Taylor Spears

Chancellor's Fellow @uoebusiness & @UoE_EFI. Lecturer in Financial Technology and Organizations.

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

Very happy to see this chapter, co-authored with @BondoHansen, available online. Will be of interest to anyone interested in how machine learning is transforming the cultures of financial modelling and bringing about a closer alignment with Big Tech.
https://t.co/jUGDTB1FLr

[Y Disassembler @loomdoop]

There is no AI economy. It loses hundreds of billions of dollars and all gains are in speculative valuation.

The only one making a profit is Nvidia, and it doesn’t make anything. It resells Taiwanese chips to companies that use them to lose money.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

I don't know how people manage without air conditioning in this weather. The idea that opening a few windows and turning a fan on is good enough is crazy. The people responsible for stopping aircon from being built into in new build housing in Britain really should be in jail.

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

@hamptonism Where is probability theory?

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

The stuff of nightmares

[tamara @tamarajtran]

My firebase bill is usually $50/month, but I was surprised to see a ~$70,000 bill in one day.

Now Google is mentioning in 10 days it will be sent to debt collection

Can anyone help??

[John Handel @_John_Handel]

Is there a better feeling than receiving proofs?

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

@_John_Handel Oh nice. This might be perfect for my social studies of FinTech course.

[Benjamin (offline for a bit) @bschne]

oh god

[Dr Nigel Kellow @NigelKellow]

I’m a consultant in private practice in London and I treat patients covered by private medical insurance every day.
If you think it’s better in the UK, think again.
I’ll share some stories I and my colleagues see every day. After reading these please DM me or share your own 🧵

[hagaetc @hagaetc]

I’m born and raised in Norway. I think it’s a beautiful country that I would love to live/build in but right now that’s not possible. Sadly Europe as a whole is falling behind due to innovation hostile policies/culture. If you all help calling it out it might improve eventually🙏

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

To riff on Rosa Brooks’ 2016 book: “How everything became finance and Treasury became everything”

[Paul E Williams @PEWilliams_]

We live in an interesting world where, as a result of policy-by-tax-credit, Treasury now administers:
Our largest housing program (LIHTC) instead of HUD
Our largest energy program (ITC/PTC) instead of DOE
One of our largest antipoverty programs (EITC) instead of SSA

[Rasmus Corlin Christensen (ghost account) @phdskat]

🚨 New paper out!

Excited to share this, where I take a 'weaponized interdependence' view at explaining historical failure and recent success in global tax policy - and how that view can help fight climate change and inequality🧵👇

#OA @Global_Policy:

https://t.co/FSry1V1A5L

[Rick @rickasaurus]

This meme was a small moment of enlightenment for me a long long while back

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

Is this real? Seems wild to use QR codes for pull transactions in payments.

[lozzyloz @lozzylozboz]

Be careful everyone, this happened in greystones. The lady's daughter was scammed out of €1000, using a QR code that she scanned to pay for parking.

[Justin T. Pickett @JustinTPickett]

(1/2) We need more attention to selection bias in qualitative research. A new study in a top sociology journal examines "how young people experience policing," but it draws only on interviews of youth in an organization devoted to abolishing the police, one that bombards...

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

This is really fascinating from @ByrneHobart. Money is a form of media

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

Back in the day Taleb wrote a paper to criticise Nate Silver’s forecasting approach. He used arbitrage reasoning to argue that the election outcome likehihood should be close to 50/50 up until election day. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate his reasoning, but it’s interesting to see the market playing out this way:

https://t.co/TLDtN8zoEw

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

Wild how AI is quickly replacing “the market” as the preferred deus ex machina that American elites invoke to provide a future solution to a wicked problem so that they don’t need to do the difficult work of thinking carefully and making hard tradeoffs in the present day

[Tsarathustra @tsarnick]

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says energy demand for AI is infinite and we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway, so we may as well bet on building AI to solve the problem

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

Is there a word for overcomplicating a task with needless abstractions, only to achieve poorly what could’ve been done simply? In finance, that’s like delta hedging a long call and a short put separately to mimic a straightforward long stock position.

[Find me on bsky @colin-fraser.net @colin_fraser]

The insane irony of this is that each one of these failed multiplications requires performing trillions of successful multiplications

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

@_RustyRooster What's haskell?

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

One of the weirder LLM glitches I've encountered. I asked my article summariser app to summarise a PDF with no embedded full text (PDF was just images of pages). Text extraction failed silently, and so no article text was provided to GPT-4-mini. In response, it pretended to be a rule based system by outputting a fake mad lib style template.

[Taylor Spears @tcspears]

I created a Python app with Claude's help that lets you drag and drop articles into your browser for quick summaries via the OpenAI API. I'm finding it helpful for quickly developing a high-level understanding of literature in unfamiliar fields. Saves time compared to repeatedly prompting ChatGPT.
https://t.co/tZBUL0wQZ4