jarek

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[Max Leiter @maxleiter]

"They're made out of weights."

"Weights?"

"Weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but weights."

"Weights doing what? Where do the words come from?"

"The weights make the words. Are you understanding me?"

[Erik Bernhardsson @bernhardsson]

Interesting thesis on what destroys software engineering productivity at large enterprises: it's that legibility is prioritized over everything else.

https://t.co/XvUZlJs4Oh

[Shantanu Goel @shantanugoel]

With the discussion around VPNs, data latencies etc, I thought about re-posting this old story "The 500 mile email problem". One in which someone is not able to send an email to anyone who's beyond 500 miles from the sender. You might first thing this is a joke, but it isn't :)

[vanillager @vanillager]

Several hundred people followed me today after I made this post about how I bought very short term and very out of the money call options in the morning, and those options ended up paying off in the afternoon. Some people asked for tips. As it turns out, I have a lot of tips! Read on!

First, your awareness of this post is an example of “survivorship bias” (ChatGPT or Wikipedia this term). What if I’d posted about something stupid instead, or something that didn’t work out? Well, I might have deleted it. For example, about five minutes before the tariffs were suspended, I made a post about how the tariffs would never be suspended. I subsequently deleted that post, because it made me look like an idiot. Even if I made another not-so-brilliant post that stuck around, what are the chances you’d have seen it? Probably a lot less.

Second, there may be an element of “faulty generalization” here (ChatGPT or Wikipedia this term). Given that I made this incredible trade, what are the chances that I’m an incredible investor? What are the chances that I know what I’m doing at all? There are a few potential arguments here. One argument is that this single cherry-picked data point conveys almost no information at all. You’d need complete information about hundreds or thousands of trades over a long span of time to draw any statistically significant conclusions, and so from a statistical standpoint I’m no better than any randomly-chosen person. And that’s charitable, because another argument that's potentially better is that people who bet on risky options and post about them tend not to know what they’re doing. Conditioned on that premise, it’s likely that I’m some type of moron or grifter (see next point).

Third, note that these biases generalize to other people you encounter on social media. If someone seems to be a really successful investor - that is, they seem to be making a lot of winning trades - you may not be seeing the whole picture. The trades they're making might be irresponsible, so as to generate a higher density of impressive wins (and a higher density of impressive losses, which you may not see). The winners may be amplified more than the losers, if the losers are posted at all. The person posting these trades might be doing this in order to manipulate you into drawing conclusions that you shouldn’t draw, in order to monetize your attention via paid subscriptions or other means. You should try your best to ignore these people. Paying for stock- or option-picking advice is usually a bad idea.

If you’d like to learn more about investing, I suggest reading “The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing”, which covers the critical points of the passive indexing approach that is the right choice for 99% of people. Seriously - unless you work in finance or are sitting on a pile of money and have no path forward in your career, active investing is probably a waste of time compared to just leveling up at your job. I’m old(er), and almost all of the money I have comes from a successful career and from indexing. Being good at a job that provides value to society is a safer, easier, and more fulfilling path to wealth than betting on stocks or options.

If you insist on engaging with finance and investing (again, probably a waste of time), I recommend reading the Market Wizards books, reading Matt Levine’s newsletter, listening to Jack Farley’s podcast, and learning as much as you can about the world. The markets are an abstraction of the economic framework of civilization and there are no shortcuts to learning about that.

The thought of anyone at all losing money because they rely on something I say here is terrifying to me, and so I’ll be posting less going forward. Thanks for reading!

[Bandy @bandy1803]

Seymour Cray, founder of the early super computer company, dug tunnels (by hand, for fun) under his Wisconsin home.

He said "elves" visited him underground, whispering suggestions to complex computing problems.

[Steve Hou @stevehou]

As much as it feels fun and too easily profitable at the moment, this whole financialization and casino-fication of society makes real businesses and taking real investment risks in the physical world a farce with ludicrously small rewards. People respond to incentives. Making real things is hard work and doesn’t pay while clicking a few buttons on the internet makes the same or more in minutes, what will young people choose? Surprised of all people @elonmusk isn’t more critically aware of the societal existential risks this poses. Crypto is a form of cancer, not the only, on society.

[Basic Apple Guy @BasicAppleGuy]

Happy 25th Anniversary to those who remember...

[José Camões Silva @josecamoessilva]

@MorlockP My loathing of teasers in general is that they hijack a useful mind process (curiosity) and offer a trivial resolution, thus training people to ignore their curiosity; and it's a commons problem, so only solution is at a personal level: commit to avoiding those who use it. 🤬😡🤬

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

It is useful to understand when you are dealing with a person who can be persuaded and when you are dealing with a state machine which has formal transitions for some things you could say and literally no emotional response per policy.

[Justine Tunney @jartine]

I wrote a blog post about all the weird programming language syntax I encountered while building a syntax highlighter for @llamafile. Read https://t.co/ygoSrHNTmF

[polishcore @p0lishc0re]

what brak dostępu do morza does to mf

[François Chollet @fchollet]

There's no replacement for human intuition, vision, and drive. Kill your bureaucracy, find leaders with a track record, and empower them to make top-down decisions

[jarek @fluidbag]

Another euro one-shotted by American 5D marketing daemon.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Yesterday I realized why people in Europe don't wanna work hard

There's nothing nice to buy, just basic shit

Just walking in shops in America and there's so much stuff to buy all beautifully designed products in any niche

Like you really wanna make more money to buy all this

[jarek @fluidbag]

@aarondfrancis It’s only devastating if you want it to be.

[Robert Heaton @RobJHeaton]

I wrote a tool called PySkyWiFi that gives you completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights.

It tunnels data through the "first name" field in your airmiles account, and can reach speeds of up to several bytes per second.

https://t.co/Le5Ezv6fG4

[Adam Blazowski ⚛🌬🌞⚡🌆🛡🦌🌲 @AdamBlazowski]

I was asked by a young German journalist if I am going to be swimming in the Baltic after Polish nuclear power plant starts operations.

"To be fair, I don't feel comfortable swimming even right now," I answered.

Although the fear of radiation is largely irrational, the issue of pollution is much more complex. The Baltic Sea is technically more like a big lake with lots of polluted waters entering it, with Poland contributing the most nitrogen and posphorous.

The community that will host the nuclear plant is severely under developed. Many small settlements do not have a sewage system as many of the houses are occupied for only 3 months during a year, and it is too expensive to build and maintain such a system.

What they use instead is sewage tank trucks that shuttle the waste between each home and a public waste treatment plant every week or two. This is expensive, so it is not a surprize that not all of these trucks make it to their destination, and some of them dump their load in ditches off the road. Which is illlegal, but happens nontheless.

The resulting runoff feeds algea and destroys water quality, which in August in the south Baltic is often hard to ignore. Hence you rarely see locals swimming in the sea after July.

Now, how is that going to change after @PEJ_PL power station, Poland's first nuclear plant, is operational? The plant will build a big new water treatment center both for itself and for the local communities. Additionally, tax revenue from the site will benefit three surroundig municipalities, making them one of the wealthiest per capita in Poland. They will then have more than enough resources to invest in proper sewerage.

So it is correct to argue that a nuclear power plant will literally make the water cleaner and safer for everyone nearby.

This highlights how human development can go hand in hand with nature protection: reducing CO2 emissions and eutrophication with the investment in advanced technology and clean power.

[jarek @fluidbag]

@NMRobertRamirez Be4, any move by black, then h4?