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"in August 2021, Discord had reported $130 million in 2020 revenues, triple from the prior year, and had an estimated valuation of $15 billion"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord#History


Revenue is not profit. You need to subtract expenses and whatnot.


That’s right. But for GDPR no one cares about profits. They need to be fined on revenue.

Otherwise non-profit making companies could do any privacy BS and not be fined.


They need to be fined based on gross annual worldwide revenue or market cap, whichever is greater.


Good point.


There's no evidence in that sentence that they have made a dime.


The company may not have recorded any profit, but the founders and other equity holders can leverage or sell that equity worth $15B.


> treaties [...] not based on trust

How are these treaties enforced? All international treaties are ultimately based on trust. There is no higher authority, only elective councils of and voluntary commitment to procedures (a.k.a. promises) by sovereign states.

Specifically not even these formal promises have been given by e.g. the United States of America which to this day has signed but never ratified either the VCLT[1] or the VCLTIO[2], so is figuratively giving a lukewarm "let's see about the convenience of that when it comes up".

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_the_Law_o...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_the_Law_o...


A 2016 talk by Tribeflame CEO Torulf Jernström about the monetization of mobile games called "Let's Go Whaling!" also caused a bit of a ruffle a while ago.

Ominously delivered with smug smirk, met by smug laughter: "I'll leave the morality of it out of the talk. We can discuss it, if we have time, later."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4

Turns out they would have had time later but for some reason opted not to.


It’s like the wonderfully pretty, comfortable offices of Phillip Morris. Help everyone forget where their salaries come from.


Written as though it's competing for the attention of fourteen-year-olds against meme scrolls, video games and online porn.


> Written as though it's competing for the attention of fourteen-year-olds against meme scrolls, video games and online porn.

Well, technically they are. Only not just teens. Attention spans have gotten shorter; I doubt that many of my friends can make it through that without checking their phone at least once.


That's quite literally the exact context, so yeah.


Unfortunately that is also the problem with rational arguments if they are deliberately or ignorantly reductive, i.e. without holistic perspective.


Web.de was founded in 1995 and GMX in '97. Both now belong to the gigantic German United Internet AG founded in '88 which currently has roughly 10,000 employees and EUR 5.5bn revenue.


European companies lack the self grandiose promotion that USA companies have. But I think that it is a good thing. I wish USA corporations and CEOs chilled a little.


Or if homogeneous data is fine, just cat or dd from a source like /dev/zero.


I think I've seen /dev/random used for generating large amounts of garbage data as well. (Though usually my problem is too much garbage data, not too little.)


> If every statement fit within the column limit of the page, yup. It’s a piece of cake. (I think that’s what gofmt does.) But our formatter also keeps your code within the line length limit.


I think you are correct and am confused why you're being voted down without explanation.


IMO too, it's a stronger argument. The duplicity (which would have been a great word to use in the article) is not the point: open and closed are suitable metaphors for systems. It's the semantic gap/lack of relation between concept and name, and that applies to any other arity as well. It's just that binary separations are very frequent: we really like to split the world in two.


Maybe I misunderstand, but didn't JSLinux[1][2] do system emulation running a proper kernel basically since 2012?

1: http://jslinux.org/

2: https://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html


For sure, it's amazing to get a full kernel running; there's so much one could do. But an emulator and a full kernel is going to have a sizable footprint, be a significant amount to download, and performance is going to be mediocre. Yes there's a linux kernel running, but it's inside a virtualization layer; if you want to integrate & have the page interact with the kernel, you'd need to start hacking some pretty wild channels to punch through that virtualization layer.

Writing an operating system that directly targets the browser, that offers the expected/standard system calls ought to be smaller and faster, and more interestingly, it can potentially integrate with the rest of the page in interesting fashions, easily.


I did underappreciate this, thank you!


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