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Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#151
post #175

[stub for offtopicness]

Jane Street skims money from our retirement accounts by building expensive clocks that the rest of us don’t have access to and adversarial queue modeling. We get WWVB and NIST NTP. They say they “add liquidity” as if subsecond trades are some fundamental need in the market. Normal legitimate business settles daily. The contemporary concept of time in banking is inhumane in the strictest sense. These firms are a bligh…

> Jane Street skims money from our retirement accounts by building expensive clocks that the rest of us don’t have access to and adversarial queue modeling

How does Jane Street skim money from those who hold passive index funds?

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#152
post #175

[stub for offtopicness]

All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?

I agree, this is why I'm a big fan of enforcing workplace democracy [1] onto problematic industries like finance, media, advertising on a legislative level; these things can't be trusted with individuals, all workers should share in the company process.

Have no doubt that workers at these companies could do a better job than an out of touch executive + board team that more resemble communist dictatorships than sound business practices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine that increasing crop yields would do social good primarily via decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land, especially since we're well past Jevons paradox territory with calorie intake I imagine. While the pharmaceutical industry is large, the marginal researcher does still seem to have a pretty positive impact from an outside view. The most positive use of human time probably looks something like…

>decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land I have good news and bad news for you. Good news: we've known the solution to that for more than a century, which is to reduce livestock consumption, a cause which many smart people have dedicated their lives pushing vegetarian/vegan culture and producing alternatives. Bad news: from my point of view, the masses are not going to give up meat and eggs faster with each add…

Thanks for that.

> each additional alternative meat

As a side note, for many vegetarians and vegans, “alternative meats” actually mean hundreds of different legumes (fresh, dried, milled, split, fermented…) and other delicious plant foods. They’re packed with macro and micronutrients that can replace[0] those found in meat.

Taste is a bit trickier: nothing will ever taste more like flesh than… flesh — and taste is subjective anyway. Meat substitutes can be tasty, but they’re not the same. Which brings me to this:

the masses are not going to give up meat and eggs

That’s true. At first, giving up meat just to eat “fake meat” can feel like a downgrade. But the real key to change is curiosity. There are so many ingredients and recipes to explore. Classic egg-and-milk pancakes are great — but why eat the same thing all the time when there are so many combinations of plant milks and oils to try? I used to love pig and chicken. Now my favorite staples are fried tempeh and lentils with nutritional yeast.

0: I like to joke that meat replace beans, you get the idea. Fun fact: meat is viande in French, from latin vivenda which mean "which sustains life" and used to describe any edible. I think english meat have a similar etymology from mete.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#154
post #175

[stub for offtopicness]

All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?

You are underestimating the importance of efficient allocation of capital and and attention. What use is discovering a way to improve harvesting efficiency if there is no money to develop it into a product or inform customers of its existence. It might as well not exist without there being a way to finance, make people aware of it, and reward the creator.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?

You are underestimating the importance of efficient allocation of capital and and attention. What use is discovering a way to improve harvesting efficiency if there is no money to develop it into a product or inform customers of its existence. It might as well not exist without there being a way to finance, make people aware of it, and reward the creator.

it seems to me that the problem is quite the opposite. people believe that the "importance of allocation of capital" (good euphemism by the way) is WAY more important that it really is. do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines? do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions? We don't need a sophisticated AI to "inform" the customers.

there is a ton of things that are there simply because at some point people made money out of it, and then lobbied politicians to death to avoid regulation.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#157
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HFT doesn't inflate or deflate any valuations. They operate at the market microstructure level and provide liquidity. HFT firms have no impact on the long-term value of assets.

HFTs can siphon away profits from the people actually doing good investing, but Not all HFT is created equal. There have been some pretty high profile instances where HFTs have increased market volatility and caused a "flash crash". HFTs that trade at the microsecond scale probably aren't valuable to society.

That's all factually incorrect. The reason that HFT is valuable to society is exactly because it trades at the microsecond scale. That's how it provides the most liquidity.

Flash crash was transient and had no impact long term value. Neither does volatility.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are underestimating the importance of efficient allocation of capital and and attention. What use is discovering a way to improve harvesting efficiency if there is no money to develop it into a product or inform customers of its existence. It might as well not exist without there being a way to finance, make people aware of it, and reward the creator.

it seems to me that the problem is quite the opposite. people believe that the "importance of allocation of capital" (good euphemism by the way) is WAY more important that it really is. do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines? do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions? We don't need a sophisticated AI to "inform" the customers. there is a ton of things that are t…

>do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines?

If we want local, small, or niche businesses to exist.

>do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions?

If we want people to easily get a fair price when they want to buy or sell something.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#159
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's your point?

I wasn't really sure how to respond, it seemed obvious to me, so I put your question with the two comments into Claude. I genuinely think it gave a great response. I encourage you (or anybody) to try yourself next time, but here it is: The second person was essentially unpacking the phrase "the market" to reveal who it actually represents. Here are the top 3 interpretations of their point: 1. The market isn't a neutr…

Yes, it was clear that you wanted to refocus this as a moral problem of people. But that's irrelevant. The point of the guy above is that there is a system (the market) that creates certain incentives, and as a result, we have what we have. That's why I ask: what's your point? We still have all these problems.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're accused of opening short positions, then pumping and dumping to trigger the shorts. That's not arbitrage.

What? “Opening short positions then pumping and dumping to trigger the shorts” doesn’t make any sense at all. You’re saying they opened a position that profited if the price went down then they bought to raise the price

You’ve never heard of this strategy before? If i tried to explain it, I would do a poor job, it’s happened a lot, enough that it is forbidden on most regulated exchanges.

In this case they buy slowly to avoid artificially propping up the price, then sell all at once to artificially drop the price, only momentarily. They don’t have to cause the entire price drop through selling everything they acquired, they just have to move the price down enough to trigger stop loss orders that they know about.

With this strategy they can accumulate assets while also taking profits on the shorts. It’s the retail investors who put in market orders or stop loss orders that get taken for a ride.

In their role as market maker they have all the information needed to minimize the risk of this strategy.

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