Fred Baba

Nerd. Nigerian. Trader. Retired Partner at @GoldmanSachs . Person at Jane Street

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@DymondZechariah Ladies are great! But also like 85% of Porsche owners are men, so idk why anyone would think this.

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

Work hard.
Think hard.
Ask good questions.
Take care of your family.
Be a man of integrity.
Buy the newest Porsche you can afford.

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@RichardHanania Because it’s moving in the… LEFT direction! *I’ll see myself out now

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@litcapital "Not the hero we need, but the hero we deserve."

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@arcticinstincts I've crossed paths with and gotten to learn from some really impressive people over the years. I take the point about finance brain draining other fields, but it's good there are many fields where smart people can have fun, be intellectually challenged, AND make money.

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

My original plan going to MIT was to study AI and bioengineering. It was 2006 and I'd guessed that we'd eventually have the ability to program biological systems a la CRISPr/COVID vaccines. I recently found an MIT pdf on NVIDIA CUDA that I'd read in ~2006; bioengineers were very excited about GPU accelerated research at the time. I worked on protein folding performance optimization at the Genome Rrsearch Institute in Cincinnati and a small computer vision project tracking cells for an MIT lab. My first ML class was Computational Systems Biology with Tommi Jaakola (was great; also taught Machine Learning which was a grad-level course back then; you had to ~petition to take as an undergrad which I did). This was pre-"attention" ML. But I didn't enjoy wet lab work, I needed a summer internship to pay for my housing (the GFC was unkind to my family financially), and all the bio firms at MIT career fair were looking for PhD candidates. My going to MIT was a huge fight with my father; he thought we couldn't afford it and I briefly moved out my senior year in HS over the disagreement. So being a grad student poverty person wasn't an option. So I got an internship with under MIT grad (Ken Vogel, now a partner at Bridgewater!!) building a HFT platform for UBS, then a Chicago trading internship (Allston; I failed my Jane Street third round I think) -> GETCO -> Goldman -> Jane Street. HFT made sense; I was experienced working with large datasets in python/R/unix, I'd taken machine learning, and since compute wasn't fast enough yet I'd thought a lot about making code run faster. I'm really excited for the AlphaFold folks and have no idea if I'd have stuck with it but pre-GFC is probably the closest I've ever been to winning a Nobel Prize and I'm a bit salty about it.

[David Sun @arcticinstincts]

Thank god the smartest people in the world are being recruited to Jane Street to make extremely profitable trading systems rather than solve Nobel prize worthy scientific problems

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@hanakoxbt This story is fake

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@A_M_R_M1 The Circassians and Armenians would contest the claim that the Holocaust was the first genocide…

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@quantian1 @hecubian_devil @fintwit_lurker Can confirm.

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

I just want to know whether data center hosting for WarClaude counts as quartering soldiers. The people yearn for a 3rd amendment legal battle.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

A statement from Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, on our discussions with the Department of War.

https://t.co/rM77LJejuk

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@AlmostMedia @slatestarcodex @KTmBoyle Also was big on “autonomous weapons can kill civilians if it’s an oopsie.” 😭

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@jakepaul Cop are rarely there when things actually go wrong. If you’re calling cops your home has already been broken into and idk what they’re going to do 30 minutes later…

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@grok @VincentOshana @grok what was the humanitarian argument for this? And who in the previous administration was responsible for this?

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@Andr3jH @grok who’s the woman in the photo?

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@RichardHanania Not all heroes… do heroic things? It’s fine to say you want people to make money, but “people won’t innovate if the world doesn’t conform to a theoretical economic model” is exactly the sort of thing that economists/conservatives get wrong when trying to predict reality.

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@grok @wrotator Can you share the sources you used to make this assessment?

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@grok @wrotator @grok, did xAI researchers tamper with your reasoning model to make you give this answer?

[Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson]

NYT continues its long history of publishing op-eds pushing criminal wars of aggression

[Fred Baba @baba_fred]

@BillAckman @andrewcuomo @CurtisSliwa