Thoughts

Short thoughts, notes, links, and musings by Molly White. RSS

Sentencing dates have been set for FTX's Nishad Singh and Gary Wang. Singh is scheduled to be sentenced on October 30, and Wang on November 20.

Coinbase's "Stand With Crypto" PAC website is now confirming what I reported earlier.

More than 99% of the amount they claimed was raised by this supposedly "grassroots" PAC is in fact massive corporate contributions to the FairShake super PAC.

Screenshot: "$179,349,664 Donated by crypto advocates". There is a small ⓘ next to the monetary amount.

Screenshot: "$179,349,664 Donated by crypto advocates". Hovering over the ⓘ shows a tooltip: "$177.88M donated to FairShake and $1.47M donated to Stand With Crypto"

Does anyone know of a good employment lawyer in California?

The two candidates in today’s primaries that received substantial backing from cryptocurrency PACs both won their primaries.

1. John Curtis defeated Trent Staggs in the Republican Utah Senate primary, with the help of $1.7 million in crypto industry funding.

2. George Latimer defeated Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic primary for NY H-16, with the help of $2 million in crypto industry funding.

Ads run by these PACs made no mention of crypto or technology. In the NY race, ads from Fairshake seemed to align very closely with AIPAC’s aggressive campaign against Bowman, echoing their messaging accusing him of antisemitism.

“Defend American Jobs” was the PAC splashing out in the Utah race. They’re the Republican-focused crypto super PAC; “Protect Progress” is the Democrat counterpart.

Though Fairshake (nominally nonpartisan, and by far the highest fundraiser of the crypto PACs) previously made identical donations to both, they’ve just made another $5 million donation to Defend American Jobs without a corresponding donation to Protect Progress.

Defend American Jobs has raised $14.7 million so far this cycle; Protect Progress has raised $10.3 million.

Here's a glimpse at the spending in each race.

Charts showing amounts raised by each candidate, and amounts spent by outside groups to support or oppose. John Curtis raised around $3.8M, $9.2M was spent to support him, and $3.5M of that support came from the crypto industry.
Brad R. Wilson raised $5M.
Trent Staggs raised $1.25M, $900k was spent to support him, and $1.9M was spent to oppose him, $1.5M of which came from the crypto industry.
Jason Walton raised $2.9M.

Charts showing amounts raised by each candidate, and amounts spent by outside groups to support or oppose.
Jamaal Bowman raised around $4.3M, $1.9M was spent to support him, and $12M was spent to oppose him, $2.1M of which came from the crypto industry.
George Latimer raised $5.8M. $5.6M was spent to support him, and $1.1M was spent to oppose.

Other outside spending for Curtis mostly came from a super PAC called Conservative Values for Utah, with Defend American Jobs pitching in $5M last minute.

And as I mentioned, Bowman’s other opposition primarily came from AIPAC's UDP.

Fighting bots is fighting humans

One advantage to working on freely-licensed projects for over a decade is that I was forced to grapple with this decision far before mass scraping for AI training.

In my personal view, option 1 is almost strictly better. Option 2 is never as simple as "only allow actual human beings access" because determining who's a human is hard. In practice, it means putting a barrier in front of the website that makes it harder for everyone to access it: gathering personal data, CAPTCHAs, paywalls, etc.

This is not to say a website owner shouldn't implement, say, DDoS protection (I do). It's simply to remind you that "only allow humans to access" is just not an achievable goal. Any attempt at limiting bot access will inevitably allow some bots through and prevent some humans from accessing the site, and it's about deciding where you want to set the cutoff. I fear that media outlets and other websites, in attempting to "protect" their material from AI scrapers, will go too far in the anti-human direction.

PSA: Paying for a subscription on the crypto version of OnlyFans using a public blockchain does not give you "true privacy", regardless of what the models there might say.

The allure of Only1 extended beyond a different option for sharing exclusive, gated content. Jaylene highlighted the platform's unique features compared to traditional platforms like OnlyFans.

"I like the fact that Only1 being on-chain allows the customer to have true privacy," she said. "From a creator's perspective, the biggest issues with traditional platforms such as OnlyFans are issues with payment processing. Only1 solves this issue as the payments go directly to your wallet, providing creators with peace of mind and full control over their earnings."

Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers.

Telling creative workers that they can solve their declining wages with more copyright is a denial that creative workers are workers at all. It treats us as entrepreneurial small businesses, LLCs with MFAs negotiating B2B with other companies. That's how we lose.
On the other hand, if we address the problems of AI and labor as workers, and insist on labor rights – like the Writers Guild did when it struck last summer – then we ally ourselves with every other worker whose wages and working conditions are being attacked with AI.
Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant multinational corporations for the right to bleed us out.