It’s playing stupid to pretend that the theft of a hardly used handle has anything to do with an actual user account. I’m sure if @hac had a presence online, their handle wouldn’t have been sold from under them.
Maybe I do, or maybe I am very selfish and I think that my palate is more important than cows? Or maybe cows wouldn't even exist at all without the cheeseburgers?
I think their point was that beef farming has an enormously negative environmental impact, and we in the west in fact do overconsume meat. Though I think their point was to use AI with impunity, when I think we should cut back on our meat consumption a lot.
Some quick napkin math: AI energy usage for a chat like that in the post (estimated ~100 Wh) is comparable to driving ~100m in the average car, making 1 of toast, or bring 1 liter of water to boiling.
I’d wager the average American eats more than 20 dollars/month of meat overall, but let’s say they spend as much as an OpenAI subscription on beef. If you truly believe in free markets, then they have the same environmental impact. But which one has more externalities? Many supply chain analyses have been done, which you can look up. As one might expect, numbers don’t look good for beef.
No, there is nothing fallacious about accurately pointing out that someone is being inconsistent or irrational by caring about minor issues while ignoring larger issues of the same kind.
I spoke with a silver expert a week ago before the crash and he said half the flow is speculative, structural flow will remain. Looks like he was right.
It is most certainly LLM generated. Nobody but an AI prompted with “connect the unwind of the yen carry trade with Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland” would have ever written something like that.
My guess is that she did a lot of research on the topic with AI then created this article partially with AI generated text.
I definitely got a strong feel of LLM output reading it. Not sure if the points themselves have any merit, but I don't think that I'll go and run to buy jpy.
Speaking as a quant that has followed this story closely for months (and was educated about the yen carry trade in my degree), this narrative is somewhat wrong and also very obviously LLM slop.
It is true that the yen carry trade is currently being unwound and that it has significant implications for nearly all holders of treasuries. But claiming that ALL of the recent volatility is due to this one event is ludicrous. There are some blatant falsities, like saying that gold and silver are historically uncorrelated??? And it’s clear that the author has a bias against the financial establishment (“monopoly money”), coloring the output.
That said, there are legitimately interesting bits here I didn’t know about, like the Japanese institutional liquidation of US treasuries. I would not repeat this information to others without fact checking it, but if accurately described it’s an important space to watch. It’s not surprising that the LLM would get some things right, of course.
One big problem with this article is the clear prompt given to connect x current event to the yen carry trade, like Warsh’s nomination and the Greenland nonsense. This creates a lot of noise. It’s basically the LLM looking for a pattern between these things instead of identifying a structural flow. It might not even be wrong, but it’s horribly biased towards finding a fake pattern, so I would never trust it.
For the tech heads in HN that are excited to see a Justine Tunney post: don’t go crazy. If you’re really interested in learning about the unwinding of the yen carry trade, there’s plenty of information from actual experts to read about, not this slop.
We're deep in an era where "finance cosplay" is a thing. Wallstreetbets, zerohedge, the memestock subreddits. And daytrading apps to go along with that, like Robinhood. The trick is to realize that most market discussion you're not paying for is itself marketing at best and cosplay at worst. People doing this stuff professionally have Bloomberg terminals. Do not attempt to compete with Bloomberg Chat.
I am also veeery suspicious of monocausal finance explanations. There's simply a lot going on. The Greenland nonsense will definitely have moved the needle somehow; while a token deal was made to get it out of the media and allow all the insiders to front-run it, some very real changes are now going to happen over a longer period in order to decouple from US risk.
> The trick is to realize that most market discussion you're not paying for is itself marketing at best and cosplay at worst.
There was a leak posted on Wallstreetbets of some paid analysis (https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1qpwyqz/dbs...), and it was basically follow the hype with a layer of sophisticated post rationalisation on top. I fail to see the difference between these and the average "DD" on an investing subreddit.
> Leading EV manufacturer. Tesla is a leading global EV manufacturer, backed
by its firm market leadership and healthy automotive margins. Tesla's leading
share is backed by its economic MOAT in EV charging infrastructure and
supercharger network, autonomous driving and other software (e.g., full self-
driving aka FSD) (...) Tesla’s pivot toward AI provides a long-
term growth foundation, but near-term performance will remain sensitive to
progress on AI-driven execution milestones.
>We're deep in an era where "finance cosplay" is a thing.
I feel the same way. It's so frustrating. I try to read and learn and then just hit one of "wait those numbers don't add up", or "this reads like the author just learned about this thing too" and other strange logical leaps time and again.
Also, while I’m not an expert on Japan, I’ve been following Gearoid Reidy’s commentary on Takaichi and the new Japanese economy and I think the fears expressed are significantly overblown. But this is also characteristic of many other market participants so I wouldn’t categorize this as something obviously wrong, just a disagreement.
I’m not finding a single article with a good summary, but you can find coverage on Bloomberg of all the twists and turns. FX markets are complicated, so you’ll need to do some research on how they operate as well. It’s not too hard to plug the keywords and concepts from these articles into AI and get a reasonably good background, though.
Tbf, they are not far from a Truss-squared moment. And doesn’t help that CCP is gaining momentum with US leaving a vacuum while Sino-Japanese relation is going down the toilet.
Takaichi is much more popular than Truss was, and Japan is in a much better situation right now than post-Brexit post-COVID UK. And absolutely nobody is seeking a better relationship with the US right now other than satisfying short-term needs. Japan is not in a good spot long term (population slowdown, debt, slow economy) but there’s no reason to panic right now.
That's about as clear as 1+1=2; I wouldn't be surprised if Truss was the least popular PM/President of the last century in the OECD at "start of tenure D+5".
> Japan is in a much better situation right now than post-Brexit post-COVID UK.
I don't think the popularity matters, more the propensity to make bad decisions. Lacking any insight into Japanese politics, I would say that the Truss Lettuce Risk Factor is much higher for the US, which often has trouble passing a budget.
Because those criticisms misses the forest for the trees. You might as well complain about the pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution. AI doesn’t use nearly as much as water as even a small amount of beef production. And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations.
The more interesting questions are about psychology, productivity, intelligence, AGI risk, etc. Resource constraints can be solved, but we’re wrestling with societal constraints. Industrialization created modernism, we could see a similar movement in reaction to AI.
Well, that's just it. Those extentitential risks aren't even proven yet.
Meanwhile, threats to resources are already being felt today. "just overhaul our infrastructure" isn't an actionable solution that will magically fix things today or next week. Even if these don't end up being big problems in the grand scheme of things doesn't mean they aren't problems now.
The “fancy math” associated with quant usually refers to pricing derivatives like options.
The thing is that there isn’t really strong institutional demand for exotic derivatives, people are happy using existing methods and just applying those to current markets.
The other type of fancy math has to do with deriving alpha, which is also not that complex, from a statistics perspective you’re mostly using linear regression or other basic forms of regression.
The hard part of quant is implementation, making sure your data is right, hunting through poorly understood markets, and managing risks carefully and understanding them.
There’s also ML but that’s equally complex in quant as it is anywhere else.
> The hard part of quant is implementation, making sure your data is right, hunting through poorly understood markets, and managing risks carefully and understanding them.
In my experience I have seen far more division of labor than you describe. Real quants don’t do work like making sure your data is right or even much of implementation; they delegate that to software engineers. But a cheap quant shop might be too cheap to hire SWEs so quants end up doing this work instead. The real quant work is just hunting through poorly understood markets.
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