hessenwolf

One of the best books to make me realise this was Accelerando, by Charles Stross. The chips were inside her head, but, you know, accessible through typing and inside your head is just a difference in degree.

I would really appreciate it if you could describe some of your experiences in this in more detail. How many approximately have you given? How is the success rate? How many do you turn away, and why? Have you been able to match up key successes and disappointments with particular signals in the interview, and what were they?

And you know what? Maybe I'd like to work for Google or McKinsey. However, I suck at brainteasers.

I've worked in research since 2002. I always solve the problem. I'm the one you go to, after the other teams ran into trouble (I work rather hard to position myself as that).

I take the details of your issue, and offer to come back to you. Then I brainstorm and come back with a proposal. I will probably discuss the problem with several other specialists, one or two at a time.

Ideas occur at a Poisson rate with time spent thinking. I find running helps to focus the time spent thinking.

My most creative problem-solving ideas I've had while peeing. I think it is the interruption.

These screening interviews will rule me out, with high probability. Fine.

I also want to work with religious nuts, boring fuckwads, skiing junkies, food fetishists, and closet crocheters, as well as fellow social drinkers; and I want them all to be able to keep their oddities out of the workplace. It doesn't suggest a human amount of social intelligence to have a divisive image on your public profile.

So, like acronyms and abbreviations?

It has the contango element of a future with an underlying that has higher storage costs than the value inflation rate, but, unlike a future, the asset already changes hand, hence it resembles more a collateralised loan.

I am convinced the majority of the software in the world is really written in Excel, which was ripped off Lotus 123. LibreOffice does not really compete.

But do you play by ear? I don't think sight reading would help at all. I had been playing music for years, sight reading, and had picked up no musical ear.

Now, I can happily play along with the radio, and pick up languages by sound quite well.

Except for German. And I live in Germany. German is just... schmooshy.

This is really true. Where I am from, we discuss a six-week period or so when the season changes, from shitty to other-shitty, in which we say either your blood or skin thickens to the cold, or your blood thins for the warmth. (somehow, the skin never thins) I have no idea if this has any scientific basis.

Anecdotally, the partner of the Columbian who shares an office with me is complaining that she is now used to colder temperatures.

I quite enjoyed how the author quoted, “I would be much more convinced if I was reading the report from a credible peer-reviewed professional.”, without criticising the quote themselves. The reader is left to decide on their own that the quote is douchey.

The chap with a bit of blind luck, who lives off the personal data of others, accuses anybody of a lack of integrity? The chap who runs the website with constantly changing, fantastically obfuscated privacy settings?

I'll have as many faces as there are people who face me, thank you.

What would be the value in it? Justice? What does that mean? Punishment?

Or to send a warning? Would that really be effective?

What would be the cost? Was there anybody in the pot that was expendable, economically?

The whitening can be over the top, but have you seen a young person with crooked teeth? I feel my 'characteristic' smile really ages me :).

This is interesting, as it turns my viewpoint on its head. I firmly believed heroin addicts were all zombies. You are arguing they are quite completely saveable.

It changes my view on whether it is useful to help somebody. Do you have any references for this?

I came across a troupe of Longswording Englishmen in a fencing workshop in Scotland. They mainly practiced mowing down unarmed peasants with longswords, from what I could see. Perhaps you could expand on my limited insight?

The article says that the numbers increased from "1,706 in 2011 to 2,226 in 2014". So, 520 baby tigers in 3 years?

How many baby tigers per birth?

What is the mortality rate on those babies?

Is this definitely not just greater efforts to count tigers?

I think the Swiss Bank intervention is the classic black swan story. The model really only works until somebody puts their foot in it.

Risk management looks at the usual processes via stochastic modelling, but you need to also make scenario analysis, where you just make a deterministic event happen and then measure the effect on the value of your portfolio.

The risk wasn't 2 billion Euro, just the portfolio. The risk, according to solvency II, is 30-50% of the equities, approximately a 1% raise or drop in interest rates, 25% change in FX, etc.

The risk is probably about 40% of the 2 billion.

There's naught to do but converse, in a wee village in the West of Ireland. Gotta put a bit of colour in.

Don't worry, dude. Give it time.

Coming out of any multi-year relationship is normally a shock to the system. The wonderful whiff of want is the fiercest anti-pheromone.

Also, a good tip, put a rug on the floor.

Yeah, so, I'm guessing you don't do a lot of financial modelling.

You are throwing the baby out with the bath water, with respect to financial modelling. Yes, there are failures, and, yes, the models are severely imperfect.

We reduced the risk on a portfolio of 2 billion Euro, from a about a billion Euro to a risk of about 50 million Euro using hedging. The remaining 50 million was mostly basis risk, i.e., the mismatch between the underlying instruments in the liabilities and the hedge assets.

Using a similar logic to yours, senior management argued that we introduced a new risk called basis risk by trading derivatives.

The chromecast thing is great. It's an ugly little widget that comes in an overly-fancy box and does what it's supposed to.

However, it's terribly advertised, and it still annoyingly says "beta" all over stuff. I feel like I bought it out of some kind of anonymised side-door at the back of the warehouse.

Don't get me started on trying to convince them not to spend 10 year's earnings on an overpriced dwelling.

Does anybody else know about Thermite from the Jolly Roger's cookbook? I think that file, on a 486 laptop owned by my friend's mid-life-crisis separated father, was my life's best illicit thrill.

Interesting comment. I need to go home and do some gazing.

I've had that question used on me in a scientology clinic. I assume it opens one up to new suggestions.

Administer I like. A busy office can really do with a good quality administrator. My best bosses have been precisely that.

To counterpoint, I just got through a presentation for a business line for a large consulting firm. Presentations like this are out of my scope of expertise, so I really appreciated seeing a successful, professionally done version.

Questions:

What is the main font? What is the title font? What software was used?

Entirely as a result of my years of coding, I am an embarrassing typist. Super-quick touch-typing and rattly noises, but I live on the backspace key. I live so much on the backspace key, that I think it kills any efficiency.

I should probably play that zombie learn-to-type game or something for a while.