voces
Alcohol lowers your inhibition and makes you do stupid stuff. When age limit is 16, you do that stupid stuff when you are 17, and know your own limit by the time you are 21 and dating.
If you are a girl at a house party, you drink beyond your limit, go upstairs, and sit on a bed with some boys, you are not responsible for any assault that happens, but you do have your own choices and a will to avoid such risks. For:
> Regardless of how drunk or incapacitated a person may be, it is never their fault that they were assaulted.
does not count for the attackers, who may be very drunk as well, and sitting on a bed with a pretty girl.
Anyway, those rules are more for having students not act out, and have the rich parents of a cheerleader sue the university, when she somehow ended up drunk in the basement of a frat house, completely unable to consent.
Such sexual assault does exist in adult life (under police, not campus - supervision), but is of the degree of completely intoxicating a person, then dragging them home. Not: I drank wine, don't know how much, could have been drunk, then he made an advance on me. Like, she had to remove her clothes herself... it is not like she was passed out on the couch and he forced herself on her.
It was not even "rape" in her own mind, because they had sex another time.
Don't write a viral public post about it, ahead of the court case, invite others to comment on it, then blame the women struggle in tech on others who don't agree on the very strong, and damaging, qualifier of rape.
Rape is when you agree to have protected sex, but the man removes the condom sneakily, or the woman punctures the condom. What happened here was consensual sex without a condom, and one party regretting that after the fact (and being unspoken uncomfortable about it during).
Imagine having unprotected two-night stands years back, and suddenly your name is in a widely distributed article, charging you with rape. Like damn, and we wonder in a few years why the overreaction and demonization of the Scala community damaged its growth and inclusion.
Sex has always had aggressive and domination elements. Some women even request you slap them during.
I don't know any woman who does not want to have unprotected sex, but just let it happen like that. Then come back for seconds, even though she is not in the mood.
Are there naive young women who lack self-authority and self-esteem to say no, to an older man who needs those women to get their fix and wants to make up for their unpopular youth? Yes. And that awkward dance of nature takes two to tango. Panicking and crying during or after sex does not a "rape" make (but the definition depends on jurisdiction anyway, and we haven't even let a court in the right jurisdiction look if it qualifies, so I'd like to avoid that term).
Unless you want to claim openly that a named person is now a serial rapist. I'd like to think it takes more than a Medium post for you to do that.
They still are a citizen journalist type of outfit, they don't take direct funding from government orgs. But they have to suspect some of their anonymous analysis contributors are working with a state agenda and resources.
As a result, Bellingcat unlikely to go after Israelis in Gaza, but more likely to go after ISIS terrorists, Syria, Russia. WikiLeaks more likely to focus on US politics and NATO, than to look at Putin's finances or Russian banks.
But then all of advanced journalism becomes murkey, as you can be independant, while only looking at what your anonymous sources give you. Is NYT or WP independant when it runs an article on national security by the CIA or DoD for censorship, and securing those future juicy leads?
Both correct: charset before title element, and charset within first 1024 bytes.
Older browsers would infer charset automatically if not in first 1024 bytes or undefined. So if user had possibility to change the page title (for example: profile name), they could do persistent XSS by having IE infer the title contents as UTF-7, before the actual declaration happens. Sometimes the title or other elements can also be stuffed, so the charset declaration happens after 1024 bytes.
> Older versions of Internet Explorer can be tricked into interpreting the page as UTF-7. This can be used for a cross-site scripting attack as the < and > marks can be encoded as +ADw- and +AD4- in UTF-7, which most validators let through as simple text.
Modern browsers don't fall for this, but this was a huge XSS vector back in the day (for instance, Google was vulnerable to this, and maybe still is, for its users on ancient browsers).
At least we went from beating a fair coin with a crowd to benchmarking against a passive portfolio :)
The quote just means that the winning model was overfit to leaderboard. Not that there weren't better models submitted than the baseline, for else someone submitting the baseline would have won.
> If you whipped up a script but was 10 minutes late to the party, then you'd get zero gains
See, I really don't believe this. You can use the script features for longer timelines, then there is no rush. You are also not as much competing with the smart money, as you are joining them. I really don't think those few 1000s $ someone early on spends, are taking any action of the table. And the big players can't take it all.
> that almost sounds like "timing the market", which is generally known to not work for unsophisticated investors.
counter trading as in https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/countertrend.asp
but yes, would need both sophistication and time investment, else passive way more attractive. But you can use crowdsourcing on overhyped trends as information for this strategy.
> should tell you all you need to know about their "skin in the game"
I am not saying that newspaper stock pickers solved the problem of mindless hype. But skin-in-the-game or staking is an effective counter against clueless people following trends, and moves it further away from the coin flip.
> [insert joke about how economists have predicted 15 of the last 3 recessions]
[Insert fact about how those predictions cluster around the last 3 recessions]
> allows their alpha to be diluted and get front-runned
If anything, this would happen at the real front: hedge funds would contract someone to contract an expensive New York PR firm to meme and astroturf some stock, say Palantir, to something noteworthy. Then the open planning online for anyone to see does the rest. The private Discord channel of random traders (who bought into that group with 5 BTC to have skin-in-the-game) knows what's up, and quietly rides along.
A crazy thing went on early with ETH bot trading. Of course, if you are going to download a bot from Github which works on a few trends and technical indicators, you should not expect to make a lot of money. But many did -- It is easy to predict whether a rocket is going up. The features the bot used are still indicative (at other timeframes), because so many were running them, influencing the price in future timeframes.
> misleading impression that picking stocks is very easy
At least picking a stock yourself is easier than predicting what stock someone else will pick.
> MBAs, and work in fund management every day for decades...and will never come close to being profitable
That seems like a cosy lifestyle not worth bragging about, good job security. Rooting for the night janitor at a small hotel though, who put a 1000$ on doge coin when first reading about the rememe potential.
But I agree with the gambling and financial terrorism for kicks. More as a warning against financial irresponsibility, less as in "stay of my turf!".
And I think it is enough to claim that the average of the recommendations was better than any individual stock picker.
> The problem here is that all that information is public and the amount of alpha is scarce.
Not insurmountable, no? I feel these objections are often busied by finance professors, after a student rudely assumes they wouldn't be teaching if they knew how to make money.
RenTech was doing speech recognition on foreign TV broadcasts in the 90s. Can't you think of similar features you could whip up in a 100 lines of Python and the YouTube API? Some very profitable companies hire very smart PhDs to that for them. Could you bootstrap this? Work harder? Extend to some new hip platform a well-paid quant has never heard of?
> trying to get a piece of the action, diluting or even eliminating the benefit for everyone.
So join in. You are aware of the action. It's not like we are doing this for a bit of fun. The crowd wisdom is there, the hedge funds don't have a monopoly on polling it or analyzing it. Then redistribute the wealth for the benefit of everyone. Those very hard in on the action are not going to.
> but doesn't work if they're clueless and are all trying to buy into the same bubble.
Yes, this is correct, and a big problem in crowd analytics. Or at least, it has a big negative effect (you ideally want everyone to make decisions of their own accord, using their own information). But you can also again harnass this with counter trading strategies. Over the years, it has been fairly easy to call the top of a hype, and predict the obvious correction. So for instance, if the Teletubbies twitter is tweeting about Bitcoin, you know that maybe now is time to sell some Bitcoin, and rebuy back in 6 months when all newspapers are writing about how Bitcoin is a scam and a world-wide crypto ransom attack just occured.
The problem can be overcome in a couple of ways. An interesting one is: "skin-in-the-game". If your wrong hype predictions damages your reputation or causes money loss, you are more serious about it. Another is to ask: What percentage of other people do you think got this question wrong? People who answer Sydney as the capitol of Australia, think that few got it wrong. People who give the correct answer think that many will get it wrong.
> You do realize that the stock market is exactly that, right?
Partly yes. The difference with crowdsourcing is that you are building a model on top of the other participants. Many day traders with bots do not know that hedge funds have models more complex tracking what they are doing and going to do, than the bot is complex. But many day traders also underestimate how they'd stack up against an office of suits, if they worked together, and ramen-noodle hacked it.
I think this is akin to the unintuitive finding that if you randomly chose someone from your friendlist, there is good chance that this person is more popular than almost everyone else. Just being in the friendlist is a positive factor to the capability of making friends.
The vast majority of day traders is not honing their skills and information sharing inside a dedicated Discord group. Especially in crypto, these groups, and not the big Wallstreet hedge funds, are the most sophisticated and skilled at profiting from smaller markets.
> If the smartest institutional traders with the best tools can't figure out the direction of SPY in the short run with any kind of certainty
This is misunderstanding trading. It is all about uncertainty and willing to take risks if EV+ situations arises. Extremely few are figuring out the short run with any kind of certainty, and these few risk being fined or charged with market manipulation. The average person can find profitable coin flips (56% accuracy), which, while far from certain, can be flipped many times. Sometimes such flips are not possible for the bigger smarter institutional traders, because their plays use way more money, and they focus on what they learned over 30 years. Anyone starting in 2010 is able to be more knowledable about crypto trading, than someone with a 50-year trading career (who pays someone a little-less-knowledgable than you, not in-the-know of Discord or Telegram, to write an analysis).
Incorrect risk management from investment bankers, treating highly-variant finance as deterministic physics, and a fanciness of extremely smart people to invent extremely complex solutions, which obfuscate the ever-increasing assumptions and are less robust to black swan events. This illusory superiority bias over the common man, giving too much authority and decision-making power to a set of mathematical functions, and a culture of financial optimism and realization that you are too big to fail. This is what caused the big crash of 2007-2008.
The common man, as a class, lost money from that crash. In response, Bitcoin and fractional stocks were introduced. New markets emerged, where wearing a suit or MBA seems a negative, not a value add. Now, as a class, you at least have the possibility to win money. Else you always lose (but maybe that's the natural way it is supposed to be, not everyone can be the queen ant, or has the adaptation capacity to become one). BTW: every hedge fund that opened their data to the public, saw better, more accurate, models being build on that, than any of their elite quants in-house was able to beat. The masses, when harnassed, are no match for even the biggest hedge funds.
The posts said that gold would see decent increase (was around 1650$/kg at the time). That everyone with hotel or travel investments was expected to severely lose, and that most such players were putting their liquid money into other investments, to counter the blow, and avoid charges of insider trading. That the Euro would be the most stable currency, when currency trading due to localized pandemic and the lockdowns effecting purchasing power. That the US stock market will see a short boom, with Fed support, and little other investment opportunities, before a crash and world-wide stagnation will become inevitable. That you want to be in two growth niches for the next 3 years: biotech, for it will see free government-funded research & development, when it can profit in the future on new high-margin (HIV/Herpes) vaccines. Plastics industry, because everything will be wrapped in plastic, environmental regulation will be low priority, and it will be overlooked by retail and play-safe pension funds.
Not only did the financial elite predicted it, they predicted it right. Then felt bad for keeping it private, when they saw US senators selling their hotel stock positions after being informed of the situation in China and prospect of a pandemic, so they posted it publicly for everyone to see and with nothing to personally gain.
The pandemic was predicted (+5 -5 year error bars). The correction was predicted. Individual recession predictors are mostly made through survivor bias. When Goldman Sachs sees a market recession upcoming, they don't put that on Twitter or a newspaper to gain a following. They have people pay for what its worth.
It is also fun going back to 4chan /biz section 5 years. People are not saying now: see, I was right. They did better than the majority of the best, highest-paid, analysts and quants and remained anonymous. But I agree it was really hard to not hit a fish when shooting in a barrel.
You are assuming that the stock market is as-good-as-random, and that you can't crowdsource aggregate market sentiment and private information (someone who knows that they will buy the next 5 Tesla cars, so they will contribute to the growth). If you have a 100 of those private information owners, and you aggregate it, you just encoded for brand loyalty. People betting on the GameStop play did so, in part because they were made aware that they were not the only one with nostalgia and hope for GameStop. They did this by pooling their private information.
Finally, if you do assume that clueless pickers are the same as a coinflip, then their noise should cancel out, leading to a very uncertain prediction of 50% (so you turned their non-knowledge into valuable information about the variance/confidence/mindshare penetration/information availability), and then the real experts votes will balance the vote in favor of the most likely prediction (you distilled their expertise).
Taken my counter-example to your spoiler to the extreme: Imagine if all Redditor stock traders gave their honest best guess on if a stock would be down or up next month. The market would become very predictable with that information. Crowdsourcing a subset, just lowers this predictability (but never down to the level of a coin-flip). This crowdsourcing for predictability is precisely the reason the bigger, profitable hedgefunds are crawling Reddit, viewing 16-year old Crypto coin pickers on Youtube, and analyzing retail trades on RobinHood.
I think the resurgance of retail stock trading in the last 2 years or so, is not due to the uncertain economy (again, only big players really benefit from market uncertainty), but because there really were few other places to put your money (negative interests rates, high gold prices, impossible real estate market) and the Fed printing money and keeping the market from collapsing, led to a fairly certain economy, where the Fed would garantuee your losses, but you could keep the wins. This top-down manipulation was obvious enough to trickle down to retail investors using RobinHood.
In smaller, emerging, markets, quantitative active trading has become very competitive. Some markets, still profitable to active trading, are now beaten by a "mindless" passive trading strategy. Like stocks, it makes little sense anymore.
Wallstreet bets is a non-regulated pump-and-dump group, in the upper echelons ethically worse than the owners of the biggest hedge funds (who won't take profit on some plays if they know it causes long-term damage to the economy, the economy being a matter of national security). The GameSpot play made a few of those a millionaire, lost the college funds of people too late to jump on the bandwagon, and done damage to the degree of billions, when hedge - and pension funds had to withdraw from solid businesses such as Google and Amazon, to cover the losses from this memetic war. You can also state that the drivers of the bandwagon, were doing a passive strategy spanning years. It is the active trading of the bandwagon that made their strategy worthwhile (and not a poorly-informed play based on nostalgia and potential).
Numerai also is a passive investing (3 weeks+) fund. They are not that different from a hedge fund buying prop data.
I do think the article is interesting, and adds information on a new emerging trend. But it also reads a bit too kind and objective, like a music journalist describing a new album she isn't a particularly personal fan of. Subtleties will be missed, while the overal picture still is objective and correct to the quality.
As an investor myself, both active and passive, I progressed the most when I learned how the game is played at the top level. Active meme traders should do well to investigate these top players, just like these top players are studying them. RobinHood's order book is fed to the top players. They stand to gain by promoting this active retail trend, and taking near-certified profit on top of these predictable low-information emotion-driven masses. Buy things like Tesla or social media technology, which you as a 20-year-old, see using in 10 years. That's the way to beat the 35 year old senior Goldman Sachs analyst.
If you trust in the science of viral load not mattering, you will pick randomly when given the choice of having 1 or 5 novel viral particles placed in your nasal cavity. Nobody sane trusts that.
Yes, viral load is correlated with higher severity for majority of flu-like illnesses, supported by research. Even if this coronavirus is somehow different, combating viral load is still beneficial for avoiding viral viral co-infection (getting COVID-19 with severe influenza on top).
However, it is important to note that seat belts from ropes, seat belts from cotton strings, and seat belts from elastic bands offer very little protection when compared to a properly tested and fitted seat belt, and wearing these seat belts may produce a false sense of protection (resulting in no avoidance of speeding or driving too closely to the person in front of you, the best general public guidance we currently have to avoid corporal damage from car crashes).
It is a novel disease, but it is close to SARS-CoV-1 from the 2003 outbreak. There is a lot of long-term research on the quality of life indicators. One paper listed 20% of hospitalized with full disability due to chronic fatigue syndrome 5 years after hospitalization.
Young people with viral pneumonia and mechanical ventilation still walked slower than 60+ seniors (very little restoration of lung capacity).
> a large percentage of those who get it will experience life-long adverse effects
Mental health also influences QOLI. From SARS, MERS, HIV, and other severe viral infections, we know that this can have severe impact on mental health (many from SARS-CoV-1 and MERS suffer from PTSD and depression if not degenerative bone necrosis == constant muscle pain).
People report trouble smelling or speaking months after COVID. There are support groups popping up for people with persistent problems, chronic fatigue and sleep problems being one that seems to linger for months.
Early research from Italy:
> Patients were assessed a mean of 60.3 (SD, 13.6) days after onset of the first COVID-19 symptom; at the time of the evaluation, only 18 (12.6%) were completely free of any COVID-19–related symptom, while 32% had 1 or 2 symptoms and 55% had 3 or more. None of the patients had fever or any signs or symptoms of acute illness. Worsened quality of life was observed among 44.1% of patients. [...] a high proportion of individuals still reported fatigue (53.1%), dyspnea (43.4%), joint pain, (27.3%) and chest pain (21.7%).
For GPT-2 it is as easy as creating a corpus you want to fine-tune on, adding new unseen tokens to the dictionary, and run a finetuning command. https://huggingface.co/transformers/v1.2.0/examples.html#fin...
> Has anyone done it
Many have. AI Dungeon is a great example. Others are experimenting with humor generation, short story synopsis generation/creative writing, and supportive chat bots.
Fine-tune on educational materials, and a language model could be a 24/7 assistant to students.
Fine-tune on psychology or medicine data, and a language model could tell you of all medicine interactions, or act as a better ELIZA, and "socialize with" - and "support" people with depression or trauma.
Fine-tune on etiquette and social norms, and autistic people could ask questions without being ashamed.
These are some positive use cases. There are also neutral use cases (seeding a new social platform with autogenerated comments), and negative use cases (SEO spam, fake reviews, scaling up disinformation campaigns).
Edit: not complaining, but no idea why this was downvoted. Would be helpful to state why, so I don't make this mistake in the future (I am optimizing for useful replies).
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
This can be illustrated with math or logic statements. To refute the program "1 + 1 = 3" you need to, at minimum, state "1 + 1 != 3", and such a program is always lengthier. A fuller refutation could be "1 + 1 != 3, 1 + 1 = 2", more than twice as long as the bullshit statement.
What's happening here is sort of an inverse Brandolini's law: 35 world-class computer scientists use a massive amount of programming and compute to come up with a new language model trained on massive amounts of data. The trained weights don't even fit into memory. Impressive NLP progress.
Then Gary Marcus comes around and states "Not AGI!". Not one of the computer scientists stated that they delivered AGI. But some tech journalists did. So OpenAI is guilty by association. Even though Altman came out to temper the hype and expectations. That's like proving the Poincaré conjecture, and someone dissing your research, because "1 + 1 != 3".
No, this is outsourcing your whistleblowing activities to journalists. It is leaking unvetted data in the hope that there is something of public note/damaging to your employer in there (of course there is, top secret and noforn classifications are there for a reason)
> Whistleblower protections that didn’t really exist?
They existed. Just because Snowden did not like his chances with American justice does not mean whistleblower protections do not exist. Obama even pardoned Chelsea Manning (I believe that leak was part of a suicidal life style).
> One which they got for callously breaking the law?
I am not saying the PR disaster is not warranted. I am noting the extend of the PR disaster. I am also adding the soft-ball questions from journalists, and Snowden's meticilously prepared talking points.
> What kind of confirmation do you want? You can’t just put things in quotes and hope to weaken them.
The NSA coming out and saying these documents are real. Thread OP was talking about proof, but proof requires a better standard. Of course, it is highly likely these were real documents, and the Chinese or Russians did not add false documents to muddy it, like they do with their own leaks. I actually added the quotes, not to be pedantic, but to ward against pedantic replies.