ATsch

> Surely you must understand this?

Yes, I understand why blockchains are bad, have no benefits, terrible performance and are a privacy nightmare. Thanks for explaining it in more detail. And binance understands it too, that's why they're not using it (not even a private one!) despite all of their talk about how it's a revolutionary technology.

The comment you're replying to is clearly sarcastic. Infecting 2400 people with HIV is generally not considered good care.

It's always very amusing how all of the blockchain companies wax lyrical about all of the huge supposed benefits of blockchains and how every industry and company is missing out by not adopting them and should definitely run a hyperledger private blockchain buzzword whatever.

And then, even when faced with implementing a huge, audit critical, distributed append-only store, the thing they tell us blockchains are so useful for, they just use normal database tech like the rest if us. With one centralized infrastructure where most of the transactions in the network actually take place. Who's tech stack looks suspiciously like every other financial institution.

I'm so glad we're ignoring 100 years of securities law to let all of this incredible innovation happen.

Yes, this. linux sucks in a lot of ways. But it sucks for boring reasons I can deal with, like lack of resources, incompetence or even just ideas I disagree with. You know, just the every day inevitabilites that come with interacting with other human beings, even when they're doing their best.

But what is infinitely worse than that is, on top of all of those things still happening, also having a random chance of waking up every morning to discover that someone has very deliberately, specifically decided to make my life worse, not out of personal conviction, but because it makes a line go up somewhere in a board room on the other side of the world. That I can not deal with.

It doesn't matter if they're a minority if moderation just lets them use HN as a megaphone and post hundreds of comments before any sort of reaction.

Or in terms of a tired metaphor: If you refuse to weed out your bad apples, you can't really complain when people stop taking your fruit shipments because they keep spoiling their bunches :)

The thing that truly shocks me about this whole thing is how absolutely blatantly corrupt the Irish regulator appears to be.

> The book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was written in 1841

It feels worth noting that this book, as well as the wider idea of an abstract idea of crowd-induced mania in general it reinforces, is pseudoscientific with little credible evidence to support it.

It's origins lie much more in the political motivations and historical context of the authors: It is no coincidence that this book was written by a wealthy scotsman against the backdrop of the idea was first floated by an aristocrat during the upheavals and riots surrounding the introduction of capitalism, and that the idea was initially proposed by an aristocrat during the french revolution. They were both times where it was extraordinarily convenient to be able to dismiss engaging with the things the crowd was being driven by.

I'd urge against making the same mistake today. To me, it is impossible to separate the web3 mania from the historical context it happened in: Like 2008, it is a time of job insecurity, financial anxiety and distrust in systems with governments doing little to help. They are prime times for wishful thinking and people who want to take advantage of it.

I wonder if they checked this with the compliance department regarding their obligations to delete data under GDPR. I hope their Data Protection Officers have the time to respond to all of the thousands of relevant manual email requests and delete all of the data in a timely manner, if people are made aware they are legally required to honor those.

It is personal data regardless of how it is used. The only question is if that use of personal data is permissive.

Using it for user analytics, which is neither required to run the service, nor in the users interest, nor reasonably expected by the user, is almost definitly illegitimate use.

The definition of personal data under the GDPR is anything that can be used to uniquely identify a natural person (with sufficiently high probability). Both cookies and date-modified meet that definition identically, as do IP addresses.

That doesn't mean you can't use it at all. It just places strong restrictions on what purpodes you can use it for. The important point is just that those restrictions are the same under GDPR for all of these technologies. It doesn't matter how you uniquely identify users, what matters is what you do with that information.

I don't think it makes sense to apply you-and-I logic where actions have consequences to a billionaire. He obviously never had a business case that would make twitter worth the premium and extra billion dollars a year interest it's paying now.

So my point is not that he doesn't want it to succeed, it would obviously be a great personal embarrassment. It's that the risk of destroying a community of millions of people was clearly lower on his mind than the power trip of how cool it would be to own Twitter. He can afford to not care, and that's a deeply depressing situation.

I don't disagree. I think he bought it on a whim because to show that he could, in the same way that a football fan might say they could run the team better than a manager.

Then he realized it was not in fact a good idea and backed out of it.

I don't have any inside information, but as I understand it's basically just a spending commitment. The online auctions still take place, however the purchaser will gain some sort of bonus for agreeing to a certain amount of spending over the next year.

The deals seem to be rather secretive, but from what I can tell bonuses can be anything from a straightforward discount, to a guaranteed amount of impressions for some campaign, to things like guaranteeing that the client will win a certain percentage of auctions above some price.

I don't know who said it, but the real point of buying Twitter was to prove he could buy Twitter. He doesn't really have to care if it burns down, he's not going to be out on the streets from it like the rest of us. It's futile explain what he's doing using any other logic.