He’s been trying to make an everything-including-payments thing called X for decades.
He did say he’d do this with Twitter, but as GP points out it wasn’t a new idea for him then.
This is a “keep doing the same thing until it works to prove I was right and those others who forced me out were idiots with no vision” kind of a thing.
As a company I’d be terrified to be tied to his brand in any way. I also suspect the primary use of this may end up being scams, which seems like a really bad market to get into.
Now not only can you fake having cancer or whatever, you can ask for donations in-app! Or let people help you in your fight against $EVIL_THING by donating to your cause (no matter how real or not) without leaving the site. Or you can just peddle your new sponsor $WONDERFUL_THING.
If it’s not primarily used for scams, seems likely to turn the platform into a big begging space. Before you had to convince people to go to IndieGoGo or your site or whatever.
I know this has always been his dream. I just don’t see a likelihood of it making anything better. And I’d say that for any social network. Maybe Meta hasn’t done it because they realized that would likely be the case?
Also, "why Visa" from the X.com perspective. As far as I can tell, Musk's vision was WeChat for the Western world. The platform for everything. WeChat replaces Visa, it doesn't use Visa or a competitor. If X.com is using Visa then Visa is the platform, not X.com. Using Visa feels like an admission of defeat to me.
I imagine it has to do with the difficulty of financial compliance. Musk was part of PayPal which has gotten into trouble before for being not quite a bank and attempting to do bank-like things.
Yes, it's hard. That's the point. Visa is a monopoly that makes monopoly sized profits. (Visa's $20B of income is misleading, that's tiny compared to the profit the banks issuing Visa cards make).
If Musk could crack the Visa monopoly X.com would be worth a lot more than the $44B he paid for it. He's the richest man in the world because his companies do hard things.
Landing a rocket on a barge bobbing in the ocean is difficult. Tesla not being on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man... is difficult. Sending 280 character messages across the internet is not difficult in comparison. Breaking the Visa monopoly, OTOH...
Musk has consistently pushed his companies into higher risk acceptance and financed those moon-shots to deliver a product that had a demand but not a supply (reusable rockets, electric cars, low-orbit internet satellite network). Also the tunnel thing, neuralink, and a handful of other smaller and less successful gambits.
I don't see him having the same benefits tackling financial transactions. There are already multiple players with significant regulatory capture, significant centralization, on top of established reputations.
Financial payments is a cartel wherever you go. In China it's not better, it's just different players; AliPay and WePay. In fact UnionPay is probably more of a cartel since it's the only card authorizer in China.
A couple of companies have tried their hand at a western mega-app, most notably Meta, and you could consider Apple close, but for the most part the consumers are not super interested.
>As a company I’d be terrified to be tied to his brand in any way.
Ok, but what if he gave you a billion dollars plus promises of billions more in transaction fees? If that wasn't enough, what if we promised 2 billion plus fees? At what point would your (Visa's) terror be offset by your (Visa's) greed and fear of giving this profit opportunity to a competitor (MasterCard/AmEx)?
The brand is completely wrecked and now associated with things that mainstream advertisers and businesses rightly want nothing to do with. This feels nearly like Stormfront or 4Chan announcing a partnership with Visa. Wild times!
Visa and Mastercard are very strict on merchants (so in this case Twitter), when it comes to any kind of fraud. So this I would take as a signal that Twitter will have to completely clean out frauds. Selling directly through Twitter will then give a high level of fraud protection to customers.
Compare this to Instagram and Facebook, where over half of all paid advertising are outright frauds, and where their policy is to allow frauds even when users have reported them.
Letting customers purchase directly on social media instead of social media just being ad platforms for scams could be a positive thing. Meta would have to go the same way then. And maybe – maybe – we can move on from the ad/scam/bot hellscape into a system where social media platforms are instead funded by taking a percentage on direct sales from businesses selling there. That would be a much healthier system for everybody involved, except for scammers and ad professionals.
Even if the file system does it that’s still per-file. You still need all the bookkeeping. And you’re not gonna get great compression if a lot of the files are tiny.
The tar contains a whole bunch of related files that probably compress a lot better together, and it’s only one file on disk for the file system to keep track of. It’s gonna be a lot more efficient.
When compiling you’re probably gonna touch all the source files anyway right? So if you load the zip into memory once and decompress it there it’s probably faster than loading each individual file and decompressing each of them, or just loading each individual file raw.
> And you’re not gonna get great compression if a lot of the files are tiny.
The future of compression is likely shared dictionaries, basically recognize the file type and then use a dictionary that is optimized for that file type. E.g. JavaScript/TypeScript or HTML or Rust or C++, etc. That can offset the problems with small files to a large degree.
But again, this is a complex problem and it should be dealt with orthogonally to npm in my opinion.
I also checked and it should be possible for npm to enable file system compression at the OS level on both Windows and MacOS.
Also if it was dealt with orthogonally to npm, then it could be used by pip, and other package systems.
> This also took a lot of seeking time for disks because there were so many individual files.
The fact NPM keeps things in node_modules unzipped seems wild to me. Filesystems are not great at hundreds of thousands of little files. Some are bad, others are terrible.
Zip files are easier to store, take up less space, and CPUs are faster than disks so the decompression in memory is probably faster reading the unzipped files.
That was one of my favorite features of Yarn when I tried it - pnp mode. But since it’s not what NPM does it requires a shim that doesn’t work with all ps mage’s. Or at least didn’t a few years ago.
Thats a much higher hurdle to jump. I don’t blame the author for trying this first.
If accepted, it might have been a good stepping stone too. A chance to get to know everyone and their concerns and how they think.
So if you wanted to see how this works (proposal + in prod) and then come back later proposing something bigger by switching off zip that would make sense to me as a possible follow up.
As someone who mostly works in Java it continues to floor me that this isn’t the default. Why does every project I work on need an identical copy of possibly hundreds of packages if they’re the same version?
I also like Yarn pnp’s model of leaving node_modules as zip files. CPUs are way faster than storage, they can decompress on the fly. Less disk space at rest, less disk slack, less filesystem bookkeeping.
Every single filesystem is way faster at dealing with one file than dozens/hundreds. Now multiply that by the the hundreds if does, it add up.
I’m sure this will work out great.
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