SBF posting 1 letter tweets to evade delete detection bots? | Hacker News Reader

SBF posting 1 letter tweets to evade delete detection bots?

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116 pointsmemish55 comments

the person who posted it realized they were wrong later: https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1592378315431550977

It wouldn't even make sense to hide tweets like that (a bot can easily download all your tweets without watching for you to delete them... and deleting illegal tweets doesn't make them disappear from twitter servers)

No criminal knows everything. Just because it "wouldn't even make sense" doesn't mean a criminal wouldn't try it. Caroline Ellison did delete her Tumblr accounts a few days ago. (Though if she actually wants more attention and is trying to exploit the Streisand effect... well played, Caroline, well played.)

I'm pretty sure Caroline deleted her Tumblr accounts because a Twitter mob was digging through them and doxxing her friends (many of my friends were scrambling to hide their connections to her).

Doesn't explain deleting tweets about GAAP and cash on hand from this current scandal.

Seems like SBF isn't deleting Tweets with this trick but others that RTed his stuff are deleting theirs, causing his tweet count to go down. Tom Brady seems to be a big one. According to this source at least.

https://twitter.com/cmsintern/status/1592372634955976704

Does not explain https://twitter.com/AutismCapital/status/1592344609912672256 .

EDIT: suspending judgment again after seeing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33605431 .

Sure but he wasn't using this alleged trick to cover up those deletions.

Sam's explanation:

Shortly before the interview, Mr. Bankman-Fried had posted a cryptic tweet: the word “What.” Then he had tweeted the letter H. Asked to explain, Mr. Bankman-Fried said he planned to post the letter A and then the letter P. “It’s going to be more than one word,” he said. “I’m making it up as I go.”

So he was planning a series of cryptic tweets? “Something like that.”

But why? “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m improvising. I think it’s time.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/ftx-sam-bankma...

This NYT puff piece is a shame. It doesn't mention the fraud committed of using users' funds, servers wiped out, etc.

And put this in the context of the NYT writing negative pieces for 10 years on almost every tech founder.

EDIT: A Twitter thread on how SBF is well-connected with the New York Times.

https://twitter.com/JagoeCapital/status/1592311592875597826

NYT reporter have an hour with SBF.

https://twitter.com/yaffebellany/status/1592353938099302401?...

Nothing about fraud or crime.

https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1592349684471037955?s=...

then someone on Twitter found the connection between SBF and WEF, his aunt.

"As for the WEF, its ties with Bankman-Fried extend to his family as well. His aunt, Linda P. Fried, an epidemiologist who serves as the dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, is listed on the WEF’s website."

https://nypost.com/2022/11/14/how-world-economic-forum-other...

SBF seem to have a lot of connections with the elites of our society.

This FTX fiasco look more and more like Thaneno.

Imagine, someone whose parents are both Stanford professors might have a family connection to other highly successful professionals.

Why would they send such an inexperienced reporter to interview someone like this who has manipulated even experienced people?

The whole debacle reeks of someone who is used to being the smartest person in the room and using it for manipulation. Unfortunately he has reached a point where intelligence is no longer needed to see the end result (thousands cannot withdraw from their accounts), and no amount of manipulation is going to change that.

The nonsensical tweets are like watching a sociopath short-circuit when he gets caught in his own trap.

Are you overlooking the obvious: that it is not a very good newspaper at some things?

Or that the NYT and the connected elites have an agenda?

https://twitter.com/WakeToBitcoin/status/1591542267742937089

I'd rather like to know why sophisticated people were easily manipulated by him, but he seemed to set off alarm bells all the time in unsophisticated people(like myself, but also many others)

What alarm bells, specifically? I didn't see it. He was someone who had passed through well-known institutions like MIT and Jane Street, with a family reputation he would have wanted to protect, had a team around him with known pedigree (which plays into them wanting to preserve their reputation), was obviously smart having been math olympiad as a kid, and talked the talk of Bill Gates-esque altruism. I found FTX and SBF less suspicious than all the other crypto personalities, at least.

One alarm bell for me was that he was pitching a product that is a Ponzi scheme that doesn’t bear any scrutiny.

How did you know it was a Ponzi before this info came out? Looked like a regular crypto exchange to me.

I have a theory that certain successful people have a very acute ability to grasp opportunities while downplaying downides/risks, which sometimes can be a very successful life strategy. The average person may be more in tune to these risks as our life depends on only a few paychecks of runway before homelessness.

This post just sent me on an interesting web crawl. Summarizing what you said, alongside some other interesting discoveries:

His aunt works at the World Economic Forum [1]. The World Economic Forum was promoting his organization, FTX. [2] He was the second largest donor to Biden's 2020 campaign. He was also the second largest donor to DNC primary campaigns [4]. He had a stated intent of spending up to $1 billion on the 2024 election [5]. The NYTimes, which generally has an overwhelmingly negative stance on crypto/tech/billionaires, is now running puff pieces on him. [6]

It will be an interesting test of our legal system. It's increasingly looking like FTX was simply a giant scam/fraud, but SBF is extremely well connected and buttered all the right bellies.

---

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20221112024919/https://www.wefor...

[2] - https://www.weforum.org/people/linda-p-fried

[3] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-a-close-race-for-ceo-suppor...

[4] - https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donor...

[5] - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/crypto-billio...

[6] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/ftx-sam-bankma...

> Thaneno

Autocorrect of theranos?

typo. Elizabeth Holmes's company.

It's almost as if NYT is extremely biased

Worth adding that “negative pieces for 10 years” is not an opinion. It was official NYT editorial policy (original tweet now deleted)

https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

This makes me think he's going to get away with it.

> He has also found other ways to occupy his time in recent days, playing the video game Storybook Brawl, though less than he usually does, he said. “It helps me unwind a bit,” he said. “It clears my mind.”

I'm glad he found a way to unwind after committing fraud and gambling away billions of dollars from innocent people. This guy is out of his mind. Why is he not in jail yet?

I'm glad he found a way throw in a promo for the game he owns.

FWIW parent comment isn't exaggerating — FTX acquired Storybook Brawl this past March: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/storybook-brawl-developer-acqu...

(SBF is infamously an avid, but poor, League of Legends player, and has been seen online playing League post-blowup; his Storybook Brawl comment seems pretty self-serving.)

I can’t understand what that means.

It means that this person is liar and probably a sociopath who will continue lying to every person who listens to him.

More research and analysis is being done on this guy's tweets than was done by the investors before giving him billions of dollars.

All the people buying up houses sight unseen without appraisal/assessment or due diligence was just an analogy for what was happening in the entire market during the near 0 interest rate frenzy of circa-2021. The fed created incalculable damage with their short sighted policy.

This person used stolen money to partially fund the campaign of the President of the United States as well as other American politicians. He also placed bets on the outcome on the Presidential election.

The parties should return these amounts to a fund that goes towards making the exchange's users whole again.

"FlexPort is returning $400,000 that FTX donated to support our Ukrainian refugee relief efforts as soon as we can figure out where to send it back that won't get stolen."

Ryan Peterson seems to be a pretty stand-up guy.

https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1592248022372880384

The Trump bet was the other side of this guy's trade:

https://nitter.net/GCRClassic/status/1591108154775212040

https://nitter.net/GCRClassic/status/1591109004042043393

I don't know that Alameda would have the position if GCR didn't ask for it. Like he says in the tweet, he thought they hedged it.

When I saw his posts, my first thought was “this is a dead man’s switch”. Glad to see he did an NYT interview since.

Technically kinda clever in a stupid way. Seems in character.

That wasn't very nice in base64 :p

V2VsbCB0aGF0cyBub3QgdmVyeSBuaWNl

Kinda funny at the crypto spam level

(Original post in base64 was flagged for the crypto sarcasm I guess.. A base64 pun exchange would have been glorious on this topic)

Still laughing that the normie mods couldn't distinguish between base64 and gibberish.

Thought this was a geek site :p

Why is research AI so amazingly advanced but production AI so incredibly primitive?

We have software that generates complete fake scientific papers that fool experts on a first glance, but spam/abuse detection bots get stumped by someone hammering on a keyboard? This makes no sense.

Considering the (academic) state of the art of AI, spam and all other kinds of nuisances should have been a solved problem years ago.

I feel this is a problem of misaligned incentives in legacy organizations. If you can accept some degree of spam without completely alienating your users, you get to inflate your usage metrics - crucial if your revenue model depends on showing higher growth/impressions.

I've always been surprised by the discrepancy between Google's AI research and the quality of Google's search results. Google search should be so much better given all the incredible AI work Google and other AI researchers have already done. But then I also realize that if Google were to somehow incorporate AI-powered search agents (say, something like Adept.ai), the current ad-driven revenue model would collapse.

This is surely a limitation of the deletion bot designed to work with Twitter API limits. You can only scrape so much before you get put in the naughty box.

Apparently "SBF" is Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of one of those cryptocurrency companies that is imploding right now.

I've been purposely ignoring crypto news and drama for the past couple years. Seemed so pointless. But this FTX thing blew up so big it took over all my feeds and I decided to learn about the company and the founder. Had zero clue about any of this stuff like 10 days ago. What a saga.

Well, hey, at least we know it’ll be another fun part of Matt Levine’s next post.

Who else is having a hard time thinking the worst of this guy? I seriously want to think he was not a fraud. But the more I learn about ftx, the more I realize they strayed far from their mission of world philanthropy.

I would caution everyone to be extremely wary of anyone who actively promulgates the idea that they themselves are virtuous, selfless or altruistic. I cannot think of any genuinely good reason someone would want do this.

Instead, when it comes to these kinds of traits they should only be considered as possibilities after observing what a person does rather than what they say. Actions rather than words.

If they are using words good chance they are forgoing the actions. Otherwise why would they need to be telling you what they are?

No-one else.

This guy is one of the greatest pieces of shit to ever walk the earth; just imagine the sheer panic of one user being unable to withdraw their funds in FTX, then multiply that by a thousand.

Not to even mention all of their investors (including teacher's pension funds for example) who have already marked their investment to 0.

I couldn’t care less about any of the investors. They have little to blame but themselves. Someone else mentioned that the teacher’s pension fund could even be bailed about with tax money. So in the end, it’s lower and middle class people that pay for all these mistakes and fraud.

And the whole ecosystem gets overwhelmed with greater doubt on the major players.

Everyone in the industry knew this guy was a rat long before this implosion.

https://rekt.news/ftx-yikes/

https://twitter.com/lightcrypto/status/1302559496309485568

It was a scam in the first place. Please stop giving scammers more moral sympathy than they are due. It sustains their existence.

It is genuinely perplexing to me that anyone believed SBF. Nothing has ever added up, and frankly he gives off very strange vibes. The entire thing was so unsettling.

I suppose my concern though is that Will MacAskill was knowingly involved in this garbage. I didn’t realize how close he was to SBF or for how long. Now that I know, I have a creeping suspicious that he could be implicated in this. His organization received significant funds from SBF. Like you, I’d like to believe will isn’t hypocritical jackass and that EA genuinely matters to him.

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