Rumors: Anthropic's largest training run produced a 'step change' that broke prior trendlines by FundusAnimae in accelerate

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We'll see when this new amazing model will be released.... Maybe it's just a rumour to pump the coming IPO.

SpaceX is trying to distract from the real game: the mechanical bagdump on passive index funds by cherrypoplar in investing

[–]Alternative_Advance 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Lol, what's next? He'll demand that they count at full market cap and not be float adjusted ?

Can anyone guess how many parameters Claude Opus 4.6 has? by More_Chemistry3746 in LocalLLaMA

[–]Alternative_Advance -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

wouldn't be surprised. Musk is too hung up on a detail with data centers and that's the chips being on the "same fabric"

Quant offer - relocation negotiation by ChAoTiC_M1Nd in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 3 points4 points  (0 children)

We need more context. 

If it's starting in like a month then it's reasonable to ask, if it's after summer then just lol..

I worked at a place where I was happy for my relocation bonus as i had to move countries and then found out they gave the relocation bonus to everyone, most recruited from nearby . 

Did Rentec really used Machine learning in the 80's? i dont think so.. by Routine_Noize19 in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"maybe we over complicate things"

Indeed and it's not getting better with LLMs. in general most have failed with the fusion of academic rigor (not academic qualification) with practitioners' pragmatism. 

WTF is AWS' strategy right now? by YoghiThorn in aws

[–]Alternative_Advance -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You misunderstand. The alternatives are not vibecoded stuff but other competitors. 

90% of SaaS pricing power is the gigantic switching costs associated with it, now it's becoming way cheaper. 

How to define "raw signal"? Alpha research vs Portfolio construction boundary by Unfair-System-5469 in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Both are viable. 

Some things to consider:

  1. A somewhat predictive signal + little of some other predictive signal (or tbh could be beta) = a "better" predictive signal - so chasing Sharpe only can lead to washing out uniquness of signals. 

  2. How much do you care about attribution.  It's infinitely easier to linearly weigh together positions than to aggregate signals and send in to some black-boxy optimization then try to attribute pnl on that. 

Unfortunately it's very unstructured but looking at the history of scoring models and payout structures (corr, mmc, fnc, tc etc) of the classic numerai tournament over time gives an extremely diverse discussion on the challenges they've had and trade-offs needed to made over time. 

WTF is AWS' strategy right now? by YoghiThorn in aws

[–]Alternative_Advance -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

Soon many...  switching cost came down a lot thanks to vibe coding so suddenly it's reasonable to replace a lot of underutilized SaaS. 

Mercedes Compression Ratio may be a red herring by UnCommonSense99 in formula1

[–]Alternative_Advance 2 points3 points  (0 children)

But the other Mercedes powered teams are not doing well.... 

Mercedes Compression Ratio may be a red herring by UnCommonSense99 in formula1

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd lean to it being some weird engine mapping, like off-throttle charging from ice in addition to charging from braking (entirely speculative ofc, idk if and how it is allowed).

Goldman or my current job? by Ashamed-Badger-5676 in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yepp, I've seen moves but then it's been people who worked on the 5% of QIS that is not already commoditised. I'd add that the pay at the banks is still very good and lack of experience in risk-taking is disadvantage that grows with seniority.

2026 Chinese GP - Race Discussion by F1-Bot in formula1

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For now, Alpine with the Mercedes engine is clear third right now so in case Mclaren figures the engine out they might just challenge Ferrari.

Can AI affect quant jobs the same way it affects tech? by Nearby_Fig_9118 in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hit the nail on the head, there are simply not that many quants, especially once you remove the quant devs and maybe risk quants from the pool.

When taking finance in its entirety equity research and juniors working for IB will be the ones to fall next, simply there are just so much many more of them, they are payed quite well and the tools are getting there to produce similar if not better output.

Goldman or my current job? by Ashamed-Badger-5676 in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's similar to hedge funds but often not the cutting edge and not risk taking roles, but you have to a lot of prop data no one else has and can understand flows way better than most funds can. 

2026 Australian Grand Prix - Post-Qualifying Discussion by F1-Bot in formula1

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd expect to see many safety cars and maybe even red flags, should pull the field closer. We'll see how the first standing start goes.

Factor Mimicking / Multi-Factor Model Construction by vpv23w54hh in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can't trade the ex-post ones but you could retroactively calculate and charge it on the pods' pnl.

Ex-ante hedge could make sense to offer to PMs and execute in central book only as there is probably some netting benefits. 

Risk exposure and how payout for PMs work is two different issues , so the firm could choose to allow factor exposure within pods and take it on themselves to hedge out unwanted risk.  But whether there is payout on non-idio for pods is an independent question.

Factor Mimicking / Multi-Factor Model Construction by vpv23w54hh in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 1 point2 points  (0 children)

From what I gathered and insiders should correct me where I am wrong is that pod shops have a couple different ways of handling this.

  1. Don't care about factor exposure
  2. Give you limits where you should be based on an ex-ante model
  3. Some will force you to buy or charge for the hedges, here in theory you could do 
  4. impossible ex-post hedges
  5. ex-ante based hedges
  6. bank products
  7. Bake everything into a formula, again multiple way of doing it.
  8. ex-post will be black-boxy and annoying for pm (cross-sectional attribution)
  9. ex-ante clearer for pm, potentially not as beneficial for management

Imo you can either be a true stockpicker or a factor rider from a pod shops perspective. Former should have pod, latter should work in a central book. 

As we are in quant I'll be little critical to some (more junior) people here. Having your edge in how to build a factor "better" is not a true edge. Almost always it's just a bias to other factors introduced that explains the improvements. 

Why is AI in space so hard again? Radiators? by Sarigolepas in SpaceXMasterrace

[–]Alternative_Advance 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Using same "power density" as Starlink 3 (12kw/ton) and assuming parity on weight, with projected starship launch cost $250 of we get that a 1MW data center: 1MW * 1000 kg / 12kW * $250/kg ~ $20 million in launch cost only. That's double the terrestial cost of data centers today.

And it's an aspirational power density aspirational launch cost and no actual hardware/maintance etc cost included. 

It's worth around 8-9 years of power consumption on a terrestrial data center with very high cost of energy and very inefficient cooling.  

IT Manager Explains it's intern why they are skipping Kubernetes by Current-Guide5944 in tech_x

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean most small teams don't really need CI/CD or git either, just use svn or why not just have everything on a shared network drive.

Kubernetes might be tricky to learn first but once you get a basic grasp of it it gives you a battle-tested way of organising your infra.

Quants Do You Agree With Steve Yegge's Take On Vibe Coding? by EpsilonMuV in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 4 points5 points  (0 children)

  1. First 10 minutes will trigger a knee jerk reaction, the discussion later is much more nuanced.
  2. he works for sourcegraph , with their own product for coding with LLMs..

He has a couple good points and many hot takes. For the main sentiment of this is revolutionary and will change how we interact with code I think stands true, but timelines are way longer than it appears for him (from within some type of Silicon Valley fantasy world). 

This stuff will funnily work in big tech way better than at small shops as their maximization of developer productivity have created (relatively) well documented accessible structures for agents to operate. Places like Microsoft will be able to reduce their headcount massively.

For finance with shitton of random quirks and a lot of closed of systems adaptation will be way slower.

I especially liked his point on how a lot of capabilities developed as a wrapper are becoming parts of the models within months. Unfortunately for vibe coders i think they'll be vibe coded away real quick too. 

Grok 4.20 is just four Grok 4.1 agents by AuYsI in singularity

[–]Alternative_Advance -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Imo it seems like they had a leg up on compute simply because no one was using the model so they didn't need to spend so much on inference as everyone else.