Author: DOuG pRATt

Fried by the Bank Man

The future of investing in the summer of ’22.

The inside cover of The New Yorker, July 4, 2022.

At least he was right about having a big impact globally.

The next two pages of the July 4 issue.

Last summer I glanced at that magazine ad for half a second and, seeing the word “crypto,” ignored it. This was what the kid said at that time. Four months later he was out of business.

July 6 (Reuters) – Sam Bankman-Fried, head of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, said he and his company still have a “few billion” on hand to shore up struggling firms that could further destabilize the digital asset industry, but that the worst of the liquidity crunch has likely passed.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-exchange-ftx-has-few-billion-support-industry-bankman-fried-2022-07-06/

Code in the Node

My first hands-on experience with networked, time-sharing computers was an introduction to BASIC programming in a math class I took in my freshman year of college. The programming was interesting but, I admit, it didn’t grab me the way the hardware setup did — teletype terminals connected to a remote data center over leased telephone lines.

Technology Review explains the background on how this educational initiative began, exposing students to the future that we live in today, and the directions the program took later.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/20/1071291/learn-to-code-legacy-new-projects-education/

By April 1971, the network encompassed 30 high schools and 20 colleges in New England, New York, and New Jersey. All an individual school needed to connect were a terminal and a telephone line linking the terminal with the mainframe on Dartmouth’s campus (often the greatest expense of participating in the network, at a time when long-­distance phone calls were quite costly).