16 Mar 2024

X-Men 97 Is To Return

Somehow slept on the news that the fabled 90s version of X-Men is returning. Trailer.

12 Mar 2024

Crypto and ‘TradFi’: a friendship of convenience

Jemima Kelly for the FT.

The reality is that the embrace of crypto by the world of traditional finance, or “TradFi”, as crypto types like to call it, is just as hypocritical as crypto’s embrace of institutional investors. I heard one of the hosts of another bitcoin-focused podcast, the Wolf of All Streets, say recently that “TradFi is just as degen” — a crypto word describing a reckless (and degenerate) gambler — “as the crypto community is” and this, unfortunately, is not wholly unjustified.

With the advent of bitcoin ETFs, what was once a relatively clear boundary between crypto and conventional finance has been broken down for good. And the world of TradFi has shown the emptiness of its talk of learning the lessons of the financial crisis. It has shown that — like the world of crypto — it is really just as greedy as ever.

06 Mar 2024

The mysterious rise of the Chinese e-commerce giant behind Temu

The Financial Times:

Temu’s sister app Pinduoduo already dominates China. When it still published such numbers, PDD reported more than 870mn active users in the country supplied by over 13mn merchants who, it claimed, together generated a third of all parcel traffic in the country, tens of billions of packages a year.

why do US investors have so much confidence in an opaque operation whose financial statements seem to lack much pattern or explanation, and whose operations, management, auditors, and regulators sit in a distant untouchable jurisdiction?

No mystery here. These are the same geniuses who loaned Musk billions to purchase Twitter. Greed and stupidity are a powerful force.

The Guardian:

China’s consumer prices fell at their fastest pace in 15 years in January, as the world’s second-largest economy sank deeper into deflation amid weakening demand.

China’s economy first entered deflation last summer, with prices falling at a faster pace since then. Its factories have also cut prices, with the latest producer price index pointing to a 2.5% drop in annual prices in January, after a 2.7% fall in December.

When your internal market fails, you flood external markets to keep the factories working.

06 Mar 2024

Twitter Debt

A bank group spearheaded by Morgan Stanley held discussions with Elon Musk and his team about refinancing a roughly $12.5 billion debt package that supported the tech billionaire’s take-private of the social media platform X, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

A group of seven banks, led by the New York-based lender, has been stuck holding the debt since 2022. They’ve repeatedly renewed an agreement not to individually offload their holdings, with the goal of coordinating a sale when X — formerly known as Twitter — is on firmer financial footing with stable advertising revenues, subscription growth and further traction from a planned peer-to-peer payments platform, one of the people said.

Good luck with that. Via Bloomberg.

04 Mar 2024

Oumuamua, Our first interstellar visitor

In 2017, astronomers identified the first known interstellar object to have entered our solar system, now commonly known as ʻOumuamua. A relatively small body, estimated to be roughly the size of a skyscraper...

One of the great things about the internet is that you can get a lecture from an Oxford Professor for free.

About

Chancee is a designer who codes from London Town.

They have worked for the likes of Nike, Vodafone, Sky, Disney and Pearsons. Won awards from Promax, BAFTAs, the Appys and The Drum. Spoken at The Waldorf and Southampton University - despite swearing like a sailor. Available for hire to draw pretty curves and code clever things.

Topics

Music: 20Cities: 12SovietTough: 11Hip Hop: 11Heavy Rotation: 9Crypto: 9Design: 9Architecture: 9Space: 7Code: 7NFTs: 6Low Power: 6GameDev: 6Twitter: 6Robust Computing: 5No Bullshit: 5OpenBSD: 4Hacking: 4Javascript: 4Walkman: 3Headphones: 3Engineering: 3CSS: 3History: 3Google: 3Sci-Fi: 3Development: 3Trains: 3Web3: 2Low power: 2Swift: 2Cloud: 2Apple Music: 2Politics: 2Carbon: 2LowTech: 2Solar: 2SP-404: 2Protocols: 2Skateboard: 2London: 2Housing: 2Halfway house: 2Machine Learning: 2Bitcoin: 2Africa: 2Fashion: 2Wall Street: 2RSS: 2Transport: 2Aesop Rock: 2Disney: 2Comics: 2

Archive

Mar 2024

X-Men 97 Is To Return

Crypto and ‘TradFi’: a friendship of convenience

The mysterious rise of the Chinese e-commerce giant behind Temu

Twitter Debt

Oumuamua, Our first interstellar visitor

Feb 2024

Heavy Rotation February 2024

JavaScript Bloat in 2024

Knots on Mars!

World’s least profitable blog

Jan 2024

Heavy Rotation January 2024

SP-404 Resources

How a 27-year-old busted the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity

Dec 2023

Heavy Rotation December 2023

The future is probably federated

Heavy Rotation November 2023

Plagiarism and You(Tube)

Nov 2023

Integrated Tech Solutions: Aesop Rock

The Design Museum: Skateboard

Oct 2023

Heavy Rotation October 2023

Vim syntax highlighting

DJ Shadow - Action Adventure

Twitter Bank

No, we didn't forget any zeros

"No more trains!"

Tupac Shakur murder: video released of suspect’s arrest for 1996 murder

Sep 2023

Heavy Rotation September 2023

"How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes"

Financial siren

Saving the sounds of Afghanistan

Rain Gardens

Aug 2023

Fuck around and find out award: Antoinette Sandbach

Heavy Rotation August 2023

The long drawn out implosion of NFTs

Kowloon Walled City

Jul 2023

Heavy Rotation July 2023

How palette and lighting works in The Settlers II

Hidari: The Stop-Motion Samurai Film

Jun 2023

Heavy Rotation June 2023

Babylon 5: The Road Home. Official Trailer

Sounds of Fashaga

May 2023

The secret Babylon 5 project is...an animated movie

Mar 2023

MF DOOM X TATSURO YAMASHITA

Jan 2023

Panic enters the Mastodon arena

Adobe is collecting all of its customers' pictures into a machine learning training set.

Gluten Free Weed Edibles

Nov 2022

UK Treasury joins chat app Discord and is met with torrent of abuse

my website is one binary

Twitter Impodes

Jul 2022

Eevee Beat Tape Discography

The mars company

Another recruit joins the Walkman ranks

Jun 2022

ProleteR: Curses from Past Times

Cocaine, class and me

May 2022

Financial Times's Gideon Rachman on the Ukraine Conflict

Why African fashion is having its moment

DJ Cable: Throw Back Thursdays

Apr 2022

Web3.0: A Libertarian Dystopia

Mar 2022

From Downtown

Edited latecomer's guide to crypto

Feb 2022

iPod Shennanigans

Jan 2022

Line goes up

Fuck NFTs

Web3 is going just great

Aesop Rock x Blockhead. Garbology

Dec 2021

Playdate Art: Scale

Website carbon

Humble ‘retro’ corded headphones are making an unexpected return, for both aesthetic and practical reasons

Moving files around for Crayon Munchers

Low Tech Magazine

How it all happened

Nov 2021

Space War

Oct 2021

HomeLab MkII

Human History Gets a Rewrite

Aug 2021

Autonomous Monastic State

Jul 2021

Back to the future, baby!

Jun 2021

Gemini and robust computing

Rust and LEDs

One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball

May 2021

Go slow and fix things

The Oral History of the Chelsea Hotel

Good developers know how, great ones know why

"Fuck the bread, the bread is over"

The Promise and Perils of Insect Farming

Apr 2021

It fell of a lorry

Inside a halfway house

Hacking an iPod

Indian drop calls

Why bumblebees love cats, or, why everything is a system.

Sony NW-A55L FTW

Mar 2021

Climate models and Fortran

Plain text protocols

150 Watt Office

High Potassium Posting

Feb 2021

Fuck google: Part II

Fuck google

City cycles

Eating the super-rich

Jan 2021

Four seasons

Dec 2020

"This time, damn it, we’re going to get to the surface"

Chrome is bad

Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese industry

Bad launch leads to real world relativistic math

Nov 2020

Moomins

#SovietTough

Abandon stream: Part 2

Oct 2020

Fuck Boris

American Viziers

Sep 2020

Subscriptions

Motherless Brooklyn

Riding rails

Basic Printing in OpenBSD

Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle

Technicolor portals

Aug 2020

Abandon stream

Behind the Accidentally Resilient Design of Athens Apartments

Jul 2020

The Walkman Forty Years on

Jun 2020

I Dream of Canteens

May 2020

OpenBSD Git server

Unreleased De La Soul Acapellas

Apr 2020

Animating SVGs: Strokes

You're designing for the web wrong: Part 1

A newspaper made from RSS feeds

Marvellous glass

Charlie Sloth Rap Show

Swift: Google's bet on differentiable programming

Mar 2020

OpenBSD Everything

Master & Dynamic: MW60

Where are the voyagers now

Lethal Bizzle is back!

Feb 2020

Low cost, low power NAS

A CSS history tour

Debugging a live saturn V

Two up, Two down in London Town

Jan 2020

Into the indie-verse