Yes, he is a magician called Michael Carbonaro and his gimmick is that he presents his magic tricks as if they were real products for sale in regular stores. Some of his tricks involve juicers with unlimited juice, impossibly packed "mini" versions of real products, a smart fridge that magically fills up with contents you select from a tablet, and many others.

In this one he presents a suit jackets, pants, and hanger that supposedly all pops put of a credit card sized package. (I didn’t show the hanger part, you can find the full trick on his youtube channel.) But it reminded me of how Ark packs many user funds into a single utxo, and how surprising it is that a user can "unpack" their funds from that one utxo.

You don't zap people who use coinos?

I am glad he got out of there. I know what it's like to get an uncomfortable feeling and just leave a place. And it sounds like they were pressuring him to drink alcohol that he didn't want to drink, which is enough of a reason to leave and go to a safe place.

I don't know why he is so confused about personalized doordash ads though. Google probably shared flight info from his emails with Doordash and they just sent him a notification when he landed. But that is an invasion of privacy (which he probably consented to years ago without reading the fine print) so it's probably good that it jarred him. Maybe he'll learn to be more careful about terms and conditions in the future.

I think it is a good idea and has its place

I also think both teams working on it are overselling it, downplaying its limitations, hiding the risks from users, and discouraging safe use of their software by prioritizing a venmo-like user experience that only works when users trust the server. All of that is bad. Arkade is doing the bad things more than Second but both are doing them.

Also, robosats coordinators currently publish all orders on nostr and update them when their status changes. But there is currently no way for users to signal via nostr that they accept a particular offer. It would be great if you could DM a coordinator with an offer id and say "hey, I accept this offer, send me a hodl invoice," and then take it. Nostr devs, consider making this a thing! Robosats needs more devs!

I'd love it if people started doing that and then a directory of websocket-compatible bitcoin nodes was created. Maybe they could signal on nostr. Or even signal on bitcoin's p2p layer, using service bits. It's possible to make bitcoin's p2p layer web-friendly - but it takes work

On that note, did you know the websocat tool can expose any TCP port (including bitcoin's) as if it was a websocket port? Yep! It's got a built-in converter that will do the websocket handshake and then directly pipe TCP data to the browser. Consider running it on your node!