Bitcoin and NFTs

[ursus arctos]

There was a Gnomon Copy on Mass Ave in Cambridge where I had my thesis copied, among other things.

Every year, there would be a couple of graduates who worked there while they were figuring things out.

They tended to studiously avoid eye contact lest people recognise them,

[caja-dglh]

Every year, there would be a couple of graduates who worked there while they were figuring things out.

They tended to studiously avoid eye contact lest people recognise them,

That has since relocated to Menlo Park.

[Hot Pepsi]

There was a Gnomon Copy on Mass Ave in Cambridge where I had my thesis copied, among other things.

Every year, there would be a couple of graduates who worked there while they were figuring things out.

They tended to studiously avoid eye contact lest people recognise them,

I think I knew that. It might have still been extant in 1997 when I was sometimes on Mass Ave.

In the underated/overlooked Judd Apatow show Undeclared, Jason Segel's character works in a copy place while he "figures things out." It seems to be that kind of a job.


At W&M, there was not a copy place very easy to get to. The nearest one was a bit of a hike out Jamestown Road. So if teachers wanted us to use something like that, they either arranged to have it available at the bookstore, somehow, or we had to figure out a way to get to that place. By the time I was at BU, they could put it on a very slow-loading website.

[Balderdasha]

I handwrote a lot of my university essays and that was in the early 2000s. I didn't have my own laptop. Sometimes I went down to the computer suite and wrote an essay there and printed it out but that was more effort than just hand writing it at my desk in my room.

I had to write one or two essays a week. We got a book list of about 12 books per essay. There would be copies available in most of the individual college libraries, or if not, they'd be available in the subject libraries (politics library, anthropology library, etc) or the main university library but then I had to cycle all over town looking for them. Sometimes we were assigned articles which were on JSTOR which we got access to and could print out from the university computers. I didn't always source every book but you could usually get a good mark on an essay with reading about 6-8 books from the reading list, or sometimes less. I didn't pay for any books apart from a few that I bought before I started.

Again, looking back, that was quite a substantial workload, alongside the fact that I was doing about 15 hours of paid work per week and various extracurricular stuff (I did an evening Mandarin course in my last year, I played tennis and squash sometimes, went to yoga and dance classes, I was visiting Oxford regularly in my first year, I did an improvised drama course, I went on hiking trips with the hiking club, I raised money for charity for my hitchhike to Morocco, I helped carry out interviews for summer camps and made lessons plans for when I was going to teach abroad, I learned origami and taught it to get into May balls for free, I attended talks, lectures, plays, art films, debates, art exhibitions. I shopped and cooked and fed people on my corridor and did my laundry at 2am sometimes. I took part in psychology experiments after morning lectures to earn £5 to buy a nice lunch. I drove ten miles to my sister's village and babysat her children when she was ill, depressed or hungover. As well as spending a substantial portion of the time drinking and dancing). And yet I thought I was lazy. Oh to have the energy of youth again. I disagree that youth is wasted on the young though. I think I had a pretty good crack at using that energy.

I've never written anything on a typewriter though except as a novelty.

[S. aureus]

I think the first (and possibly only) things that I wrote on a typewriter were letters to US universities about a place in their graduate programs.
Before that everything was handwritten, and once I got there they had computers with word processing programs available.

[ursus arctos]

I honestly had no idea the divide was so stark

I was typing papers in high school

[San Bernardhinault]

I think there was an "office skills" course that everyone did in my school when I was in my mid-teens, so perhaps mid-80s, to prepare us for life in actual offices (and particularly to prepare the girls for life in the secretarial office pool) where we did some touch typing practice on actual typewriters, but the typewriters were rare, paper and ink were obviously expensive for the school, so we didn't do much and were made to feel terribly guilty every time we fucked up and particularly when thumbsy fools like me hit two keys at the same time and the typewriter jammed. I think we may have done 3 or 4 lessons in total.

That was it for typewriters. Nerdy kids like me had access to the school's few RM Nimbus computers for an hour or so a day once I was 17 or so, but even then I don't think printers were available and I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have been allowed to submit printed work to teachers even though I'm also sure that all my teachers would have way preferred printed content than having to decipher my random scribbling.

[My Name Is Ian]

I manually typed my university dissertations on a manual typewriter, though I had used a word processor by then. My dad would often get them in the scrap in good conditions - the last one I had was from about the 1930s and it worked perfectly well - and I enjoyed making corrections with those little strips of Tippex. This would have been early to mid 1990s.

[Hot Pepsi]

I took typing in 9th grade but dropped it because I wasn’t doing well in it and the teacher was insane and probably racist.

I eventually got better at it.

[Balderdasha]

I took typing in 9th grade but dropped it because I wasn’t doing well in it and the teacher was insane and probably racist.

I eventually got better at it.

I know I bang on about this a lot, but....

Did the teacher have a diagnosed mental illness? If not, then "insane" may not be the most appropriate description.

Perhaps you mean unpleasant / erratic / unpredictable / irrational / unreasonable. Using one of those terms can be more accurate and less inflammatory than a mental health slur.

[Lang Spoon]

We got touch typing as a non exam module in 4th year of high school, but id broken my arm that term. I had way more interaction with computers and even the nascent internet in high school than at Uni, when i did computer science Higher in 6th year theyd even replaced the bbc micros and a horrible 3 colour DOS pc with a suite of monochrome windows running Macs, which felt like a thing of the future in 1993. The school library had an Acorn Archimedes for some reason, which was very much a British idea of hi tech thats Good For You.

[Ginger Yellow]

The school library had an Acorn Archimedes for some reason, which was very much a British idea of hi tech thats Good For You.

It had a great multiplayer version of Tron/Snake though, which we played so much of, and of course Zarch.

[Snake Plissken]

And pretty much built the foundations of every mobile chip in use.

[ursus arctos]

Chief executive of collapsed crypto fund Hyperverse does not appear to exist


Exclusive: Steven Reece Lewis was introduced to investors with an impressive list of qualifications and achievements, but no organisation cited can find any record of him

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...ppear-to-exist

[ursus arctos]

Prices of cryptocurrencies swung sharply on Tuesday after a false posting on the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s official X account claimed the regulator had approved the first ever US spot bitcoin exchange traded funds.

The fake post declared just after 4pm Washington time that the SEC “grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges”. It was picked up immediately on social media, business news websites and Bloomberg TV.

Just over 10 minutes later, the SEC chair poured cold water on the announcement. Gary Gensler posted on his personal account on X: “The @SECGov twitter account was compromised, and an unauthorized tweet was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.”

An SEC spokeswoman said that the original post “was not made by the SEC or its staff”. By 5pm the SEC staff appeared to have regained control of the X account and the false posting had been deleted.

Bitcoin rallied immediately after the post, for a 1.5 per cent gain on the day, but swiftly reversed on confirmation that the news was fake and the price slid as much as 3.4 per cent.

[San Bernardhinault]

Ooh! Somebody probably made a lot of money out of that little hack. Nice work.

I'm normally upset by corruption, but I struggle to have a lot of sympathy for whoever owns bitcoin and lost money to this crook. If insider dealing and price fixing and stock boosting are going to happen, let it all happen in crypto where normal people are insulated.

[WOM]

The lower floor people apparently will get their deposits back, but they're only Tarion*-insured up to $20,000 and many may have put down more. There's additional insurance that's been taken out, but it's unclear who it benefits at this point. One article said they'll likely get back $20K, plus whatever fraction other creditors eventually get.

The Chinese bank was apparently illegally demoted by someone on Coco/Mizrahi/Bridging's side. I don't think the Chinese bank's lawyers knew anything about it.

*Ontario builder protection org.


Big question for me: do they finish the building? It's never going to recoup, but surely someone would be happy to take the shell, reconfigure it and make a small fortune. I don't see them completing 85 stories, though. I don't know what the point would be. Clearly the market for $20-$30 million condos at Bloor and Yonge isn't as robust as predicted. This was pure hubris.

Apparently the market rate in Toronto is $1300 a square foot, and the market rate in this neighbourhood is $2400-ish. The One was looking for $3200+. It just makes no sense. For $20 million, you could have one of the nicer mansions in Rosedale or Forest Hill or even The Bridal Path.

Further to the 'The One' debacle, the court appointed receiver has jettisoned Sam Mizrahi, the visionary and developer behind the whole thing.

https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-t...zrahi-toronto/

And

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift...IFN64766ABFM4/

[WOM]

And now Sam's financial partner in a completely unrelated property is suing him. No doubt seeing the The One writing on the wall....

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift...OPHWIWNGF4YJU/

[ursus arctos]

The project is no longer expected to meet its projected March 2025 completion date.

Wonderfully deadpan

[caja-dglh]

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/03/13/dogwifhat-becomes-4th-largest-meme-coin-as-community-completes-fundraising-for-las-vegas-sphere-showing/

[Lang Spoon]

I love the bleating that London under dangerous extremist Khan is a block on Innovation for not granting permission for that fucking Sphere. Thats exactly the kind of shit that needs to stay in Vegas. And maybe fucking Florida.

[WOM]

I spent 45 minutes this afternoon reading about Bridging Finance and Coco Paving.

Hoo boy.

What I haven't yet figured out is if one of the cannabis startups the former funded was the one run by the neer do well brother of one of my partners.

The Coco Paving thing keeps getting better. A judge has refused to release their first $40 million payment from GFL from escrow due to the Chinese lawsuit.

All the deets here. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift...A3YGT6XO6BNK4/

The line that's particularly chilling: "Under the Coco Paving purchase agreement, if the legal liability fund is depleted, any additional damages must be paid by the Coco family."

[WOM]

SBF Sentencing Pool

The prosecution wants 40-50 years.
The defence wants 5-6.5 years.

I'm predicting he gets 14-16. Serious crime, but non-violent...sends a message...punitive...but not life-ending.

[caja-dglh]

30.

[ursus arctos]

I will take the over on 30