I suspect one of the reasons for the price run up is that ownership claims over these cards now can trade as NFT's. Such cards are one of the biggest volume drivers for "real world assets" on Solana. What the custodial arrangement looks like and how to know they can actually be redeemed is someone else's problem for the speculators. MTGox ... that's Magic The Gathering online exchange... anyone?

The article's basis of comparison, Twitter, is a completely different kind of platform. Yeah, if you handle tons of personally identifying data you do need a bigger staff (though even Twitter was bloated before Musk took a chainsaw to the payroll). If you have a Si Valley blitzscaling business model to justify a giant series-A valuation, then you need staff for that.

Or don't handle PII, be reasonable with the technical scope of your platform, and have a smaller staff. Bitcoin, for example, was coded by a single person (or at most a tiny group). Even today there are only about 30 people actively writing code for it. You don't need a big team if you link to standard libraries and don't bloat up with gratuitous features.

I would say the future of mass scale social media is to die out. The one, big, network-effect-entrenched platform is an artifact of a particular stage of technology where the servers are much better at pushing ads than the clients are at filtering them out. This ad-driven centralizing force is already breaking down.

Platforms that grow too big will suffer the fate of a hot nightclub that makes a splash (and a ton of money) but can't sustain the excitement and goes out of business. Eventually the format burns out and the most desirable people find a new venue, or social competition gets so hot that gangsters start showing up and violence breaks out. Social media will then fall into the pattern of social everything-else. Trendy venues come and go, and smaller venues must find a sustainable niche (craft beer, decent pool tables, or what have you). Slashdot, after all, is still here. I'm glad they didn't try to get too big back in their heyday.

Hey, at least the legislature voted on something. In New York, an unelected bureaucrat just imposed a suffocating regulatory regime by fiat, and then got a seat on the board of one of the worst ponzi schemers in the industry.

One point I have not seen so far is a rebuttal of the notion that Bitcoin mining is purely wasteful. The resources spent to mine Bitcoin does, in fact, buy something very valuable: it buys security. An ideal world would not need security, and everything spent on security is, on a theoretical level, wasteful. All cryptography (just make it a rule not to snoop), every lock (don't open doors when not allowed), every weapon (just agree not to fight), every fence (don't walk that way), and so on. Enough people believe in the value of trustless digital money to give Bitcoin billions in market cap, so spending something to secure it would make perfect sense in any other context.

I don't think it is a coincidence that New York, home of a cartel that would lose immensely in a Bitcoinized world, and the pioneer of oppressive crypto regulation, would have a hostile attitude to a mining operation, and I suspect that the environmentalist types behind this hit-piece are (perhaps unwitting) patsies for well-connected bankers and their crony political insiders.

The chip-foundry business went through something like this in the 90's, when fabless companies found themselves high-and-dry when they got outbid for production capacity. The solution was to ink long-term contracts with things like guaranteed production slots in exchange for minimum buy quantities, and so forth, of the sort you may see in the crude oil markets.

I would add that payment processing (and financial services generally) is an industry shot through with government licensing and regulation. You are not free to "build your own platform" without government approval. This is one way Jim Crow laws were enforced back in the day: a black-owned trucking company with the lowest bid can't win the contract without insurance.

I would also add that expansive copyright law, in particular the ban on non-licensed multi-platform client software (ruled contributory infringement in Facebook v Power Ventures) entrenches incumbent platforms with government power. I am old enough to remember when ./ commenters were skeptical of expansive copyright.

I made my own attempt at estimating the crowd size while standing between Constitution Ave and the Washington Monument. At 8:20am, my area-times-density estimate was 15 to 20k, with about 200 people per minute coming in from the direction of the Treasury building, and about 600 per minute coming in from the Lincoln Memorial. That doesn't include whoever was getting past the security checkpoint and entering the Ellipse. Extrapolating that means at least 45k by 9am, and the crowd just kept getting denser and filling in back to the hill under the Washington Monument until maybe 11am or so. At that point it was hopeless to try to get a vantage point to estimate directly, but my best guess is that the crowd growth was limited by the capacity of the transport networks at 800 per minute until 11am, so the figure would be 150k, plus whoever was in the Ellipse, stuck behind the hill, or scattered further out.

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By that reasoning 200k total for the whole thing seems reasonable, but figures in the millions are simply impossible given limitations of land area and transport capacity. Estimates of 30k (assuming, charitably, they are honest) would have to be based on photos taken early in the morning.

None other than Eric Raymond made a similar point a couple months ago and points up some evidence that MS is actually doing that.

When in a similar situation, AMD spun off its manufacturing and became a fabless company. That, at least, is consistent with the general trend of stratification in the industry, and from what I have seen from the inside of Intel, the fab is 352 organizational layers away from anyone doing design anyhow, so what value is there in such vertical integration anymore?

Intel management seems to want to have it both ways here: getting access to capacity at the latest nodes, without having to manage the risk of building it out. The result to me looks like a half-measure more likely to fail than either committing to vertical integration or going fabless.

This sort of mentality, that you must co-operate in your own self-incrimination, is partly a response the spread of strong encryption. In the old days, they would just ask for phone records (Smith v Maryland, 1972) or financial records (Bank Secrecy Act, 1970), etc. Now that communication (and increasingly, financial transaction) can happen without third-parties that can snitch on the target, the only snitch is you. If you don't self-incriminate, you will be made to self-incriminate. If they had an informant, they wouldn't need a trumped-up theft charge to search the house.

Not UAE...UADE, which is a fork of the UAE project focused on playing mod's. Check out the manpage, particularly the bits on filter and sampling options: you may be surprised. It hasn't been updated in years, so you have to scrounge up some obsolete libraries to compile it, and the XMMS plugin API won't take it anymore, but it can convert mod's to a wav, and it works.

I have yet to discover a modern MOD player that does sound just like an original Amiga 500 or 1200

You need UADE. It gets faithful results the way SID players do...by emulating a headless Amiga. The source code contains dis-assembled Amiga machine code for the various tracker players. Some of my favorite mod's won't play correctly on anything else (except my real Amiga, of course, but she is getting rather rickety in her old age).

Spot on. I was at a recent Python UG meeting (with 60 or so others) and the topic was using Scipy/Numpy as a Matlab replacement. One of the salient points was that, even if you have a bought-and-paid-for seat of Matlab, you can't share your scripts with those who don't. Those licenses can add up if you have an audience of 20 for your scripts. Python, with Jupyter, allows you to put your scripts on a web host and all your audience needs is a flippin' web browser.

Some E-Gold users got their accounts vacuumed out multiple times over the course of a few days, leading them to blame insiders at E-Gold. Nope, it was keyloggers and the swiss-cheesy security of WinXP. It got so bad that E-Gold rejiggered their site to make it impossible the enter your password with a keyboard; you had to use a mouse-click keyboard.