7 ms·

"they are the more straightforward part to build" More straightforward, heh, sure. But still damnably complicated. Which just goes to show how much money and h

"they are the more straightforward part to build" More straightforward, heh, sure. But still damnably complicated. Which just goes to show how much money and how much engineering talent is invested in this world that these things are so taken for granted.

ilyt 3y ago
So many intelligent people applied for something that has no value whatsoever to humanity regardless of how you look at it.
- allenrb 3y ago
  Essentially yes. When I worked in algo trading, it never bothered me that we were extracting profits from the markets, nor that we served little social good. It felt like a step up from where I’d been before (being told that we were making the world a better place, when every engineer knew otherwise.) At least we weren’t making things obviously worse. What did bother me, and was acknowledged by my coworkers, was how much top talent was being pulled away from productive tasks to essentially wank around. Not just technologists either, but all sorts of mathematicians and scientists were drawn to the flame. We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs. It’s enough to make one want to give up on capitalism, except that everything else appears to be worse.
  - tomcam 3y ago
    Seems like every person I've ever met in M&A has ended up hating life because of their career choice. They seem to burn out in 5 years or so after salting away a million bucks or 3. Was that your feeling doing the HFT thing?
    - finexplained 3y ago
      I work at an HFT firm. Most fun I've ever had.
      - maest 3y ago
        But is that because of the excellent WLB and pay or because of the social impact?
        TheAlchemist 3y ago
        The jobs in algo trading are very interesting for technically - mathéamtically inclined people. It’s really one of those fields where you have a direct impact on the results of your - measurable in additional dollars made. There is 0 social impact. That’s the downside of course - but hey, how many jobs out there are really having any kind of positive social impact ? Not 0, but close to it.
        ir123 3y ago
        I think there is some impact, for finding the correct price of things.
        MagnumOpus 3y ago
        That impact is not made by HFT - finding the right risk premia for different investments is very valuable but that is a signal measured over days/weeks/months because actual capital investment decisions take that long. Intraday financial games are zero-sum. What HFTs gain, they leech away from mutual funds and pension funds and retail investors and market makers who operate over a longer horizon.
        finexplained 3y ago
        I work on very interesting technical problems with very smart colleagues for excellent pay. All my career progression is in compensation, so I can remain an IC forever and no one thinks that's a negative. I'm subject to no politics whatsoever, and there's very little politics in the company as a whole. The work I do every day has a direct material impact on the company and I'm rewarded proportionally to my impact. My WLB is so-so, but it's better than it was in grad school so I'll take it. Regarding social impact, the world does have some demand for liquidity and price discovery. Providing those services is both essential and extremely difficult. It's definitely not the most social good I could be doing with my talents, but I think it's weakly positive.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs. Those things have driven a load of proprietary and open source tech that helps everyone else.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      Rising levels of inequality would suggest this is false.
      - justinhj 3y ago
        What would rising levels of being lifted out of poverty suggest? The equality gap doesn’t count for much if you starve or freeze to death, and poverty is declining world wide.
        cratermoon 3y ago
        > poverty is declining world wide That depends on how you measure it.
        geodel 3y ago
        Yeah, keep changing the measure until Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos etc are below poverty line.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        The worst way to measure it is inequality. How the top person is doing relative to the bottom person isn't important. How the bottom person is doing now compared to the bottom person 100 years ago is.
      - ir123 3y ago
        sorry, i don't believe inequality is rising, at least in ways that matter. in the last 50 years, a substantial number of people were pulled out of poverty. Obviously this would mean that countries that previously relied on subsidised labour from those third world countries would have to start paying up. I'm not suggesting that it is a zero sum game however.
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    Ads are tremendously useful, just ask any business owner. The problem with ads is not that they're useless, it's that it is an industry prone to scams and grift. (Because doing advertising right requires all sorts of actual science, and ain't nobody got time for that when there's money to be made.) t. Worked for 20 years and adtech.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      Disagree, most are actively harmful as it makes the product with best marketing win, not the objectively/subjectively best one.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    >We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs It's nothing to do with "we as a society". I'm a quant trader and know many others, and the vast majority are in the industry because we care about making money not some leftist save the world crap. Even if socialists managed to completely destroy the financial market, we'd just find another way to make money without trying to save the world (e.g. like the mostly corrupt officials in Russia and China when they were communist). "Society" can't change human nature; even mass brainwashing on the scale attempted by Maoist China failed. I.e. the best and brightest will always work where they want to work, not where leftists like you want to "allocate" them.
    - Intermernet 3y ago
      I think you just illustrated the problem. You have complete awareness of what you do, and you somehow manage to see it as a battle against "leftists" rather than selfish greed. I'm cool with that, but it precludes you from having valid opinions on anything related to improving the world for the majority of people. Please accept this and refrain from any social commentary. Your comment above demonstrates that you don't actually operate in society.
      - kortilla 3y ago
        > Please accept this and refrain from any social commentary. Your comment above demonstrates that you don't actually operate in society. Cut the fascist bullshit. Everyone can comment about how society should be run, even people that are very successful financially. If you try to exclude greed from the design of your societal system, it will immediately fail. In large numbers, economics shows us that altruistic people wash out of the model and everyone operates in their own self-interest (greed).
        Intermernet 3y ago
        Self interests have externalities. The pleasure you gain from improving someone's life is in no way comparable to the pleasure you gain from making other people suffer. It's a fallacy to say "everyone operates in their own self-interest". It's usually parroted by anti-social people in order to justify anti-social behaviour. > Cut the fascist bullshit. Everyone can comment about how society should be run, even people that are very successful financially. It's not financial success that precludes someone from commenting on how society is run, it's blatant, deliberate anti-social actions. This is the foundation of a social contract. It's the same reason you'll get locked up if you go around punching people in the face. Also, I don't think you know what "fascist" means.
- dougSF70 3y ago
  Facebook Ads are equally valueless.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- maest 3y ago
  HFT is _arguably_ better than advertising for society.
- latency-guy2 3y ago
  Whats the point in making a flyby comment without even mildly establishing the content in it?

ilyt 3y ago

So many intelligent people applied for something that has no value whatsoever to humanity regardless of how you look at it.

allenrb 3y ago
Essentially yes. When I worked in algo trading, it never bothered me that we were extracting profits from the markets, nor that we served little social good. It felt like a step up from where I’d been before (being told that we were making the world a better place, when every engineer knew otherwise.) At least we weren’t making things obviously worse. What did bother me, and was acknowledged by my coworkers, was how much top talent was being pulled away from productive tasks to essentially wank around. Not just technologists either, but all sorts of mathematicians and scientists were drawn to the flame. We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs. It’s enough to make one want to give up on capitalism, except that everything else appears to be worse.
- tomcam 3y ago
  Seems like every person I've ever met in M&A has ended up hating life because of their career choice. They seem to burn out in 5 years or so after salting away a million bucks or 3. Was that your feeling doing the HFT thing?
  - finexplained 3y ago
    I work at an HFT firm. Most fun I've ever had.
    - maest 3y ago
      But is that because of the excellent WLB and pay or because of the social impact?
      - TheAlchemist 3y ago
        The jobs in algo trading are very interesting for technically - mathéamtically inclined people. It’s really one of those fields where you have a direct impact on the results of your - measurable in additional dollars made. There is 0 social impact. That’s the downside of course - but hey, how many jobs out there are really having any kind of positive social impact ? Not 0, but close to it.
        ir123 3y ago
        I think there is some impact, for finding the correct price of things.
        MagnumOpus 3y ago
        That impact is not made by HFT - finding the right risk premia for different investments is very valuable but that is a signal measured over days/weeks/months because actual capital investment decisions take that long. Intraday financial games are zero-sum. What HFTs gain, they leech away from mutual funds and pension funds and retail investors and market makers who operate over a longer horizon.
      - finexplained 3y ago
        I work on very interesting technical problems with very smart colleagues for excellent pay. All my career progression is in compensation, so I can remain an IC forever and no one thinks that's a negative. I'm subject to no politics whatsoever, and there's very little politics in the company as a whole. The work I do every day has a direct material impact on the company and I'm rewarded proportionally to my impact. My WLB is so-so, but it's better than it was in grad school so I'll take it. Regarding social impact, the world does have some demand for liquidity and price discovery. Providing those services is both essential and extremely difficult. It's definitely not the most social good I could be doing with my talents, but I think it's weakly positive.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs. Those things have driven a load of proprietary and open source tech that helps everyone else.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    Rising levels of inequality would suggest this is false.
    - justinhj 3y ago
      What would rising levels of being lifted out of poverty suggest? The equality gap doesn’t count for much if you starve or freeze to death, and poverty is declining world wide.
      - cratermoon 3y ago
        > poverty is declining world wide That depends on how you measure it.
        geodel 3y ago
        Yeah, keep changing the measure until Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos etc are below poverty line.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        The worst way to measure it is inequality. How the top person is doing relative to the bottom person isn't important. How the bottom person is doing now compared to the bottom person 100 years ago is.
    - ir123 3y ago
      sorry, i don't believe inequality is rising, at least in ways that matter. in the last 50 years, a substantial number of people were pulled out of poverty. Obviously this would mean that countries that previously relied on subsidised labour from those third world countries would have to start paying up. I'm not suggesting that it is a zero sum game however.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  Ads are tremendously useful, just ask any business owner. The problem with ads is not that they're useless, it's that it is an industry prone to scams and grift. (Because doing advertising right requires all sorts of actual science, and ain't nobody got time for that when there's money to be made.) t. Worked for 20 years and adtech.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Disagree, most are actively harmful as it makes the product with best marketing win, not the objectively/subjectively best one.
- logicchains 3y ago
  >We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs It's nothing to do with "we as a society". I'm a quant trader and know many others, and the vast majority are in the industry because we care about making money not some leftist save the world crap. Even if socialists managed to completely destroy the financial market, we'd just find another way to make money without trying to save the world (e.g. like the mostly corrupt officials in Russia and China when they were communist). "Society" can't change human nature; even mass brainwashing on the scale attempted by Maoist China failed. I.e. the best and brightest will always work where they want to work, not where leftists like you want to "allocate" them.
  - Intermernet 3y ago
    I think you just illustrated the problem. You have complete awareness of what you do, and you somehow manage to see it as a battle against "leftists" rather than selfish greed. I'm cool with that, but it precludes you from having valid opinions on anything related to improving the world for the majority of people. Please accept this and refrain from any social commentary. Your comment above demonstrates that you don't actually operate in society.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      > Please accept this and refrain from any social commentary. Your comment above demonstrates that you don't actually operate in society. Cut the fascist bullshit. Everyone can comment about how society should be run, even people that are very successful financially. If you try to exclude greed from the design of your societal system, it will immediately fail. In large numbers, economics shows us that altruistic people wash out of the model and everyone operates in their own self-interest (greed).
      - Intermernet 3y ago
        Self interests have externalities. The pleasure you gain from improving someone's life is in no way comparable to the pleasure you gain from making other people suffer. It's a fallacy to say "everyone operates in their own self-interest". It's usually parroted by anti-social people in order to justify anti-social behaviour. > Cut the fascist bullshit. Everyone can comment about how society should be run, even people that are very successful financially. It's not financial success that precludes someone from commenting on how society is run, it's blatant, deliberate anti-social actions. This is the foundation of a social contract. It's the same reason you'll get locked up if you go around punching people in the face. Also, I don't think you know what "fascist" means.
dougSF70 3y ago
Facebook Ads are equally valueless.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
maest 3y ago
HFT is _arguably_ better than advertising for society.
latency-guy2 3y ago
Whats the point in making a flyby comment without even mildly establishing the content in it?