Perhaps because encoding &lt but not &gt makes the code significantly more confusing and less readable.

SDET is one of those things that you can never justify, but if you allow it to happen and the SDET is good it pays itself off several hundred times over

If you’re a layman investor just dump all of your shit in index funds. Even if you’re smart and sophisticated, you’re still competing against the massive amount of fraudulent insider trading happening right now with zero enforcement and are trading at a disadvantage as a result

Not to mention huge quant firms that paid more than 4x your salary just to get a trading latency advantage

If you understand finance and aren’t specifically attempting to arb on that timescale, you actually want to participate in markets with those participants, because their presence gives you less variance/better price discovery on the scales that don’t factor into your decisions to buy and sell things.

So basically if you’re larping as a trader you will consistently get your ass handed to you unless you are genuinely better than all the pros, but if you’re investing or optimizing for a specific risk profile/exposure/timeline you’re playing a different game.

Anyway the fact that it’s so hard to explain this stuff to individuals does strengthen the argument that most individuals are better off following the herd.

thats one of the areas where quants squeeze edge the other is more boring where they are essentially "market neutral" and they try to figure out how to make a few cents everyday knowing the downside is a global financial crisis.

their edge is basically political so that they get a bail out and thats what the quants will never see in their models.

not to get cynical further, just do what the GP says, buy index or figure out what the biggest movers are and buy those for more exposure

I think you're missing the point why younger people do that. Real wages have been deteriorating over the years. It's much more difficult to afford a house today than it was 50 years ago. People are perfectly aware that investing into index funds is the "correct" approach, however it does not solve anything for them. They're desperate and for them _to gamble_ seems like the only way to become decently rich allowing to escape the rats race, otherwise there is not much to live for, just slaving their days away. That's exactly what led to the recent situation of en masse margin calls in Korea.

Here in Europe I too have been working for years and I just don't feel like I'm earning actual money. Most of my income is eaten away by taxes and very basic living expenses. ETFs won't compound for me much if there is not a lot invested into them in the first place. This is exactly what led me to despite high electricity costs to buy 2x open source bitcoin lottery miners (NerdQaxe++) and just hope for the best.

Yes. You used to start at -1000 points and earn 5000 over your life. With investment and luck you could make that 10000 and end up at +9000.

Now you start at -9000 and earn 3000. With investment and luck you could make that 6000 and end up at -3000 so that's still a guaranteed loss. To have any hope of hitting the positives at all, you need to excessively gamble. Sure you could end up at -999999 (which is no worse than 0) but also +999999.

Yep, that's a nice illustration. Basically, if to continue steady leads to an inevitable loss, then _to gamble_ is actually a rational decision. You can see that in chess a lot: if someone is down a pawn, they have to take more risks if they need to win

Real wages are higher today than they ever have been. The whole story about median real wages falling is entirely a result of Simpson’s paradox as applied to women entering the workforce from 1970-2000. This sort of axe grinding is just excusing people’s bad decisions it isn’t grounded in reality.

How are your real wages being calculated?

By taking nominal wages and then normalizing them to some specified year’s dollars using a price index. Yes I know you believe that price indices are made up but if anything CPI overstates inflation slightly because it doesn’t properly account for substitution across goods categories (for example if the price of apples increases people will buy fewer apples and more oranges, but the CPI won’t update the weights on apples and oranges immediately). That is why the Fed uses PCE as its target index, because it more accurately adjusts for substitution elasticities.

I think the situation is slightly more nuanced than that. When the easiest path by far is long lived keys, there is something to be said about the security posture of a solution where those are the default behavior, especially if they don’t actively discourage usage in documentation. For instance if you go to aws and try to create an iam user with access key/secret key they warn the shit out of you multiple times. They say things like “this is a bad idea” “we don’t recommend this” and “use this better solution instead”. I think if you’re providing an auth service like this you have some level of responsibility to guide people towards the less naive solution - part of what you’re selling in an auth offering is security, so if you default to garbage security, you don’t have a very good offering

This is a very long form way of saying “understand the work you are dispatching, and if you don’t, ask questions until you do”

> “understand the work you are dispatching, and if you don’t, ask questions until you do”

My rant about this, not directed to the commenter but in general:

I wish people would have been so interested on discussing and planning with teammates like they seem with AI tools.

Because this is nothing new. Communication, knowing what you are doing, planning... was already a mandatory step for any engineering task.

And if people that use planning with AI then ignore their teammates, other teams, etc. then it is time to reconsidering their way of working.

Dealing with humans is way harder than dealing with a machine that is programmed to agree with you

Yes, shouting at clouds is easier with LLM :) But those clouds are deaf, sometimes.

Ah, the starry eyed lifecycle of project management. Every young project management tool, born out of the same concept of feeling like its predecessors were too complex. Next comes the growth and excitement phase. Then the new feature requests come in. Now I’ve got a few users, and they are requesting things that expand the scope a bit. Fast forward 5 years and a couple funding rounds and we are now a scrappy PM startup, still slim but growing and can do a lot more. Fast forward 5-10 more years and we have pivoted to enterprise, implemented every feature under the sun and completed our transformation into the Jira operating system

The silent voice of those whose work powers everything you do screams loudly. Thank you for your contributions to society Dan

I’ll just say as nix Darwin user the default vanilla install does not garbage collect well and every 2 months or so I have to hack around nuking shit in my system to free up space. Maybe NixOS itself is better managed and it’s an idiosyncrasy of nix-Darwin. Maybe not

I like the sound of nix but the disk space issue is a deal breaker for me - my sdd is always full.

I run my main arch system in under 6GB. That's enough for qemu and wine and a few other bits which is all I need - the rest is in VMs

Would like to switch it to nix though..

I think, like everything with Nix, if you recite the correct incantation for configuration you can avoid this issue. But it’s not default behavior

Agree but I think it’s interesting to discuss the larger implication here. Nix the language and ecosystem has historically been completely unapproachable for people unwilling to beat their head against the wall continuously to figure it out. It is famously unapproachable. Now, the benefits are accessible to the quasi-layman. Good news all around

I mean, just the way Tao phrases these inqueries seems to imply a weighting towards an extremely abstract and high level rigorous corpus. In a way, prompt engineering really is the big unlock here.

Maybe! But I suspect you can write a little LLM assisted helper to at least make your prompts sound more like Tao's. (Your ideas won't necessarily be better, but you can probably 'imply a weighting towards an extremely abstract and high level rigorous corpus'.)

Not likely. You run the risk of bleeding into the crank mathematics language pool which is well represented in the training. I mean the prompts may sound good to you and me, but they will have low probability words in respect to the Tao level maths.