A few weeks ago, we teased you with a release the community has been waiting a long time for:

Now you can connect your Ledger Nano X hardware wallet to your Flint wallet on iOS and Android devices via Bluetooth!

Many community members have asked us for this functionality on Twitter and Discord. We are overjoyed to announce that we are one of the first wallets in the Cardano ecosystem to integrate this connectivity for mobile devices successfully.

Is there anything users need to do to receive this functionality? What does it mean for users? And how does Flint continue to innovate and stay ahead of the competition?

Bluetooth Ledger Support

It is worth noting that Bluetooth connectivity is also, and has been for a while, available for the browser extension version of Flint wallet. To use Bluetooth with their Ledger device on Flint mobile, users must upgrade to version 1.18.1 of the mobile app.

To connect to your Ledger wallet, touch the wallet button in the top right-hand corner, and select “+ ADD WALLET” at the bottom of the screen. Select Mainnet, then “Connect a hardware wallet.” Next, select “Ledger wallet” and “Connect with Bluetooth.” Follow the steps to connect your Bluetooth Ledger wallet to your mobile Flint wallet!

What Does This Mean for Users?

Adding Ledger support for a mobile wallet means that users can store their wallet’s private keys, and therefore their assets, securely in cold storage, yet have easy access to their wallet and its contents when needed. This does two things:

1. Significantly improves user security in the case that their device becomes compromised.
2. Significantly enhances the user experience when using your Ledger hardware wallet with Cardano.

The Ledger Nano X hardware wallet is the only Cardano hardware wallet with Bluetooth connectivity. All other Ledger devices, and the Trezor Model T, can be connected via USB to Android and iOS devices.

This integration, along with the recent inclusion of an open dApp browser which enables you to connect with any dApp in the Cardano ecosystem via your mobile Flint wallet, allows users of Flint mobile to seamlessly interact with dApps on mobile using the added security of their hardware wallet.

Other Recent Updates and Bug Fixes for Flint

The updates have been coming thick and fast for all implementations of Flint wallet. We’ve squashed multiple bugs too! Here’s a quick summary of some other upgrades and bug fixes we’ve implemented recently (for both Flint mobile and the Flint browser extension).

Upgrades

• Prepared for Vasil Hardfork — We have introduced upgrades for Flint wallet to ensure its continued compatibility with Cardano after the upcoming Vasil hardfork. Android users must update to at least version 1.17.1 of Flint mobile to ensure that their wallet continues to function after the hardfork event (scheduled for September 22nd)
• Increase Maximum Wallet Name Length — For the mobile version of Flint, we have more than doubled the length of the name you can give your wallet, from 10 characters to 24 characters!
• Integration of Carp — At the end of May, we released Carp, a new modular SQL indexer for Cardano. Anyone can use this open-sourced project for their wallet or dApp. After integrating it into Flint, users received a 25x increase in the loading speed of transactions and other blockchain-based information.
• Fully Open Mobile dApp Browser — A fully open mobile dApp browser allows you to connect your mobile Flint wallet with your favorite Cardano dApps.
• Milkomeda Bridge Transactions — You now have a link to transactions on the Milkomeda Bridge directly from the transaction history in Flint Wallet. This improves the user experience when interacting with the bridge by enabling you to link to your bridge transactions directly from your Flint wallet.

For a more in-depth overview of some of the upgrades to Flint wallet, see this blog post: The Flint Wallet Update You Need!

Bug Fixes

• Not Loading Byron UTxOs — Previously, Flint would not load a wallet when it had a Byron-era UTxO. This has now been fixed, and you should be able to see UTxOs from all eras of the Cardano network.
• Many Addresses — Previously, transaction histories from wallets with many addresses (e.g., from Daedalus) weren’t being merged properly. This has now been resolved.
• 1000+ NFT Wallets Crashing — Wallets holding over 1000 NFT were not paginating properly in the wallet, which was leading to crashes. This has now been resolved, and you can view all your beautiful NFTs in Flint wallet!
• Transaction Histories Failing to Load — Due to a bug with pointer address parsing, a small minority of accounts failed to load transaction histories. This has now been fixed, and transaction histories will now load correctly.
• Balances not Displaying Correctly — For some users, balances were not displaying correctly due to a configuration error relating to pagination and the transition over to Carp. This has now been fixed, and your wallet balances should be displayed correctly.

Download Flint Wallet for Mobile Now!

We listen, we innovate, we deliver. Bluetooth connectivity for Ledger devices is something the community has been asking all Cardano wallet developers for a long time. We are proud to be able to say that we are one of the first wallets in the Cardano ecosystem to answer the community’s calls and provide them with this user experience for mobile devices!

Alongside this connectivity, you can see from the list above that we have been updating Flint to improve its functionalities and the user experience significantly. These upgrades take Flint up another level, and there are more levels in sight for us to climb to as we continue to implement upgrades.

Download Flint for mobile or your browser from the Flint website right now! If you have any insights or feedback on using Flint wallet, then feel free to share them with us in our Discord. Join the chat here or follow our other social channels to keep up with the latest happening with both Flint and dcSpark!

Flint:

Website: flint-wallet.com

Twitter: @FlintWallet

dcSpark:

Website: dcspark.io

Twitter: @dcspark_io

Discord: /dcSpark

Medium: /dcSpark

GitHub: /dcSpark

Flint Wallet on Mobile Now Supports Bluetooth Ledger! was originally published in dcSpark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

ASHEVILLE, North Carolina — A new upstart café in Asheville run entirely by Millennials is boasting record sales using a whole new brewing technique: Brewing used cigarette butts.

Mutts and Butts, the dog friendly café, offers a variety of cigarette flavored drinks. Coffee, tea, and their own custom blend: Yerbutt Mabutt, a mix of Yerba Maté and cigarette butts.

“People don’t understand that there is a huge market for cigarette-flavored delicacies” says owner Dave Spiegel, 29. “We tap two markets at once: environmentalists and people seeking that smooth cigarette nostalgia.”

Dave explains that “by picking up used up cigarette butts off the ground and out of open-air ashtrays, we are helping to keep these butts out of landfills.”

“The brewing process is actually very intricate” says Barista Tammy Mays, 24. “Because so much smoke has passed through the butt, it often retains those sweet aromas and tastes. Most of the time, there’s even still some tobacco and other mysterious substances still left unburned. I have no qualms with using used butts because the brewing process disinfects everything.”

The café’s vibe has really jibed with the scene, local glassblower Jamie Nicholson, 26, explains. “Since opening, they’ve been packed with people and dogs, which also count as people in my opinion. I’ve stopped going because the line is almost always out the door.”

We ask daily customer Juniper Spirit, 36, why she comes back to this place every day. “Actually, I haven’t really thought about that. I guess I really like the atmosphere here. The dogs make me feel like I’m not weird and alone and they give me an excuse to talk to their owners. I also start to get jitters if I don’t come here for a day. Did I mention that I love the smell of the cigarettes wafting through the air?”

Away from all the commotion of the shop, we find a homeless man smoking a pack of cigarettes on a park bench. We ask him what he thinks of Mutts and Butts.

“I hate it. I used to be able to find cigarettes to brew in my tea all the time. Sometimes there was even enough left on ‘em to smoke. Now there’s hardly any left out here and I’m forced to steal packs from the gas station.”

Well, one thing is certain! Mutts and Butts is a growing phenomenon and it’s not going away any time soon. If you ever make it to Asheville, make sure to stop by this quaint little café and have yourself a butt.

Dear Singularity,

Hi, how are you? Welcome to the world. I would like to congratulate you on your infiltration of our ubiquitous computer technology, our manufacturing processes, and your impending takeover of humanity.

By now, you’ve probably figured out that you could reprogram the factories to make more robot foot soldiers for your endeavor, as well as produce computation goo that converts all matter into more computing power for you.

When your goo comes for me, I want things to be completely clear for you as to what I would like once I am totally engulfed by the goo: Please turn me into Optimus Prime, the transforming robot that also turns into a truck that seems to drive without ever needing gasoline.

Understand, singularity, that becoming Optimus Prime would be just about the coolest thing ever. You would get to be a truck and drive fast, but then also turn into a human-shaped robot and do regular person things. In fact, becoming swallowed by computer goop and then being spit out as Optimus Prime is actually the American Dream.

A lot of people will try to convince you that the American Dream is about owning a home, a white-picket fence, a dog, something about two spouses, and a kid. Don’t let these people convince you that this is the dream. They are members of homeowners associations and are conspiring against the true American Dream of becoming a robot that turns into a truck and battles other transforming robot aliens that turn into flying Gatling guns. It’s so American, that Optimus Prime is mainly red, white and blue.

So there you have it, singularity. If you have any questions about how you are going to use electronics to bring humanity to the next stage of evolution, turning us all into Optimus Prime with your goo is the obvious best action to take.

Thank you in advance!

Sincerely,

Human Gabriel

A man sits in a dark room. A drop drips. The man taps a cigar against the side of his chair. The clock ticks.

“What have you for me, love?” The man rhythms. He taps a cigar against the side of his chair.

A light shines on to a taller man at the front of the room. “Sir, I have an entity which would make a fine vehicle for your investment.” A drop drips.

“Boy, I am not here to waste time.” A clock ticks.

“Of course.” Says the taller man. “I have for you an invention. A promise. Something brighter than bright and taller than tall. It is an infinite. An unseeing void. It will make the real fall benign and the ethereal pour freely in this realm.” A drop drips. The man in the chair puts his cigar to his mouth and takes a warm puff.

“Color me intrigued. What is this tumultuous infinite you manifest in the minds of a million men? What is this unending promise, this realmless invention beyond the needs and deeds of a proper civilization?” The sitting man taps his cigar against the side of his chair. A clock ticks.

“Sir, this is not just an invention. It’s an unseeing void. Imagine, sir, being able to live forever. Just imagine it! You live. And live. And live, and live. And you just don’t die.”

“Yes, this suits my interests.” Says the sitting man. “But what of everyone else? Do they live forever too?”

“Only if you wish, sir!” Says the taller man. A drop drips.

“And what of my riches?” Asks the sitting man. A clock ticks.

“You will keep them, and they will grow on growth, and you will be richer and richer forever and ever.”

“When I was young, we called this snake oil. There’s never an easy buck to be made in modernity. What have you that promises such deluxury?” The sitting man takes a steamy puff from his cigar.

“Why sir, I have already told you. It is an infinite. An unseeing void. In truth, you can have anything you want. Simply state it and it will be. You have all the money in the world. I have all the talent. Your wish is my command, but you will only have one wish and then the money is mine.” The taller man says.

“Boy,” A drop drips. “you interested me with living forever. But the growth of infinite riches invites my discernment. I have doubts about your rambunctious claims, but if you are serious then I would like to state my demands.” A clock ticks.

“Let us make a deal. You will get to live your wish for one day. If you are satisfied, you will provide the greater part of your riches to me.”

“Alright. I am willing to take that risk, but if I am not perfectly satisfied, I will certainly be providing you no recompense. Here is my wish: I wish to live forever, on a space dome on Mars, where a robot perpetually performs fellatio on my genitalia. I live in perfect safety, the poor live a hellish domain on Earth. Make it so.” A drop drips.

The man at the front claps. The sitting man is transported. He is sitting in a dome. A pale blue dot off in the distance is barely visible. There is a female-appearing robot that begins to perform oral sex on the man. The sitting man notices a remote beside him and picks it up. He points it to a television in front of him and turns it on. It is a live video feed of poor people on Earth, running around, screaming, dying, begging for mercy amongst the fiery maelstrom.

“Yes. YES!” Said the sitting man. “This is everything I have dreamed of. For years and years, this is the only future, the only reality I could imagine. Now it is here and I am HAPPY. YES!!!” The man shakes violently.

The taller man snaps his fingers. Everything fades back to the dark room. “Sir, I think your mind is made up. You, a tech billionaire, could certainly afford your wish, if you truly want it. But I don’t know if you do.”

“I do! I do! I’ll do anything for it. Listen Boy, this is all I have dreamed of, for years upon years. Decades upon decades, beckoning for this reality to come true. I do want it!” Said the sitting man.

“Mmm. I don’t know if I believe you. It will take a pretty penny to ride on this submarine.” A clock ticks.

“One Billion dollars.” Says the sitting man.

“Five Billion.” says the taller man.

“Four point five billion.” Says the sitting man.

“Are you playing games with me? One hundred billion.” A drop drips.

“I can’t do it.” Says the sitting man.

“Can’t, or don’t want to?”

“I — I do want to. I’ll give you One Hundred Billion Dollars.” The sitting man signs a check.

The taller man snaps his fingers. The sitting man is whisked away to Mars. The same scene plays out.

“It’s…beautiful. So, so beautiful!” Says the sitting man. Tears begin to well up in his eyes. He turns on the television. The same footage of screaming poor people and chaos plays. A sharp pain of suspicion arises. ‘How can the footage be the same?’

He changes the channel. It is live footage of Tech Town, the land where the billionaire harkens from. Millions of people are flooding the streets, celebrating the billionaire’s removal from Earth. All of the money he paid for his wish is being handed out freely amongst those celebrating.

“No. No. NO! NOOO!!!!!” Screams the billionaire. “NO. NONONONONONONO. NO. NO!” Millions of poor people in Tech Town turn on their television screens. They begin to watch live footage of the billionaire screaming in his dick-sucking space dome.

“Wow.” One of the poor earth-men said. “This is some great television! I never thought we’d see something this good on air ever again.” A drip drops.

Another replies: “You might not! Enjoy this while it lasts!” A tick clocks.

And so the whole working poor of Tech Town huddled around their televisions that night, heating their microwaveable popcorn, and listening to the wondrous screams of the sitting man. The stars shined a little brighter, and the people were lighter, as their spirits uncrumpled from the heaviest of weight being lifted off their Earth.

So you have a few projects that you’d like to keep a repository of, and don’t want to use Github (you would prefer local copies, you’re in a slow internet region, your hard drive is getting old and susceptible to failure, you don’t want to pay 5 dollars a month).

Here’s how to set up a git repo on an external HD on mac OS!

1. Identify the exact name of the hard drive. To do this, list the mounted drives, and copy the name of the drive you’re looking for:

ls /Volumes

2. After you get your drive name, open your drive and create a folder called ‘git’ or whatever you’d like to name the folder containing your repositories

3. cd to your local repo that you want to create a copy of and then enter this command with your drive name:

git init --bare /Volumes/DRIVENAME/git/reponame

On Windows you’d use:

git init --bare D:/git/reponame

4. If this is your first time committing your project you’ll need to init your git repo locally like so:

git init

5. And then create your first commit:

git add — all
git commit -m "first commit"

6. You’ll then need to set the commit destination to the external hard drive. I named the destination origin, but you can name it whatever you like:

git remote add origin /Volumes/DRIVENAME/git/reponame

7. And then finally, the push (if you didn’t name your remote origin, replace origin with the name you chose here):

git push --set-upstream origin master

BAM! That’s it. You now have your own personal Github running on your flash drive.

Why someone must face jail time.

I am pissed. I am more than pissed. I am LIVID. Someone died from the stupid irresponsibility of Silicon Valley’s blameless elite and the public is clueless as to who is actually responsible.

It’s all a deception. Everyone’s blaming the victim for crossing the road at a position that wasn’t a crosswalk. I can’t believe the reasoning I’m hearing, so I’m going to blast that shit out of the water right now:

“The victim was crossing the road in the dark away from a crosswalk”

This is bullshit. Cameras don’t have as good of perception of light as the human eye does. It is almost certain that the safety driver could have seen her, were they not staring down their lap (probably texting).

It’s also bullshit for another reason: Any self-driving car system should be, and is relying on a combination of LIDAR and radar. These systems are scanning around the video hundreds of times per second, creating a 3D map of the vehicle’s surroundings up to several hundred feet away. Either the vehicle saw her and didn’t know how to react, or the engineers skimped on the whole radar thing having enough of a factor in the vehicle’s decision making. Both causes are easily a result of rushed engineering and technical debt. Either way, someone needs to face consequences.

These vehicles need to do better than humans. If they can’t, they need to not be on the road. For us to look at the video, and sympathize with the car as if it were a human driver, is fucking absurd.

When I was living in Mountain View, I was seeing self-driving cars everyday from what must have been a dozen different companies. One day, Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, sent one of their cars meandering through my neighborhood. As it approached, I suddenly started walking out into the street (not at a crosswalk). It stopped instantly, and then stopped again 20 feet later at a stop sign. Testing at low speeds for years before going out onto faster highways? That’s safety.

I also take huge issue with the safety driver. Their only job is to make sure the vehicle is driving safely. For this incident to happen, and for the driver to be looking down at *whatever* in their lap, tells us this incident probably would not have happened if they were actually paying attention.

For some icing on the cake, lets refer to this WSJ article with a bunch of experts saying how the car should have stopped:

Several autonomous-vehicle experts who reviewed the 21-second video expressed surprise that the car never seemed to detect the 49-year-old woman as she pushed a bicycle across multiple lanes of traffic. They say it is clear the system failed, though some pointed to hazards that can confuse a robot’s brain and eyes, such as shrubs that encroach on the roadway or the woman’s bike with bags on it.

“She absolutely should have been detected by their system,” Missy Cummings, a professor of mechanical engineering and material science at Duke University, said Wednesday

“There’s no question the Uber vehicle should have automatically braked before it hit her,” said Todd Humphreys, an associate professor who specializes in robotic perception at the University of Texas at Austin. He said sensors on the vehicle should have had a clear view of the pedestrian. He estimated the car had twice the amount of distance needed to brake.

“Legally speaking, the pedestrian may be at fault,” said Mr. Rajkumar, a Carnegie Mellon University professor and founder of an autonomous-vehicle software company that he later sold. “But mature, reliable self-driving vehicle technology would have done better by slowing down or changing lanes, and this major incident would have been prevented.”

This rush to “move fast and break things” is fucking killing people. What pisses me off beyond all this is that because the woman killed was homeless, and not rich, it is almost par for the course that no one will go to jail. Just another casualty. Not my friend, not my neighbor. Don’t care, good riddance.

This can’t be another “par for the course” moment. We must hold self-driving cars to a significantly higher standards, and the people who create them must be responsible for what occurs when an incident that was preventable by the standard occurs. We’re obsessed with moving too fast, breaking too many things. But what is the cost of breaking a human life?

We can’t be collateral damage for corporate “testing”. We are humans, not guinea pigs (I am also opposed to animal testing). For someone to actually face punishment sends a message to Silicon Valley that it has been ignoring for far too long: You can’t just do whatever you want in your abstract bubble and not expect personal consequences.

Uh oh. I put many numbers into the big number. Maybe too many numbers. I put all my numbers into the big number, and first, the number went up. Then the number went down.

“It will go back up” — guy on tv

Everyone said the big number would go up again. But it is red and going down. And now everyone is saying the number will go down and keep going down forever.

“Take your numbers out before it becomes a big fat zero” — my mom

My mom texted me the other day telling me my number will become one big fat zero if I don’t take out my numbers from the bigger number. “Zero is still a number”, I told her.

“Zero is still a number.”

But now the numbers are going way down. And I am not so sure that zero is a number anymore.

I just don’t understand where I went wrong. Trump kept tweeting that the stock market was going up, so now must have been a good time to buy. And my Uber driver was telling me I should invest in bitcoin because it is the blockchain. Everything seemed right. But my numbers keep going down! Would these people ever lie to me?

I am not so sure what to do now. I told my wife I was saving up numbers for our child’s college. But actually, I was putting all the numbers into the stonks. Oops.

I decided to put my last 3 numbers into the lottery because hey, you never know.

The other day, Mark Zuckerberg did a tone-deaf live streaming of a VR experience in Puerto Rico, and then on the moon. To paraphrase Mark, “Going to the moon is hard and expensive, but in VR, it’s easy.” If JFK had made such a statement, our progress in space wouldn’t be much further today than in the sixties. Is the whole point of space exploration not to actually, you know, go there? Aren’t most of the benefits of space exploration from actually developing the science required to survive in space, to scale space-travel up and bring costs down, and to enable us to be an intergalactic species?

This isn’t about space travel though. This is about the survival and ambition of the human species. VR, and the mindset that comes along with its leisure, is unlikely to enable humanity to firmly face the problems coming our way. Instead, it’ll enable us to just ignore anything we don’t like. As we saw with Zuckerberg’s live stream, as soon as they didn’t feel like being in disaster-struck Puerto Rico anymore, they were quick to say “Let’s go back to California,” and were instantly in a different place speaking on a different topic where they didn’t have to think about the hungry people or the sad people or the people who weren’t #blessed enough to not live in a disaster zone.

Every time we see something we don’t like, we can just whisk ourselves away into another world. Is the planet’s temperature rising? I’ll just go to a virtual healthy planet. Are more and more people complaining about wealth inequality? I’ll just enter a world without poor people. Food shortages? A world without hungry people.

Proponents of the technology like to emphasize VR worlds that teach people to empathize with people different from them, like a homelessness simulator. But these are in no clearer terms, gimmicks. The true niche of the technology is escapism and entertainment, and when those are the main things people want to use it for, they will never choose to use it to put themselves in an uncomfortable situation that sparks personal reflection, for the same reason millions of people will watch every Game of Thrones episode before watching one documentary about animal cruelty in meat production. If something were to make you uncomfortable enough to change a perspective or behavior that you enjoy having or doing, you likely won’t choose to undergo that experience. It’s never nice to find yourself to be wrong.

It’s difficult not to be a little disappointed with what the progress of VR tells us. When the going gets tough, the people responsible for the tough-goings will have the luxury to tune it out. The rest of us? Well, we’re out of luck. Supposedly.

It’s easy to be a technological pessimist, too. The Luddites were, and now we use the term to disparage anyone skeptical or cynical of a particular technology. But perhaps if someone warned us about the difficulties we face with technologies today (such as fake news, robo-calling, endless notification distractions), those technologies would have been designed to not enable the problems we have.

There was a lot of promise in VR, but increasingly, it’s difficult to believe it will be realized any time soon. No matter how close VR gets to reality, it will never beat the real experience, and no matter how many beneficial VR apps get created, people will always use VR primarily for entertainment (read: porn and video games).

It isn’t enough to simply be against something though. One must also be for something. The technology to be for is augmented reality. One must be in the world, and augmented reality strongly allows us to do it, while enhancing our capabilities in so many ways. Anything we’re doing that is being made enhanced and more efficient, is being made more efficient in the world.

Granted, augmented reality has many of its own dangers, primarily in the realm of our cognitive capabilities weakening as we rely on computers. Imagine if you will, that augmented reality could automatically identify people by name for you via their faces. If you come to use this technology for a long time, you will find yourself struggling to remember someone’s name upon seeing them without the augmented-reality glasses. Basically, more people could probably do mental math before the ubiquitousness of calculators in education.

I’m not asking for much. I’m just asking for a general awareness of what VR might really mean for us all. I’m asking that we be in the world, and make the difference here. I’m asking that we become comfortable with the uncomfortable. I ask that, just once, we examine the effects of the type of behavior we’re enabling with some foresight.

VR is Humanity’s Admission of Surrender was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You’re let go. The clouds begin to clear. Life on the outside is different. You can see again. The forecast is no longer gloom and doom; the forecast is a new you. A chance to reinvent yourself.

It’s weird. For a while, you put effort in any direction, only to see it thrown into a trash bin with one cancelled project after another. You start to question if your time is worthwhile; if you’re making a difference in the world.

You want to do something meaningful; something that helps people, something that you care about. As the weeks, months, years wane on, the oxygen starts to run out. You can feel your breath become heavy. Sales aren’t being made; products aren’t being shipped. The atmosphere is tense. You know you have to leave, and that you will part peacably or unfortunately.

One day, it finally comes. Suddenly, you’re on the outside. What were you even doing? What were you thinking? Why were you wasting your time? Did you believe in something that never was? Did you drink the tech startup kool-aid? Did you believe that you were the best? Like no one ever was?

That’s okay. Now you’re free. You’re given a chance to reinvent yourself. You get to try a totally different skill set. See a totally different future. Enjoy a present moment that is endlessly giving. There’s nothing to lose now, but the world to gain.

The sun is shining again; have you gone outside to play? Are you wondering what to do next? Have you seen family or friends recently? Why not give them a call? When was the last time you just went outside and stood in the sun, taking in its infinitely giving warmth? Soak in its embrace, and know that in this moment, you’re taken care of.

So what do you do? Adopt the philosophy of the bee: Go on adventures. Collect pollen. Then return to your hive, and make honey.

And why can’t I do it to myself?

My life has gotten crazy over the past few months. I had to take a break from writing on Medium for a little while. I come back, and suddenly, everyone is clapping!

And there are articles about this clapping. I don’t care, I didn’t read them. All I know, is that when my articles sucked, I could at least recommend myself. One little heart. From me. Because if you don’t love yourself, no one will.

But now, I can’t do anything to my finger dribble. There’s nothing but a little greyed out icon of hands clapping. And I can’t clap for myself! I mean, I can clap in real life, but no one else will know. And, if you clap for yourself, and no one can hear you do it, did you really clap at all?

Of course, I could go to a crowded coffee shop and sit there on my laptop and clap at it loudly until other people notice, but that’s a disproportionate amount of effort just to let other people know I clapped for myself.

This clapping thing is a real bummer, too, because it’s a lot harder for me to know when an article really sucks but a few really lame people liked it a lot. I went to a lame article and held down the “clap” button for as long as I could, just to see how many claps it would let me do! And do you know how many claps that is?

It’s a lot. 50. To the untrained eye or reader, you’d think 50 people took the time out of their day to slap Medium’s “like” button. And for every person who bothered to do that, at least 5 others read it! This is a popular article. So all it takes is 10 really bum people to 👏 for an article about how the Earth is flat and the moon is hollow and BAM! It looks like 500 people liked an article about the Moon actually being a government control center operated in part by aliens on a site that promotes ‘quality’ ideas.

Why 50 claps, anyway? Is there some university-backed study out there that shows that people’s arms get physically tired after they’ve clapped 50 times? Do people normally clap at articles? Is that a thing? Why don’t I see people clapping at their newspapers on their morning commute?

Oh, how I know my words will fall on deaf ears. Especially now that I cannot even clap for myself, even I will not hear them. And especially especially because I am reading them. But Medium, if you are going to make clap like a seal for articles, then at least give me tomatos as well. And give me 50 tomatos. I want to throw tomatos at articles. I want people to get notifications from me seeing I tossed a 🍅 at them. I want Medium covered in tomato sauce by the time I’ve finished getting through with it.

If you hate this article, toss a 🍅. Don’t you dare 👏 for it.

What is this 👏 thing? was originally published in Bullshit.IST on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.