We had hoped this day would never come, but Session has now entered its final 90 days of operation. If we are unable to reach our funding goal within this period, the Session Technology Foundation (STF) will be forced to shut down.
To date, the STF has received approximately $65,000 in donations. This is enough to maintain critical Session infrastructure for the next 90 days. We are extremely grateful for the support Session has received from the community, but unfortunately this is not sufficient to retain full-time developers. As a result, all paid staff and developers will have their final working day on April 9, 2026. After this date, some team members will continue on a primarily volunteer basis to help maintain Session until July 8, 2026.
You recognize one word in there and because you associate it with cryptocurrency you dismiss the entire thing.
To be fair, it’s a consistent red flag.
Blockchain is theoretically interesting. Very interesting, in certain niches. But 9 times out of 10, “blockchain-based” is code for “enshittified” or “a pyramid scheme scam from the start.” And in the cases where its implementation is altruistic, it’s still questionably sustainable or creates considerable overhead.
I mean, yeah.
But also, goddamn, are we not allowed to discuss projects with it with interest because a bunch of other assholes talked about it too much a few years back? (btw I fully expect to be having this exact conversation about genAI in about a decade)
Of course it can be discussed…
I’m really into (open weights) genAI myself, have been for years, but at the same time I’m under no illusion the space is clean. The vast majority of services are scams, many open source AI projects are autogenerated slop from someone with AI psychosis (if not outright Tech Bro scams), and that’s not even touching on what Big Tech is pushing.
What I’m asserting is that a fat slab of skepticism is healthy in this kind of space. Be an enthusiast, not a believer. I know much less about blockchain, so perhaps I was a little zealous in judgement, but something about this project just raised a lot of red flags in my head like scam-adjacent AI projects do.
Another thing is that the blockchain scams haven’t gone away, and in ten years they probably will still stubbornly persist. GenAI is going to be the same.
You’re 100% right, both of these technologies are absolutely stained by the people pushing them for their own benefit. I think they could be extremely useful technologies and I’m hoping this era of overhype doesn’t push the timeframe of that usefulness back because a bunch of billionaires were trying to buy their 4th yacht.
I’m just really tired of the parroted and reactionary “blockchain/AI bad” comments because they often have no nuance. It’s not the implementation that’s “bad”, it’s seemingly that they used the tech at all.
Agreed on that, too.
There was this one instance of a remastered” TV show, partially processed with GANs, a long time ago. I pointed this out (as apparently this little detail was forgotten with time), and I got chewed out. Reddit commenters either claimed I was lying (when I helped work on it), or declared it was now awful and intolerable just because it’s “AI”… something they had loved for years, way before the LLM bubble.