That’s the thing, it’s not centralized

But who is able to mint/create those cards? Anyone or just the company? That is what I was primarily getting at.

if the company hosting it closes it’s doors, you still have something in your ownership that corresponds to your cards,

Yes, proof that you owned cards in a now defunct game. The question is how much value is left at that point.

opening up the possibility of others re-implementing everything.

Barring copyright/IP law allowing it, or are we disregarding that? If someone wanted to take over they might just buy out the old company and take over.

And even when starting from scratch they’d have to evaluate if honoring/adopting the existing tokens would be worth it (would give an existing player base, but in return you don’t get any money from them and probably less than from a customer that starts from scratch).

A third option would be some form of foss project reviving the game. But the game seems independent of the blockchain aspect, which only tracks card ownership. Why would any such effort want to adopt a system build on artificial scarcity and profit?

Could you elaborate a bit how blockchain enables something unique here? I see that it enables trade between users, but if a single company controls the game and I assume supply of new cards, does the blockchain aspect for trading really matter?

Trading itself is basic and doesn’t need a blockchain. I guess with it you have it implemented in a public and tamper proof way, but that second part doesn’t seem to matter to me if the source is centralized.

So what exactly is gained from this approach over just your average ingame auction house?

As always with debates on the internet nuances get lost and things get painted more black and white.

And they still deserve credit for having invented the concept and designed the bulk of the bricks.

No idea if the other comment that they stole it is true, but looking at the wealth of the owner family I’d say they got more than enough credit. They are set for many generations to come. At some point ideas have to become common good for others to also build upon.

Thanks.

It sounds like the entire industry is fragile at this point.

Things are definitely shifting and it’s not clear how they will play out. And considering leading edge semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most complex processes invented by humanity, while being crucial to our economy, calling it fragile might be accurate.

I’m not sure why Intel can’t just keep making shitty laptop processors though.

Interestingly enough laptop processors might be the one area where Intel is still decently competitive. Their Luna Lake processors (Core Ultra 200V series) are quite competitive and some of the best offerings on the market. Solid performance, good efficiency and strong battery life, and great integrated graphics. However they are using TSMC to manufacture them rather than their own fabs and similar to apples M series chips they utilize integrated memory, which does reduce margins and laptop manufacturers don’t like it as it reduces their ability to differentiate their models.

Intel in it’s current form can’t, because as explained above it is so much more than just the designer of laptop processors. Split up into parts a small fabless design firm for x86 client processors would probably survive, but that wouldn’t be Intel anymore, adress a much smaller market, and also not completely “make”, but only design them.

the client market for desktops and laptops is just way to small to sustain leading edge semiconductor manufacturing on its own. On that note one of the recent comments of Intels current CEO Lip-Bu Tan was that they will only pursue 14A (the process node after the upcoming 18A), if they can at least win one major external client as customer, since otherwise it wouldn’t be economical to scale up. Which basically puts them on a timer of like a year considering the leadup times required.

You only need to be so fast to use the Internet and write papers.

If that were the benchmark we’d have passed it a long time ago. Although it should be noted that progress not only means better performance, but also better efficiency.

Lego as a brand does imo substantially benefit from positive associations such as heritage, sentimentality, and other positive attributes. Otherwise how would they be able to demand such premium prices.

So I would see it less as them being “dinged” for this action, but more as them losing some of those privileges. Something they are not inherently entitled to.

Imo the title falsely implies that Lego not being a US company means they are completely independent and unaffected by US actions.

Lego presumably does substantial business in the US and thus is beholden to US jurisdiction and the whims of Trump to some degree. Them dropping diversity and inclusion from their reports just shows their priorities. However on that note Lego still being family owned lets us pin this decision more squarely on some particular individuals, rather than the usual vague mass of shareholders.

I think for businesses that deal with physical items, rather than offering services, and are not drop shipping, selling something 3D printed has to be one of the lowest inventory options. You need to have the printers, some filament, and maybe some accessories like packaging boxes, but otherwise you can just make your product whenever you get orders (or have a small stock for faster fulfillment).

Using a spare system that isn’t in active use anymore to mess around and learn is definitely a good idea. However for long-term use I would keep an eye out for energy consumption. Depending on electricity prices it might make more sense to get a newer system with lower power draw, especially for something with high uptime.

What is going on here?

I’m just an interested layman, but i’ll give explaining it a try. I think this is more about whether or not Intel can stay in the market for leading edge manufacturing against TSMC.

The first thing to understand is that there are two parts to Intel: the manufacturing side and chip design.

In manufacturing leading edge chips they are primarily competing with TSMC (the clear market leader) and Samsung. In the past they used to be far ahead of the competition, but they screwed up that lead and are now behind. This is a very capital intensive market as fabs cost billions to build. And each new generation gets more and more expensive.

On the design side there are multiple different markets: servers, desktop/laptops, and mobile devices. Ever since losing out on producing the chip for the first iphone intel hasn’t been a factor in the mobile market. Between servers and desktop/laptops, servers are the fastly more important and bigger market. Here they are competing with AMD, but also increasingly arm based processors, increasingly done by the large hyper scalers themselves (e.g. Amazon with their Graviton processors). Additionally with the ai boom the market has severely shifted towards gpus being vastly more important (which is dominated by nvidia).

Intel is relatively unique in that they still do both design and produce their own chips (not taking outside customers, but in recent times outsourcing some manufacturing to tsmc). Samsung also designs and produces their own arm based processors (exynos), but on a smaller scale and also has other customers. AMD used to have fabs in the past, but got rid of them (today called global foundries).

I would argue that here we need to primarily focus on the manufacturing, not design side. Even though they are also under pressure on the design side aswell and e.g. AMD is beating them in the server market.

It’s more about whether or not Intel can hold on being in the leading edge race as manufacturer or drop out (like GlobalFoundries did a while back), which would leave us with only TSMC and Samsung (potentially China’s SMIC, should they ever manage to develop their own EUV technology and catch up). No western manufacturer of leading edge chips, only asian ones that are heavily concentrated geographically and TSMC bearing a substantial geopolitical risk.

As mentioned above Intel has struggled with getting better process nodes working properly (especially in a timely manner) and costs are increasing by a lot. The issue is that now intel is severly cash strapped, as they’ve paid out massive dividends in the past when things were better and now that they’ve fallen behind earnings have disappeared (which is also why the mass layoffs).

Their competitor TSMC can spread the needed investment costs over many large customers such as apple, nvidia, amd and qualcomm. So far Intel manufactured purely for themselves and didn’t take on external customers. With massively increasing costs it becomes obvious how this becomes less feasible on your own and scale increasingly becomes important. Especially if either/both the design or manufacturing side mess up and fall behind on delivering competitive products.

Switching to manufacturing for external customers is difficult. They have to adjust their internal processes to suit what customers are used to from others. There is a potential conflict of interest as Intel might at the same time be the customers rival (an issue TSMC as pure manufacturer doesn’t have). And lastly customers need reliable schedules, if you are e.g. apple and release an iphone anually you need your manufactuerer to reliably deliver a workable node at a specific time and can’t have it delayed (or even have the uncertainty of this happening).

They originally planned for their upcoming 18A (maybe even the axed 20A?) process to have external customers, but that didn’t pan out (they will just produce some of their own products). Now they target external customers for the next generation 14A. Should they by then not have gotten their shit together enough to attract customers or be profitable Intel (the former giant of the semiconductor industry) will probably break apart and be done. At least in it’s current form.

The fabs in germany and poland have been dead in the water for a while now from the moment they fell behind schedule and eventually were put on hold. This is just them officially axing those plans.

I mean in the server space Linux has already won and is doing just fine. Imo it is actually the reverse and sad that it needs this level of turmoil to get Europe to even think about software and digital infrastructure as fundamental. And even with all that’s going on they are just dipping their toes into it rather than properly comitting to a radical shift. Hell, even with all that’s going on some parts of the police here in Germany are still getting into bed with companies like Palantir.

You and all the companies training their AI models, like Meta for example

he consumed only vitamins, electrolytes, an unspecified amount of yeast (a source of all essential amino acids) and zero-calorie beverages such as tea, coffee, and sparkling water, although he occasionally added milk and/or sugar to the beverages, especially during the final weeks of the fast.

Worth mentioning imo, but you are right that most people should be fine fasting for some days if necessary. Although I would bet that almost everyone has a few days of food anyways. Unless you literally have empty shelves and buy groceries every day, most people will have a base stock of shelf stable foods like noodles, canned stuff, sugar, flour and so on.

Imo the limiting factor will be drinkable water most of the time. If something would cut off the supply immediately and for longer durations it would be a serious issue. Especially during warmer months.

Agreed. I hope this gains even more traction. Building a digital economy around support and service of free open source software with the requirement of personnel being local seems like the best way for Europe to finally become competitive.