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Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”
- bradgessler 4y agoWhat annotations software is this? All news should be reported this way when source documents are available. Edit: scrolled to the bottom of the page and found https://github.com/molly/annotate https://github.com/molly/annotate
- jtbayly 4y agoSo it's just the front-end, relying on you to manually write all the HTML. I'd love some software to make generating these (or similar) annotated documents easily. Any ideas?
- batmenace 4y agoFermat's Library offers something that comes relatively close https://fermatslibrary.com/margins https://fermatslibrary.com/margins
- bradgessler 4y agoSlightly tangential: is there software that converts multi-LaTeX PDFs into responsive HTML in a reasonable way? I'd read more of these papers if they were more viewable on a phone-size viewport.
- Eisenstein 4y agoPandoc?
- bradgessler 4y agoYeah I was thinking the same thing. A GUI where the original text material is loaded, then you highlight it and write the annotations. Bonus of each annotation could be tweeted/tooted/whatevered and include open graph screenshots of the annotation. Also, I'm sure you didn't mean to trivialize the project, but it's more than "just a front end". The design is what's really great about it.
- cma 4y agoSounds similar to Ted Nelson's Xanadu project.
- linusha 4y agoYou might find https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/ helpful.
- Denzel 4y agoDoes Hypothesis require a cloud account that syncs your annotations? If so, these products are a non-starter for any corporate environment, which is unfortunate. Obsidian gets this right. Most software these days doesn't which is a shame.
- sorokod 4y agoCool idea, why don't you have a go at it and share the outcome on HN.
- lofatdairy 4y agoI assume there's probably a way to modify or configure MD-based SSGs to produce side notes instead of footnotes. Hilariously I think you could use RMD because that has built-in sidenote functionality but it would probably require some manual effort to produce those nice highlights. That said, Molly is also making use of footnotes inside her margin notes, so if that's the goal my suggestions might not work.
- kees_ 4y agoThis is what my fork of her project does https://github.com/kees-/annotate https://github.com/kees-/annotate :) Well, all it does is generate her identical format from a spec. Like @bradgessler said a gui to coerce annotations to that format from highlighting would be awesome
- chubot 4y agoAgreed this is awesome! The author understands how to use the web: HTML, CSS, and JS (which is unfortunately rare in 2023)
- jzelinskie 4y agoMy team recently built NextJS-based site with sets of annotations on the research paper our project is based on (Google Zanzibar): https://authzed.com/zanzibar https://authzed.com/zanzibar https://github.com/authzed/zanzibar-annotated https://github.com/authzed/zanzibar-annotated Could be easily forked and used for other purposes. Happy to facilitate if we get any requests in the GitHub issues.
- molly0x57 4y agoThis is super cool!
- ibebrett86 4y agohttps://kaimerra.com/kaimerra-graffiti https://kaimerra.com/kaimerra-graffiti I had worked on a tool for hosting collaborative editing of these kinds of things, but we are currently evaluating whether we should pursue it further.
- inasio 4y agoHooray for diffs, Molly joked about formatting issues (triple space), SBF probably read it and fixed it
- bmitc 4y agoSam Bankman-Fried is something else. He seems to be incapable of stopping talking, both before and after this saga. He also seems just purely delusional. He's co-conspirators have readily plead guilty. He has a tough hill to climb. Regarding Sam Trabucco, why do we not hear anything about him in these proceedings? How is it possible that he wasn't involved given he just up and left in just August 2022? Why hasn't he been charged? This seems very strange to me. https://protos.com/scoop-ex-alameda-exec-sam-trabucco-bought-millions-in-property-pre-collapse/ https://protos.com/scoop-ex-alameda-exec-sam-trabucco-bought...
- pavlov 4y agoMaybe Trabucco is a voluntary witness for the prosecution and they don't want to dilute what he's going to say at the trial?
- bmitc 4y agoBut why isn't he charged as well? His timing on leaving is quite suspicious, and there seems to be no way in which he wasn't both aware and a participant of what was going on. Plus, his personal purchases seem quite suspect, if the claims in the article are true.
- whatshisface 4y ago"At no point was my client aware that FTX was insolvent, and I have 100s of emails and public statements for you to read if you don't believe me." - what a lawyer would hypothetically say.
- Invictus0 4y agoApparently he told CZ it was insolvent in a phone call: https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/2022/11/16/binance-ceo-i-did-not-expect-to-hear-of-ftx-insolvency-in-call-with-sam-bankman-fried/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/2022/11/16/binance-...
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> FTX International and Alameda were both legitimately and independently profitable businesses in 2021, each making billions. From the article. What are your thoughts given this? > Again, FTX's and Alameda's 2021 tax returns suggest they were massively unprofitable.7 Ah. I missed this point right next to it.
- stusmall 4y agoCan he just gift wrap these statements with a little tag that says "To the prosecutors with love. Merry Xmas, SBF"
- timmytokyo 4y agoI'd love to know what his parents think of what he's doing. They're law professors at Stanford; they have to be aware of how utterly stupid this is, don't they?
- yessirwhatever 4y ago[dead]
- easytiger 4y agoHave you spent much time with humanities academics? I would make no such assumptions.
- __derek__ 4y agoThey're lawyers and law professors, not humanities academics.
- wmf 4y agoHis father is reportedly conflict-averse to the extreme and his mother wrote an article saying free will doesn't exist therefore people aren't responsible for their crimes.
- jasonhansel 4y agoSBF also wrote a later post about FTX US's balance sheet: https://sambf.substack.com/p/ftx-us-balance-update-2023-01-17 https://sambf.substack.com/p/ftx-us-balance-update-2023-01-1... Is that post at all accurate or is it even more lies?
- Marazan 4y agoIt confuses customer funds with ftx.us assets so no, it is just more self serving lies.
- TacticalCoder 4y agoTotal lies: the current bankruptcy CEO says that balance sheet accounts for hundreds of millions in a company called LedgerX (IIRC, out of memory) which FTX.us acquired with... Money fraudulently siphoned from investors and customers. So the money used to buy LedgerX (and which LedgerX still partially has) should at some point be seized. FTX.us is insolvent too.
- low_tech_love 4y agoBalance sheet: ===== Money I got 100.000 Money I owe 90.000 Total +10.000 See? Totally solvent bruh!
- SilverBirch 4y agoOne of the reasons that people keep on saying "this kid is insane for continuing to talk" is because they're rightly worried that he would admit to something that he'll go to prison for. In that post, he essentially does so. What the new CEO did in bankruptcy is he wrapped up the business into 4 silos, one of which (WRS) contains FTX US, LedgerX, FTX NFTs and a load of other stuff. Now what Sam is doing is saying "Hey look! WRS does have enough cash to pay back the FTX US customers!", but if you count all the money that WRS has, what you're saying is that FTX US's customers weren't held as deposits, it's just that the total assets of the company exceeed customer deposits. Which means he's basically saying "Yes, I did do the illegal comingling of your deposits, but in total the company has enough cash to pay you back if, for the purposes of accounting, we split out an arbitrary part of the company and ignore the shortfall in the rest of the company".
- wpietri 4y agoI am truly grateful for people like Molly White, David Gerard, and Amy Castor. As the crypto grift circus expanded and expanded, I just got worn out. There was so much to pay attention to as it metastasized. All those writers have been diligently following it for years with a critical eye, and all of them have taken a lot of heat for it. As the wheels come off, it's great to have their detailed insights.
- ur-whale 4y ago> As the crypto grift circus expanded crypto != FTX
- rejectfinite 4y agoThe medium is the message. Crypto enabled this.
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- wpietri 4y agoOh? You're saying that FTX was the only bad thing to happen in the crypto space? This sort of tedious, disingenuous quibbling is exactly why I'm grateful to the people I mentioned. Because instead of having to laboriously find all the failures, I can just tell you that all of this is documented in David's books, Amy's blog, and Molly's projects like https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
- lolinder 4y agoThe crypto grift isn't limited to FTX, it's nearly everywhere in crypto. My great-uncle (who's constantly trying to find the one big break that'll make him rich) was working on starting a crypto token before everything collapsed. He is in his seventies and knows nothing about tech or finance, but he knew crypto was the place for people who want to make quick cash. The whole industry has become a haven for grifters. That there are a few sincere projects doesn't change that.
- breck 4y ago> Judge Dorsey ultimately overruled objections to their retention by two individual FTX creditors. I think Molly White defaults to too much credibility in judges and lawyers. SBF's main argument is that Sullivan & Cromwell misled him into going the Chapter 11 route, which he later learned was more motivated by its ability to make hundreds of millions rather than helping his customers. He made a mistake in trusting them. All entrepreneurs make mistakes in trusting people they should not. He admits to serious mistakes with Alameda etc, but believes those were recoverable. I would agree—the crypto market is huge and so important—and think as long as all customers get their money back, that it was fixable. I think S&C has done a terrible job with FTX since taking over since the bankruptcy, so find SBF's argument to have merit. SBF's main message to entrepreneurs, which I think is a good one: be more transparent, and be careful who you trust. Source: I think I have $30,000 in my FTX.us account, so if anything I should be biased against SBF/FTX. But I am currently dealing with a dishonest lawyer and incompetent judge in the San Diego Family Law Cartel, so I am biased against the system at the moment.
- rrdharan 4y ago> the crypto market is … so important Citation desperately needed.
- breck 4y agoCrypto is a 24/7 global, resilient payments network. It increases the velocity and transparency of money, which will have a huge impact on global economy. Also, if you think customers losing a $8B to FTX is bad, wait until you read about retail banks in the USA taking $30B a year from their customers: https://breckyunits.com/the-great-bank-robbery.html https://breckyunits.com/the-great-bank-robbery.html
- fckgw 4y agoWhen? It's been 13 years.
- automatic6131 4y ago>Crypto is a 24/7 global, resilient payments network. Man, your mind is gonna be blown when you realise that you can have that _right_ now! All you have to do is move to a first world country* *like the UK or any country in the EEA. US not included. I jest, but my point is serious. This is already a reality for anyone living in Europe. It's a political problem (is a 24/7 global payment network important to people in democracies), and incidentally, crypto also faces the same political problem. "ohhh but it's permissionless" yeah nah no one is taking in magic beans for value
- CydeWeys 4y agoThis is one of the best fiskings I've seen in a long time. Just absolutely brutal.
- breck 4y agoHere's some constructive feedback to make this more trustworthy: - Include a "View source" link to the source code for this document. Everyone makes mistakes and new information comes to light. You should provide a link to the GitHub source file used to generate this page, so that your readers can see the version history and all changes for the lifetime of the article since publication. - Include the actual sources. A number of your sources, such as #7, are links to secondary sources, that have dead links to the primary sources. You should copy any primary sources and include them in the repo with your article. "But Breck, the WSJ, NYTimes, CNN, WaPo, et cetera, don't do anything of those things!" Yes. Exactly. You can't trust them either.
- molly0x57 4y agoThanks for the suggestions! I've implemented both, and I also reached out to the Forbes writer to let him know his link was broken.
- breck 4y agoFantastic. The View source link points to: https://github.com/molly/website-v2/blob/master/src/pug/pages/annotations/sbf-ftx-pre-mortem-overview.pug https://github.com/molly/website-v2/blob/master/src/pug/page... Very cool use of Pug. And thanks for following up with Forbes! I've really enjoyed your stuff, but wasn't sure if you really cared about the truth or not. Now I know. Thank you! The world needs more journalists like you!
- linuxftw 4y agoThe way I see it, Alameda is the real criminal here. They clearly operated with the criminal intent to take the assets, and distribute who knows how. I think it's perfectly possible that SBF is just dumb, and Alameda exploited his stupidity. Once everything crashed, Alameda was all too happy to turn state's witness. SBF's best chance at this point is to secure his own plea deal with proof that Alameda is lying to the feds and scapegoating him. I don't see the feds going for this, they hate ever admitting they're wrong, but I suspect that's how it's going to play out.
- JCM9 4y agoSBF’s lawyers probably struggling to get him to keep quiet. What he keeps saying can and will very much be used against him.
- simple10 4y agoMolly published the front end tool (annotate) she used to create the writeup. This would be an amazing VS Code plugin! https://github.com/molly/annotate https://github.com/molly/annotate
- mrguyorama 4y agoJust a reminder RE:Making investors whole. If you defraud investors, but magically a trillion dollars appears in your bank account and you distribute it equally to all investors you defrauded and they somehow walk home with 2X what they invested, YOU HAVE STILL COMMITTED A CRIME. The crime is not owing money to investors, the crime is taking their money and using it as the company's money. It doesn't matter if your bonkers ideas of ownership allows to you make each and every investor a trillion dollars.
- grammers 4y agoThat's a great summary, putting everything in perspective.
- Symmetry 4y ago> No one in their right mind would use the word "solvency" to describe this. No, you absolutely can. They were balance-sheet insolvent but cash-flow solvent from when they took the money until when people found out.
- low_tech_love 4y agoSteal a handful of dollars: get thrown in a dungeon for years and be forgotten by history (or worse). Steal billions of dollars: get a free home vacation and the chance to explain yourself and sway the public opinion!
- SergeAx 4y agoI really love that format and wish there were more content like that!