A useful project related to Apple's Core Audio is qaac - it wraps iTunes Windows DLL's in a standalone encoding tool with a CLI interface. I believe it even works under Wine on Linux: https://web.archive.org/web/20250814194428/https://www.andre... So you don't need a Mac or even a full iTunes installation to get high quality AAC encoding.
Either way you look at it, stablecoins are both better rails and asset than commercial bank deposits - they are cheaper, faster, global, 24/7, and remove unnecessary friction. And if you look at, say, USDC reserves (mostly treasuries or overnight repos) they are structurally better than what your commercial bank has (illiquid mortgages and similar). That said, you don't get the FDIC $250k backstop and for some that might flip the entire conversation (in particular, narrow banking/reserve quality argument doesn't apply under that cap - you are simply fully covered).
This is one recent paper, but with this and other personnel details (eg. Fed governors attending the last few "A Very Stable Conferences", ex-Fed people working at Circle / doing stablecoin startups) you can infer that the Fed is more pro-stablecoin than you think.
Why? Cross-border payments are hard, CBDCs are unpopular / politically infeasible, and Fedwire takes up a ton of balance sheet capacity (etc).
UST and the other ones were "algorithmic" stablecoins collateralized poorly -- USDC and OUSD (eg.) are collateralized under the regulation of the OCC / by USD-equivalent short-term bonds etc.
This is not to say that there can't be liquidity challenges or "black swan" events, but the current iteration of stablecoins are _comparable_ to being "made by banks" and are certainly regulated.
This still doesn't answer the many other unstablecoins in existence offered to unsuspecting retail customers, USDT, USDC, GUSD, USDG, OUSD, USDS, USDD, USDGO, TUSD and the myriad of other confusing unaudited, risky and pointless coins.
Why do we need so many stablecoins?
I am willing to bet that at least one or two of them will completely depeg in less than 5 years.
These are audited and regulated by the federal government!
Re: why do we need _so many_, I tend to agree but it's the equivalent of "USD" in the banking system really being a wide range of deposits at different institutions, with different underlying balance sheets (banks fail regularly, and are regularly backstopped by eg. the FDIC!). There is clearing infra being built around this problem (increasing fragmentation of deposits between stablecoins/etc), just like it was a problem for the old world in which clearinghouses emerged
>You'd probably have to 4X to 5X the current housing supply to make a dent in prices.
Not at all. The important thing here is that price is set on the margin. Relatively modest supply increases can have outsized price effects. As an example, consider rents in Austin - something like 30% housing stock increase led to 16% drop in median rent, all while Austin simultaneously had massive in-migration, i.e., rents fell despite demand surging.
As another example of margin behavior: vacancy rates matter a lot, a modest vacancy rate increase can crater rents, which we see in the CRE market.
Uber/Lyft takeover had little to do with price (though, yes, they were cheaper) and everything to do with reliability and overall quality of service. Even though ride sharing industry lost money in subsidy arms race and side bets it was fundamentally sound in major metros since early on (similar to how Amazon was fundamentally sound from early on, despite not recognizing profit for a long time). Popular "analyses" kept equating Uber/Lyft with firms losing money on every sale with no path to fix it but the demand was always there as riders had already left taxis and transit on reliability and convenience grounds.
Exactly right. Even though ride sharing industry lost money in subsidy arms race and side bets it was likewise fundamentally sound in major metros since early on. Popular "analyses" kept equating Uber/Lyft with firms losing money on every sale with no path to fix it but the demand was always there as riders had already left taxis and transit on reliability and convenience grounds.
Similar experiences in Boston area. Hailing a taxi at a taxi stand (e.g., at Prudential or Logan) - good experience to this day. Calling dispatcher - half of the time they don't show up (esp. so for scheduled airport rides) or show up late or arrive in a smoke-filled car. Hackney carriage medallions might have been bad investments for some cabbies, but Uber/Lyft are simply a much better service for the customer. Uber/Lyft takeover had little to do with price (though, yes, they were cheaper) and everything to do with reliability and overall quality of service.
Nice work! FWIW, you can still use Manifest V2 extensions, like uMatrix, uBlock Origin, or Violentmonkey, in Chrome by passing command line flags. For example, on macOS:
open -b com.google.Chrome --new --args --disable-features=ExtensionManifestV2Unsupported,ExtensionManifestV2Disabled
When Google finally nerfs that, it is past time to move to Firefox or Brave, the latter of which has explicitly announced uMatrix support.
> For as long as we’re able (and assuming the cooperation of the extension authors), Brave will continue to support some privacy-relevant MV2 extensions—specifically AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix
Once Google removes MV2 and it's supporting code, Brave is not going to shoulder the cost of keeping all of that patched to run on newer builds of Chromium. Especially not because their own blocking doesn't rely on it, uMatrix has been deprecated since 2021, and AdGuard is already committed to transitioning to MV3.
I thought these stopped working altogether with the release of Chrome 142? I know you could override it for awhile there, but I've been lead to believe that option is gone.
This is part of what forced my hand and made Firefox my daily driver, at least for personal use.
It works fine in Chrome 148. Earlier Chrome versions removed chrome://flags versions of the above even with "Temporarily unexpire M147 flags" (and similar), but command line invocation continues to work.
Awesome, thank you so much for that! I'll have to dig in and get this working for my work machine where I still have to use Chrome. I literally quit using Chrome for personal use over this but I guess it was premature.
Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge
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