Since Kalshi's HQ is in NY, I guess the most charitable interpretation is that perhaps the CFTC's statement is based on the assumption granting the TRO would have the net effect of disrupting Kalshi's operations everywhere until they can serve the site from outside NY. Of course, without disclosing that extrapolation, the statement is still factually incorrect.

Setting aside that significant error, I suspect this CFTC order is an attempt to create a federal vs state conflict in the hope the judge will suspend or defer any TRO until that issue is decided. I imagine Kalshi will file a response tomorrow arguing exactly that. Ultimately, this will still come down to whether Kalshi can be regulated by states, and if so, whether it's gambling.

This is the inherent downside of such a rapid rise to being the world's most valuable company AND still being considered a growth stock. At their massive scale, the number of new adjacent businesses that have both sufficient size and potential growth is limited.

> I hope they succeed in chewing even 50% of what they bit off.

Anything approaching that is vanishingly unlikely. They're being forced to play the game more like a VC. The question is if a few unicorn winners can offset dozens of losers. The challenge is that, unlike a VC, their bets are much more correlated around AI.

It's possible Google has intentionally decided to take a more conservative blended approach than purely competing at the bleeding edge of the frontier. If so, they obviously have no incentive to state it publicly but the recent departures and financials are consistent with the idea. It also makes sense that a company so much bigger, longer-term and (somewhat) more diversified than pure-play frontier labs would play the game to align with their strengths (capital, balance sheet, breadth, etc).

In their position, why not take an 'arms supplier' strategy in the near-term while drafting behind the frontier labs as a fast follower in AI, essentially betting the AI race is more akin to the Indy 500 than a quarter-mile drag race. If they're wrong and it IS more like a drag race, Google is in a better position to absorb and adjust than a frontier lab, for whom current valuations and capex spending requirements nearly require this to be a relatively short, winner-take-all race.

Apparently, he worked in charitable giving at FTX and had nothing to do with the shady investments. He was never charged and there's no sign he was even investigated. Beyond SBF, only a handful of people were in on the scam and charged.

> "Over the past week, traders at major hedge funds and other firms began sharing information about Situational’s exposure, with some placing short bets against its top holdings, hoping to profit as Aschenbrenner sold his positions to raise cash, according to two people close to the situation.

The short bets by the rivals weighed on Situational’s portfolio. Meanwhile, tech shares like SK Hynix were sliding. Over the three trading days ending Tuesday of this week, hedge funds reduced their positions at a scale not seen in three years, according to Goldman Sachs."

Having created (or at least amplified), the short squeeze on SA's position "Citadel executives reached out to Aschenbrenner, saying that the firm could be helpful if he needed ways to raise cash."

> "Aschenbrenner partially blamed short sellers who targeted the firm’s positions for exacerbating the fund’s losses"

"The fund had gained about 270% after fees this year through May. At that point, it was up more than 1,000% after fees since inception. It had ballooned to well over $20 billion under management, reaching the size of other well-known hedge funds that took decades to build."

So, down 67% in July but that was after already being up more than 1000% from the beginning up through May.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/pioneering-ai-hedge-fund-w...

> "Research boutique Citrini posted some commentary on the potential developments at Situational Awareness on X Thursday. The post sought to downplay the gravity of the situation and opined that investors are likely to give Aschenbrenner the benefit of the doubt. “To put that into perspective, if you invested $100M with SALP at inception and wiped out ninety percent in July, your investment would be worth $230M,” said Citrini."

KOR is both complete and very capable. It can very probably do everything you'll ever want but, as many people observe, the UI is just a bit weird. That's not to say the UI is broken or inconsistent, its simply that its approach is a little different than you'd expect. Once I got familiar with the main flow of the UI, it hasn't been an issue for my daily-use needs. If you care about flexibility, control, features and having it "your way", I think it's well worth the one-time effort to set up. It's also extensible with plug-ins and the UI is entirely user-moddable with Lua scripts. I use several found here: https://github.com/sebdelsol/KOReader.patches.

(Edit to add a few other collections of mods I've seen recommended: https://github.com/SeriousHornet/KOReader.patches, https://github.com/joshuacant/KOReader.patches/tree/main, https://github.com/joshuacant/KOReader.patches/tree/main.

Also, the 5th and 9th amendments. For the government to sustain a blanket prohibition on any U.S. citizen even possessing what amounts to a broad, economically significant technology will very likely require a new act of congress which specifically defines and limits what is banned, when, why and how. SCOTUS will almost certainly see it as a "major question" subject to 'strict scrutiny' which is a very high bar.

If they can't compel you to enter a password (courts have ruled passwords are 'speech' and the government can't compel or constrain speech, absent some well-defined grounds for doing so. There IS law around spoliation of evidence but AFAIK this requires a judge issuing an order. Of course, suddenly taking actions you wouldn't otherwise have on learning you're under suspicion could be claimed by a prosecutor in court as circumstantial evidence of guilt but it's not a cause of action in the first place until you're notified by a court to preserve evidence. Can a prosecutor try to construct a theory that the alleged actions do amount to obstruction? They can try but it's a serious long shot. I think this is a case of this administration directing the justice department to bring yet another dubious, likely-to-lose case as an extremely aggressive way to make a point by trying to assert and establish rights they don't actually have. So far, their track record in such cases hasn't been good.

> Note that if you're not a citizen of the USA

Yes, everything is different in this context if you're not a U.S. citizen. The U.S. govt can deny entry to non-citizens essentially without justification. I think this sucks as it goes against long-held American ideals around presumption of innocence, consistent treatment under the law, standards of evidence and having cause, but it's not currently prohibited.

But there's also hyphen-minus: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+002D, and a search for 'hyphen' returns a bunch of others: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/search?q=hyphen.

Beyond certain obvious 'third-rails' even experts have reasonable disagreements on what 'aligned' means.

> everyone integrates it into their business

Few large corporations would sole-source integrate a closed model developed in a country designated as a foreign adversary (which could cut off access at any time) or which their own country might restrict.

> now the foreign actor has control

Your concern is one reason why the Chinese are making most of their models open weight.

> it's not as trivial as "regulatory capture".

You're right, it's not just regulatory capture but the vested interests trying to achieve regulatory capture are certainly leveraging concerns like yours to deceptively achieve that capture. In the case of an open weight, domestically-hosted model, the threat vector you're concerned about isn't a threat in the same way as a Chinese-made, closed source data center router or 5G phone switch.