Gerard
7.9K posts
Gerard
@diverging_paths
What needs to be proved today is that as long as a man has a car, he can do anything and go anywhere.
Katılım Mayıs 2023
165 Takip Edilen176 Takipçiler
Gerard retweetledi
Fun Fact - creating my app using gen AI consumed roughly 1.5 million liters OR equal to this small lake :)
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@Lycorysia Most of the phenotypes which people attribute to Raj rule (low musculature, diabetes, etc) are actually thousands of years old.
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Mind you thousands of South Asians today still have long-term health problems, especially metabolic illnesses, due to the mass famines prevalent under the British raj causing significant epigenetic changes. India has very high rates of diabetes as well.
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Gerard retweetledi
Had a Jane Street phone interview in 2016. "Price a 6-month forward on carrots."
There's no carrot futures market, so I build one from scratch: seasonal harvest cycles, USDA demand elasticity, cold storage decay rates.
One trader stops me. "Your storage cost function– you're modeling the carrot as dead inventory. Like grain in a silo." He asks me the metabolic respiration rate of a post-harvest carrot at 2°C. I estimate.
"Your forward is overpriced by exactly that shrinkage. The underlying is consuming its own sugars. It's alive." Good correction. I adjust the model. I think I've recovered.
Rejection email comes the next morning. Subject: "Ethical Review." My framework, they write, "relied on the severance of the root organism from its growth medium." The question about respiration was a test. The carrot was still alive and I'd built an entire derivatives structure on top of its death without questioning whether harvest was an acceptable act.
I pull up the recruiter's original email. It doesn't say Jane Street. It says Jain Street– a non-violent quantitative commodities fund.
The carrot was never supposed to be priced. It was supposed to be refused. I later learn the only candidate who passed that round was a former monk from Gujarat who sat in silence for eleven minutes and said, "I cannot put a price on life." He's now a partner.
Deedy@deedydas
Jane Street made ~$40B in 2025 with 3,500 employees, a ~2x from the year before. At ~65-70% profit margin, that's $8M profit / employee, the highest for a 1000+ ppl company. High-frequency trading continues to be the most efficient money making engine. I want to share an old story about my Jane Street interview in 2014. Jane Street was known for hiring a lot of math, physics and CS olympiad winners from top universities and putting them through many rounds - including, for trading roles, a gauntlet of mental math. It was my 6th interview and my final round and I recall being asked "What is the next day after today in DD/MM/YYYY where all the digits are unique?" They'd toy with you and say "You can use a pencil and paper, if you want" but you knew that was an instant no. Painstakingly and as quickly as I could, I came to an answer. "How confident are you that this is correct on a 0-1 probability scale?" the interviewer said. "0.95", I blurted out, not fully knowing how to answer that. "Are you sure?" After thinking harder for a few more seconds, I realized I could've flipped the digits around to get a closer date. I gave the interviewer my answer. It was correct. "0.95 huh?" he chuckled. That's when I knew I failed. Note: fwiw, other companies that come close in efficiency are - Tether ($90M+ profit/emp) - Hyperliquid ($80M+ profit/emp) and on revenue: - Valve ($50M/emp) - OnlyFans ($37M/emp) - Craigslist ($14M/emp) - Anthropic ($12M/emp, run rate) - OpenAI ($8M/emp, run rate) For comparison, Nvidia is very efficient at scale and is $4.4M/emp.
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@ElijahForCA I feel like a lot of critiques of American capitalism actually just boil down to being critiques of lawyers.
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@bandorexic I was wondering why people considered this a difficult choice since -10 calories per step can really easily kill you by accident, but then I noticed everybody here is anorexic and I seem to have stumbled into edtwt yet again.
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Gerard retweetledi
so apparently the concept of a teenager basically did not exist until post-WWII. a specific combination of historical forces produced a new class of young people who all had to go to high school, could not work on farms or in mills or factories anymore, and had access to money and cars. the entire rebellious teenager trope was created in this time period so it refers specifically to boomers rebelling against the silent generation, who grew up in a completely different world. the generation gap here was so stark this is also where the term "generation gap" even comes from, and i think the whole practice of naming distinct generations
saturdayeveningpost.com/2018/02/brief-…
smug fecundity@SmugFecundity
We have 3 teenagers now, 16/15/13. I cannot understand the idea that teenagers are any kind of problem. I love hanging out with them, and, surprisingly, the feeling is mutual. Every stage of parenthood has been delightful.
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@RubeuhmScutuhm @Lightswarm @amazingmap Attempts to implement it anywhere were not very successful until after WW2 since material conditions demanded more hours worked. The US was not unique in this. Do you actually believe that somebody in hyperinflating Weimar or wartime Nazi Germany worked <=40 hours per week?
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@diverging_paths @Lightswarm @amazingmap Tried but didn’t succeed until after WW2? You could say they needed an additional push. Oh wait! I said that! You just wanted a chance to mansplain and „uhm, aktuahlly 🤓“ someone.
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@RubeuhmScutuhm @Lightswarm @amazingmap My point is that whatever narrative you're operating on doesn't actually make sense, the US was not particularly inhumane, and the 40 hour work week emerged when material conditions were good enough to allow it. Activist movements had literal decades of failure prior to that.
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@RubeuhmScutuhm @Lightswarm @amazingmap This is a trend that exists today. The countries that work the fewest hours per week tend to be very wealthy and productive, since the unproductive must work more to survive. Variance in hours worked amongst wealthy countries then mostly comes down to marginal income tax rates.
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@nise_yoshimi To view it as a slapstick comedy you basically just have to take the devs at their word without actually interacting with the game. There are plenty of games that make you feel like expendable chaff in a pointless meat grinder, and HD2 only pays lip service to that idea.
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@nise_yoshimi No, HD2 has pretty bad ludonarrative dissonance. They present it as some satire of a grim and pointless conflict and then have identical gameplay to every other co-op shooter about a small, elite force beating impossible odds, but with some ragdoll and funny voice lines.
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Helldivers 2, a slapstick comedy, is always fascinating in how obviously it reveals the extreme overlapping insecurities of gamers, who need to win every time, and the milscifi right winger, who is still adamant that nothing military should ever be allowed to look silly or bad
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@ride_enjoyer Probably very true that it's just part of the culture now, but I'm certain that fitness tier lists emanate very close from the source. 1) It's very male-dominated 2) it's increasingly full of nerds 3) I've anecdotally known guys who use fitness as a substitute for video games.
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@diverging_paths N=1 data point: I've almost never played video games and yet I randomly came up with this while bored at work.
I think certain things dissipate in wider culture, i.e. you probably understand allusions to movies and shows you've never actually watched. x.com/ride_enjoyer/s…
ride enjoyer@ride_enjoyer
@Sinistersex002 @PunishedAltus Tier 1: intellectual fluency in underlying science and philosophy Tier 2: intellectual fluency in underlying science Tier 3: shallow working model of underlying science Tier 4: rote knowledge of the ideas with little insight Tier 5: incomplete, internally contradictory views
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I feel like the internet fitness community has an extreme fascination with tier lists. I don't know if there's anything inherently wrong with this, but I do feel it reflects on such people in a number of ways. Including that a lot of them probably played a lot of video games.
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@uncle_deluge For me, I actually find the Iranian mode of government (the guardianship of the Islamic jurist) to be extremely intriguing but I feel like I can't really talk about this much given current events.
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Hm. Yes. The Sokoto Caliphate
Jewish pashtuns with attitude 🇦🇫✡️@midnight_b65055
Every white person on Twitter has 1 Muslim country that they really like for some reason
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@iiblowurmiind I don't think a lot of straight men view it as degrading to begin with, although when men can now play either role, then it can become degrading for a man to be there. I think the population of men who view it as degrading outside of this, are just really puritanical about sex.
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@iiblowurmiind I don't really think that that is what this implies. The fact that it's gay sex definitely matters a lot here, and that is certainly the source of this dynamic. It's easier to paint a junior/senior dynamic with 2 men, and a gay bottom makes many sacrifices for sex to happen.
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Most men don’t see sex as a mutually pleasurable act but rather a degrading action of dominance done to the “receiver” example 57464664883:
Greentext Wizard@GreentextWizard
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