Molly White (of Web 3 Is Going Just Great) has a helpful intro post about the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, now playing in a courtroom near you. I know I’ll be following along with all her coverage.

A while back, Bennett Tomlin (of Crypto Critics’ Corner) did a video breaking down a Financial Times documentary about SBF. Won’t have the hottest new developments, but it’s still a good watch.

Folding Ideas (of Line Goes Up and The Future Is A Dead Mall) has a new video about how the community that drove the GameStop short squeeze has morphed into a full-blown financial cult. It’s so densely packed with layers of nonsense — bad math, bad economics, crypto crossover, QAnon crossover, the works. I’ve watched the whole thing through twice.

(…I bought 5 shares of GME during the original frenzy, purely because it was making hedge fund managers cry on TV, and that was a cause I wanted to support. Had a look at r/WallStreetBets, but their posts were more concerning than inspiring, so I didn’t stick around. It got so much worse.)

Got from Folding Ideas to Jauwn’s chronicle about one specific Meme Stock Guy who is genuinely not well. And it turns out most of Jauwn’s other videos are reviewing NFT games to examine how well the gameplay holds up, which I’m working through now. It’s basically Web3 Gaming Is Going Just Great: The Channel.

From July: “A video about how “passive income” money-making schemes took over the internet, and the world.” Featuring some incredible parodies of financial/coaching influencer videos.

From August: “The efforts of sex work advocates are better invested, says Stabile, in campaigning for new laws that would make it illegal for banks to discriminate against sex workers on the basis of their profession, than in developing an alternative financial system.” Sex workers versus crypto.

From September: “Meta acknowledged in a statement to The Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms and said that other terms are being blocked, but the company declined to provide a list of them. A search by The Post discovered that the words “sex,” “nude,” “gore,” “porn,” “coronavirus,” “vaccines” and “vaccination” are also among blocked words.” (They do redirect you to, for example, the CDC page on COVID, so it seems like it’s an anti-conspiracy-theory measure. They’ve just given up on, I guess, moderating against conspiracy theories.)

And from now, a matched set of stories about search engines racing to the bottom:

“Testimony during Google’s antitrust case revealed that the company may be altering billions of queries a day to generate results that will get you to buy more stuff.“

“Like a good AI tool, Bing also offers a few citations to show that it has checked its facts. There is just one big problem: Shannon did not write any such paper, and the citations offered by Bing consist of fabrications.”