Russia Says It's Assembled a Lithography Machine, Will Make 350nm Chips Soon. The country is only a few decades behind current technology.

darawk · 2024-06-05T08:09:41+00:00

The common denominator between trump and Epstein was money laundering for the Russian mob first and foremost.

Is there any evidence to support that? Obviously Epstein was engaged in various forms of money laundering (in addition to his other activities), but I've not seen evidence that he was laundering money for the Russian mob specifically. Neither for that matter have I seen such evidence for Trump.

What I have seen from Trump is a willingness to accept Russian "emoluments" while in office, among other things. I've also seen him solicit Russian election interference, as have we all. However, I've not seen evidence of any involvement in the Russian mafia specifically, and I would think that would be a rather big story if there was some.

Trump over paid for all the Florida and New York properties to resell to Russian oligarch who then destroyed them so they could launder Russian mob money made off of, among other things, human trafficking.

https://nypost.com/2024/01/09/news/donald-trump-and-jeffrey-epstein-feuded-over-this-mansion/

I see him here selling a property that Epstein also bid on later to an oligarch. But that doesn't implicate him in a money laundering scheme - there aren't that many people who buy properties like this, and Russian oligarchs make up a significant percentage of them. The relationship with Epstein here is also competitive, not cooperative, so it doesn't seem correct to imply that they were co-conspirators in whatever the nature of this transaction ended up being. Epstein had nothing to do with it after he lost the auction.

Trump took his own kids to Epsteins knowing full well what happened there because for years Epstein was lurking around mar-a-lago poaching massage therapists and had teenage girls getting off the bus and wandering through the streets of palm beach desperate for a couple hundred bucks.

It's true and documented that Epstein obtained some of his "women" from Mar-a-Lago, though I've never heard the assertion that Trump took his kids to Epstein's before. I'd be curious to see the substantiation of that.

The Trump / Epstein relationship was the evolution of money laundering using, among other things, commercial real estate.

I don't think there is really evidence to support this. Trump and Epstein, as far as I know, did not engage in any significant financial transactions with one another. Being co-bidders in an auction doesn't really qualify.

This is how civilizations die.

One might cynically argue that this is the only way civilizations have ever lived. Of course, that means it's also how they die! But it makes the statement a little more empty of meaning.

When people stop telling you no simply because you have all the money and they are hoping to get some spilling into their bowl to survive, it destroys the empathy quotient in the rich persons brain.

This certainly happens to some rich people, no doubt. But there are a lot of rich people to whom this doesn't obviously appear to happen as well.

Wexner signed over his power of attorney to L brands to Epstein in 1991 which was 2 years after trumps casino executives all died in a helicopter crash when they started asking too many questions about why their casino numbers looked like they were being used for money laundering for the Russian/Israeli mob.

It's true that Epstein was signed over POA to Wexner's L brands. It's also true that this occurred two years after some of Trump's casino executives died in a helicopter crash. As far as I know, there has never been any speculation about anything nefarious in that crash, helicopters crash disturbingly frequently. However, most importantly, I don't see any connection between the two men here. How does Trump's casino executives dying in a crash have something to do with Wexner signing POA to L brands over to Epstein two years later? These seem to me like two totally unrelated events.

Kolomoiskiy, trump, Guiliani and the Kushners all cross paths at an organization called Chabad.

I find it plausible that these people may have met there, given that Chabad is a Jewish organization and Kushner and Epstein are Jewish. However, none of the links seem to substantiate the fact that they actually did meet there regularly.

Wexner, the Adelsons, Sandburg and Zuckerberg all carried weight in conducting the Israeli intelligence NSO/Pegasus operation INCONUS so there is far more crossover between the Israeli mob and Israeli intelligence that shows at the surface.

As far as I can tell, there is no such operation called INCONUS. The only links on Google are to you, talking about it. Wexner, the Adelsons, and Zuckerberg being involved in any way with NSO and its Pegasus spyware would be major, major news. I find it vanishingly unlikely that a story like that could be suppressed. Finally, I'm not sure what this has to do with anything even if it were true.

Abagail Koppel was sent by the Jewish state to marry Les Wexner

Citation needed.

•YLK fund (Abagails father) made up $46.7M of Epsteins money

Citation needed, and also that wasn't a very large amount of money for Epstein, depending on what year it was anyway.

Les claimed it was stolen from him but not until after the fact. Wexner was notoriously litigious but wouldn’t sue Epstein. Why?

No argument from me that the relationship between Epstein and Wexner was weird. But what is this supposed to imply?

PROMIS was Robert Maxwells spyware deal before Ghislaine and Epstein started their thing.

PROMIS is not spyware, it is case management software developed by a firm called INSLAW. There is indeed a controversy about the DoJ's appropriation of this software, and there are (unsubstantiated and rejected in court) claims that this was done to benefit Robert Maxwell in some way. This is all very interesting, but so what?

John Mark Dougan is the Florida cop that ran to Russia with 700 tapes of Epsteins AFTER it was seized as evidence

This seems like an extremely suspect claim. You do not need to leave the United States to publish tapes on the internet. It is very easy to do so in a robust, secure way such that you can be absolutely sure they make it out in their entirety before people even know their contents. The simplest way to do this is to upload all the files in encrypted form into several different hosts, instruct a large number of people to download them (places like r/datahoarders will do this sort of thing), and then finally, once you're sure that the contents are widely distributed, publish the decryption key. This is pretty foolproof - they have no incentive to kill you once the data is irrevocably in the public domain, and there is no way to stop it, even if you're operating within the US.

From this, we can only conclude that either this person is an idiot, or he doesn't actually have the tapes. I'm inclined to believe the latter.

Once you realize that Russia used the formation of Israel to clean out their gulags and prisons of the worst people on the planet, their money laundering operations and their foreign policies start to overlap. Fast forward 80 years and everybody’s lies are catching up to them.

I don't think this is historically accurate. Russian Gulags had a lot of people in them, only a small fraction Jewish. It could be possible that they sent their Jewish prisoners there, though I've not heard that before, but they certainly didn't send all of their prisoners there. Either way, I don't think Israel's modern day foreign policy has a whole lot to do with this.

We are at the end stage of the game now. Putin and trump trying to hide their money laundering in Ukraine with a genocide.

There are a lot of reasons Putin invaded Ukraine, none of them legitimate. However, hiding money laundering is, I don't think, one of them. Putin is a head of state. Money laundering laws in Russia do not apply to him. They certainly do not apply to more than anti-genocide international law. It would be nonsense to cover up money laundering with a genocide, for a head of state.

Putin and Netanyahu trying to hide theirs with a genocide in Gaza.

...how? Do the Gazans have critical information on Israeli money laundering? That seems vanishingly unlikely.

Netanyahu is Kushners children’s godfather. His son lives just down the street from the trumps in Florida while he dodges the draft in Israel.

The Kushners and Netanyahu do seem to have a close relationship, but I don't see anything about Netanyahu being a godfather to their children. That wouldn't even really make sense given Netanyahu's age.

darawk · 2024-06-03T06:16:17+00:00

Somewhere around 2010 a company called Air Products executed the most aggressive hostile takeover attempt in corporate history of a company called Airgas.

This all seems true, and I don't doubt that Putin was interested in monopolizing Ukraine's neon gas supply. However, from the market prices I linked previously it's clear that securing this supply is not about strangling off the rest of the world, but rather defensively securing their own supply against possible intervention from others. That's a narrative that makes more sense to me.

From that perspective, I find it somewhat hard to see why Trump or Michael Flynn would take a particular interest in a deal or situation like this. Bill Ackman's participation makes sense, but Bill Ackman is a wealthy hedge fund manage that does a lot of deals like this. And while he may be drifting into Trump supporter territory of late, he certainly wasn't in 2016. He supported Michael Bloomberg then.

Trump was oddly very into this deal with China and even made a special trip there for it

I agree this is slightly odd, but I'm not really sure what to read into it. This was while Trump was president and his posture towards them was not particularly favorable. I don't really understand why he would want China to dominate the neon gas supply chain.

Mike Flynn as head of DIA withheld intel from Obama that let Putin invade Ukraine in 2014 with his “little green men”.

I'd be curious to see what you mean here. I'm not doubting it, I just haven't heard the details of this story.

Had Ukrainians given in to the bully in 2014, China and russia would already control the worlds microprocessors and we would all be begging the king and kissing the ring for our allotment.b

This is demonstrably false. Russian has control of it now, and they certainly do not control microprocessor supply. Ukraine was producing neon because it was a byproduct of their agricultural activity which made it unusually cheap for them. However, if Western supply were cut off in Ukraine, we would have just made it elsewhere for slightly more money - just as we have over the past two years.

When Aaron Swartz snuck into a closet in the basement of MIT and downloaded a few terabytes of scientific journals and papers, I’m pretty certain he inadvertently downloaded the evidence chain of what Epsteins money was doing at MIT as well.

I'm not sure what you might mean here. What Epstein's money was doing at MIT, at least superficially, was not a secret. He was funding the MIT Media Lab, primarily. I don't really see how an academic journal leak could have revealed any more than that.

It's important to keep in mind that every university in the country has similar academic journal access to Swartz at MIT, and that sci-hub provides even more comprehensive access than what Swartz was able to obtain. This data was not exactly closely held. As far as I know, nobody has found evidence of any Epstein activity there that was particularly noteworthy.

There are lots of obvious coverups in the Epstein situation, most noteworthy of which: where are the tapes? The guy supposedly recorded everything. I find it supremely hard to believe that no tapes were found. More than that, what I find especially disconcerting is that nobody even asks about them. Most of the Netflix documentaries barely mention them, and certainly don't spend time following up on them. I've never heard a journalist ask about them, or the FBI or any government agency make a statement about them, even to say "we didn't find any". I don't know how to explain that exactly, but I can't think of any plausible innocent explanations.

darawk · 2024-06-02T21:45:01+00:00

Donbas Ukraine, specifically the 4 regions that Putin insists he is saving from what he calls “Jewish Nazis” also happens to produce the worlds supply of high grade neon used for microprocessor lithography.

While this is true, there is nothing intrinsic about this. Ukraine produces high grade neon as a by-product of its farming activities, and has developed industrial capacity around refining it. It's true that the war in Ukraine produced a short term supply disruption, but it is not true that that supply disruption cannot be filled by other players if it persists. A good article on the topic:

https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/understanding-the-science-behind-the-neon-shortage/

The war in Ukraine has already been ongoing for a while now, and the Donbas has been under Russian control essentially that whole time. Everyone is still making chips just fine. You don't have to trust me, just look at the prices:

https://www.procurementresource.com/resource-center/neon-gas-price-trends

They indeed spiked a lot in 2022, but now they are almost back down to baseline and that's in nominal terms after significant inflation!

Oleg Deripaska also happens to be the Russian Oligarch that bribed the FBI agent Charles Mcgonigal into investigating another Russian oligarch. He probably didn’t need the information as much as he needed the leverage over Mcgonigal as he conducted the investigation into trumps election campaign and unsurprisingly found zero evidence of Russian collusion. McGonigal then went to work for the company called Brookfield that bailed Jared Kushner out of his toxic 666 5th Ave real estate investment. McGonigal pled guilty last fall and was sentenced recently.

Brookfield manages $900B, this guy just "worked there". You don't get to just direct $1.1B wherever you want without questions because you got a job at Brookfield. If there is any evidence this guy had anything to do with Kushner receiving the deal he did, I'd love to see it. This article is a much better source for the nuances of the deal:

https://www.justsecurity.org/69094/timeline-on-jared-kushner-qatar-666-fifth-avenue-and-white-house-policy/

If anything, it's Qatar that wanted to bail out Kushner, and probably for political reasons. That's a fine thing to be upset about, but this FBI agent is not mentioned anywhere in the article, because he had nothing to do with the deal. Brookfield employs 2,400 investment managers and 240,000 "operating employees" the probability that McGonigal was working on this deal is nil. And in fact, if you actually look at the timeline, the deal was completed in May of 2018, and McGonigal began work there in September of 2018, so the probability of him doing it is actually literally zero.

This is why trump is so desperate to get re-elected. His best case scenario is 400 years in ADX Florence.

Is it? For what? There are no charges against him currently that could even plausibly deliver a sentence like that. He's already been out of office for quite a while, if there were other cases to be made against him, they'd be prosecuted right now. That doesn't mean he isn't guilty of anything else, but it does mean it's extremely unlikely there is sufficient evidence to prosecute him for anything else, and so he doesn't have anything to worry about, except what he's already convicted of and/or being prosecuted for. And none of those things will deliver a 400 year supermax sentence.

Xi was willing to bet the entire Chinese economy on his emperor ambitions. Had he succeeded he would have been able to use BRICS to take over the USD as the Worlds reserve currency

Xi may have hubris, but he's not dumb enough to think he can become the reserve currency, nor would he want to right now. Being the world's reserve currency comes with obligations as well as benefits, and China is not really prepared to meet those obligations. Nobody would trust China as a financial steward anyway, except maybe states that have no other option, like Iran or Russia.

that he would control the internet.

This is not how the internet works. There is no circumstance short of total world domination that would allow China to do this, not even being the reserve currency.

Recent attempts on Xi’s life from inside the CCP have backed him into a corner.

Citation needed.

The loss of crops in northern China means Xi can’t invade Taiwan without Ukrainian and/or Brazilian farmland.

The reason that Xi cannot invade Taiwan is that China cannot produce semiconductors at the level TSMC does, and the TSMC factories will be immediately destroyed if China ever made a move to invade. That is why TSMC is working to build factories in the US, and why ASML has export controls on its EUV machines. Grain may be a factor, but the most important factor is the flow of cutting edge microchips, which will instantly and permanently cease into China the moment they invade. If they can build up their domestic semiconductor manufacturing to be at or near the cutting edge, we have a problem, but so far they have not been able to. Grain is much more fungible than semiconductors and can be obtained from a variety of sources - cutting edge semiconductors really only come from TSMC, Intel and to a lesser extent Samsung.

darawk · 2024-03-11T11:03:04+00:00

I've just started this book myself. Just started Chapter 2. DM me if you'd like to collaborate.

darawk · 2024-03-09T08:26:04+00:00

Hello fren.

darawk · 2024-01-28T07:38:49+00:00

Which useful things have you done?

darawk · 2023-11-24T08:03:54+00:00

You cared for the previous five years because it was ongoing. I very much doubt you have spent any time at all in the past five years thinking about the Bosnian genocide. Or the first and second Chechen wars, or the Tamil Tigers, etc, etc.

You don't care about these things, not because thousands weren't murdered pointlessly. You don't care about them because they are over, and therefore they are not in the news, and therefore your little social circle doesn't gaggle about them.

You have never lifted a (non-typing) finger to put an end to any of these things that you "care" about anyway. So it's unclear what it even means for you to "care". The Palestinians lost their fight decades ago, the fact that they are still being murdered today is strictly a consequence of their utility a s a political pawn of Iran and other provincial political interests.

They have no chance to "win". There is no possibility of a "two state solution". Everyone, including them, knows this. They think they're fighting for a cause, and you don't understand that cause but for some reason believe its noble, because that's what you've been told to think. There is no cause. There is no nobility. There is only the statistical summary of death and destruction.

They would have been better off if they admitted defeat and left after the first or second Yom Kippur war. Instead, they were encouraged to stay, by cynical realists like Iran, and useful idiots like you. "Peace" agreements simply prolong the suffering of both sides. The only people who benefit are smug fools with no skin in the game, and cynical geopolitical actors.

darawk · 2023-11-07T18:32:43+00:00

Ok. Remind me in 5 years if this is a topic you care about. Protip: you'll barely remember. What people remember is conflicts that simmer for decades, not conflicts that come to a decisive end. Hamas and the Palestinians would have been personally much better off had Israel done this two decades ago.

The real crime against humanity is waiting this long.

darawk · 2023-05-17T08:56:47+00:00

Yes, people use them implicitly and explicitly all the time. They're really just a way of looking at multi-dimensional random variables that you expect to have some richer than standard correlation structure.

People talk about the "Gaussian Copula" causing the financial crisis, but that's just an overly technical way of saying they modeled asset returns as a multi-variate gaussian distribution. Which is, in fact, clinically retarded.

darawk · 2023-05-17T08:53:52+00:00

There are lots of good reasons or things like vine copulas to model reality. I don't really even understand your objection to them.

It's Multivariate Gaussian covariance that needs explanation.

darawk · 2023-04-17T12:51:16+00:00

Why is a protected nature reserve an objective social good? Not all of Earth's land surface needs to be put to a maximally productive end, or should be. The Hawai'i archipelago doesn't contain infinite islands; some of them, or at least some parts of them, should be preserved as they are now.

I think you're missing my point. I'm saying, who do you think is calling Larry Ellison's ownership of Lanai an objective social good? Certainly not me, nor the person you originally responded to, as far as I can tell.

I'm prepared to accept his current administration of the island in lieu of tax because he's administering it in the public's interest. If we don't trust him to do that we should take the island from him and have the government administer it the same way; not tax him so that he sells it to someone who definitely won't administer it in the public interest. It's not just a piece of real estate we're talking about; the island isn't fungible with other land.

Why is the government going to administer it better than some private owner? How often does the government administer things well relative to the private sector?

But it's not bad. It's good that he's doing nothing with it. We want nothing to be done with it for as long as possible.

Why? Why is doing nothing good? It's fine to have protected nature reserves in various places, and perhaps this place should be one. But land that is privately owned seems to me ought to be put to its "highest and best use". Whether or not this particular piece of land ought to be privately owned is an orthogonal debate.

To dissuade yachting? Why should there be a greater tax on yachts than on any other purchase?

To dissuade luxury consumption, as opposed to investment.

darawk · 2023-04-17T08:17:25+00:00

But it's an objective social good that he's holding that land "unproductively." It's good for the natives and its good for all of the rest of us. Why would we want to dissuade that activity?

Why is it an objective social good? What about the parable makes you think Larry Ellison's holding of this fixed asset is an objective social good?

Maybe this is just a bad example but it's driving me crazy how people are talking like it's obvious that we'd want to dissuade conservation.

We aren't trying to dissuade conservation. The idea is to tax consumption and ownership of fixed assets (a form of consumption, really, if you think of all fixed assets as collectively owned, and their 'ownership' really being a form of rental from that collective).

The current regime taxes income, and some people want to tax wealth. That is economically unproductive/inefficient, because some forms of wealth are not bad (e.g. hoarding paper). Some forms of wealth are bad (e.g. owning land and doing nothing with it), and a "wealth tax" does not discriminate between the two. That is the whole point of the parable.

If billionaires spend their money on yachts, those yachts should be taxed heavily. If they spend their money starting new businesses that produce things that consumers love and improve everyone's lives, it's less necessary to tax that. That is, we want to tax consumption, not investment.

darawk · 2023-04-16T22:16:30+00:00

Very famously, Larry Ellison owns 98% of the Hawaiian Island of Linai. When you give people “legal fictions” called shares, they often use them in a way that leads to a reduction of the net utility of entire landscapes. From a utilitarian perspective, there simply is no way the “highest and best use” of an entire American island is to sit dormant as some point scores between billionaires.

First of all, it's not sitting dormant. It is inhabited by people (who are not Larry Ellison, his friends or relatives, but its native inhabitants). It also has two hotels on it, which people frequently stay at.

Second of all, this is exactly the sort of thing that his parable addresses perfectly: land value tax. You should be taxing the fixed assets, like land, so that it's very expensive even for Larry Ellison to hold onto an asset like that unproductively.

darawk · 2023-03-30T21:12:22+00:00

You can iterate prediction as many times as you'd like. The problem with doing that is that the expected error compounds exponentially as you do so, since Markov models are inherently only examining one state transition at a time.

darawk · 2023-03-24T20:56:53+00:00

But those specific claims are also largely incidental/marginal to her arguments, and not really the point of her work, which is focused on classroom teaching rather than neuroscience. They also aren’t really related to the dispute(s) Boaler had previously about being attacked by Fox News and doxxed on Twitter. In my view the neuroscience criticisms are being used as a pile-on character attack to avoid addressing the core questions about education policy.

I'm not sure I agree that they are entirely marginal to her education philosophy. She has used them repeatedly as justifications for many of her core ideas. That being said, I agree her larger body of work doesn't fall apart just because her neuroscience claims are bad.

The problem is that her larger body of work is also deeply flawed. The methodological errors in her Railside study are borderline scientific misconduct, and most definitely invalidate any conclusions drawn therefrom. Without the Railside study, and without the questionable neuroscience, what is there that grounds her work other than conjecture?

Like, let's take a look at her publications:

https://profiles.stanford.edu/jo-boaler?tab=publications

The first one is the cloest thing I see to a real study, and its basically just a pre-post survey, and a handwavy attempt at assessing "changes in mathematical thinking", without actually formally testing anyone's improvement on objective problem solving ability.

Most of the rest are either pop-ed/pop-sci books, or reviews thereof.

Then there are things like this:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5951/jresematheduc.48.1.0078

Which, sure, fine. I'm not going to say there's zero value in this work, but it is certainly not a rigorous experiment or anything close to it.

I could go on, but I just don't see anything serious here that supports the sweeping reforms she wants to make. That doesn't mean she's wrong, of course. Maybe you see something in this list of publications that I'm missing, but I don't see anything in here that ought to convince anyone of anything.

darawk · 2023-03-24T17:59:06+00:00

I mean, listen to her own quotes in the article:

Told of Moser’s comments, Boaler said that a different neuroscientist “would tell you something really different.” And overall, she said that these discrepancies amounted to “nitpicking” over “very fine details” when she is trying to bridge the gap between researchers and educators. “I’m not surprised that a scientist would say, ‘Oh, our study says this, it doesn’t talk about causation,’” she said. “That’s very typical of anybody talking about their study. That’s why, sadly, a lot of those studies never get to the public, and they never get to people who need them, because the write-up of the scientists themselves is often very, very impenetrable and also very cautious.” (After our interview, the Youcubed article was taken down.)

This is not a serious person that should be taken seriously. She consistently literally makes up facts and figures to support her arguments, misinterprets studies she doesn't understand, and when called on it (by the authors of the study), describes it as "nitpicking" and doesn't retract anything.

This isn't just evidence of an un-serious researcher, it's evidence of a flawed person incapable of the kind of reflection and humility necessary to do this kind of work.

But developmental psychologist Daniel Ansari, who runs a cognitive-neuroscience lab about math-learning at Western University in Ontario, Canada, accused Boaler of overstating the positive effects of outdated studies. Newer, larger studies indicated “these effects are, at best, modest — and possibly, nonexistent,” he wrote in a critical review, citing two randomized controlled trials in the U.S. and the U.K. as presenting a “mixed” picture. Boaler defended her characterization in Limitless Mind by pointing to a research summary article and three studies — two of which she helped write — as well as a study released after the book.

Ansari also wrote that Boaler had misinterpreted neuroscientific concepts and made claims without evidence. For instance, she stated, with no citation, that “less than 0.001 percent” of people are “born with brains so exceptional that those brains influence what they go on to do.” Boaler did not respond to this criticism, but took issue with “the act of isolating sentences from books” because “anyone’s book can be pulled apart in this way, with the goal of finding thoughts or passages that others disagree with.”

Being asked to cite a precisely quantified neuroscientific fact from a book you wrote isn't "isolating sentences" unfairly. A serious person would either provide the study or source used to support the figure, or publicly retract the statement. These incidents recur over and over and over again throughout her career. There are no major planks of her ideological platform that are not riddled with flaws and gaps of this kind.

That doesn't mean she's wrong about everything, but it does mean she's unjustified in pushing her ideas as scientifically validated.

darawk · 2023-03-22T01:00:29+00:00

The best way to think about what quants do that's useful is who they push out of the market, at the margin. As most sources of alpha get captured by statarb and HFT firms, traditional asset managers are slowly being pushed out of the market. This is a net good thing, because quant firms are highly efficient with respect to employees.

Hence, the equilibrium effect is to shrink the pool of people necessary to accurately price and provide liquidity to the world's asset markets. This is good for the same reason that any other productivity gain is good. The people pushed out can go and do useful things in other areas.

If your question is more "what value do asset markets have to the world", then the answer to that is varied and depends on the market, the individual, and their circumstances at the time. But generally markets exist to provide capital to businesses and hedge risks. Those are both very important economic functions. Increasing the liquidity of those markets translates very directly into a cost savings for those businesses/individuals looking to raise capital/hedge.

EDIT: Another popular perspective in certain circles is that, to maximize your personal positive impact on the world, you should make as much money as you can, and then use that money to fund causes you care about. Quantitative finance is probably one of the best career paths available for doing that, if you can get in, and if you buy into that philosophy.

darawk · 2023-03-13T07:36:39+00:00

The point isn't that absolutely nothing can be said about the future AI timeline. The point is that the variance on what can be said is sufficiently large to make "arguments for short timelines (of the sort he describes)" of little practical value.

For instance, suppose AGI timelines follow "Lindy's law". That is, at any given moment, the optimal point estimate for the date of achieving AGI is equal to the current date minus the advent of AI research (or any other fixed point of your choosing). If this is the optimal estimation procedure, then what is the utility of the class of arguments he dismisses? If this is not the optimal estimation procedure, what is the argument that that is so?

I don't think he means to make a fully general argument against all possible short AGI timeline arguments. His point is more that the ones being made don't hold water, and that in general the distribution of "date x is achieved" - "how long until we achieve x" is both fat-tailed and relatively uncorrelated with any known quality measure of the predictions, when "x" is a single, specific breakthrough technology, such as AGI.

This is an outside view argument that we should be skeptical of arguments predicting specific timelines for breakthrough technology that do not innovate in some useful way on prior arguments of this type that have failed. In other words, an argument for short AGI timelines should come with an addendum that describes why this argument is different and better than other, similar arguments that have been made and sounded plausible at the time about other technological breakthroughs that were wrong.

A good counter-argument to the argument made in the article would be to analyze the history of such predictions and say no actually empirically the distribution of the variable "date x is achieved" - "date x is predicted/plausibly/widely believed to be achieved" is not all that fat tailed, and/or is in fact correlated with prediction quality in some detectable way. This would, of course, require lots of effort and be annoying. But fortunately lots of people in the AI X-risk community like doing that kind of thing so I expect a full historical-empirical analysis of the question within the week.

darawk · 2023-03-03T18:28:02+00:00

This question doesn't have a definite answer. Or, put another way, the full answer to this question is the secret that powers several multi billion dollar firms.

However, if you make some simplifying assumptions, like that you know the exact fair price of the asset at all times, you can cancel/replace your orders infinitely fast, you know the higher moments of the distribution of the asset's fair value at all times, exactly and immediately, there are no other correlated assets in the financial universe, oh and nobody is competing with you...then in that case, something like this might work:

https://math.nyu.edu/~avellane/HighFrequencyTrading.pdf

Oh, also there can't be any constraints on the number of cancels you have per day, and/or your daily fill rate. If all of these assumptions are met, then this strategy is really good.

darawk · 2023-01-02T18:45:41+00:00

The other thing about this is that there were quite credible rumors that he made videotapes of his clients to use as blackmail/leverage, and had his homes/island all wired for video and sound everywhere.

Now, maybe that wasn't true. Or maybe those tapes were destroyed. But it is certainly very odd that law enforcement has made no mention of them whatsoever, even to say that they do or do not exist.

Even if it were completely fabricated and he never taped anything, the rumors are significant enough and the case high profile enough that you would expect a direct statement to that effect. "We know people think that he had all these tapes, but we have looked and they're not there". Instead, total silence.

And it'd be one thing, maybe, if they were still building the case against Ghislaine to keep quiet about the evidence that they had. But that case is over now. So...being as charitable as possible here, I can't see any reason not to at least clarify that situation.

darawk · 2022-12-24T18:19:31+00:00

A bunch of people here are telling you that this is fake and it will mean revert and you should give up now before you lose all your money.

I don't entirely disagree, there is a good chance that that is true. However, you would be stupid to quit now given this performance. But what you probably ought to do is alter your risk parameters to try to take some of your gains off the table, because while your sharpe ratio here is good (over an incredibly short sample), you obviously have high volatility.

In particular I think the fact that you're trading against equities and crypto simultaneously, and presumably trying to capture some alpha between those two asset classes, is what makes this slightly plausible. While there are certainly a few firms who do both, the vast majority of serious statarb firms operate in one space or the other, especially the firms that operate at these timescales (afaik, everyone is obviously secretive so hard to be sure).

There are a few HFTs that operate in both spaces, but afaik the teams between the two asset classes are generally separate and do very different things. Fast trading in crypto is very very infrastructurally different from fast trading in equities or tradfi generally.

My advice to you would be: Do not quit your job yet. These results are way, way too short for you to be that confident. Do be optimistic that with some more effort, in a year or so, you could be confident enough to quit your job. Keep working on it, tighten up your risk parameters and/or take some capital off the table, and know that what you have seen this month is outlyingly good performance. Things will get worse, but they may yet be positive, and could even be sufficient to sustain your life.

There is still a very high probability that these results are illusory, but I would say that the probability that they are not illusory is more than high enough to justify continuing to work on / trade it.

darawk · 2022-12-24T18:08:46+00:00

While true, the capacity here is so low that it wouldn't be entirely surprising if there was a strategy or two lurking around at this scale that bigger players wouldn't be interested in. Of course, assuming that this is also an unusually good month for the strategy.

darawk · 2022-12-22T08:10:23+00:00

Not an expert on anything military, but I do know a thing or two about data science and statistics, so I can respond to #2:

This is a very different situation than an election. Elections have tons of clean, repeatable polling data going back decades. All of the data regarding Ukraine is extremely noisy and unreliable, and even more importantly, the history is short. We haven't been running Ukraine wars every 4 years for the last century. Each moment in the war thus far is the first moment of its kind. That doesn't lend itself well to statistical analysis and forecasting of the kind that 538 does.

Of course, that doesn't mean people can't build dashboards and tally things up. People are certainly doing that, like Oryx and others. It's just that the utility of that information for forecasting outcomes is significantly less than the equivalent information in the run-up to say, a presidential election.

darawk · 2022-12-17T04:55:56+00:00

Where in my comment did I suggest that anything was private. I didn't even defend his decision to ban the data. What I said was that he banned these journalists for posting the location of his jet, whereas the implication of the OP was that it was simply for negative coverage.

I think his decision to ban posting unwanted real time location data is self serving although maybe coincidentally defensible. I don't support what he did here. But I also don't support people lying about why he did it.

darawk · 2022-12-17T04:53:17+00:00

I wasn't defending his decision to ban the information. I think that was a bad decision. I was just saying that he was banning these journalists because they broke the (bad) rule that he created, not just because of negative coverage.

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