Max Finder

Slangin' water treatment and renewables tech. Research commercialization @bountifulwork. Out of the Lab podcast. Chess, jiutjitsu, salsa. I just lost the game.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Mexico paid $20 million for eight minutes in this movie. Then those eight minutes forced them to invent an entire cultural tradition.

Before Spectre, Mexico City had no Day of the Dead parade. The holiday was celebrated at home, at cemeteries, with family altars. Quiet, intimate, centuries old. Sam Mendes fabricated a massive street parade for the opening sequence, shot it with 1,500 extras in skeleton costumes across the Zócalo, and audiences worldwide assumed they were watching a real annual event.

Mexico's government had negotiated hard for the placement. Leaked Sony hack emails showed officials offered up to $20 million in tax incentives for four minutes of positive portrayal. Sony was drowning in a $300 million budget. The deal included script changes: the Bond girl had to be a Mexican actress, the villain could not be Mexican, and the city's modern skyline had to appear on screen.

Then the movie opened in 182 countries and tourists started booking flights to Mexico City for the parade.

The parade that did not exist.

Tourism authorities panicked. Visitors were arriving expecting the spectacle they saw in the film and finding nothing. So in October 2016, the government spent $500,000, hired 650 volunteers, built dozens of floats and giant skeleton marionettes, and staged the first real Día de los Muertos parade in Mexico City's history. 250,000 people showed up. They openly called it a "Spectre-style parade" in press materials.

Ten years later, the parade draws millions. Anthropologists call it the "pizza effect," where a cultural element gets exported, transformed abroad, and reimported as authentic. Mexico's most famous public celebration of its most sacred holiday was invented by a British director shooting a $300 million spy movie.

That tracking shot is doing more for Mexico City's economy every November than the $20 million they paid for it.

[Michelle Maxwell ™ @MichelleMaxwell]

With everything we are hearing right now about ticks this seems like good information to share.

“Here’s what I’ve learned after more ticks than I care to count.
First, whatever your uncle told you, forget it. No matches. No nail polish. No Vaseline. No soap on a cotton ball. All of those do the same terrible thing, they stress the tick out, and a stressed tick empties its gut back into the bite before letting go. Which, if you think about what that actually means for a second, is literally how Lyme and the rest get transmitted so you’re not speeding up its exit. You’re making it throw up into you.
Fine-tipped tweezers. Grip right where the mouthparts enter the skin, not the body, the head. Pull straight up, steady, no twisting, no jerking. It’ll feel like it’s resisting because it is, the mouthparts are barbed. Just keep the pressure on and it lets go in a few seconds. If a piece breaks off in the skin, leave it alone. Your body pushes splinters out. Digging around with a needle does more damage then the fragment ever would.
Clean it with alcohol or soap. Wash your hands.
Now here’s the part most people skip: don’t flush the tick.
Tape it to an index card. Clear packing tape right over the body, write the date and where on your body it was, and stick the card in a drawer. If you come down with anything weird in the next 30 days, rash, fever, joint pain, that flu-that-isn’t-flu feeling, that tick goes with you to the doctor. Some labs will test the tick itself, which is faster and often more reliable than waiting for antibodies to show up in your own blood. A dated tick taped to a card is one of the most useful things you can hand a doctor who’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
The other thing worth saying out loud: if the tick was engorged when you pulled it, and you can’t swear it was off your body within 24 hours, call your doctor that same day. Don’t wait for a rash. Fewer than three out of four Lyme cases even produce the classic bullseye. A single preventive dose of doxycycline within 72 hours of a deer tick bite cuts the Lyme odds way down, and most docs in tick country will write that prescription without giving you a hard time, especially if you walk in with the tick taped to a card and a clear timeline.”

[Christian Keil @pronounced_kyle]

In my first weeks at Astranis, I went to every engineering lead and said "hi, I'm dumb, how does [XYZ] work?"

Turned my notes into an onboarding guide, which we used for our next ~500 hires.

Many great things are downstream of being willing to look dumb!

[Max Spero @max_spero_]

legendary pull on facebook marketplace

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

Hot take: There is a limited window of time, like any new industry, where a new tool appears and people don't understand it fully yet, and it's powerful enough to change your entire life, but not so powerful it's been completely taken over by corporate interests yet. And when this tool appears you have two choices: use it to skyrocket your life and take advantage of this TEMPORARY moment, or resist/hate/be angry/complain/, do nothing, and the moment is gone forever.

These brief moments in time are when shifts in the game board happen. It happened with Crypto, its happening with AI, it happens with any NEW thing. These shifts in the game board allow people who came/come from nothing, to elevate, using nothing but DEMOCRATIZED tools, moving first, their creativity, and execution.

Our take is that instead of poo poo-ing the tool, USE the tool, improve your life, try applying the tool to the industries/things you know best, get creative, and catapault your way into a new class. You'll fine the sense of fulfillment you get as you're building, growing, expanding, learning, elevating your life, to FAR OUTWEIGH any feelings of superiority you get by hating and rejecting the tool.

If you don't use this time, VERY likely chance in the future, whether 5 years, 10 years, when you are older, have more family, more weight/responsibility, and the realities of life are much more tangible, you'll wish you had acted more during this time. You don't want to be filled with regret because you chose to hate/dismiss, instead of build/grow, which ONLY helps you and the ones you love.

TLDR? Instead of hating/dismissing a new tool, use this BRIEF WINDOW of time to elevate/improve your life. The window is temporary and if you don't use it because you want to please a small niche of people who don't really care about your success anyways, you may very highly regret that decision.

Disclaimer: Post written with care and consideration and in a good spirit. Please don't be hateful for no reason. This is to benefit those who these words get through to.

[Max Finder @MaxFinder]

@mrwtffacts Which is daisy and which is joan

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Contractions with 3 words:
-she'd've
-wouldn't've

Contractions with more than 3 words:
-y'all'll've
-they'dn't've

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

This is a monarch butterfly migration arriving in the oyamel fir forests of central Mexico. None of these butterflies has ever been here before.

Their great-great-grandmothers left this exact grove in March. By July those grandmothers were dead. The butterflies you're watching are four to five generations downstream, born somewhere between Texas and Ontario, and they just flew up to 3,000 miles to a tree none of their parents ever saw.

The brain doing the navigation is smaller than a grain of rice.

The mechanism is a sun compass time-compensated by a circadian clock running in the antennae. Cut the antennae and the monarch loses orientation within hours. The clock corrects for the sun's position drifting across the sky as the day moves. Add iron-bearing magnetite particles for magnetic field detection on cloudy days, and a 0.5 gram insect is running redundant inertial guidance.

The destination is more specific than the navigation.

They cluster on a few dozen oyamel fir groves in the Sierra Madre at 9,000 to 11,000 feet. The microclimate has to sit between 32 and 41°F. Below freezing kills them. Above 41°F burns the fat reserves they need to survive five months without feeding. The right band exists a few hundred meters thick on a few specific mountains. Outside it, the migration ends.

One generation each year is built differently from the rest. Summer monarchs live two to six weeks. The fall generation lives eight months. It postpones reproduction, fattens up, and carries the entire round trip in a single body.

The map is genetic. Nobody has fully decoded how.

A monarch hatched in a backyard in Toronto in September has never seen a mountain, never smelled a fir, never met an ancestor. It flies south for ten weeks, picks the right peak, and lands on the tree its bloodline has been returning to for tens of thousands of years.

The forest knows the families that come back.

[Max Finder @MaxFinder]

@foundmyfitness Normal is apparently 1.7-2.2

Whatevel are you recommending?

[Today in History @TodayinHistory]

This may be the most articulate response I’ve ever heard to this question.

[Magdalene J. Taylor @magdajtaylor]

walking around outside is like scrolling with your body

[ian @IanRountree]

I wasn’t concerned about these bottlenecks because I know how supply & demand work, but someone recast it for me recently and now I’m worried…

Why won’t suppliers ramp production to meet demand? It’s because they’ve seen this story before. Silicon Valley has some new hotness that’s going to change everything, they invest in it, then the crash happens and they’re in a worse place than before.

They won’t be fooled this time. So they hold production steady, enjoy higher prices and operating margins, and assume the party will end soon.

The upshot is this creates more room for high-conviction new entrants.

[ADIN @ADINresearch]

Had a Jane Street interview in 2014

Round 7. Interviewer says 'meet me at Washington Square Park, southwest corner, 2 PM.'

I show up. He's playing chess with a guy who's clearly hustling tourists. Interviewer's losing badly.

Without looking up he says, 'Take my position.'

I sit down. The chess hustler looks at me and grins. 'Your boy owes me $40. You covering his position?'

I look at the interviewer. He nods.

'Assume the debt,' he says. 'Now optimize.'

I study the board. I'm down a queen and two rooks. Completely hopeless.

'This position is unwinnable,' I say.

'Correct. Now make it profitable.'

'What?'

The chess hustler is getting impatient. 'You playing or what, kid?'

The interviewer slides me a $20. 'Market make this game.'

I'm confused. 'How do I market make chess?'

'Bid-ask on the number of moves until checkmate. Hustler takes the under, you take the over. Spread is your edge.'

I look at the position again. Maybe 8 moves max until I'm mated.

'I bid 12 moves, offer 15,' I announce.

The hustler laughs. 'I'll take the under on 12 all day.'

'Done,' says the interviewer. 'You're now short volatility on a deterministic outcome.'

Three moves later I'm checkmated. I owe the hustler $40 plus my $20 bet.

'How confident were you in that 12-move bid?' the interviewer asks.

'0.95,' I say, because that's what you always say.

'0.95 huh?' He chuckles. 'You just sold insurance on the Titanic.'

He stands up. 'The real trade was shorting your confidence and going long on the hustler's experience. You missed the obvious hedge: offering chess lessons to tourists at $25/hour while the game played out.'

'But I don't know how to play chess well enough to teach.'

'Exactly. That's called selling vol you don't have. Very Jane Street.'

Offer rescinded. Reason: 'Failed to recognize that the park itself was the market and the pigeons were the only rational actors.'"

[Max Finder @MaxFinder]

Dang

[Max Finder @MaxFinder]

Dang

[Jared Friedman @snowmaker]

If you want to reindustrialize America, this is an amazing list of ideas to work on.

[Max Finder @MaxFinder]

@nasdaily @sellwithnas Congrats on 3 letters

[Max Finder @MaxFinder]

The sycophantic way LLMs talk to us is so irritating. I'd rather have a C3PO-type energy. His anxiety is somehow more tolerable. Kinda like my aunt with high blood pressure.

[Michael Jackson @WorkMJ]

Deeptech founder trying to keep the government and university grant funders happy, while simultaneously trying to attract private investors.