he authored a tweet
boo