somuchfordonor

> honestly by finding mispricings in the market. Eg Buffet, or Burry during the housing crisis.

Like who wants to be on the other side of a Jane Street transaction? Absolutely fucking nobody. If you're talking about "mispricings" during the "housing crisis," my dude, nobody wanted to sell their house to these dumb fucks! They were going to starve, they had no choice! How does that not seem like a scam of some sort to you? That's not honest money!

Those 20 year olds with Math degrees from Harvard. They don't fucking know anything dude, they did not discover a model, they did not make a model with a price that says price is lower than this other price, then persuade some people to make some bet. That's a parallel reconstruction, that's to justify whatever actual scam is going on. How do you not see that?

There's no common sense reason Math 55 equips you with some magical vision into pricing that actually winds up meaning anything. When it does, it might as well be random.

If the Mercers were good people, would they be Republicans? No dude. C'mon, use common sense. Don't get hung up on "normal sense." Use common sense.

If Sam Bankman-Fried was a good person, would he fuck $10b out of his own god damned customers' money?

No dude, he's made some unspecific, previously-bankrupt-and-now-literally-bankrupt promise to donate some money to something somewhere in the future, to whitewash the fact that he just went around fucking everyone.

I mean get a grip Effective Altruists, whose guts I hate too, and whose energy is the stereotype of the student I am talking about - the same students! - where they get this readily packaged "religion" that happens to align exactly with their meaning-bankrupt approach to life.

So don't even get on it with the "honest" money. I can find the venture capitalists who take some dumb person's money and then hand it over to something risky and interesting: I see how VC is honest, it's just not necessarily intelligent, but it's redeemable. But the Jane Street people: No dude. Not Warren Buffet, not Burry, none of those vultures.

I see a lot of variations on these arbitrage and secrecy themes.

Arbitrage that sticks around for years: those are scams dude. They involve collusion, not intelligence. I understand it might not be illegal collusion, but if either side of the transaction being scammed found out, they would find someone else to work with.

Trust me, I know. I've worked in ad tech.

> Alameda’s CEO is Caroline Ellison, a Stanford University graduate who like Mr. Bankman-Fried previously worked for quantitative trading firm Jane Street Capital. Alameda is based in Hong Kong, where FTX was headquartered before relocating to the Bahamas last year.

Are the folks at Jane Street making money because they are smart, or because they use that perception to perpetuate some scam?

I interact with a lot of Harvard kids. Some of them are from Long Island, they know dads who work at that Republican's hedge fund. They are smart kids. They have good cognitive gifts.

But not once - not from word of mouth, or directly from them, or someone, ever, anywhere - have I heard a common sense way these guys make money due to intelligence, instead of due to a scam or due to luck.

It is really frustrating. So much human potential wasted on chasing the dollar sign. They are in denial that it is scams.

It has always been scams. Why is this so hard to believe? Why in the absence of any positive evidence, like "oh here is our genius but nonetheless expired" trading strategy, which anyone could have furnished in the last two decades, they agree, oh it must be real?

The simple answer seems, because if you believe it to be real, you can be this specific kind of Harvard + New York + "X" kid - and seriously, they are all cut from the same jib, superficially and inside their character, it tarnishes the institution - and you can do this scam and pocket your change and eat dim sum with 20 people on the weekends and have a skinny girlfriend and buy a condo. You can do something pretty meaningless with your life in exchange for the burn out.

This scam life lets 20 year olds not hear from their horrible parents that burned them out and gave them no meaning. Eventually they turn 30 and hope that a decade went by without a crash, and then life decides for them to sell before the ponzi collapses. Like you have a baby with your skinny girlfriend and you buy the condo and great, you sell, and it happens to be well timed!

I fucking hate Jane Street, I have hated them since I've known the assholes who intern there, and I don't know why this Bankman-Fried guy got such a big pass for scamming literally millions of people, and why this Caroline girl isn't going to be sent to jail, and it's frustrating because you can actually tell! You can predict this from when these kids are 20!

> And one of the triggers started when around 2005 the FED started raising interest rates

The fed did not cause the crypto crash. It didn't force people to gamble on cryptocurrencies. It didn't force them to not sell, at the top of the naked ponzi schemes they participated in.

> so I have no idea why you felt the need to bring him up.

This is what we are lampooning.

This forum is full of people with amnesia over how many id Tech people are assholes.

Well it turned out to be fire.

On the other hand, the end user can only distinguish two kinds of recommendations: (1) what is most popular over a period, and (2) what is similar to your most recent few likes/buys.

Besides, in a social media app, you can do whatever you want. To overcome limitations in (1), you can show whatever view counts you want. To overcome (2), you can take a video recorded a week ago, whose similarity you learned in a batch 3 days ago, and show it to a new user with a tag that says "1h ago."

> Even if FTX has stopped withdrawals, it does not necessarily mean they are insolvent.

Listen to yourself.