Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you’ve probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There’s been a lot of conclusions made, and while we’ve wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first to make sure that our understanding of the situation was legally sound. That took some time, which was frustrating to ourselves and to our users, but now we are educated and ready to give an informed response.

source: L

There’s a convenient punching bag for many of these failures: outdated government technology, and outdated approaches to tech by the bureaucracy. But try to fix that through policy change and you’ll find it’s turtles all the way down. The levers leaders use to fix tech are the same ones they use to steer the economy, improve government-funded healthcare, manage immigration, and even strengthen our national defense. We increase budgets, cut budgets, make new rules, and hold hearings, but the tools we use to fix our tools aren’t working either.

The people on this project knew quite well that using this ESB was a terrible idea. They’d have been relieved to just throw it out, plug in the simple protocol, and move on. But they couldn’t. It was a requirement in their contract. The contracting officers had required it because a policy document called the Air Force Enterprise Architecture had required it. The Air Force Enterprise Architecture required it because the Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture required it. And the DoD Enterprise Architecture required it because the Federal Enterprise Architecture, written by the Chief Information Officers Council, convened by the White House at the request of Congress, had required it. Was it really possible that this project was delayed indefinitely, racking up cost overruns in the billions, because Congress has ordered the executive branch to specify something as small and technical as an ESB?

Jack beat them all, winning the contest and demonstrating not only his enormous skills in securing critical national security systems, but an incredible enthusiasm for serving his country. He was a dream candidate, and the Defense Digital Service (DDS), the team that had sponsored the Hack the Pentagon contest, encouraged Jack to apply for a job. But the resume Jack submitted described his experience developing “mobile applications in IonicJS, mobile applications using Angular, and APIs using Node.js, MongoDB, npm, Express gulp, and Babel”. This would have given a technical manager a good sense of the range of his skills, but no one technical reviewed his resume. DoD’s hiring protocols, like those of most agencies, required that it be reviewed by an HR staffer with a background in government hiring rules, not technology. The staffer saw what looked like a grab bag of gobbledygook and tried to match it to the job description, which required “experience that demonstrated accomplishment of computer-project assignments that required a wide range of knowledge of computer requirements and techniques pertinent to the position to be filled.” The fact that he’d just beat out 600 other security researchers meant nothing. His resume was deemed “not minimally qualified” and didn’t make the first cut.

I really like the “tech debt” metaphor. A lot of people don’t, but I think that’s because they either don’t extend the metaphor far enough, or because they don’t properly understand financial debt.

Pretty good financial debt explainer, too.

source: trivium

‘Prompt engineers’ are being hired for their skill in getting AI systems to produce exactly what they want.

An interactive experience!

source: DF

Recently, I took a look at Nintendo’s MMC line of mappers, and some other boards. All boards for the NES’ western releases had to be manufactured by Nintendo, and so they generally met certain standards set by Nintendo. But these rules were enforced by technology, not by law. And the company that had previously killed the American game industry decided to break those rules. Madness? No. This… is Tengen.

Lots of custom cartridges here.

Some additional info: https://hackmii.com/2010/01/the-weird-and-wonderful-cic/

source: HN

The gap in price between a 40-pound block of fresh cheddar and a 500-pound barrel has widened steadily over the last two years. At the end of 2018, the average block-barrel spread hovered around $0.12. That’s well above the $0.07 average spread calculated for 2017 and triple the traditional $0.035 spread.

When the GameStop and Robinhood story exploded at the end of January, suddenly everyone took an interest in market structure, and things like payment for order flow, and the role that high-frequency trading shops play in enabling free retail trading. This of course gave rise to lots of conspiracy theories about ways retail traders are taken advantage of. On the new Odd Lots, we speak with Doug Cifu, the CEO of Virtu, which is one of the largest HFT shops in the country, to get his perspective on how this part of the market really works.

Hour long, pretty thorough.

The episode captured Medium in all its complexity: a publishing platform used by the most powerful people in the world; an experiment in mixing highbrow and lowbrow in hopes a sustainable business would emerge; and a devotion to algorithmic recommendations over editorial curation that routinely caused the company confusion and embarrassment.

As part of a Zoom call today, I tried to sign up for a $10 monthly subscription on a Substack page to test the user journey. I paid $2,023.

When I’ve clicked my card details in 1Password, it’s entered my expiry year in the hidden, custom subscription amount box (I’m not sure why - is this a 1Password bug?). Because this box has now changed value, the Substack UI has automatically selected this option. I’ve then hit “Subscribe” before I had time to notice and 💸 $2,023.

source: HN

I’m a capitalist. A friend of mine is a devoted Marxist. I think we mutually agree that, considering any particular employee, it is in that employee’s personal interest to stop selling hours of labor and start renting access to his accumulated capital as soon as humanly possible.

A lot of day jobs structurally inhibit capital formation. If I were a Marxist I’d say “And this is an intended consequence of Capital’s desire to keep Labor subservient to it”, but I honestly think it’s true even without anybody needing to twirl their mustache.

source: HN

Tatís signed a contract with Big League Advance, an unusual investment fund that pays minor-league players money up front in exchange for a share of their future MLB earnings.

The Big League Advance payouts aren’t loans. If the player never reaches the majors, he doesn’t have to reimburse the money, and Big League Advance loses its stake. When a player turns into a MLB star like Tatís, Big League Advance receives a huge payout. In effect, Tatís is now funding a bunch of minor-leaguers who will never make it. It’s similar to a venture capital fund that backs lots of startups that fail, in return for a gigantic payday from getting in early on a company like Facebook or Uber.

Venture capital for all the things.

Last August, Citigroup Inc. wired $900 million to some hedge funds by accident. Then it sent a note to the hedge funds saying, oops, sorry about that, please send us the money back. Some did. Others preferred to keep the money. Citi sued them. Yesterday Citi lost, and they got to keep the money. I read the opinion, by U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, expecting to learn about the New York legal doctrine of finders keepers—more technically, the “discharge-for-value defense”—and I was not disappointed. But I was also treated to a gothic horror story about software design. I had nightmares all night about checking the wrong boxes on the computer.

source: ML

Okay let’s do payment for order flow again, because people are talking about it and that always stresses me out. Here’s an intuitive description of how it works.

source: ML

They had $19 million, a deal with Disney, and dreams of becoming the next Ben & Jerry’s. Then everything fell apart.

source: ML

Maybe the biggest capital markets story of 2020 was the boom in special purpose acquisition companies. A SPAC raises money from investors in a “blank check” initial public offering, puts the money in a pot, and goes out and looks for a private company to merge with. 1 In the merger, the target private company gets the money in the pot and the SPAC shareholders get shares in the new combined company; the result is that the target company has raised cash and gone public through the merger. It is an alternative to an IPO that can offer more speed and certainty and perhaps even a better price.

We have talked about SPACs before, but I have somehow neglected to express appreciation for the clever and elegant bit of financial engineering at the heart of the SPAC structure. Here’s how a SPAC works:

source: ML

In exchange for billions in tax subsidies, Foxconn was supposed to build an enormous LCD factory in the tiny village of Mount Pleasant, creating 13,000 jobs. Three years later, the factory — and the jobs — don’t exist, and they probably never will. Inside the empty promises and empty buildings of Wisconn Valley.

In short, I enjoy and appreciate The Times. And after paying over $300 a year for nearly a decade, and having read the Times on a near-daily basis for my entire adult life, I feel I qualify as a good customer. And they repay me by deliberately annoying me several times a day, every day, when I attempt to read the product I’m paying them for. How could one not find this outrageously annoying?

source: DF

A cash-strapped rancher, a virus-stricken meatpacker, an underpaid chef, a hungry engineer: The journey of a single burger during a pandemic

A bit dramatic, but a good look at the food supply chain.

On its own, that may seem like just one more move in the chess game between major news companies and the platforms. But it could also be an indication of a more geologic movement. Will the rest of 2020 bring tectonic shifts in platforms’ power over news — or just a few more small tremors?

And: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/technology/new-york-times-apple-news-app.html

source: DF