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Side note but I do not like that font Reuters uses, it feels like it is mixed case with the different sized characters even when it isn't mixed case. It's messaging me like comic sans.
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I don't know, we hold other engineers responsible for the consequences of their work, personally I think the industry would be better off if we had more accountability for programmers.
But we don't hold the gun-industry accountable for mass-shootings. Maybe we should. But situation is a little bit similar here. The engineer created the gun. He didn't use the software to shoot people. Or maybe he did. The question is did he personally benefit from the change made more than his usual salary? Or think about people who build bridges. They just follow the orders they get from higher ups. Bridge collapse…
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People gatekeeping the word “engineer” is a bit annoying, since the word “engineer” dates to at least 1380 and originally just means someone who works on engines. “Engineer” as a legally super special class of job is a thing that came much later and only ever applied to certain jurisdictions anyway. “Software engineer” is just a synonym for “programmer”, in the actually existing practice of the English language.
And 'doctor' means someone with a PhD. I know a lot of doctors. However, when you talk about medicine, we mean 'Doctor' with an M.D. and they are literally held to higher standards of ethics and liability. They are licensed and people who practice professionally without a license are subject to legal ramifications. Call yourself whatever you want, but that doesn't mean you get to define what 'Engineers' are and what…
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It depends on the time, it's public after the fact, but not-public during the time gap where someone like Alameda could do front-running by managing to get in other transactions before the loser's orders get executed, or before any others get the chance to take that order.
Alameda was in general deeply incompetent. Front running your customers is not all that doable if you insist on using python.
That said they are being accused of something much less sophisticated. They were allowed to take money out when they made money but didn’t have to pay money in when they lost.
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> Crypto is flooded with liquidity so market making is like selling ice to an eskimo. This is not true at all, in general quoting in these markets is absurdly capital-intensive compared to tradfi. > These days a naive market making strategy in crypto just incinerates capital very reliably as the tiny bid ask spread is a small fraction of the adverse selection risk (whole spread moving past). They did probably make mo…
Of course sophisticated tradfi players are in crypto and have been for years making hand over fist in money. Source: I work at a firm that does this.
For example, it's surprising that big tradfi players were not able to prevent take-only basis arb bots written in Python running on a un-tuned VPS from printing five figures on individual new listings in mid 2021, or permitted us to click trade tokenized stock quarterly futures minutes from expiry for nearly guaranteed profit also in mid 2021.
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Ignorance of the law is never an excuse if you are found to be breaking the law. So if you think what you are doing is possibly in violation of the law you better bone up or ask a lawyer for a statement on letterhead that what you are doing is ok.
> Ignorance of the law is never an excuse if you are found to be breaking the law. That’s true, but ignorance of the facts often can be. “I didn’t know I was doing X” rather than “I didn’t know X was illegal”.
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> > Engineers are of course partly responsible for the things they implement. > That is outrageous. And this is why software engineering is a joke.
Engineers are responsible for strictly technical failures. When a piece of software does what a representative of company management asks for it hasn't failed. Software engineers are not lawyers and they are bad at interpreting laws.
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Alameda was in general deeply incompetent. Front running your customers is not all that doable if you insist on using python.
You don’t need speed to front run someone you need special access, which Alameda had. That said they are being accused of something much less sophisticated. They were allowed to take money out when they made money but didn’t have to pay money in when they lost.
The real problem behind all these crypto companies is the people who make the money have no concept of what "integrity" is. They aren't coming from a baseline assumption that their job is to protect and interests and the money of their clients. Traditional banks, for the most part, have DNA built around protecting customer interests and customer money. Crypto companies have none of that attitude - behind every one of…
On one of of my previous contracting gigs (about 20 years ago), for a very large, USA-based financial services company, the VP hired me for a full month (at consultants pay rate, 40 hrs a week) to investigate and track down a 1-cent discrepancy in $4,000,000,000 under assets for a particular division that differed between two reports by exactly 1 penny(one generated on the mainframe/cobol system, and one generated on a custom pc based system).
Turned out it was a rounding error in like the 8th decimal place on the mainframe side. I thought it was crazy at the time - but guess his thinking was there is no difference between being a penny off, or a million dollars off - you need to be able to account for every cent.
> Bankman-Fried had directed subordinates to update the software in mid-2020 to enable Alameda to maintain a negative balance on its account, the SEC complaint said. And thus do we have another piece of evidence for why morals and ethics matter, even for software developers. I doubt they'll end up with liability, but I do hope they at least recognize and think about how their actions enabled this whole mess.