Unexpectedly participated in a class action lawsuit in the USA

Recently, I unexpectedly encountered a justice system in the USA.

In 2017-2018, when there was a crypto boom, I invested a little in a mining startup: I purchased their tokens and one hardware unit.
The startup went up and began to build a mega farm, but it didn't work out — the fall of Bitcoin coincided with their spending peak, the money ran out, and the company went bankrupt. It's funny that a month or two after filing for bankruptcy, bitcoin played back everything. Sometimes you're just unlucky :-)
I had already written off the lost money, of course. I acted on the rule "invest only 10% of the income you don't mind losing."
Since everything legally happened in the USA, people gathered there and filed a class action lawsuit.
I received a letter stating that I would be automatically among the plaintiffs if I did not refuse. I did not refuse; when else would I get an opportunity to participate in a class action?
Everything calmed down until 2024.
In the spring, another letter came: "Confirm the ownership of the tokens and indicate their quantity. We won and will share the remaining among all token holders proportionally, minus a healthy commission to the lawyers."
But how do I confirm? More than five years have passed. The Belarusian bank account is closed, the company's admin panel is unavailable, and there was no direct transaction in the blockchain—I paid in Bitcoin directly from some exchange (although it is not recommended to do so).
I found an email from the company confirming I bought tokens (without the amount) and printed it as a PDF. I attached it to the application with screenshots of the transactions from the exchange for the related period. I gave the address of my current wallet, where these tokens lie dead weight. I sent everything.
Today, I received $700 in my bank account. Of course, this is not all the lost money, nearly 25%, maybe slightly more.

What conclusions can be drawn from this:

Sometimes, you just don't get lucky in your business.
Keep all emails. You never know what and when will come in handy.
Class action lawsuits work and do it in an interesting way.
Justice in the USA works slowly but, apparently, inevitably and unexpectedly (for me) loyally to minor participants in the conflict. At least sometimes.

2024-08-31

Places to discuss Feeds Fun

I continue developing my news reader: feeds.fun. To gather information and people together, I created several resources where you can discuss the project and find useful information:

So far, there is no one and nothing there, but over time, there will definitely be news and people.

If you are interested in this project, join! I'll be glad to see you and will try to respond quickly to all questions.

2024-08-25

business, exocortex, feeds.fun, open source, practice

Preparing a business plan for a game on Steam

Earning millions is easier than ever. I'll tell you how :-D

When I posted my final presentation [ru] (slides) for World Builders 2023 (my posts, site), I promised to tell how I made a roadmap and a financial model for the game. So, here they are.

At the end of this post, we will have:

A brief strategy of our company: what we do, how, and why.
A table with our beacons — successful games roughly similar to what we want to make. Similar in gameplay, team size, budget, etc.
A composition of the team we need to assemble.
A roadmap — a development plan for our game.
An outline of our marketing strategy.
A financial model — how much we will spend, how much we will earn.
A large number of my caveats throughout the post.
Jokes and ~~I hope~~ witty remarks.

All the final documents can be found here.

Grainau: hiking and beer at 3000 meters

For her vacation, Yuliya decided to show me the beautiful German mountains and took me for a couple of days to Grainau — it's a piece of Bavaria that's almost like Switzerland. At least, it is similar to the pictures of Switzerland that I've seen :-D

In short, it's a lovely place with a measured pace of life. If you need to catch your breath, calm your nerves, and enjoy nature, then this is the place for you. But if you can't live without parties, you'll get bored quickly.

What's there:

The highest mountain in Germany plus a couple of glaciers.
There's skiing in winter. If you really need it, you can find a place to ski in summer, but the descent is short, and the lifts are turned off.
A large clean lake and a couple of smaller ones.
A huge number of trails for hiking.
A huge number of waterfalls, streams, and a couple of mountain rivers.
Restaurants with beer.
Beautiful fallen trees in the forests, private property, fences, cows with bells, and "racing tractors" (I don't know how to name this phenomenon better, but tractors are moving fast there :-D).

This is briefly, and now in detail.

Migrating from GPT-3.5-turbo to GPT-4o-mini

Recently OpenAI released GPT-4o-mini — a new flagship model for the cheap segment, as it were.

They say it works "almost like" GPT-4o, sometimes even better than GPT-4.
It is almost three times cheaper than GPT-3.5-turbo.
Context size 128k tokens, against 16k for GPT-3.5-turbo.

Of course, I immediately started migrating my news reader to this model.

In short, it's a cool replacement for GPT-3.5-turbo. I immediately replaced two LLM agents with one without changing prompts, reducing costs by a factor of 5 without losing quality.

However, then I started tuning the prompt to make it even cooler and began to encounter nuances. Let me tell you about them.