OP should've been more specific. HFT firms, not any other finance companies, probably have a lot more exciting work due to the nature of reducing latency using all sorts of novel techniques.
I wonder if they disable all the fancy exploit mitigation protection in linux kernel just for a tiny performance hit
Mother capitalism deems that our brightest young minds best serve humanity in two tasks. Keeping the public passively scrolling, and moving money at speed to make wealthy people more wealthy.
Actually, not. These market makers are often prop shops. That means they use their own fund (prop = proprietary) to do the trading. They can do that because they don't need much capital to run.
So the story here is that over the last twenty years they stole the lunch from the traditional market makers like eg banks.
Of course, they got rich in the process. But they started from relatively modest means, compared to the companies they took on.
Michael Lewis's 'Flash Boys' is an hilarious account of this process. Well, it's involuntarily hilarious, because to tell his story, Lewis needs to cast Goldman Sachs (!) and other big banks as the victim. See the rebuttal 'Flash Boys: Not so fast' by Peter Kovac for more insight.
Perhaps some start this way. But in terms of the general trend of talented engineers and mathematicians being sucked into this quant vortex, it is a matter of making wealthy people wealthier.
Automation in trading makes all investors wealthier via lower fees. Trading costs basically nothing nowadays, and that is because far fewer people are employed to do it.
Obviously, the people who own the automation will want a cut of the rewards, like any other business.
Obviously NASDAQ and electronic trading systems are a good innovation. But firms basically doing arbitrage or exploiting uneven network latency are not that economically productive.
Well lowering market spreads is all about increasing the returns for capital, and incenctivising overfinancialisation. It's hardly curing cancer is it?
At worst it's actively harmful if you believe that the current state of turbo-financialised capitalism has its drawbacks.
> Network latency
Not really sure what you're talking about but surely spending billions of dollars to bring rtt latencies to 50 micros or whatever is not really a great use of money and top engineering talent. Again, it's playing an arbitrage game but not really delivering any value.
lol I said "closeted dictator" for the record. But alrighty why don't we start over and see if we can both argue in good faith. I can certainly be a dick on the internet sometimes.
I honestly can't tell what your concrete points are. I come from the position that economies are naturally occurring phenomena which cannot be centrally planned or controlled. If people can find ways to profit off market inefficiencies, they should! The HFT/Quant firms make their arbitrage money (value for them) and all market participants in return see: (non-exhaustive list)
If your bar is that "all smart people should be working on curing cancer or andrepd-approved endevours" then almost nobody in the economy is providing value. Is my lowly SecEng job at $MEGACORP good enough? What about my buddy who writes firmware for toothbruhes? Are professional starcraft players wasting their talents?
> EDIT: The funny part is even the exchanges and hft firms agree with me see PLP/speed bumps on exchanges like Eurex lol
This debate has been going on for ages, and it's silly to pretend that it's been settled and everyone agrees with you.
> I come from the position that economies are naturally occurring phenomena which cannot be centrally planned or controlled.
This is a challenge to untangle. It sounds like you're saying that there is no point trying to regulate, legislate or control what happens in the economy at all. But that sounds bonkers to me.
For starters, there are (and should definitely remain) absolute limits to business activities. We've moved on from Victorian-era child and slave labour for good reasons, even though such a situation was "naturally occurring" at the time. Moreover economic activity is dictated by cultural mores - if your service is morally reprehensible in some way then you won't get much business whatever your matgins are. Economies are inherently subject to the laws and customs of the agents.
Secondly, some regulation is pretty clearly beneficial. For example, there's a recurrent tendency for market power to concentrate in modern economies; we need robust anti-trust regulation to prevent consumers from getting ripped off and to prevent fragile supply chains. A well-conisdered balance of public and private provision supports the least well-off in society while allowing room for the fruits of individual flourishing.
Thirdly, we must consider what makes one economic system better than others. One way to measure this is to look at how efficiently it converts resources to social utility. I'm far from convinced that it's efficient to employ our brightest minds to build trading models with brief lifespans so that investors who are already well-off become slightly more so. It's worth investigating what regulations and incentives could put those minds towards things of greater value - solving climate change, cancer, sending humans into space etc... .
> This is a challenge to untangle. It sounds like you're saying that there is no point trying to regulate, legislate or control what happens in the economy at all. But that sounds bonkers to me.
I really do not appreciate this mischaracterization of my position. Focus on my actual words. I don't care about 'winning' this online argument. I take effort to engage because I am disturbed by the number of intelligent people who believe if only _THEY_ were in charge (or at least the right person), we would be able to fix all of society's problems.
> For starters, there are (and should definitely remain) absolute limits to business activities...
I agree with everything that follows. Government needs to be around to keep the peace. I want to be explicit: When I say "centrally planned/controlled economies" I am NOT talking about the general concept of regulation. If you are debating in good faith, this should be obvious. Look at all the history of failed states who tried to implement top-down control of their economies.
Also, YSK that not all regulators are government entities.
> Thirdly, we must consider what makes one economic system better than others. One way to measure this is to look at how efficiently it converts resources to social utility.
Never before in history has mankind been so prosperous. What system would you like to emulate? The US capitalist system is not perfect (and never will be)...but it blows all of its peers out of the water in terms of economic prosperity. Here's a couple data points: (Please read the technical definitions if you are truly interested in this subject)
> I'm far from convinced that it's efficient to employ our brightest minds to build trading models...
This is where my "closeted dictator" quip comes from. Nobody is "allocating" these minds...they are acting on their own free will. Why should you or anyone else be the arbiter? What if individuals disagree with your beliefs? Space exploration is a great example of a debatable "worthy endeavor"
Do you mean that high salaries indicate a demand in the market? Not much argument there, although it is sometimes the case that large companies hire talent purely to starve competition. But what I'm really questioning is whether those high salaries translate to value to society.
Some fraction of young minds, not all. I was happy to work at a small aerospace company with extreme concentration of brightest minds. Only because they loved the domain, and didn't mind a salary cut. What a joy and relief it was for me after FAANG!
No, I eventually left because money, I needed to save for a house.
Most of the staff were locals, so already had own/inherited property to live in. After FAANG it was new to work with mostly locals, way more stories about the surroundings.
Absolutely. The moral aspect is certainly questionable. Although, I wouldn't say "all brightest minds" are going to neglect their moral concerns for getting rich
To be honest, even this is morally questionable. It makes superficial sense in that someone else will do the work if you don't. But this happening on a large scale is still a drain on talent that could hopefully be used for work of greater social value.
Is the problem with the system or with the minds? The minds that want to scroll are the same as the ones that make money on the scrolling, that made the scrolling itself, and that made the system we're in. Why is it that defeatist comments always focus on the capitalism part and not on anything else? I don't think it's perfect like we aren't perfect but unless you have some particular suggestion this type of comment just reads "boohoo the world is bad and it's not my fault".
> Why is it that defeatist comments always focus on the capitalism part and not on anything else
Because endless growth is the only reason these once fun spaces have been hyper focused to be as addictive and stressful as possible to the "whales" of scrolling. That's why, when their own internal reports say "people spend unhealthy time on our platform and it's making them unhappy," it gets passed up the chain of command and whittled down by internal incentives until it dies as an issue.
Individuals hold some blame, but to put most of it on them is to ignore what growth demands. You're supposed to doomscroll and engage and worry. That's the business model. Facebook is in the same business as Cigarettes and Casinos. When I see someone on an air tank playing slots, literally crying when they spend their last dollar, I will not waste my breath blaming them. Just like I won't blame the doomscroller, anxious that they need to stay "informed," who hasn't met the basic needs in their own life.
> The minds that want to scroll are the same as the ones that make money on the scrolling
No? Where are you getting this? I don't think the people guiding these companies want to spend 6 hours scrolling TikTok. This is not the way most people live their lives.
> No? Where are you getting this? I don't think the people guiding these companies want to spend 6 hours scrolling TikTok. This is not the way most people live their lives.
I meant they are all humans. We're all sort of the same. If you disagree just think of your opinion of any other species, or about a group of people a thousand years ago, and you see what I meant.
Would they also change the aliasing assumptions to something close to C/C++? Otherwise I imagine it would be relatively easy to make mistakes and get "surprises" at runtime thanks to the optimizer.
I’m guessing you navigated to the https://mise.jdx.dev/environments.html page and saw the TOML syntax (which looks an awful lot like INI), and confused yourself.
Mise (like a lot of software) uses TOML as the format for its config files (as opposed to something like JSON). Mise reads that config, to automatically export environment variables on a per directory tree basis.
When the docs refer to environment variables, they very literally do mean environment variables. The values of which are taken from a format that resembles INI, as you have noticed.
Environment variables are key/value pairs that are passed from parent process to child process when the child is first created. A convention has also arisen where these can be put into environment files so the overarching system (for example, docker) can load them from a consistent place (without having to add them to your shell and risk leakage across projects) and then pass them down to child processes in typical environment variable fashion.
Also there are no sections like there are in ini files.
Hahahaha you’ve never worked in ad creative have you? It’s full of people who have been crushed by their inability to support themselves making pure art.
This ad makes perfect sense from that perspective.
I'm a mix/master engineer, and I just skimmed the paper to look for attenuation potential of this new material. It looks like they only tested above 100 HZ, which is still alright for conversation, but not for professional recording studios.
As you can imagine, the low frequency attenuation isn't great. But the performance of higher frequency attenuation is pretty good. I think this material would work well for meeting rooms, and perhaps restaurants. Not for recording studios.
It is too often that I get linked a 30 minute video that reading an abstract like this for most of them would really help me prioritise whether to watch it or not.
Now I guess I just need it in an extension to appear below the video automatically or something :)
Many jobs in finance are updating 20 year old Java code, or figuring out new ways to load data in and out of Excel files for custom reporting.
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