Nishad Singh, FTX’s head of engineering and owner of a 7.8 percent stake in the company, has pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges. He wrote the software that let Alameda exempt itself from being auto-liquidated, Reuters previously reported.
Also of note: Singh gave $8 million to Democratic campaigns and PACs in 2022, according to Open Secrets.
Writing in The London Review of Books, sociologist William Davies considers the “reaction economy:”
The Instagrammer on holiday learns how to increase follower engagement by monitoring the reactions that their images receive; the delivery company keeps track of its logistics (and surveils its drivers) on the basis of the customer feedback it receives; the financial analyst scours their Bloomberg terminal for the all-important price movement. The most important thing about feedback isn’t whether it’s positive or negative, but that you get it in the first place, and sustaining a constant feedback loop requires constant vigilance and work.
[London Review of Books]
We’ve talked a little bit about how interest rates explain what’s going on in tech, but I really enjoyed this insightful newsletter about why Alexa is suddenly bothering you about how it can make shopping lists:
The other day was the final straw. Someone in my household made a request, and during the follow-on prompt, in a terrifying concert, my wife, my 3 and 6 year-olds, and me, all, in a tone that no parent should ever encourage for their kids, yelled, “Alexa, NO!!!!”
[www.readmargins.com]
Spare a moment to think of the young VCs, who thought they were going to the moon and are instead... doing a lot of cold calls and creating TikToks about How 2 VC. I do love the artist formerly known as Business Insider, which is secretly a very funny publication.
The founders of Forsage, a alleged Ponzi purporting to be a DeFi protocol have been indicted for fraud. That’s not the funny part.
This is:
Analysis of the computer code underlying Forsage’s smart contracts allegedly revealed that, consistent with a Ponzi scheme, as soon as an investor invested in Forsage by purchasing a “slot” in a Forsage smart contract, the smart contract automatically diverted the investor’s funds to other Forsage investors, such that earlier investors were paid with funds from later investors.
The game is to guess the secret word. The hitch is that the AI is classifying what words are alike. Yesterday’s word was “grasshopper,” and the AI thought “ant” was closer than “cricket.” Maybe that’s true if you’re analyzing texts to predict the next word — after all, there’s a fable about an ant and a grasshopper — but “cricket” and “grasshopper” are synonyms!
[contexto.me]
Caroline Ellison, the head of Alameda Research, also worked there. It’s a hotbed for the effective altruism world:
“The sorts of people who are into effective altruism are not the sort of people who would flourish” in investment banking, William MacAskill, a British philosopher who is considered a leader of the movement, said in an April interview with The New York Times. “But Jane Street has this very nerdy, intellectual culture, so it’s a better fit.”
[The New York Times]
AI is based on low-paid labor. This interview with one of the people who help decide what Google will show you is worth a read — for starters, he says he makes $3 less per hour than his daughter, who works in fast food.
Readers of a certain age will recall when McAfee software was unavoidable. McAfee himself became a tabloid fixture.
Nearly every source for this story says they had at some point felt manipulated by McAfee, conned, betrayed. That he was the ultimate hype man who could sell anyone anything. Without him, software companies might’ve had to make their own products more secure and been better prepared for threats worse than dot-com-era viruses.
[Bloomberg.com]