mempko

Regarding carbon capture, it will take more energy to capture the carbon than we burned putting it up there in the first place. Alan Kay, who actually did some systems work on the environment, explained it to me that the climate system is like an upside down coke bottle. It doesn't take much energy to tip it over, but it takes a lot more to put it back up.

In other words, we shouldn't have tipped it over in the first place. We may not have the energy to put things back to a habitable place.

They did. The ensemble had confidence intervals.

vibe coded. But vibes are off

There is a reason they call it 'fuck you money'

Long time ago I worked for a company that I learned was selling it's software to help target people during the Iraq war. I quit because I cannot support building software that kills people.

This is a message to people working for that line of business at Anthropic. You don't have to do it, you can quit. If you are helping this insane administration to conduct war on Iran quit. You don't need to have that kind of blood on your hands.

I saw a someone's hypothesis that a generative model was used to help classify buildings to decide what to bomb and that the Girls school was misclassified. If this was an Anthropic model, I can imagine what it feels like being a worker there in that line of business.

Did the people pay for the majority of the tariffs, like 80% percent? But the companies are getting this money? How is this now just a transfer of what I paid to these companies? They just get free money at my expense?

Excuse me for making some pretty sharp statements. Twitter is objectively a worse product now. Musk is a deeply uncreative person who doesn't seem to actually like people and attracts people to him that are the same way. This shows in his truly uninspired products. Tesla is way behind the Chinese now. xAI is a copy cat. SpaceX seems to be taking old Soviet ideas. Musk I go on?

If it's true that AI is creating productivity gains (and I think it is), then a company has two options. If every employee is X more productive, then you can either cut people and increase profitability, but sacrifice growth. Or you can be creative and see this as an opportunity to develop new features, new lines of business and new products. The choice depends on the creativity of the business leaders. Judging from Jack's post here, he chose option one. Which suggests to me he is deeply an un-creative business leader taking the easy path.

memory safety isn't really much of a problem with modern C++. We have the range library now for instance. What's nice about modern C++ is you can almost avoid most manual loops and talk at the algorithm level.

I'm pretty sure global warming isn't debunked. Yes, we should worry about all the other pollution too. But global warming is happening and we are causing it. What's different than nature doing it is the rate of change. Yes the earth was warmer in the past and would be in the future, but it has never warmed as fast as it is now.

Except they don't just talk this way with underlings but everyone including their peers.

I've noticed this too when dealing with people with power. If you want to be seen as a peer, you have to stop caring. It's weird but it's definitely in the culture. As someone who learned English as a second language, it's especially weird since I worked hard to speak and write good English.

It's also ironic for a self described "classic liberal" building a company which grows the power of the government instead of limiting it. Alex Karp must have deep cognitive dissonance and likely suffers for it.

Palantir itself is trading at an unjustifiable premium given their fundamentals. They P/E is north of 200x. It's forward guidance also doesn't justify their price imo.

So their beef with analysts is obvious since they have a huge risk to the downside in price. The recent pullback of around 21% is not sufficient in my opinion. Note this is not financial advice.

Don't forget he also had Sam Altman's phone number. Do you any of you have his number? Also before he did all this he was semi retired for 5 years because of a successful exit. So for anyone thinking they can replicate this ask...

1. Are you already rich? Do you have cash in the bank to vibecode a project fulltime for many months just for fun?

2. Do you have Sam Altman's (or similar) number?

We use Apache Arrow at my company and it's fantastic. The performance is so good. We have terabytes of time-series financial data and use arrow to store it and process it.

We didn't use other LLMs. We built our own models and had a system designed to never leak future information at any given timepoint. Models can only access data the system allowed it at any time point gating future information. This means even training has to use the same system.

You have to design it from the ground up with that approach. Just to give you an idea of how hard it is, when a company releases an earnings report, they can update it in the future with corrected information, so if you pull it later you will leak future information into the past. So even basics like earnings need to be versioned by time.

But you know, most people don't really care and think they have an edge, and who knows maybe they do. Only live trading will prove it.

I'm curious about something. If this is based on historical datasets, and people build strategies using LLMs, then in theory this is deeply flawed since LLMs would contain the knowledge about some of the datasets, and certainly the prices of the biotech stocks. This approach cannot be used to figure out which strategies are good because they know the future outcome.

How do you prevent this problem? It's a classic problem in backtesting strategies where you leak future information into the model.

EDIT: Some context, I ran a quant fund before.

One interesting thing from this paper is how big of a LiDaR shadow there is around the waymo car which suggests they rely on cameras for anything close (maybe they have radar too?). Seems LiDaR is only useful for distant objects.

You're right that $566B alone isn't a black swan. That FINRA figure only captures retail and small institutional margin at broker-dealers. It excludes prime brokerage (hedge funds), securities-based lending, and repo markets. Conservative estimates put total leveraged exposure at $10-15 trillion. The $566B is maybe 5% of the iceberg.

I see visible margin debt as both a canary and a proxy. It's a canary because retail cracks first (less sophisticated risk management, stricter regulatory margin). It's a proxy because when visible leverage contracts, it usually means hidden leverage is contracting too. They're exposed to the same assets. When FINRA margin debt starts falling, it's not just a warning, it's confirmation that system-wide deleveraging is already underway.

That's my 2c. Does that make sense?

This is a good analysis of the yen carry trade but i'd argue the causality is backwards. Record high margin debt in the U.S. is the root cause as it's a powder keg. The yen is just the fuse being lit. When system-wide leverage is this extreme, any funding sock (whether it's the BOJ rate hikes, hawish fed, or geopolitical event) can initiate the liquidation cascade. The yen carry trade is one source of that leverage but the fragility was baked in. If Japan didn't do anything something else would have cause the liquidation cascade, only a matter of time.

The real story isn't Tokyo, it's that Wall Street built a house of cards and ran out of steady hands.

I have a public ThetaEdge card that monitors margin debt and calculates the correlation with the S&P here:

https://thetaedge.ai/public/thetix-card/42d9c6de-218d-4627-a...

This article crystallizes something I witnessed firsthand last week.

Overheard a guy at a restaurant explaining how he builds phone apps with AI and no coding experience. When asked how he verifies the code works, he said he pastes it into a different AI to explain it.

That's the "slopware" problem in action. The code compiles. It might even work. But there's no understanding of what it's actually doing, no ability to debug when it breaks in production, no awareness of the technical cruft accumulating with every prompt. That's a problem for people creating software for others and is a huge opportunity for software developers to take prototypes and build real stuff.

Does anyone remember the RAD days of the 90s?

On the flip side, for people making software to solve THEIR problems, they don't need to make anything production quality. Its for a single user, themselves! Maybe the LLMs are good enough now that people don't need to buy or subscribe to software that solves trivial problems as they can build their own solutions. Maybe the dream of smalltalk, hypercard, and even early web where anyone can use the computer of what it was meant for is finally here?

Am I the only one still looking at different and correcting the AI abiyt design and algorithms so it stays on the path I want, or do you just YOLO at this point?

The reason de-dollarization should be concerning to US citizens and many don't understand is that having the dollar as a reserve currency is a huge asset to the US. The US has control over how many dollars are created and where they are spent. If countries are willing to sell to us for dollars, then the world becomes a friendly market for raw materials and products to be vacuumed up here.

Losing the dollar as a reserve currency is losing the empire.

If you are serious about this, you know full well the data is out there. So stop asking for it and just go get it, go write some code and process it, then come back here and report your results.

And what will you do with the raw data? Are you trained in processing and interpreting it? How good is your math?

Look at the degrowth movement. There are solutions but nobody, especially the leadership, are going to like them.

Why would the raw data be useful to you? Do you have the skills and training to process and interpret it?

For those not understanding why aerosols dimming the sky is not a solution is it won't stop ocean acidification and obviously just slows down the warming, not stopping it.

The thing we need to do is remove CO2 but unfortunately that will take more energy than putting it up there is in the first place.

Read it again.