The Eternal Optimist

Technology | Markets | Sports Fanatic | Bibliophile

On Twitter to learn from others and gain perspective.

[sarah 😾 @chowtato]

Places to drink and dance in SF!

Bars:
Butter
Balboa Cafe
Persona
Harper & Rye
Bar Darling
Jaxon
The Devils Acre
Last Rites
Smugglers Cove
Tonga Room
Cold Drinks Bar
Li Po Lounge
Novela
Key Club
True Laurel (hard to walk in)

Clubs/Dancing:
Long Weekend
Bar Part Time
Monroe’s (crowd will be younger)
Raven Bar
Rick & Roxy’s
Madarae
Temple
DNA Lounge
Hawthorne
The Valencia Room
Westwood
White Rabbit

Wine bars:
Amalie
Arcana
Bodega
Roaming Goat
Union Larder
Bar Gemini
Etcetera

Speakeasies:
The Pawn Shop (bring something to trade for entry!)
Blind Pig (need password from insta)
Bourbon & Branch
Local Edition
Lore

[Just Another Pod Guy @TMTLongShort]

Weekly podcast dump

(Rec: Every on wealthion, Tibo interview, Setser on Ezra)

[Naval @naval]

One of the best recent podcasts on AI. Neil has a gift for explaining all of the jargon and insights simply.

(I’m not involved, just found it unusually educational).

[The Eternal Optimist @somoksen]

@Pivot2Centre Yield curve control measures will be deployed by the US.

[Rossst.03 @Rossst_03]

Mrityunjoy Chakraborty, IIT Kharagpur professor:

"Jane Street pays a 22 year old $500,000 a year for one skill: turning uncertainty into a number you can bet on. that number is the first thing this professor teaches, and it is free"

this free lecture is the foundation every quant bot and hedge fund model is secretly built on.

before the AI, before the strategy, there is one question. what is the chance this happens, exactly.

get that number right and every bet after it is just math. get it wrong and no model, no bot, no amount of compute can save you.

Chakraborty builds probability from the axioms up, on a blackboard, in notation a 15 year old can follow.

Wall Street sells this as a $500,000 edge. an IIT professor hands you the source code for nothing.

[betraidx @betraidx]

A broke Italian gambler in 1560 wrote a short manual on how to win at dice. Nobody in finance read it for four hundred years.

The nine-trillion-dollar insurance industry runs on his equation.

His name was Girolamo Cardano. The book was called Liber de Ludo Aleae. He scribbled it in Milan to settle a card debt. Every dollar of premium ever collected on Earth is a footnote to that scribble.

Nobody connected the dots until 1996. A ninety-year-old man in New York wrote a book called Against the Gods and traced every modern risk model back to Cardano's manual. Wall Street called him the historian of risk.

His name was Peter Bernstein. In 2008 a small production company filmed him for thirteen minutes. He walked through the entire five-hundred-year arc. Cardano to Pascal to Fermat to Black-Scholes.

Then he stopped and said the industry had built glass towers on the back of an idea a broke gambler scribbled to shave the house edge.

He died the following summer. Age ninety.

There are only four ways to make money. Labor. Capital. Arbitrage. Insurance. Insurance is the oldest and the least visible. Every actuary on Earth still prices catastrophe risk with Cardano's framework.

The video is thirteen minutes long. Free on YouTube. Twenty-nine thousand people have watched it.

[Voltex @VoltexGar]

The smartest player always loses to the one who owns the rules. a Stanford professor proved it. Wall Street built a $20 billion machine on it.

it is called algorithmic game theory, free on YouTube for years. the professor is Tim Roughgarden, and his whole point is one move. stop trying to out-play the game. sit in the seat it was built to reward, and let everyone else supply your edge.

the post above is that seat, in cash. Jane Street does not predict the market. it takes a toll on a third of every retail order in America and books $20.5 billion whether you win or lose.

the mechanism does not care how smart you are. it margin-called Bill Hwang and his $36 billion into 18 years, in two days.

that same lesson runs Google's ad auction, the traffic on your commute, and every marketplace you have ever paid a fee to. the money is never in playing well. it is in owning the rules of play.

no prediction. no genius. one seat, and the rules.

the smartest player is in prison. the house that wrote the rules is up $20 billion. the difference is one free Stanford lecture.

[Ryomen @Ryomenex]

Harvard needs 8% return every year just to keep the lights on. 5% spending plus 3% inflation. Miss that number and buildings stop, professors leave, research dies.

40% of the operating budget comes from one portfolio. Not tuition. Not grants. One fund.

Jake Xia manages that fund's public markets. He also teaches the math behind it at MIT for free. One of the top five most-watched courses on OpenCourseWare. Millions of views. Almost nobody changed how they invest.

Every year he hands students a blank page. Build a portfolio. No rules. Someone writes 100% Apple. Someone writes rare coins. Confident picks. Same blind spot, every time.

Not one student asks the only question that matters: how much goes in each position. They all pick what to buy. Nobody sizes it.

Sizing is the entire job. The answer won the Nobel Prize. It's called the efficient frontier. Xia draws it on the board in under a minute.

Five equations sit underneath it. Compound growth. Present value. The geometric mean. The Rule of 72. Real return. All older than any bank on earth. All fit on a napkin. None behind a paywall.

A "guaranteed 5% bond" during 4% inflation is a 1% return. The industry doesn't hide this. It just hopes you never run the equation yourself.

The lecture is free. The napkin is free. The only thing that costs anything is not knowing.

[the lich @thelichhh]

One of the largest trading firms in the world teaches new hires poker before it lets them near a book. A newspaper brought a camera to the table and sat down to play.

The men across the felt are working Wall Street traders. The firm is Susquehanna, which built poker into its training programme decades ago and still runs it that way, on the argument that the card room teaches something no finance degree does. Gunjan Banerji from the Wall Street Journal plays the hands herself rather than interviewing them about it.

A green table, a dealer, chips, 4 people who do this for a living. No lecture hall, no slides. The teaching happens between deals, while money is actually at stake.

They break it into parts on camera. Risk management first. Then bet sizing. Then patience, which sounds like the soft one and is not. Then reading the person opposite when the only data available is how they behave with money on the table.

The section on patience is the one most people skip. Folding is the correct action in the overwhelming majority of hands, and almost nobody can do it for hours without inventing a reason to play. The same failure shows up in a trading account as overtrading, and it kills more people than bad analysis.

Then bet sizing, which is where the video earns the watch. Being right about the odds is the easy half. How much you put behind a correct read is the part that ends careers, and they work through it hand by hand instead of describing it in the abstract.

The turn is what the traders admit about being wrong. A good decision loses regularly, a bad decision wins regularly, and the only way to last is to grade the process instead of the result. Everything else in the video sits downstream of that.

It matters more now than when the firm started running these tables. Every model prices probability in a second and hands it to you for free. Nothing on the screen tells you how much of your account to put behind the number, or what to do after the number was right and you lost anyway.

Free on YouTube, produced by a newspaper, filmed at a real table with real hands.

The maths is public. The sizing is the job.

1 table. 4 traders. It is in the video.

[Neel Somani @neelsomani]

I'm a former Citadel quant who covered power & gas.

There's constant talk about chips & memory, but power is the central bottleneck for AI.

Very few people understand it, so I'm posting a canonical primer on power pricing & data centers: https://t.co/LO5ovj2imA

[venus @RitOnchain]

MIT Professor just revealed the exact mathematical framework behind quant trading and zero-sum edge.

80-minutes. free. By Ian Bell.

here's what they cover:
• how von Neumann proved moving first isn't a disadvantage in zero-sum games
• Nash equilibrium vs. security strategies (minimax & maximin algebra)
• why chess has an exact objective outcome (1, -1, or 0)
• von Neumann poker model - proving bluffing as pure math

Bookmark & watch today. Then read the article below.

[Isa @isssa0x]

A dead MIT professor accidentally destroyed the $20 billion executive coaching industry with one hour of lecture, and ten million people have already watched him do it.

He filmed it once in January 2018 and died eighteen months later.

Executive coaches charge fifteen thousand dollars a session to teach a third of what he covered in that one hour for free.

His name was Patrick Winston. He ran the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 and wrote the AI textbook every computer science major in the world read for thirty years.

Every January for four decades, he gave a lecture called "How to Speak."

His entire framework fits on a napkin.

Do not read. Be in the image. Keep images simple. Eliminate clutter. Start with an empathetic connection. End with a punch line the audience can repeat over dinner. Never open with a joke. Never end with "thank you."

That last rule alone has probably cost the executive coaching industry a hundred million dollars.

"Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order."

That is the actual opening line of the lecture. Winston believed it strongly enough to spend fifty years teaching computer scientists how to talk.

Founders spend $80,000 on an MBA and then hire a communications coach to teach them the same material Winston filmed once for free. Engineers write brilliant code and lose promotions to teammates who watched this lecture on the train.

The lecture is free on MIT OpenCourseWare. The textbook is free on his page.

Winston died in 2019. Almost none of the ten million viewers have actually implemented the four rules on the napkin.

The napkin is free. The willingness to actually use it in your next meeting is the entire edge.

[Silverhand @21xSilverhand]

A man who went to prison for talking people out of their money filmed himself doing it live, then sold the method as a course. 7 million people have watched him work.

The man is Jordan Belfort. The film about him made him famous. What almost nobody has done is watch the real one, on camera, running the actual technique on a real prospect for 22 minutes with no script and no edit.

And the way he does it is the reason to watch.

He barely talks about the product. The first minutes are almost entirely questions, and every answer gets used against the person later in his own words. He is not persuading. He is collecting.

Then the phrase the comments turned into a meme. He ends his key sentences with four words that make agreement feel like the neutral option and refusal feel like rudeness. Once you notice it, you cannot unhear it, and you will catch it in the next call you take.

One viewer broke the whole method into 9 steps in a comment. It got 12 thousand likes, which tells you people are studying this video like a manual.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Every technique in it is ordinary sales advice: listen, mirror, remove friction, set expectations. That is exactly what makes it worth studying. The tools were never the crime. The intent was.

Learn what is being done to you and it stops working on you. That is the only defense there is.

22 minutes. No script. It is in the video.

[Jason Luongo @JasonL_Capital]

I'm only going to say this once.

If you're under 40, this dip is a generational opportunity to buy great companies at a discount.

$NVDA - $194 now. $250 stock. Data center revenue up 92% to $75B last quarter.

$HOOD - $91 now. $150 stock. $307B in platform assets. Built its own blockchain.

$MRVL - $171 now. $225 stock. Custom AI silicon went zero to $1.5B in one year.

$NBIS - $162 now. $200 stock. Revenue up 684%. Backlog over $50B.

$ONDS - $7 now. $10 stock. $70M in new defense orders in four weeks.

$AMZN - $234 now. $300 stock. AWS reaccelerated to 28%. Ads past $70B.

$SOFI - $15 now. $25 stock. 14.7M members, up 35%. CEO keeps buying shares.

$SPCX - $116 now. $150 stock. Starlink, reusable rockets, and Starship.

$ZETA - $22 now. $30 stock. 19 straight beat-and-raise quarters.

$NOK - $9 now. $15 stock. NVIDIA invested $1B. AI and cloud sales up 49%.

Ten years from now nobody will remember what these traded at this week.

The people who built real wealth didn't do it buying all-time highs.

[xanax @donttouchxanax]

An Indian institute filmed a professor teaching classical physics with no notes, no slides, and a green board. Almost nobody outside India watches it.

This is Classical Physics, lecture 1, taught by V. Balakrishnan at IIT Madras, published free by NPTEL, India's national open courseware programme.

Balakrishnan taught at IIT Madras for decades. Students who sat in that room describe the same thing: the whole subject held in his head, delivered in order, no paper on the podium.

Lecture 1 is the introduction. What classical mechanics claims, where the claims hold, and the exact points where they stop holding and quantum takes over.

Watch how he speaks. Complete sentences, no filler, each idea finished before the next begins. Rare in any lecture hall on any continent.

A physicist I know worked through the whole NPTEL series and rates it above the western courses he paid for.

Free on YouTube, 17 years online, low resolution, no marketing.

The teaching was never concentrated in the famous universities.

[The Eternal Optimist @somoksen]

@signulll This unfortunately shows a lack of understanding of the game. A single play a single pass can open up the game of possibilities in a second.

[The Eternal Optimist @somoksen]

@Pivot2Centre I was there in person and it was anything but meh.
I stay in a city in the US very close to one of the stadiums. The buzz is not the same that one sees on social media.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

10 websites that cure boredom better than TikTok.

Want to actually have fun online again? Open one of these websites.

Save this list.

1. Zoom Quilt
An infinite zoom animation that never ends. Pure mesmerizing chaos.
Site → https://t.co/MOHHeCOGwQ

2. MapCrunch
One click teleports you to a random Google Street View anywhere on Earth.
Site → https://t.co/sYoccelfWJ

3. Stellarium Web
A real-time map of every star, planet, and constellation directly above your head right now.
Site → https://t.co/5HWRv2eGqg

4. neal fun
The internet's playground. Infinite Craft, The Password Game, and 30 other addictive experiments built by one developer.
Site → https://t.co/3YBKjGAeDc

5. Universal Paperclips
A free incremental game that will eat 4 hours of your life and you will not regret a second.
Site → https://t.co/hNuhntFmoC

6. GeoGuessr
Drop into a random Street View location. Guess where you are. The puzzle every curious mind gets hooked on.
Site → https://t.co/h8ttdjRYLq

7. Radio Garden
Spin a globe. Click any green dot. Listen to live radio broadcasting right now from that exact place.
Site → https://t.co/LiJ7jLyIMG

8. A Soft Murmur
Mix rain, thunder, coffee shop, fire, waves, and wind into your own custom ambient soundtrack.
Site → https://t.co/ZeTNbkfuD4

9. The Useless Web
One button. Infinite random useless websites. All better than another TikTok scroll.
Site → https://t.co/zT0XGDPfji

10. Window Swap
Look out a window from a stranger's home somewhere on Earth. Real, slow, beautiful.
Site → https://t.co/xFOhKTa8RW

Wonder. Exploration. Beauty. Curiosity. Surprise.