SBF’s trial is the capper to Stanford’s annus horribilis. Just weeks before he was indicted, fraudster Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced over her failed blood-test start-up, Theranos, which was founded using Stanford’s name as cachet and bankrolled by many a famous Stanford alum. Do Kwon, another Stanford alum, was arrested earlier this year for a multibillion-dollar crypto scheme. And Stan Cohen, an active Stanford professor, was found liable in court for tens of millions of dollars worth of fraud.

Bankman-Fried, known universally as SBF, is the kind of fraud that Silicon Valley specializes in producing: the philosopher con artist. One of the most prominent proponents of effective altruism, he advocated doing the most good for the most number of people — or, in his case, making the most money possible in order to give it away. Stanford went mad for this story of an upstart entrepreneur trying to improve the world and making a killer fortune on the way.

We’ve heard stories like this before. This isn’t the first time that tech visionaries have blown their horns signaling the imminent arrival of the digital promised land. The “digital future” never quite arrives. And what’s most noteworthy about these three stories is their timing and their omissions. Somehow, here we are in the 2020s and we still have tech visionaries conjuring a future in which the climate crisis is somebody else’s problem to solve.None of these imagined futures are imminent. The reason Silicon Valley has become so fixated on starting the next chapter of the digital revolution is that they would like to be finished with the current chapter.

Then there’s the Artificial Intelligence future (It’s not just machine learning and text/image generation, and don’t you dare ask about Full-Self-Driving mode!).

There’s the Web3 future. (It’s not just NFTs, and don’t you dare call it a ponzi scheme!).

It was in 2021 that the whole of Silicon Valley decided all-at-once that the next chapter of the digital revolution is about to arrive.

For now, let’s keep discovering, learning, and teaching what we have uncovered. Let’s continue to build the incredible foundation of universal knowledge upon which our future generations will make their stand in an uncertain, indescribable future.

The expansion, proliferation, diversification, and protection of information, both genetic and knowledge-based, is the most important task that we can undertake as a species. Every action that a human being takes can and should be attributable towards this goal. Those, like me, who are unable to directly contribute to the expansion of human knowledge have the ability to facilitate a world where others may succeed. Through this lens, our species, our knowledge, and the complexity of life itself may have the ability to sustainably expand, diversify, and thrive as it moves forward through time. This is not to say that experiential pleasure, learning to be present in a moment, and genuinely enjoying the incredible reality that we live in is not important. To exist within a space as well as the vast context of time is an undertaking that must be done simultaneously, and with great passion. It is a skill to do both, and truly difficult to do them both well.

George Orwell put the point simply: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” The phrase says a great deal about our muddled ideas about reason, emotion and argument — a muddle that has political consequences.

It’s about language and cooperation, about people transcending barriers and immersing themselves in a new culture to understand a foreign race.

His pitch is: He's rich, he won't owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won't do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people.

Trump's basic argument is the same one every successful authoritarian movement in recent Western history has made: that the regular guy has been screwed by a conspiracy of incestuous elites.

Here is the collected wisdom that we have gained from running the Taskwarrior project for nine years. It has been rewarding, enjoyable, and sometimes frustrating. We learned a lot about users and Open Source expectations.

Instead of seeing each moment as it is, we react to each moment from our past pain and frustration; then we react to the pain and frustration; then we react to that reaction; and so on and on. In this way a special form of mental torment is created that consists of seemingly endless layers of pain, negative emotion, self-doubt and self-justification--known in Buddhism as "samsara," the illusory world we think of as real. It is what, in honest moments, many people might call "normality."

Sanders’ angry populist demagogue shtick goes over extraordinarily well with young liberals, especially white ones, who are weary of horse-trading incremental change.

"I just try to ship products that I’m not ashamed of," a Yahoo executive told the New York Times in December. This is not an attitude that tends to produce excellent products.

Eule also talked about the billions of dollars US taxpayers would pay into funds to help poor countries mitigate the effects of climate change and develop clean energy economies.