e-master

> The Azure pricing is at least as complex as AWS/GCP, plus the pricing tool seems worse. They also lag behind the other two major providers in CPU releases - Turin and Granite Rapids are still in closed preview at the time of writing this.

Small nitpick, but Turin-based VM's have been available for more than a month now [1], and they are a beast.

[1] - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azurecompute/announ...

Really depends how deep you want to go.

For a structured products introduction you may take a look at this one: https://sspa.ch/en/book/

It's a very simple book, very high level, but explains the most popular structured products in a very simple manner. If you can read a payoff diagram, then this is the simplest intro.

Looking at their website though, they seem to have some nice online material there also. For example this explains the 5 most popular products, and perhaps that's good enough for an introduction (really these 5 products cover 90% of the market anyway, though there's no limit to how exotic some bespoke structures can get): https://sspa.ch/en/lab/?underlying=CH0012221716&final_fixing...

In case you're interested in getting to get to learn about them on a deeper level I would recommend https://www.amazon.com/Exotic-Options-Hybrids-Structuring-Pr.... This book explains not only the products, but also the pricing dynamics and hedging too.

And just a small gem I found recently about volatility trading:https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306680584072?chn=ps&_ul=GB&_trkpa...

Despite its appalling Amazon reviews I consider this book to be a real gem when it comes to the introduction to vol trading (basically dynamic hedging of equity derivatives)

I assume exotic derivatives (binary, asian, barrier options...) and structured notes that predominantly use above said derivatives (autocallables, barrier reverse convertibles, accumulators etc.)

Would you mind sharing which course it was? Is it available online by any chance?

Yes, I think so, it's right next to the parking lot. I visited it about 3 years ago, but back then the tunnel was not accessible yet, it is now.

Also, not sure if this is true, but our tour guide told us that Tesla himself actually never set foot on the Canadian side of the falls.

I highly recommend visiting the niagara parks power station museum on the Canadian side - they have a very interesting exhibition of the old power plant. You can even go down to the old tunnel and walk through it to see how the water was diverted back into the river, fascinating stuff.

The Welland canal is also very interesting. There's something really cool about seeing a large ship moving _on_ a bridge while driving under that same bridge with a car. Also, the city of Welland has some nice bike trails iirc.

A bit of off topic, but recently I started learning F# because my new team at work uses it heavily, and even though I love writing in C# and even though the latest C# features are really nice (especially love patter matching), I wish now C# didn’t have the curly braces and semicolons at all, and used instead indentation based grouping like F# and Python does. That is practically all I wish I had in C#… and discriminated unions, but let’s be honest, what are the chances of that happening? ;)

pythonnet works, we use it in a pretty large (Python) codebase, but I’m much more excited about https://github.com/tonybaloney/CSnakes, which allows using Python in a proper statically typed language - C#.

On a slightly unrelated note, I am absolutely thrilled about tonybaloney’s other project[1] that automatically generates C# bindings for python. Can’t wait for it to support complete class mappings and finally I will be able to use python ‘type-safely’.

[1] https://github.com/tonybaloney/CSnakes

I’m curious why was this downvoted, sounds like an interesting idea to me.

I’ve seen it used for OTC option pricing - there’s no liquid market, so you are more of a market maker than a market taker.

I always thought that in a highly automated world, reducing the mandated working hours would be the solution to bring prosperity and peace, but there are some obvious problems with that. For example, in a global economy, nations compete with each other, and for developing nations, an average german producing for fewer hours, but consuming the same or even more resources, would be a great competitive advantage. For something like this to truly work I think it would have to be rolled out globally, or certain tariffs would have to be in place against nations that don’t follow the practice - and let’s be honest, certain nations do much worse things today to gain competitive advantage, and really nobody cares, most people love cheap stuff, however morally questionable the source is.

Personally, I didn’t enjoy it much, but it reminded me a lot of this book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Struggle_(Knausgård_novel....

I was sure I read this story before, but couldn’t recall it for whatever reason, however you hint made me remember it, thanks :)

I just recently tried again Redis Insight after about a year and a half of a break, and boy it got so much better! It was useful before, but it’s even better now. Even small things like the ability to build a tree out of the keys if you use a separator, or syntax highlighting for a bunch of formats such as Json or MsgPack - just awesome. Though I did find it amusing that it has syntax highlighting for pretty exotic formats but not for xml? :) maybe it’s not a posh format anymore, but it’s still very common and would be nice to have it supported in the UI.

I use it too - it’s excellent, I’d think most developers don’t need more than this.

C# is lovely, and with eventual first class AOT support I believe it will become more widespread

Kids were 7 and 2 when we moved. Probably the biggest factor in timing the move was their age - I assumed that if we didn’t move then, then we won’t ever do it, as the children would grow older and it would make reintegration really difficult.

One year on they are doing well, even learned a new language! And of course they do enjoy and always look forward to the frequent visits of friends and relatives.

We pulled a similar move last year - moved back to Europe from North America after living there for 10+ years. It was a very expensive and risky move, and just like you, I’m also unsure if it will work out great in the long term, but I can tell you I feel great, I am finally in the same time zone as my brother and parents, they can visit pretty much any time, and heck even when my in-laws are in town, and I see them having breakfast with the kids on a Sunday morning, I feel like my life is finally complete.

My personal experience is quite the opposite - globalization allows capital to move to the lesser developed and cheaper places, bringing jobs and education, and over time an improved quality of life, so that people who were before desperate to leave no longer feel it’s necessary. Sure, it’s not as simple, but just wanted to mention it, since it’s not as straightforward as it seems.

On a slightly related note, I’d rather point the finger at urbanization - in my short lifetime I’ve witnessed multiple small villages (1.5 - 2k population) pretty much disappear as the younger generation moved out for multiple different reasons.

Software scales better than hardware, so most investment (capital and intellectual) is in software.

Who’s John Galt anyway…

Fwiw, I use VSCode with the ’REST Client’ extension and it’s pretty much all I need: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...

Generally speaking you can group large financial institutions into two groups: sell side and buy side. I’m no expert, but afaik, these firms either SELL liquidity (e.g. investment banks, market makers etc.) or BUY liquidity (for example pension funds, certain hedge funds). Liquidity is the key here - that is (if any) the benefit they bring to society. I can buy/sell pretty much any financial product/risk with reasonable spreads because there’s always someone on the other side of the trade ready to be my counterparty.

Not that I want to defend some of these institutions, though some are better than others, but it’s important to keep in mind that they do take on risk in order to provide us liquidity, and most of them specialize in managing the risk, some of them are even good at it. Their infrastructure and connectivity and the price they charge you to provide liquidity allows them to make profits, but they do lose money sometimes. Also, compared to 20 years ago, there’s fierce competition now in pretty much every aaset class - if you work in one of the buy/sell side firms, you’ll very often hear terms such as spread compression etc (except the Covid years of course - people just wanted to trade, nobody cared about the price of liquidity (e.g. spreads or sales credit etc.) they had to pay)

Interestingly, I’ve noticed a significant drop in stackoverflow results when I Google in the recent months. Can’t really attribute it to anything, but an honest word sometimes I don’t use SO for weeks.

Loved using edge, was happy to have a good alternative to Chrome. Then they added this Bing button and some weird Toolbar to the side, and I never used it since. Went back to using Chrome. Would’ve used Firefox, but it doesn’t seem to have a built in translator which I often need, and I’m not keen at all on installing some no name extension.

[+] for Brio, though it’s so expensive that i often joke I have half of my savings in these brio train sets.

FWIW, I’m already used to Win+Shift+S by now which I assume does the same thing?

Also, the argument ignores the potential velocity of money - as a million pounds moves through the economy it creates economic activity that otherwise may not happen, even if they just buy a boat.

Reminds me how my mother used to say that we’re not rich enough to buy cheap things. I think it must be some proverb somewhere, but I only ever heard it from her.