blakemiller

This way some faulty internet lore. The money losses were from a fluke of timing the opening date of operations versus when quarterly finances were reported. Big startup costs meant the first numbers looked silly until they had enough events to get steady profits. They’re doing fine now.

Internet should’ve known better too. It’s hard to lose in Vegas and the investors obviously knew what they were doing. The power costs are shocking for sure though. Yikes!

And we exist to extract value from agriculture. We’ve developed to a point where it’s both possible and desirable to live in close proximity to one another. It’s possible because ag is so successful and scalable, and it’s desirable because new opportunities are possible when everything is nearby. So that’s the trade off you made. To afford the city life, you accrue value through city opportunities and you trade it in exchange for the goods from service providers. The alternative is that you run your own farm. Ask yourself how many farmers you know! And you’ll see which decision most people make.

All to say, we shouldn’t think of value extraction as a uniformly bad practice. We all do it and we need to do it because each square acre of land doesn’t provide the same goods and services.

Same thing with TikTok

Couldn’t say for sure but WebDAV probably would be clunky if fronted by a distributed database. The beauty of S3 is you add more servers, add more disks, and bam you’ve got more S3. That happens most easily when the metadata system sitting in the front can expand easily. I don’t know how easy that would be to plumb up with WebDAV. Whether or not one was better here, S3 ultimately won because it’s a primitive API that was essentially impossible to fuck up.