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Elizabeth Lopatto

Elizabeth Lopatto

Senior Reporter

Senior Reporter

    More From Elizabeth Lopatto

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Samuel R. Delany, sci-fi legend, may have had a mini-stroke, but he doesn’t want to discuss his own significance.

    Delany, who is seriously one of the greats, is “willing to discuss nearly anything but his own literary significance. Openly sharing the most intimate minutiae of his life—finances, hookup apps, Depends—he recoiled with Victorian modesty whenever I asked why he’d written his books or what they meant to his readers.”

    The profile is a delight all the same.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Bait for the middle-aged: Patricia Lockwood on David Foster Wallace.

    Sure, yeah, Infinite Jest predicted Instagram filters and Zoom fatigue. But Wallace also anticipated something else:

    What now seems most prescient is that he anticipated a time when reading would be accomplished more by a kind of hive-like activity rather than individual effort. This benefited him for a while, as he was the Great Group Read.

    Infinite Jest contains a samizdat video called The Entertainment that is so compelling people who view it never want to do anything else, including eat or sleep. The only thing it got wrong about social media was that The Entertainment wasn’t portable.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Finally, a real use for AI: making spam callers miserable.

    Personally, I think it would be more effective for the government to deal with the proliferation of spam calls that have made most of us stop picking up our phones, but this is fun too:

    Whitebeard stalls for time at the start of phone calls, using chatbot inanities about TV remotes and the like to give a couple of minutes for GPT-4, the OpenAI software, to process the telemarketer’s spiel and generate responses. Once ready, the AI text is fed into a voice cloner, which carries on the conversation.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    The former president of FTX US is back with — you guessed it! — an AI company.

    Yep, it uses ChatGPT. It only raised $5 million of the $10 million it wanted earlier this year so it seems like I’m not the only who’s a little skeptical of this.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    “Posting like an influencer” is only embarrassing if you’re old enough to remember how people used to post online before influencers existed.

    Of course, that means the entirety of Gen Z is cringe...

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Matt Damon’s favorite exchange, Crypto.com, “operates proprietary trading and market making teams.”

    In most normal markets, market making and prop trading are done by independent companies. One of the reasons the SEC is mad at Binance is that they allege Binance’s entities may have manipulated crypto markets.

    Also:

    One of the people with direct knowledge about the teams said that Crypto.com executives gave other, external trading houses “absolutely dramatic sworn statements that Crypto.com was in no way involved in trading”, while another said that employees were asked to “say there is no internal market maker type operation.”

    In response to questions from the Financial Times, Crypto.com said that employees had not been asked to lie to other market participants.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Do Kwon’s sentenced to four months in jail...

    ...but for passport shenanigans, not Terra / Luna. He’s been found guilty of forgery by a Montenegro court. The time he’s served since being arrested in March will count toward the sentence.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    “It’s a pretty obvious tell that there’s financial trouble brewing when a company stops paying its bills as they become due.”

    A fun update on how badly the Twitter deal is going:

    Last time I checked, if a company has more than 12 creditors — as Twitter does — then any three of them can join together to put a company into an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding. And Elon is in danger here. At some point, the creditors he is mindlessly stiffing on a regular basis are going to get sufficiently pissed to throw Twitter into bankruptcy.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Binance made a temporary deal with the SEC.

    It’s about the restraining order, not the larger case. Last night, a judge approved the deal to make sure that only US employees have access to Binance.US funds:

    According to the proposed agreement, Binance.US will take steps to make sure that no officials from Binance Holdings, the global exchange, have access to private keys for wallets or hardware wallets, or root access to Binance.US’s Amazon Web Services tools. The U.S.-based crypto trading platform will share detailed information about its business expenses, including estimated costs, in the coming weeks.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Bill Simmons calls Harry and Meghan “fucking grifters.”

    So, remember how Duke and Duchess of Sussex were supposed to do some podcasting for Spotify? They did a rumored $20 million deal for... one podcast?

    Now I, for one, respect the hustle here. (I will also do one podcast for $20 million. Or even $10 million.) Bill Simmons, the head of podcast innovation (?) at Spotify, however, feels differently.