stouset

You cannot in the same breath argue that there are simple market strategies that offer superior risk-adjusted returns, and then claim that big money won’t go after it because they can’t get out.

There are more actors in the market than just Citadel. For starters there are day traders at virtually every wealth level and with every level of risk tolerance. Someone—or more accurately, many someones—with more money, better information, and better market access is going to claim that free alpha until there’s none left. The notion that there’s so much free, obvious, and reliable market edge simply lying there for the taking by any shmuck with $100 to put into Robinhood is farcical and flies in the face of quite literally all empirical data we’ve collected on the performance of active market participants.

Every single time this kind of discussion happens on the Internet, people inevitably rush to the comments to say that they know the magic strategy that beats the passive indexes. And yet every single study to date has shown that active market participants perform worse than chance and there is zero correlation between those who beat the indexes one year and those who do so the next.

As an individual investor you actually have a huge advantage over large institutions in that your portfolio is nimble and easy to get out of.

This is a joke. By the time you or I can act on market information, those same big players have known for a comparative eon; more than long enough to change the price of those investments enough to remove any edge.

Thinking there are straightforward, simple algorithmic strategies to beat the market requires one to also believe that the billions of dollars behind large investments for some reason doesn’t care about using these same strategies to make money.

“They have different goals”, I hear. Literally nobody’s investment strategy involves passing up above-average returns for low risk.

I couldn’t care less about solo developers who never release their hobby projects. The cautionary tales are always about potential coworkers, and as far as I can tell that stereotype simple doesn’t exist in the business world.

Also part of the issue is that lighting at night creates enormous contrast between dark areas. Even darkness is something our eyes are well-adapted to, and we can see surprisingly well with even a little moonlight. We struggle with alternating bright/dark areas.

The number of times I've heard that phrase used to justify shipping absolute crap utterly dwarfs the times it's been used to prevent over-engineering something that's already in a good state.

In a thirty year career of software engineering, I haven't once come across one of these mythical perfectionists that everyone is constantly retelling cautionary tales of, who endlessly rewrites perfectly serviceable software and never releases it. I have, however, worked at multiple companies that have collapsed under the weight of their unmaintainable spaghetti tech stacks.

You can type the intended file contents as-is.

Or just use cat and spend your brainpower on interesting, useful, and/or worthwhile topics. It boggles my mind that anyone cares about this.

From my experience, it took about a month of 150mg magnesium supplementation per day to see effects, two months for my insomnia to go away entirely.

Doing a quick search for magnesium-rich foods, it seems like it would take either an unsustainable focus on eating these foods to see results on a similar timeline or an extremely prolonged timeline to see similar results.

That said, I am not a doctor or nutritionist. But my instinct is that you can get so far in the hole with a lifetime of magnesium deficiency that supplementation is by far the most time- and lifestyle-efficient to digging yourself out. Whether or not switching to magnesium-rich foods can sustain you being at correct levels will end up depending on what the size of the deficit was in the first place, but is probably worth a try.

If blood concentrations drop, you die.

100 the same.

I tried magnesium before but didn’t see any effects after a week so threw in the towel. Then I read a comment by someone here that had the exact same symptoms as me (brain wouldn’t turn off), explained the underlying cause, suggested L-threonate, and explained that it’s a long-term deficiency and might take some time to build up sufficient reserves.

I have had insomnia my entire life, since I was a child. I would go to bed around midnight and fall asleep at 3am, if I was lucky. I simply could not get my brain to disengage.

Within a month of supplementation, I thought I noticed a bit of improvement. By two months, my insomnia was gone. Not better. Gone. I fall asleep within minutes now.

I don’t think it says the opposite.

Apple claimed a record 20% of the market. Samsung overtook them with a 24% market share. These aren’t contradictory statements.

I suspect Apple’s percent of the profit share remains undefeated though.

Any sufficiently advanced imaginary technology is capable of performing anything you feel like imagining. That doesn’t make it plausible or convincing.

"and a device to create terran life“

… and all the devices and nutrition necessary to sustain that Terran life until it can become self sufficient—without the help of preexisting humans to teach them or impart physical skills—on a rock with either no life, inhospitable life, or nutritionally incompatible life.

You might as well call that device a magic wand.

You’re forgetting food. And supplies, information, and know-how to get these lab-grown terrans to be capable of survival on a completely foreign celestial body that lacks soil, vegetable, or animal life.

And for what? What do we actually accomplish after pouring vast resources into the dystopian science project of bootstrapping a society of a handful of permanently isolated terrans on a planet we weren’t evolved to survive on light years away?

There’s zero hope of meaningful trade or exploitation of resources. Who is going to light the money on fire to make this happen and why?

This is fantasy material, not reality.

I suppose zero is a pretty significant number.

Without new physics that isn’t even remotely visible on the horizon and that utterly contradicts most of what we believe to be true, this isn’t going to happen. Robotic AI probes sent to other star systems to send back telemetry? Sure, fine. Flesh bags sent to self-replicate on terraformed worlds out in the stars? Not a whisper of a microscopic chance.

Ender’s Truck Simulator

Sure but it’s also a microscopically small component of the country’s overall economy.

First, you never specified LEO, only “space”.

Second, the situation is already so bad that current satellites in LEO already require active collision avoidance systems in order to avoid becoming sources of debris themselves. Starlink alone reports over 1,600 close encounters each week.

Yep, it’s a super cool concept. A black hole of a given size has a finite amount of matter that it can ingest over a period of time. Trying to stuff more matter into it causes an outward pressure from essentially the friction of the swirling mass of material falling in. This radiation pressure could in theory be great enough to start fusion as would happen in a stellar core.

Also fun is that this puts a limit on the largest possible black hole we should ever see in the universe. If you assume a black hole formed a moment after matter condensed and then ingested the maximum possible from then until now, you get an upper bound for the largest possible black hole according to our current understanding of the universe. This limit is somewhere around 36 billion solar masses.

It’s not just about where the observatories are. It’s where they want to point to. Good luck figuring out which part of the night sky isn’t important for astronomy.

Google “Kessler syndrome”.

By definition market makers are earning a fraction of the price improvement they provide

By definition, they’re making in aggregate essentially whatever the difference was between the “misprice” and the “true price”, assuming sufficient belief in both of these things. One of the parties in the hypothetically mispriced trade is bearing the loss. Their cut had to come from somewhere.

As an index investor you should absolutely care! How do you think you are able to buy into the fund at a reasonable price?

You are relying on an interpretation of “reasonable” to intuitively mean “cheap” when in reality it means “accurate” in this context.

As an index investor, as long as it is accurate enough I don’t care. Any mispricing of assets up and down will come out in the wash.

Index funds existed well before HFTs were endemic. I have seen zero evidence that HFTs have caused index funds to net more of the gains from their underlying indexes.

The argument is not that you get better prices, it’s that you get accurate prices.

First, this definition has always been circular: what’s the most accurate price? The one the market comes up with. More market, more accuracy!

Second, there is never any reconciliation of the costs society is saddled with in order to chase arbitrarily more accurate prices, the most obvious of which is the massive quantity of fat skimmed off by the financial services sector.

Third, as an index investor, I more or less couldn’t care less. This hyperfixation on accuracy only really matters to people who are actively trading, which is already a fool’s game.

This is quite literally government control of the means of production, which is the central tenet of the economic philosophy that the right repeatedly claims is their greatest mortal fear: socialism.

Honestly this is because an enormous segment of the population has offloaded their critical thinking skills and moral evaluation to large media conglomerates, who mostly serve the interests of those at the top who would not benefit from these things.

If a politician does want to shape policy based on research evidence for what would improve society, this captured segment of the electorate is weaponized against them.

You don’t want detonation, but you do want deflagration.

I’m reasonably familiar with cryptography but the formalism of obfuscation given here makes no sense to me.

The precise formalism typically used, indistinguishability obfuscation, says that if you are given obfuscations of two different programs that have the same functionality, you can't tell which is which.

This seems… not that useful? A sufficiently advanced optimizing compiler would be capable of transforming two input programs with identical functionality into one or the other, or both into some third representation. Either approach meets this criteria but doesn’t seem to me to provide any useful purpose.

And in practice, do two identically-functioning but different programs even exist in the wild? Two superficially identical programs of nontrivial complexity will almost certainly have divergent behavior somewhere (bugs, edge cases), at which point this formalism becomes moot.

Food has gotten progressively cheaper. At the same time, both the compensation demand for farm labor have plummeted.

Demand for the output of knowledge work can increase while demand for those who produce it falls. “Knowledge work” is not a product with inherent demand, just like you and I don’t go to the store to buy farm labor.

And what happens when the “investigations” are malicious, politically motivated, and prosecuted by a DoJ that’s been bent to the will of a tinpot dictator, and adjudicated by overtly political actors?

I honestly think the opposite.

Successful nations haven’t had enough young people to care for the elderly because they’ve all been employed as knowledge workers. Knowledge work is going away rapidly. The only work that will be left are things that require actual human bodies (for now).

In short, jobs like elder care are suddenly going to have an enormous number of new job seekers, since it requires human presence and isn’t taxing physical labor.