HolyLampshade

> security has a cost associated with it, and unless there are _real_ consequences, it's a cost that most software houses ain't gon' pay.

Good to see someone say this. Software need only be good enough to do the job, and only as safe as reasonably required. Systems can be secured and audited through other means, sometimes at lower expense than guaranteeing every line of software has zero risk associated.

I’ve only worked in a single company where it really worked out, and it took a massive amount of work to massage egos on both sides of the “fix” (one side sees their hammer tool and wants to fix everything with it, and the other has the mother’s honor issue). You really had to spend time with both parties helping them understand things were a certain way for a reason, but that there were always small changes that could improve things.

Encouraging the inverse of fixing relationship helped both parties as well.

That said, I’ve worked in a few other shops that either had the permissions/compartmentalization shit show as a permanent blocker, or were just completely devoid of a culture encouraging people to care about anything beyond their own career/fiefdom. I absolutely despise both cases.

This isn’t just AI…it’s ‘enterprise-AI’.

It’s AI, but with more bureaucracy and politics.

But I think you can do psychotic shit like applying punishing sanctions to anywhere that permits an ungoverned connection. Or apply physical force (military).

I’m not saying we’re even remotely close to this, I’m just saying State-level coercive action is not unheard of if a problem is perceived to be significant enough to warrant it. Shit, it even only needs to be viewed as significant by a small subset of the governing body (see: Iran conflict, or current pushes for “child safety on the internet”). It just has to be “useful” to a certain body politic.

> It's not the end of the world. But future will be rough.

Short term you’re probably right, but longer term is the realm where nation states will start to police the avenues of attack.

This is what will lead to govt needing to attach an actual ID your network connection.

I think it’s a bit like frontier development (like the US “Wild West”). You rob a bank because there’s no one to stop you, and even if you do get identified you can travel enough distance to regain anonymity. Application of legal recourse eventually caught up (as it will here), and the growing pains will certainly make things suck for all of us.

I’d argue even new freeways are challenging, at least in my area. They’ve been trying to close a loop around this city for 30+yr now, with a 3mi gap remaining. The last 3mi extension toward closing the gap took nearly 15 years to get through environmental reviews and legal challenges. This final segment will likely take an equally long period.

I’ll believe it. If someone were to try to achieve the same in my area (not even high speed rail), between two metropolitan areas, they’d have to contend with thousands of private land owners.

I lived in the UK for a few years, so I can appreciate and really enjoy a robust rail network, but it’s not an easy thing to achieve.

Man, I’d love more trains but we can’t act like the infrastructure necessary to support them, if not present, is very challenging to develop.

Even ignoring land acquisition (which is a big thing to ignore in populated areas where a train would most benefit the population), there are simple things like road crossings, other infrastructure crossing, etc.

In this case an airplane may be simply a lower friction solution.

One of the things I always told kids who came into these big trading firms is the owner(s) is/are a billionaire, and likely came up from one of the trading floors or something adjacent. They are not the “forgiving” types when it comes to shit like this, and they have infinitely more resources than you.

So maybe don’t try to steal code, or trade concepts.

Hasn’t stopped some people I know from trying…

(For clarification I am not ex-CitSec and do not know this poor SOB, but he serves as the perfect poster child for “Don’t do that”)

Shit, MIAX is just the old BATS/Cboe technology with some local flair. There are multiple derivatives of the old Island/INET tech stack, mainly in ATSs, but the iteration Nasdaq is operating on only diverges where extreme message volume factors in.

No one is silly enough to want the abomination of design that is Pillar, but the point still stands that technical differentiation isn’t really important in the way it was 15-20yr ago.

Well, listings had domestic regulator control for the most part but I think you hit it on the head. Brokers in Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, or Milan needed to access 15-20 countries worth of exchanges, and the curse in the EU is the multi-currency cross listings.

Easier, if somewhat more verbose, to use the three in combo to identify. Helped somewhat by the message volumes being a small fraction of what they are in the US. Less need to optimize on a per order, or per market data packet basis.

Also explains why FIX is more prevalent in EU markets than it is in the US.

I tried for a while to push internally and amongst a few of the markets to move to ISIN, Currency, MIC but yeah…anything but that.

Honestly the problem is the ticker is too valuable advertising for the listed company, and since listings are not governed by a central regulator in the same way they are in Europe, for example, there’s always going to be this sort of friction about who is willing to bend the most to win the business.

Don’t disagree there, though this has been status quo for nearly two decades now.

By that measure regional exchanges were their own beasts for a long time. The environment has definitely streamlined a ton since RegNMS was implemented and the exchanges consolidated a bit.

Even the technology stacks the current markets run are basically identical within three families of design (even the upstart markets, and even those that are not directly licensing technology from ICE, Nasdaq, or Cboe). Differentiation just doesn’t pay like it used to.

Yeah, they tried to carry the suffix symbology into the ticker itself, but that fortunately died not because of some great sanctity of the symbols but because someone thought it would confuse too much with how ACT and the CTCI protocol handled security categorization.

NYSE (really the access stack that both NYSE and AMEX ran on; the name escapes me since it died back in I think ‘08) has for a long time included a completely separate field in their protocols to indicate classification (preferred, warrants, classes, when issued, etc), but CTCI just jammed it into the symbol field.

Amusingly there is plenty of precedent (link below under Nasdaq Integrated Platform Suffix and the older ACT/CTCI suffixes) for using all of the wonderful character symbols to indicate different classes of securities.

Not as common, again, as it used to be...but still exists.

https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=CQSsymbolconvent...

Little bit of a “the more you know” moment.

Historically NYSE (and AMEX; thought of in this specific context as CTA) had a lock on 1-3 character symbols. NASDAQ (via UTP) had a lock on 4-6 character symbols.

For a long time you could tell where something was listed purely by looking at the length of the symbol it traded under.

This all changed in the late 2000s or so, so no longer useful information.

I honestly would leave the industry if one of the exchanges tried to bend the industry to allow an emoji in a symbol. The communication protocols essentially lock this at 8 character alpha. It would be a huge pain in the ass, for everyone, to change this just because some exchange wants to appeal to a potential listing.

I think the sad thing is they don’t even have to hide it. Absolutely no one will be held directly accountable for these decisions, either because they’ll be retired, or the “responsibility” can be whitewashed through organizational decision making.

As another commenter mentioned, they’ll all get their performance bonuses, and by the time the bills come due either they’ll be gone, or no one will know why in the hell they’re in the situation they’re in.

Middle bench decay is like some sort of complex immune deficiency. No one can quite put their finger on what’s wrong, but the org can’t pull its collective head out of its ass.

For many companies this happens naturally as it progresses from the dynamic operating environment of high competition to one of maintenance. Staff levels bloat and after a while no one has a grasp on the big picture and the institution forgets why it’s doing what it’s doing.

What’s amazing to me is that these companies that are lighting their hiring process on fire are willingly accelerating this process.

Of course! I have the curse of working/having worked in the financial sector, so all of the “Linkedin People” I know moved from crypto horseshit to AI horseshit. Before that it’s just as you said, cloud horseshit.

Can’t wait to see what horseshit is next.

Mortgaging the future to pay for the present.

All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.

Same boat here. Go as simple as possible (syslog) as the base, and you can bolt on whatever the hell other tools you’d like to perform advanced functionality if you really want it.

There certainly was a lot of navel-gazing and patting of backs with the dissolution of the USSR…

Truth is while the govt model and Union failed, the people who made it up didn’t vanish into thin air. You can draw a pretty straight line from 1991 to how Putin acts against the US and Europe.

The 90s were definitely a different beast. Beginning of a unipolar geopolitical push from the US. Seems after 30yr we’re starting to finally get some real push back, which is simultaneously concerning and nice to see.

To put it simply, no. I mean, as a general statement and not a universal.

There were arguments about domestication of data and the risk of compute and data being in the control of Western (mainly US) powers, but that didnt surface in real quantity and force until Snowden, and even then was more peripheral than this sort of article seems.

I don't want to risk coming off as an AI naysayer, but this all feels much more like crypto than the initial Personal Computer or Cloud boom. I think maybe some part of that is due to the sheer magnitude of capital arrayed. Feels…sales-y.

My theory on this sort of thing is if a technology is truly revolutionary and world altering, people (both individually and in a geopolitical sense) will adopt it at a compromise to values of nationalism or control. We are constantly told AI will create a bimodal world, and yet it’s not the countries who don’t have frontier labs yelling about it.

I’m losing the thread somewhat (sorry, haven’t had coffee yet), but the TL;DR is this hasn’t been something I’ve witnessed yet in previous tech evolutions (in my mid-40s), and I’m not entirely convinced by the articles arguments.

That is only if there’s a direct correlation to price movements starting after he opens his yap on Truth Social (which, within this administration there is plenty of insider trading so the movement may pre-date the social media post).

I suspect, having worked in this space for quite a while, that this specific data, faster, is useless and that there are other signals that indicate something is coming before it ends up on social media (esp TS).

Yes, there is historical data about prices moving after TS posts, but what I’m arguing is paying to get it ‘faster’ may not be worth anything if you can achieve that same end (knowing something is happening) through previously established channels.

The trading firms don’t really get anything from bribing Trump. That’s not to say hedge funds don’t want to tickle the big guy’s ego, but they don’t need “faster data” in most cases.

It’s less directly beneficial than most people think it will be.

If I had to venture a guess (and full disclosure I’m not currently working in the space, and am not privy to conversations about actually buying this product), the 100k/m for whatever the contract duration is relatively low stakes to see if there’s utility in the data. Since there is no historical data the only real option is to buy, see if it makes a difference, and dump the product at the end of the contract if it doesn’t move the needle.

The seller is trying to push upfront sales by suggesting “These guys are doing it, and if you want to keep an edge you need to too”, (and journalists wanting to write about how corrupt this shit is are eagerly picking this up and boosting the signal by writing these sorts of articles).

In 5-6 months I suspect the consumer number to be down to 1-2 from the original batch, and those who are still paying will probably be doing so because the fact that the contract exists will probably slip through the cracks.

I don’t say this lightly, and confess I haven’t dug in very deeply yet, but this is one of the most hot shit uses of ML I think I’ve stumbled across yet.

If this does what I think it does (and I confess I’m a goddamn idiot still when it comes to anything involving ‘agentic’) this is honestly pretty damn amazing.

The entirety of modern financial markets is simply incremental distributed state machines.

I think that's precisely what the previous commenter is saying. Sit on the side lines, and let other people bloody themselves up.

Similar in a way to dot com. It's not to say ML won't have practical application in the future, but the likelihood that it will have specifically this form is low and worth waiting until the dust settles and a more commonly accepted utility presents itself.

If AI/ML were monstrously useful in its current form the companies pushing it would not need to be hawking products; people would be bashing their doors down. I think that's why in areas where it's more directly applied to a known problem set (like Pharma research, and I'm hoping someone with Pharma expertise can pipe up here) there has been more natural pickup.

Coming from trading and markets, ML has been a part of the mix in quantitative strategies for...well, nearly 20 years (by definition I suppose). Spaces with obvious utility will see rapid adoption. Worth waiting that out, honestly.

One of those silly little issues with inbuilt software that drives me insane is the number of times I’ve had to log back into Apple Music or Spotify (or one of the video services to occupy the kiddo while parked for extended duration).

That’s another one that phones have just solved with the integrated password manager. The friction of providing credentials on my other devices has been reduced, but all of a sudden I need to go hunting through that pwd manager, and hunting and pecking on the infotainment keyboard, to enter a 20+ char unique pwd that modern “best practices” has established. It got bad enough for a bit (swver changes resulting in needing to re-log in) that I stopped using all of these apps for 2-3yr on our Model Y because I got tired of having to do it.

I think what’s become more interesting/impactful for me is why they elect not to support it.

Most firms moving away from it (or who never implemented it) seem determined to either sell additional subscription services to their user base (connectivity) or sell their user base to a third-party (either as data, or eyeballs). And for a product at this price point I find myself very annoyed at the attempted payment extraction.

Either way, I’m with you. Lots of vehicle manufacturers out there that will support it.