There’s a new phenomenon of small groups of people who are running these small little quant funds driven by AI models who are making fuck-you returns.
I’ve personally seen many who are 2x’ing capital in months. Many unsubstantiated rumors also claim SSI is a quant shop too.
Well known quant funds have all tested out LLMs for trading. Some claim it doesn’t work. Others, well.. what do we think Jane Street doing with their huge GPU cluster? On top of that, there’s a ton of people asking Claude / GPT what stocks to buy and/or “vibe code me a trading engine”. Applies to other financial instruments too: derivatives, futures, crypto, and on the less sophisticated side, prediction masks.
It begs the question: how does this change how we think about markets? how much retail volume is driven purely by the ripple effects of AI models? does this completely destroy efficient market hypotheses in favor of “correlated model hypothesis.” Early theories say
– Small studies including one by the Fed show destabilizing effects.
– We see amplified concentrated trades into the 20 known names in the market.
– Can leave trading vulnerable to GEO attacks like publishing specific articles to “poison” the models decision making.
Eventually any alpha generated by the model at a point of time *should* decay over time. New anti-AI trading strategies with custom post trains too. Remember, you need be able to afford the tokens to participate in this alpha. What does this mean for the future of wealth accumulation?
We live in a brave new world.
The scary part about Anthorpic's Fable nerf is not that it refuses to answer biology or cryptography. It's that it foreshadows what's coming. A world where a couple companies decide what you can and cannot do. They're building a new ruling class and you're not in it...
BREAKING.: Biggest privacy token $ZEC crashed over -50% in the last 24 hours and wiped out $5 Billion from its market cap.
The flaw was hidden inside Zcash's Orchard privacy pool since May 2022 and remained undetected for nearly 4 years despite multiple security audits.
Security researcher Taylor Hornby reportedly used Claude Opus 4.8 AI model to build a working proof-of-concept that successfully generated counterfeit ZEC in local testing on May 29.
Although the bug has now been patched on June 2, The issue is that Zcash's privacy design makes it impossible to know if any fake ZEC was minted before the fix. Unlike Bitcoin, where anyone can verify the supply, Zcash's privacy design makes it impossible to audit whether fake coins were secretly minted before the fix.
The team denies any fake ZEC was minted, but traders are selling on the fear alone. Imagine someone secretly adding extra chips to a casino, but because of the way the system works, neither the casino nor the players could tell which chips were real and which were fake.
Shielded Labs is exploring a proposed Network Upgrade to allow anyone to verify the integrity of Zcash supply.
@w_s_bitcoin@MrHodl@pwuille@_jonasschnelli_@real_or_random My rookie opinion:
I don’t think coercion is the right way to speed up adoption. The change must be adopted on its merits.
The availability of v2 p2p is enough to mitigate the worst of threats it envisions. Adoption can precede or come after a threat manifests.
I have two NVIDIA DGX Sparks stacked in my office.
They've been sitting there for a month.
Here's my honest take.
Open source AI is never going to compare to frontier models.
Running quantized Kimi K2.6 and GLM 5.1 locally is cool.
But practical? No. Not even close.
I run all my Hermes agents on GPT 5.5 through my ChatGPT Pro subscription. Practically free.
GPT 5.5 is the intelligent model in the world.
Why would I route serious tasks to a watered down local model?
If you need fast and accurate, you're not using local inference.
You're using GPT 5.5 or Claude Opus 4.7.
I'm not saying this to rage bait.
I genuinely want to know.
Why would anyone serious about vibe coding and AI agents use a local model when frontier is this far ahead?
Everyone had locks on doors. Then lockpicks broke the locks. Everyone had advance notice. Some people didn’t change the locks. Do you have sympathy for them? (I don’t presume any answer here)
The only wrong answer is to not develop new locks for the willing.
The quantum freeze debate is funny because depending on how you phrase the goal you come away with two kinda-opposite views.
“Ensure people are able to keep their coins” and “don’t allow for any freezing of peoples coins” sound like the same goal, but in fact they’re opposite!
The first one says that you should freeze with the maximum possible ways to recover (BIP 32+seedphrase proofs for new wallets, pre-Q-day commitments to allow patoshi to retain ownership without spending immediately, PQC migration with a disable-EC path, etc).
The second one actually minimizes the number of people who get to keep their coins, maximizing theft exposure but in doing so avoids any forks with philosophical challenges.
What if… it’s not that companies stayed private longer, but that we lived through an exceptional, anomalous era of capital efficiency in upstarts that’s now ending?
Jeff Booth, Jack Klucznik and Nicholas Marino perfectly explain how a Quantum threat to Bitcoin is "nonsense."
"Bitcoin is the answer. Bitcoin is physics."
My parents follow a standard procedure anytime they’re driving to unknown territory:
-Dad drives
-Mom pulls up directions on her phone
-Mom calls out turns along the way
This inevitably leads to constant, petty bickering throughout the ride.
“You didn’t tell me where to turn!”
“That’s because you’re driving too fast!”
“I don’t know what 'right there' means! Tell me the name of the street!”
“You keep talking and I can’t pay attention to the map!”
And so on and so on.
(And so on.)
For years, they have done this while a large, Bluetooth-enabled, navigation-ready screen is positioned inches away, in their nice Lexus SUV, ready at any time to connect to a phone which would then conveniently display the route on screen.
I once offered to set this up for them. They quickly hand-waved the idea and proceeded as usual.
Married 40 years and still going strong.
Marital foundations are built on bizarre customs that outsiders simply cannot understand. Never interrupt a bickering couple while they’re enacting one of the routines that holds it all together.
Wore an Oura ring for months.
It gave me great insight into my sleep, recovery, and activity. Genuinely useful.
But I stopped.
At some point, I realized I didn’t need more data — I needed to trust how I actually feel.
My “readiness score” would tell me to rest… on days I felt amazing. Or warn me I slept poorly… before I even got out of bed.
And here’s the problem:
Those scores start to shape your mood.
You wake up feeling good, check your app, see a low score — and suddenly you don’t feel so good anymore.
We’ve outsourced intuition to algorithms.
Data is powerful. But if you’re not careful, it doesn’t just measure your day. It decides it.
@MarkySnarkie@DBCrypt0@Adam_Ogilvie_ I didn’t realize I name called anybody there. It’s just our responsibility to keep up. I don’t think this change qualifies for that personally but that’s just my opinion.