Gerard รีทวีตแล้ว
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.
เข้าร่วม Mayıs 2023
165 กำลังติดตาม176 ผู้ติดตาม
@ElijahForCA And really, it's the nature of all human artifice to make the world better and worse. Yes, we've made a lot of things worse, but you'd have to forego a lot of lives to reverse that even a little. Saying this as somebody who read all of Ted K's works. x.com/diverging_path…
Gerard@diverging_paths
In some ways, earth is Edenical: we eradicate deadly diseases, make even more productive + friendly flora and fauna, and we reversed a trending ice age. In other ways, earth is hellish: the seas are full of mercury, plastic permeates us, metals are permanently irradiated
English
@ElijahForCA I think it's really not good to write off the entire industrial revolution since it contains multitudes. The first industrial revolution was started by making clothes 100x more affordable, and really didn't even need coal. The second basically ended famine in the first world.
English
@asparagoid The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. It's very long but very well-written.
English
Recommend me a nice book to read please
Thank you dear followers
English
At first I found the changes to the Odyssey to be distasteful, but now I think this is slipping into something which has a specific vision and which is very artful. Having nigga poets rap to soundcloud beats whilst nigga Odysseus escapes the hood sounds delightful, actually.
Homer Pavlos@HomerPavlos
Travis Scott will play the role of the Greek poet Demodocus in Ithaca that will sing the story of Troy. He will sing the story with trap music in the background, combined with Greek harp or lyre.
English
Gerard รีทวีตแล้ว
Fun Fact - creating my app using gen AI consumed roughly 1.5 million liters OR equal to this small lake :)
English
@Lycorysia Most of the phenotypes which people attribute to Raj rule (low musculature, diabetes, etc) are actually thousands of years old.
English
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.
English
Gerard รีทวีตแล้ว
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.
English
@ElijahForCA I feel like a lot of critiques of American capitalism actually just boil down to being critiques of lawyers.
English
@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.
English
Gerard รีทวีตแล้ว
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.
English
@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?
English
@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.
English
@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.
English
@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.
English