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- SBF landed in the US last night. Caroline Ellison (ceo alameda) and Gary Wang (cofounder ftx) pleaded guilty.
- Later, SBF released to house arrest on $250M bail. AFAIK, you don’t actually have to pay it, you just have to pledge collateral (in case you disappear) – this is his parents and their home. They’ll lose the estate and have to cover any extra to pay the 250M.
- And remember, bail is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s just an incentivization to return at the later court date for your actual trial/sentencing/whatever. If you’re a public safety risk, or a flight risk, you don’t have the option for bail. You stay in custody until your date. But if you’re just going to sit around until the date, it’s less money/admin/etc for them to keep you; hence bail.
- Remember there are two factors in your success: things out of your control and things in your control.
- Say success is a gaussian distribution for things out of your control. Most are in the middle. Some people are extremely lucky (market conditions, time/place, etc), some are not (born into poverty, etc). Those are the tails.
- But the things in your control – these efforts move your gaussian distribution up the success axis.
- That’s why it’s less accurate to say something like “I am one of the most successful people in my age/demo/whatever bracket” – there will always be a person on a lower-centered gaussian curve that lands on the upper tail due to things they’re not responsible for. There will always be more successful people who did less.
- It’s more accurate to say something like “I did everything I could to be as successful as possible” – implicitly accounting for your circumstance. Shifting your normal dist as high as possible.
- Effort is not a shortcut to the top. It’s a maximization of your chances succeed. The result is never trivial.
- “Track Seventeen” on the original LOTR Howard Shore score is no longer the same number after the rerecordings – it’s “The Road Goes Ever On” (pt1) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiaUB7-tb_8
- MSG and RCMH allegedly run face scans on the entire audience for every event. If the scans of any attendee match certain criteria (competitors, criminals, opposing litigators, etc) then they’ll be asked to leave. https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2022/12/21/facial-recognition-used-to-bar-attorney-from-rockettes
- Chess.com finished the acquisition of the play magnus group, so chess.com now owns the following: chess24, aimchess, meltwater tour, chessable, many more. This also means that magnus will play in all the chess.com events now (good).
- Lots of private work.
- Messari released their 2023 crypto report: https://messari.io/pdf/messari-report-crypto-theses-for-2023.pdf
- Night and day, how much I understand last year vs this year.
- Decentralization? Over half of all staked eth is controlled by lido/coinbase/kraken. Over half of bitcoin’s hashrate is controlled by foundry/antpool/f2pool.
- Some necessary pieces for defi lending: onchain identity, credit scores, insurance, credit default swaps.
- Point-E (from OpenAI) produces 3D models from text. First it generates point clouds then converts them to meshes. Then you can 3D print them. So you can turn text into a toy.
- So we have text->text, text->image, text->3dModel, image->image.
- Rancher is a big alternative to k8s for orchestration. Remember there’s ECS, GKE, Openshift, Mesos as well. But many use k8s primitives under the hood.
- Podman is a big alternative to docker for containerization. Remember there’s vagrant as well, but VMs. And containerd, but docker uses that under the hood.
- Alternatives to bazel for monorepo build tools: nx, pants, earthly.
- Goldfinch.
- Borrow/lend curated marketplace. Just like maple.finance. You can act as the lender (investor) or the borrower (usually SMBs).
- If you’re the lender, you can be a direct backer to a business or a general liquidity provider. Backers have a junior claim (first loss) and LPs have a senior claim (last loss). This is to incentivize the backers to actually support the businesses they invest in (lend to). High potential returns for the backers.
- Borrowers propose terms. Rate, size, term, payment frequency, fees, etc. Auditors check these listings. Investors then lend into the junior and senior tranches as desired. Remember the backers supply directly to these exact terms for the specific borrower (junior tranche). The LP funds go to a central pool (senior tranche of all terms) that supplies all borrowers on the platform.
- Backed by a16z and coinbase ventures.
- https://goldfinch.finance/
- Lots of research on marketplace lending vs balance sheet lending.
