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Compounding Knowledge

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Re: Compounding Knowledge

#161

Post by tekkk »

saberience wrote: post #135
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #45

“Hard to become an expert. Easy to be an expert.” I spent many years learning how to do cloud architecture. Now I can briefly look at AWS documentation for new services out of the corner of my eye and know all I need to for the next 6 months. Yet the other day I opened a book on Java, which I haven’t studied since college, and literally had no idea what in the world I was reading.

I’m curious as to how/why you could have spent years learning cloud architecture, it’s not that complicated surely. My company is recently transitioning to GCP and I’m architecting big data solutions. I started doing this in November or so and well, it’s not rocket science, in fact, it’s considerably easier than building systems ten years ago was. I’d hazard a guess that you’re not learning particularly efficiently i…

You must joking right? Sure you can learn how to graph down some services using draw.io or something, but to actually implement the architecture and have it working without hiccups is another matter entirely. There is a vast amount of different types of application architectures with different requirements that require completely different architecting compared to some "big data solutions". Maybe try architecting massive scale game servers next time? Or some other highly specialized solution with very strict performance requirements, it's not that easy. Sure you can again just graph down some vague lines and boxes with draw.io but the actual implementation with Terraform or whatnot is definitely not something you learn in a "month or two". Jezus what arrogance.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#162

Post by hi41 »

>>Buffett focused on knowledge and companies that change very, very slowly or not at all

Can someone please tell me what exactly non-changing knowledge is?

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#163

Post by sobani »

hi41 wrote: post #162

>>Buffett focused on knowledge and companies that change very, very slowly or not at all Can someone please tell me what exactly non-changing knowledge is?

Basic human psychology like cognitive biases seems like a good candidate.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#164

Post by tim333 »

mattferderer wrote: post #86
jboneal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial take: Buffett is actually not a great investor in the way people think. Via the float in his insurance companies, he receives a 0% infinite maturity loan to plow into the market. That financial leverage gives him the ability to beat the market year after year - not his own stockpicking prowess. If you were to start with $1B, then get an extra $2B that you never had to pay back, you too would do quite we…

I was unaware of this additional advantage he has. Reading up on floats it seems they are the money his insurance companies receive from premiums that has yet to get paid out in claims. Essentially a reserve that can be invested. Since they have a large scale of customers, this float ends up being rather high. I'm wondering how much trouble an insurance company of smaller scale would get into if they used their float…

Even before the natural disaster they'd get shut down by the regulators for having insufficient reserves if their investments did badly. Or in the case of Arron Banks underwriter Eldon Insurance you hang out with rich Russians and fund Brexit and somehow it's all good again.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#165

Post by tim333 »

robnagler wrote: post #83

People have been saying Buffet is a lucky outlier for decades. Is his success in the following decades survivorship bias or a valid ex post facto test of success? If you believed in Buffett's investment philosophy in the 1980s based on decades of results, and had a thousand bucks to buy a Berkshire A share, would it have been a lucky pick? I didn't believe you could beat the market until about 2000, and I'm happy I s…

Few people who analyse Buffett think he's just been lucky. He's more like a chess master who is just better at his game than most he competes with.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#166

Post by tim333 »

miguelmota wrote: post #128

Warren Buffet is a pattern recognizing machine that can forecast trend growth by analyzing a boat load of data and has learned how to be a master of negotiation. With that said, Warren Buffet is not someone who invents things and or is very creative such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, etc.. But someone like Buffet can amplify adoption of products and ideas by investing early and seeing potential of the compan…

He's been quite creative with the company he's built. It's hard to think of much like it apart from Fairfax Financial which was modeled on Berkshire.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#168

Post by smileysteve »

boombust wrote: post #114
smileysteve wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Apple; on a 1 year timeline APPL beats the S&P 500 by 5%. But I don't think Buffett measures his investments on a 1 year timeline; and to be honest to your comment, he made the underpriced comment on Aug 31, 6 months ago. "I do not focus on the sales in the next quarter or the next year," he said. "I focus on the ... hundreds, hundreds, hundreds millions of people who practically live their lives by it [iPhone]."…

I misremembered his comment on iPhone prices. He just said that they are undervalued relative to their utility. I thought he made a comment that Apple should look to increase iPhone prices, which, as he admits, would be a terrible move. Listen, I was just trying to make an argument that even WB can misjudge a situation. It was not a convincing argument because half the example I used was not correct. Timing wise, buy…

Yeah, the example was a pretty poor one. Your quote about pricing wasn't far off from what Apple was trying to do; I heard somebody say they're realizing that the smart phone market is saturated and seeing how high they can pump the price before it matters; and you and I both think they found it.

> I just don't see it as such an exciting brand anymore

The stock market also doesn't see it as exciting anymore. The market has had this view since Steve Jobs was alive; where Apple's P/E places it below value and dividend stock (it trades at half the multiple of Duke Energy). In order for you, or Warren Buffet to think Apple is a good value investment, it only has to be ~1/2 as exciting as Microsoft or Duke Energy.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#169

Post by saberience »

tekkk wrote: post #161
saberience wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious as to how/why you could have spent years learning cloud architecture, it’s not that complicated surely. My company is recently transitioning to GCP and I’m architecting big data solutions. I started doing this in November or so and well, it’s not rocket science, in fact, it’s considerably easier than building systems ten years ago was. I’d hazard a guess that you’re not learning particularly efficiently i…

You must joking right? Sure you can learn how to graph down some services using draw.io or something, but to actually implement the architecture and have it working without hiccups is another matter entirely. There is a vast amount of different types of application architectures with different requirements that require completely different architecting compared to some "big data solutions". Maybe try architecting mas…

I'm building Hadoop clusters in the cloud with massive streaming piplines using Kafka, then feeding stream processing jobs using Flink on Dataproc for driving machine learning models.

We're doing this at a massive scale, bigger than most production games. So I don't know why you're talking about massive scale game servers, we are literally doing this at massive scale.

Re: Compounding Knowledge

#170

Post by jodrellblank »

foobiekr wrote: post #156
jodrellblank wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're claiming that 100 people in his position, would not do as well. Therefore he was different. If it was simply a matter of self-made difference, all his peers could do that too. Which means whatever it is, is something he was born with. Why does he get credit for being born different? Does he get credit for being male as well? Either it's something any of his peers could do, and he's not special, so why praise h…

Most of the people I was referring to most likely had opportunities and backing exceeding young Gates, yes. But I don't think your point is reasonable. In your model, there appears to be nothing anyone can take credit for, effort or not.

And yet, can you point to the specific thing that he deserves credit for? Maybe my model is right, and there is nothing anyone can take credit for.

Why did he put in effort, and others didn't? Was he born to work harder, then why praise him? Or was he taught to work harder? Then why praise him. Given a choice of comfort or effort, he chose effort - why did he choose that and others didn't? Because he's morally superior? Then why is he, was he born that way or taught to be that way? And either way, why praise him for it?

The other complaint I have is your framing where "not earning one of the largest fortunes ever seen on the planet" is the cutoff for "did nothing with their lives" and then using that to scorn the peers who didn't. When do you see a discussion about how worthless Mozart's school peers were, or how Dostoyevsky's peers didn't write any good books?

The other other complaint is that writing a good book is something a person does, guiding money into their bank account is something a Capitalist does. Many people don't like DOS or Windows or SharePoint as a technology, don't like Microsoft's business practices, and don't like unbalancedly wealthy CEOs - which bit of that is the credit-worthy part? Making a successful computer company in the 1980-1990s with family wealth and connections and funding while breaking the law to stop competition is surely "playing on easy mode" if anything is, right? Where's the praise for the people who achieved a lot smaller monetary success, but did so against harder odds?

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