This was covered in some of the coverage much earlier about the bankruptcy proceedings. Essentially it's within the court's power to not only pay the creditors but to pay them interest on their losses if that's possible. That's obviously balanced against the rights of the equity holders to get back any value if there is any equity left. In this specific case the people with equity were: the fraudsters who ran the scam, venture capitalists. No one wants to pay off the fraudsters and the VCs would rather pretend this whole thing didn't happen (because it makes them look like drunken coked up degenerate gamblers on a weekend at Vegas) so everyone agreed the court should be generous with how they calculate the return to customers. Government entitires also have a claim for any fines or taxation or whatever, but they're relatively happy for the retail customers to be protected first too - but they care less about the equity getting wiped out.
My guess would be anything above what the customers get may well go out to government fines rather than returning to the equity holders.
While that's true, if you have a good understanding of bankruptcy law, and a reasonable understanding of what assets FTX owned you could make a reasonable guess of how much money the eventual bankruptcy would pay out. Since the administrators publicly published what assets there were quite early on I think it's fair to say $270k always looked like a good deal.
In our libertarian utopia every employee at every company would receive a complex set of financial derivatives to incentivize them to manipulate the stock in exactly the way we want. Will Bob from Accounts push out recognising some revenue from this Quarter so that we miss projections and he can profit off some short dated Puts? No, because we had our HR team string together a series of quarterly short strangles to incentivize him to stabilize our share price.
The difference between a betting company the stock market is that in the stock market you have regulation to separate the exchange from the market maker. So in the stock market you go to the exchange, you buy or sell at the market price (or place an offer in the book) the exchange takes a commission but you're trading with a 3rd party. In the gambling world that generally doesn't happen, the exchange and the market maker generally are the same person - and there's good reason for that, if you can do it it's a better business model.
But either way, the same effect occurs. The sharks in the stock market profit from making good trades and in order to account for that the market makers have to quote a wider spread in the book, which effectively means the retail trader pays a larger spread. The net effect is money transfer from the retail trader to the smart trader. Would it be better for the market maker to just refuse to trade with the smart trader and then give the retail investor a better spread? Welcome to payment for order flow. Could a smart investor pretend to be a retail trader and get some good trades through Robinhood? Maybe, that's pretty analagous to what these guys are doing.
These are different mechanisms for the same thing but I'm not certain one is clearly morally superior.
A: Can you hear me?
B: Yes
B: What time is it?
A: ...
At the point that B has replied Yes, B knows that it can hear A and that it can send to A but it doesn't know that A can hear B. As long as A makes the first move in the rest of the conversation that's fine - the next message from A confirms that B's "Yes" was received, but if A has nothing to say then B has to send it's next query and hope that A received the Yes successfully. If it didn't then B thinks the connection is established but it actually hasn't been.
Well this just goes to the core of your view on the role of luck in life. Are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year and 5 of them are run by geniuses who single handedly disrupt loads of markets. Or are there 1,000 startups coming out of YC every year full of roughly equally good people 5 of which get extremely lucky and make boatloads of money.
Airbnb just forked hotels, Stripe just forked Visa.
I think the most acheivable way of having some verification of AI images is simply for the AI generators to store finger prints of every image they generate. That way if you ever want to know you can go back to Meta or whoever and say "Hey, here's this image, do you think it came from you". There's already technology for that sort of thing in the world (content ID from youtube, CSAM detection etc.).
It's obviously not perfect, but could help and doesn't have the enormous side effects of trying to lock down all image generation.
> That way if you ever want to know you can go back to Meta or whoever and say "Hey, here's this image, do you think it came from you".
Firstly, if you want to know an image isn’t generated, you’d have to go to every ‘whoever’ in the world, including companies that no longer exist.
Secondly, if you ask evil.com that question, you would have to trust them to answer honestly for both all images they generated and images they didn’t generate (claiming real pictures were generated by you can probably be career-ending for a politician)
This is worse than https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd02xx/EWD249.PDF: “Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!”. You can neither show an image is real nor that it is fake.
What's to stop someone from downloading an open source model, running it themselves, and either just not sharing the hashes, subtly corrupting the hash algo so that it gives a false negative, etc?
Also you need perceptual hashing (since one bitflip of the generated media alters the whole hash) which is squishy and not perfectly reliable to begin with.
Nothing. But that’s not the point. The point is that, to a rounding error, all output is made by a small number of models from a small number of easily regulated companies.
It’s never going to be possible to ensure all media is reliably tagged somehow. But if just half of media generated is identifiable as such that helps. Also helps avoid it in training new models, which could turn out useful.
Nate Silver interviewed as SBF as part of research for his book and I think the big take away from it was basically that Sam's attitude to risk was pathological - he was willing to take any sized bet that he thought was positive expected value. The obvious problem with that is that you if you continually take higher and higher risk bets it's certain that you'll eventually lose one of them.
SBF has been widely presented as a person who was constantly running these probabilistic computations and comparing expected values, but this strikes me as total horseshit that is a group invention of SBF himself and journalists who have a much more interesting story when he is a wunderkind.
I'll totally buy that he thinks about risk differently than other people, but not in some more mathematical sense.
Well for a start to run an even passable market making operation and to get into the jobs Sam did you have to be atleast fairly good at the mathematics behind probability. He's definitely more able to reason about probabilities than the average person. But sure, "I'm gonna go steal all these guys deposits to go gambling" wasn't an aggressive but understandable bet, it was the act of a degenerate gambler.
There were two things going on: A) Betting more aggressively than the Kelly Criterion, which indicates a bad understanding of how to reason about risk and EV[1], and, separately B) taking unnecessary, negative EV risks that have no justification beyond laziness.
B) include things like "having such sloppy accounting that you simply forget about major accounts[2] and are unintelligible to potential buyers" and "storing critical private keys in a text file that lots of people have poorly logged access to".
It's difficult to see when the 80% will ever pay off. They're a year in and he's got 94% health - but with that limit in place that's an effective battery capacity of 73% (0.94*0.8). At the rate that the others' batteries are degrading it's going to be close to 2 years before they even hit 80% capacity let alone the 60-70% that would make the 80% limited battery have better total real battery time. And at that point what are we saying? You're trading a good chunk of your battery in the first two years of its life for a few percent more several years into owning the phone?
It seems difficult from these numbers to see when, if ever, this choice is going to pay off for the people who opt in.
Seems like if that was Apple's goal, it would be easier for them to just reduce the quoted battery life of the phone, limit the charge to 80% for everyone, and relabel the 0-80 scale to 0-100.
Presumably, they've already effectively done this by choosing voltage amounts that balance warranty repairs with battery life. e.g. the iPhone 15 charges to a max of 4.48V, but the battery presumably physically supports some higher voltage for "100%" that would give more capacity and less lifespan. (Notably, different iPhone models have different voltage ranges.)
"reduce the quoted battery life of the phone" - This is the bit that presumably they don't want to do.
Reducing the top-line specs of the phone means that it might fall down in comparisons to others in a spec-comparison.
I presume they would rather move the conversation into customer-land, i.e. once you've bought your phone they talk about how they are acting to preserve your expensive device.
My guess would be anything above what the customers get may well go out to government fines rather than returning to the equity holders.