Given Twitter has enacted similar policies and was met with a chorus of pearl clutching, I wonder how long until this is echoed? What this essentially does is enshrine into law the position that Musk took with Twitter, but makes it part of the landscape for all operations in the UK.

Video-game collectibles are an odd one, mostly because so many copies were made or sold and the valuation relies on three things:

- millions of copies made were consumed, wilfully discarded or otherwise written off.
- the Kafkaesque concept that whatever is in the sealed box is a worth a lot, but you can never touch it or open the box - lest its value turn to dust.
- people valuing the box far more than the easily copied, digitally indistinguishable and lossless ability to replicate the thing inside.

The Mona Lisa, by contrast, was a painting that was a one off commission by a wealthy merchant from a revered artist, and whilst you can photocopy it, imitate it, you can never own one thats really and truly the same, and the specific history attached to the single item carries a value. Nobodies thrown it away, there were never millions of them in circulation. The value of the painting is also its appearance and presence, which you can genuinely enjoy without having to lay a hand on it (for the sake of protection from elements).

That said, I still think art, generally, is block-chain and NFT's for the digital generation - rife with bad practice on the sale and value side.

Look at every single other market that is based on notions of scarcity, such as:

- Diamonds
- Collectable video games
- etc etc

The common theme is that there's a artificially scared resource that in most contexts has little intrinsic utility beyond it's theoretical ability to store value and transmute back to currency later. Artificial diamonds have long surpassed the barrier where non-specialists can pick them out, a copy of the games data is easily available for all of the collectables (and our willingness to produce new "mint" copies isn't in doubt). People who have these artificially scarce resources do a range of things, such as holding prices at high values then telling you how thats "the price". Then there's invariably networks of interlocked interests who exchange these products amongst themselves, primarily to push the idea that "It just sold for $10k a few weeks ago, you can have it for $8k now....." to try and convince people they wont be left holding the bag when the market collapses.

It's amazing what qualifies as newsworthy - there's no thought like defective thought, and I'm astonished that a reasonably established firm like Twilio thought an architectural misadventure was worth sharing. Most shops would have pulled out the duffle-bag to dispose of the body here.

TLDR for people - They used an inappropriate technology initially (SQLLite) and switched to a more traditional (Postgres) when it became readily apparent that once you exceed a certain volume of data, or want to start using the system for ad-hoc analytics and dashboarding that the embedded-oriented solution started to show strain. It took much analysis and review for them to arrive at the same conclusion anyone with half a brain would have had at the outset.

In the process of this journey of self-aggrandising re-discovery, there's a few good sledges at "other benchmarks" to try and discourage anyone from using established benchmarks to make basic decisions - which itself is a slightly nuts position to take. The most important part of using any benchmark as a decision is to understand what's actually been tested.

Gambling companies only care about two types of problem gamblers:

* Clear Cut problems - People who clearly meet "reasonable and obvious" red flags, who are spending ten times their apparent earnings a week and loss chasing.
* Flameouts - People who will burn out quickly and turn off from gambling

AI and anti-problem gambling work is generally directed towards creating a 'sustainable' customer, one who loses a managed gradient through their entire lifetime with an operator, never flaming out until the last possible time, but also never hard enough to warrant an intervention. Its the Blade Trinity model of vampirism - slowly draining over the course of years, versus big-bang loss.

There's also a third type of customer:

- Winning customers

These are the least protected in reality, and most easily weeded out. Winning customers can be have their accounts restricted, bets subject to arbitrary acceptance (i.e. not getting set for anything other than incredibly low amounts), or otherwise simply banned from products/promotions, or even whole categories of betting because they don't mean required loss rates.

Just because a gambling company calls you to ask if you're "within your means", doesn't mean they want you to stop - its just the paperwork for people who commit suicide after gambling away their life savings is a lot harder to fill out.