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Saved by @Jacobtldr

Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

 How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.
For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."
One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt
And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.
"Hey patio11 could this happen in traditional finance?"

Ill-timed liquidations can and do, but attacking someone doing something not-risky to force a liquidation is harder, because of many built in safeguards.
One, you can actually borrow in your unit of account (e.g. dollars), and $1 = $1, so you can't convince a brokerage that a $100k debt is actually $130k.

Two, if you regulated financial institution has a goof in your data feeds causes you to mechanically disadvantage retail...
... your most likely outcome is having an internal meeting and saying "Which do we dislike more, covering their losses out of our equity OR getting our knuckles rapped by the regulators, paying a fine, then covering the losses with our own equity?" and choose door #1.
Three, it is enormously hard to pervert the most popular real markets in the world and that is a game you actually don't want to win, because the first prize is frequently go-directly-to-jail.

This is not the consensus viewpoint among engineers, who do not have good calibration.
Like if you somehow did security research against e.g. the monthly Treasury auction and somehow caused it to invert expectations around reality, that would plausibly have $X0 billion in consequences and you could make out like a bandit.
And also literally everyone you had talked to for the last several years would be taken out for tea by friendly serious federal agents.
("Do you really think that would happen?"

For the treasury auction? Oh heck yes I do. Expect a turf war between the money people and the terrorism people over who gets to lead the investigation.)
Crypto enthusiasts would probably suggest me to disagree with them on this, and I actually do not at all:

The financial system is in part of broader systems of state control. Seriously attacking it at scale would be treated indistinguishably from "kinetic" war.
"So is the state going to seriously come after crypto people then?"

While they flatter themselves into thinking they materially challenge the government, following their own logic pretty closely, if this were actually true their conferences would attract precision munitions.

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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.


I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.
FOOD
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
STARTUPS
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
CRYPTO
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
One of the big promises of software is composability. You can build rich, powerful experiences out of basic building blocks.

APIs add new things to the toolbox. For example: Treasury, which lets an app/platform store, move, and track a business’

I've been a small business owner and can talk at length about SMB banking, and will later, but let's put on the software developer hat right now.

Lots of software talks about money, keeps records about money, does calculations about money, but can't *touch* money.

This is extremely frustrating when you're building SaaS apps for businesses, because you have total control over your UX right until your app needs to touch money... at which point all data about it lives in a silo you can't access.

So you generally push work to the operator.

For example, suppose you’re writing a business-in-a-box system for electricians, including an invoicing feature.

You need to be able to read bank transactions to reconcile. You probably can't. The owner can. So you ask the owner to do mind-numbing work a computer does better.

It sure would be great if your business customers had bank accounts you could actually introspect and operate on their behalves! You could just get the list of incoming payments and match against the invoices.

There is some software to write but it is not rocket science.
SOFTWARE

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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I
TECH
Matt Wallace
Matt Wallace
@MattFnWallace
Hey, who wants to read a story about @Upwork fucking over freelancers in order to upsell their clients on unnecessary services the clients don't want and can't afford? Strap in!

So after my marketing agency closed I started freelancing again. A marketing company that wanted to work with me only hires freelance writers through @Upwork. So I signed up. I wasn't thrilled about it, but that's who they contract with and it's their marketing company.

I've been receiving regular assignments from this company, thru @Upwork, for over a month now. I've written dozens of articles for them. My work has been exemplary. I've been handling repeated rush jobs and delivering. The client was and is very happy. That's coming from them.

While I was wrapping up several assignments this week I was contacted by the marketing company. They asked if I had taken a new full-time job and wasn't available anymore. It seems @Upwork's talent group told them I was no longer available to take assignments.

I was very surprised. Nothing had changed on my end. I still needed the freelance work very much. I told them so. So the marketing company pressed @Upwork and were told there were "compliance" issues that were preventing the marketing company from giving me any more work.
TECH
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Novid Houellebecq (That's Hollaback)
Novid Houellebecq (Tha...
@GarouGothic
I want to explain what happened to tumblr overnight. And why Twitter as reached it's dream (or have come ever so close to it)

Yahoo, who bought Tumblr years ago, used to have a huge adult presence on the early net. They allowed adult groups and what not.

However, people and bots (just like now) misused the service, and Yahoo were forced to make a choice. They made private the groups (and later closed them down and sold some of it to other companies) and then ended their chatrooms on yahoo messenger...

after a incident with one of the chatrooms vid cams. The damage was done, Yahoo Messenger lost a lot of people - and with the closing of the groups - backpage and Craigslist came more important.

Now backpage is no more and Craigslist is slowly passing away. Tumblr had a semi strong community, but once 2014 came around and both porn, and political bots exploded the quality started to go down,
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Ben Nimmo
Ben Nimmo
@benimmo
Great report by @satariano on a fake network that @Graphika_NYC (and others) found in December.

Twitter accounts with GAN faces, boosting Huawei, boosted by Huawei execs, and attacking Belgium's 5G policies.

Not enough evidence to prove who ran them.

We found this network when it was boosted by Spamouflage, a pro-China operation.

Independently, @mvanhulten of @TI_EU and @ArbiterOfTweets of @Knack found it with different methods.

It's not a friendly environment for fake campaigns,

This was the first account we found.

"Alexandre, PhD", apparently a CEO.

But no surname, no indication of what he's a CEO of, and a GAN-generated profile pic.


Alexandre's had a bit of an obsession with Belgium and #5G recently.

Especially, Belgium's security limitations on 5G providers, which are reportedly mainly about Huawei and ZTE.

Alexandre didn't like the Belgian approach much.


The account was created in 2017. It only started tweeting in early December, 2020, but its first posts were retweets of tweets from November 2017-18.

They were meant to be about VR, as in virtual reality. Oddly, one was actually about Victorian Railways in Australia. Awkward.
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Knarf
Knarf
@Knarf93
@zkat__ I'm in the position that I actually find npm / yarn the best ecosystem. Whenever I use something else I always end up stubbing my toe into something thats missing / feels wrong.

Ex. Cargo seems to neither have a concept of devDependencies nor peerDependencies.

I also can't understand why it wouldn't have an "add" command to add a new dependency. And I'm no fan of Toml, json is greate (easy to parse and build tooling around), and the better option in my opinion would be json5.

C / C++ seems to just not have language package managers. The linux / bsd crowd seem to have decided that the system package manager also should be the language package manager. Which might have been fine if every Linux distro used the same system package manager.

Instead we end up with a N x M problem. Where we have a bunch of different operating systems and they all support multiple system package managers. So there's no easy way of distributing, referencing and updating C / C++ packages.

It is also my opinion that the compiler / runtime should be a package dependency. I don't like Rust's split between rustup and cargo (they should have been one tool). Similarly it would be better if you added Node as a dependency to package.json, that way we wouldn't need NVM.
TECH

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Today, that person co-hosted a webinar with me that had over 470+ registered and 130+ live

👇 Quick lesson on how to successfully pitch partnerships and co-marketing opportunities

How did he get in contact with me?

He sent a cold email, but not just any email. It was clearly personal, relevant, and conversational.

Lesson: Notice the language he used and how he tied it back to previous webinars.


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In 1937, a trucker got frustrated waiting for his cargo to be unloaded. He later sold his company for $1.1 billion.

Here’s the story of how Malcom McLean made a billion dollars and which startup could be following in his footsteps. (Inspired by our episode with @laurabehrenswu)


In the early 1950s, the shipping industry was a dying business.

New York’s docks were handling half as much domestic cargo in the early 1950s as they had been in the depressed 1930s.

In thirty years, no one had invested significant money in coastal shipping.

Why?

As McLean found out, loading ships was difficult and slow.

A truck or train would deliver items to the port. Each item was unloaded separately, recorded, and carried to storage.

When a ship was ready, each item was taken from storage, counted again, and hauled on-board.


The cost of this labor was significant. As one expert at the time explained:

“A four-thousand-mile voyage for a shipment might consume 50 percent of its costs in covering just the two ten-mile movements through two ports.”


Yet, despite the industry’s issues, it felt little pressure to change.

Foreigners were barred from operating domestically. Cartels ran international routes. And gov. subsidies eased the pain of labor costs.

Reshaping the industry needed an outsider.

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Trump's "assertion that California’s forest management policies are to blame for catastrophic wildfire is dangerously wrong."

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Let's chat.

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"Design solves a problem. Art raises a question."

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"Design needs a collective acceptance. Art only needs an inner approval."
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