Saqib

[Saqib @saqibtwt]

@ved_a getting this error, my first visit to the site. Using my home wifi only

[poof @poof_eth]

Had a Jane Street interview in 2013 that still bothers me.

It was my 6th round. Final interview. The guy walks in carrying no laptop, no notebook, just a cold brew and what I later realized was a single IKEA tea candle.

He writes on the whiteboard:

food: $200
rent: $800
utilities: $150
candles: $3,600
family: dying

Then he turns around and says, “Optimize.”
I laughed because I thought it was a culture-fit bit. He did not laugh.
So I said, “Well, obviously you spend less on candles.”
He says, “Assume candles are non-discretionary.”
Okay.

I start building a model. Basic constraint satisfaction. Family survival as a soft penalty. Candles as a state variable. Maybe there’s an arbitrage where you buy wholesale paraffin and convert the $3,600 line item into inventory.

He stops me.

“You’re thinking like a consultant.”

That’s when I knew I was in trouble.

He says, “Give me a bid-ask on family dying.”

I say, “What?”

He says, “You’re long candles, short family. Where do you make markets?”

I try to recover. I say the real issue is liquidity: rent and utilities are fixed, food is elastic, candles are emotionally inelastic. Therefore the optimal strategy is to securitize future candle enjoyment and borrow against it.

He nods for the first time.

Then he asks, “What time do you sell the candles?”

I say, “Whenever the market is liquid?”

He says, “Be more specific.”

I say, “Uh… 10 a.m. Eastern?”

For the first time, he smiles.

He goes, “Every day?”

I say, “Every day.”

He says, “In size?”

I say, “In size.”

He says, “And what do we call that?”

I say, “Market manipulation?”

The room gets very quiet.

He looks disappointed and writes something down.

“No. We call it providing liquidity to candle ETFs during the U.S. cash open.”

I try to save it. “Right. Of course. The family isn’t dying because we underfunded them. They’re just experiencing temporary price discovery.”

He nods again.

Then he points back at the board.

I had missed it. The utility bill was $150, but candles provide light. You can zero out utilities.

I update the budget:

food: $200
rent: $800
utilities: $0
candles: $3,750
family: still dying, but now in a more capital-efficient way

He says, “How confident are you?”

I say, “0.95.”

He smiles and circles candles.

“0.95 huh?”

Then he asks me to estimate how many leveraged longs get liquidated if we dump $3,750 of candles at 10:00:01 every morning for 90 consecutive trading days.
Needless to say I did not get the offer.

[Jay Alto @theJayAlto]

an absolute gigabanger from substack

[Rafael Hernández @RafaelH117]

Real Madrid have won more UCLs than La Ligas since 2009 because it's easier to rob half a dozen matches in Europe than all 38 in Spain.

[Figma @figma]

Us to our mentions

[Kwikky's left foot @fit_kwik_]

If Nottingham Forest win the Europa league, do Tottenham qualify for the Champions league?

[Gappy (Giuseppe Paleologo) @__paleologo]

You can achieve any goal you set out for yourself in life. Except if you're using Claude Code. Then you've got to wait until 4am.

[em @filmlver]

new letterboxd list just dropped

[E.S. @Anqacs]

India is the worst affected of all major markets by the VRAM/GPU shortage.

[Saqib @saqibtwt]

++ [bonus] ghostty theme system i built to shuffle b/w list of preferred themes
> automatically switches between light/dark lists based on time of day
> type theme-next anywhere to skip to the next theme
> state persists across sessions, reshuffles when full list cycles through

[Saqib @saqibtwt]

had a 3 hour terminal 101 session with claude. ended up building a nice setup from scratch.

🖥️ the stack
ghostty (terminal) + fish shell + starship (prompt) + volta (node version manager)

wired together via one config file

[John Bistline @JEBistline]

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

[Schaffrillas @Schaffrillas]

Timothee only really has one course of action: challenge Michael B. Jordan to a ping pong match in a year's time

[Robbie Hendricks @robbiehendricks]

So, some kid called me a boomer today for using ChatGPT and not Claude.

[Swann Marcus @SwannMarcus89]

The Sopranos is an incredible show about how therapy speak causes people to become worse human beings. Truly ahead of its time

[Antifa_Ultras @ultras_antifaa]

Bodø/Glimt defeated FC Inter in both matches and advanced to the last 16 of the Champions League.

Glimt had shared the tweet below following the Galatasaray match in October. They had also donated all ticket revenue from their home match against Maccabi Tel Aviv to the Red Cross in Gaza.

[Zarathustra @zarathustra5150]

The rise of Dopamine Culture

[🔰Chief Georgist Shill 🔰 @BlueRepublik]

Holy shit they did the thing

[Saqib @saqibtwt]

mfs be selling kala paani

[Luke @lukecodez]

Mfs be selling water at this point

> zero caffeine
> zero sugar
> zero calories

[Saqib @saqibtwt]

tomorrowland tix land tomorrow