intuitionist

14 ms·

121.
by intuitionist 6y ago
Matt Levine likes to reference a Monty Python bit and say that the optimal tax (politically speaking) is one on foreigners living abroad.
122.
by intuitionist 6y ago
California has fairly hot, dry summers and a lot of trees; fires are going to happen fairly regularly. Everything in the ecosystem has evolved to deal with periodic fire, except for the humans and their trillion-dollar companies and multimi
123.
by intuitionist 6y ago
Is the history of psychiatry one of progress? Or is it one of damage and partial repair? I very well might not be alive if not for my SSRI prescription, but the side effects are brutal and lasting, and as a first-line treatment for kids too
124.
by intuitionist 6y ago
Presumably this is related to the absolute collapse in population serum testosterone levels over the last decades. I’m a “cis male” by the standards of 2020, but by the standards of preindustrial hormone levels we’re all trans women.
125.
by intuitionist 6y ago
Technically it didn’t IPO in any traditional sense, it went public via a reverse merger with a blank-check company, which is why these warrants are floating around out there.
126.
by intuitionist 6y ago
Yeah, buying out-of-the-money options is a dumb way of insider trading in general, but on TSLA specifically you might could get away with it. Just don’t make your first trade right before you post to Elon’s account.
127.
by intuitionist 6y ago
There’s nothing illegal, or inherently unprofitable (for the business), about selling people a lifestyle. Louis Vuitton sells people a lifestyle. Harley-Davidson sells people a lifestyle. Apple sells people a lifestyle. All of these compani
128.
by intuitionist 7y ago
IANA virologist but my understanding is that a spillover event that infects a large number of people (as would have happened at the seafood market) is considered unlikely, although this depends on your opinion of how sanitary the market was
129.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Remdesivir is very difficult and expensive to synthesize, and it’s patented by Gilead. HCQ is dirt cheap and generic. Of course we should be testing anything that shows enough promise and has a well understood safety profile, but it’s obvio
130.
by intuitionist 7y ago
My understanding is that fish tank chloroquine phosphate is the exact same molecule as the pharmaceutical. You shouldn’t take it because it doesn’t have pharmaceutical quality standards and is very tricky to dose.
131.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Someone—not me, probably not you, but someone—could have made money buying credit default swaps on WeWork debt.
132.
by intuitionist 7y ago
There were better contemporary mathematicians than John Conway, and there were (a handful of) better contemporary popularizers of mathematics, but no one else came close to doing both nearly as well. I met him on a few different occasions w
133.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Whoever came up with the name “junk bonds” for high-yield corporate debt was a master of propaganda. The truth is, the bonds the Fed is buying are more like what Ben Graham would call “senior securities with speculative features” (although
134.
by intuitionist 7y ago
It’s already 42% off its 2020 high, not saying it won’t fall further but it’s not like investors aren’t aware that Square revenues are gonna take a big hit.
135.
by intuitionist 7y ago
It’s not even clear that that’s necessary, at least for stakes in public companies, and at least under existing regulations. Berkshire Hathaway owns big chunks of all of the four largest US airlines, and smaller chunks of the big four US ba
136.
by intuitionist 7y ago
“Great restaurants” with chefs presumably have a less price-sensitive clientele than fast casual chains, who have a less price-sensitive clientele than fast food.
137.
by intuitionist 7y ago
The story I’d heard is that lobster became a delicacy when it was shipped to the US interior, where butter was relatively cheap and plentiful. Seems kind of implausible—wouldn’t it be easier to ship the butter to the coast?—but it’s a story
138.
by intuitionist 7y ago
I count four pandemics in my list that would have occurred in the lifetime of many of Sequoia’s GPs. That’s a base rate many orders of magnitude higher than significant meteor strikes.
139.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Calling COVID-19 a “black swan” is an abuse of the term, IMO. Zika in 2016, Ebola in 2014, MERS in 2012, H1N1 in 2009, SARS in 2002, HIV in 1980, H3N2 in 1968, H2N2 in 1957.... A viral disease outbreak, like a stock market crash, is very ha
140.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Ah, sure, this is what I meant by it not being sustainable. They keep fucking up in standard SV ways, eventually FINRA or maybe even the SEC will come down hard. The basic brokerage business seems fine.
141.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Reg NMS prevents HFTs from filling your order outside of the NBBO. if anything you’ll get slightly more favorable prices from a market maker, since they know you’re a retail trader who’s not going to run them over.
142.
by intuitionist 7y ago
They don’t seem like serious enough professionals to release a postmortem. Did they do so for the “infinite leverage” bug? I have a couple grand in play money in Robinhood, because hey, zero commissions, but it’s clearly not sustainable for
143.
by intuitionist 7y ago
This is maybe a bad example because it is exactly how people talk about compensation. I’ve never heard anybody say “oh I made $70k last year after taxes and rent.”
144.
by intuitionist 7y ago
It’s easy to forget how much of top-level pro sports is a mental game. Kobe was incredibly gifted at the mental game of basketball, maybe the greatest of all time. There’s an oft-reposted GIF of Matt Barnes faking an inbounds pass right at
145.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Yeah, it took six or seven years from when I was created to when I could compute the square root of 900, and that’s considered prodigiously fast .
146.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Technologists shouldn’t try to dumb things down for the general public; we should try to state as clearly as possible where the problem lies and how it might be mitigated. In this case, we need to make it clear that what’s called “AI” is ju
147.
by intuitionist 7y ago
I think the idea of ML as “unaccountable black boxes” is a bit of a bait-and-switch from the problem being described. The problem is that ML has no political biases, it just minimizes some loss function on the data you give it. So it can’
148.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Trying to make these as testable as possible: 1. A pandemic kills at least 2 million people. There are theories that the pathogen is bioengineered; they may even turn out to be true. 2. At least one of Amazon/Apple/Google/Mic
149.
by intuitionist 7y ago
Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs. But the economic statistics just don’t back this up. Total factor productivity,
150.
by intuitionist 7y ago
We know much less about P vs NP than we do about RH; we can prove weaker versions of RH (e.g. the prime number theorem) and analogues for other number systems (the Weil conjectures). This is unsurprising, since it hasn’t influenced math res

More ›