100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
Dude, I've never worked in quant finance. The use of "pedigree" was just short hand for "You should probably have at least an MS in Quant Finance from Baruch / Princeton / Etc. if not a PhD in something applied math related." It had nothing to do with, like, bloodlines. Chill, Bro.
but I seem at least as intelligent and I know more of the math relevant to the topic than them.
Prove it. Solve hard math problems and post your process for doing so online. Start a blog. Push to github. Do something. What else are you asking for? That the hiring managers at quant funds call you up unprompted and ask you politely to show them how smart you are?
So in an efficient market, there should be a job for me.
Stop whining. Understand the world for what it is, not for how you think it should be. These jobs are heavily PEDIGREE and NETWORK driven. You don't have the pedigree, that's fine. Go network. Asking strangers on the internet for advice even netted you free advice - and you 'sperged out about how "there should be a job for me and my smart me brain."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
How do you get boomer conservatives to do something about this? Why do they just lay down and take it?
The answer is that they've defected to college football.
While the superbowl halftime show was ... what it was ... Fernando Mendoza was THE darling of this year's College Football season. He's a devout Christian who talks like a Corporate PR executive. He has a Linkedin with the following lede for his bio (I am not making this up);
Process-driven and detail-oriented leader studying Business Administration at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business after graduating from UC Berkeley in three years. As a quarterback for Indiana Football, I apply a strong foundation in leadership, time management, and communication to excel both on and off the field.
"I apply time management principles to going 16-0 and stomping the shit out of elite CFB programs" is fucking epic hypernormie conservative slop. God bless this man.
More broadly, the centers of gravity for college football are still the deep south and the midwest. No New York team is anywhere near good. The California teams used to be much more formidable but due to cheating scandals and awful management at the conference level, they've fallen off. Thus, the "coast PMC" influence on college football is muted while the boomercon influence of the old confederacy and the corn-fed midwestern plains is boosted.
What's to stop college football from NFL-ifying? Well, sadly, less and less. Up until the last few years, you couldn't pay players. Athletes would pick schools based on the likelihood of winning a national championship and eventually getting drafted into the NFL. Since that rule has been changed, there's been quite the upheaval. You now have players transferring two, three, four or more times to various schools based on incentive packages. Recently, Duke university (as well as several other schools) have even sued some of their own players who have tried to transfer for breach of contract. It really is bad for college football. Still, college football teams aren't "owned" the way NFL teams are.
NFL teams have ownership in exactly the same way that companies have ownership. This is because every NFL team is pretty much a for profit company (the Greenbay Packers are weird but function the same out of necessity). The NFL owners absolutely control the league. Their interests are first, foremost, and final. The commissioner, currently Roger Goodell, makes far more than almost every player in the NFL because he has learned that keeping the owners happy is his best move. And the best way to keep the owners happy is to make a shit load of money for them.
In the past ten years, the average valuation of an NFL franchise has doubled. In no small part, this is because of Goodell's efforts to market and merchandise the league, length the schedule, and, importantly, have the NFL dominate viewership rankings. There is now an entire media and marketing team inside the NFL dedicated to expanding female viewership. Remember, the league has zero female players and zero female head coaches. The much covered relationship between Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chief's Tight End, Travis Kelce, was seen, by many, to be a deliberate PR orchestration to drive female viewership.
The next market frontier is with spanish speakers. There have been one or two regular season games in Mexico for many years. In fact the highest scoring regular season game in NFL history was supposed to be played in Mexico but was moved to Los Angeles after it was determined that the field had been maintained by a bunch of damn Mexicans. The NFL has now scheduled games in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.
The point is that the NFL is a full fledged market and responds to incentives just like any other market. There is no loyalty, there is no tradition, there is profit and there is loss.
College football, at the FBS level (the highest), still supports 130 teams (the NFL is 32). Some of these programs have been around since the 19th century. Being - for now, at least - still associated with colleges and universities, there is a strong sense of tradition, place, and rootedness in the teams themselves if not the players. While money is absolutely a concern in college football, it is much more of an imperfect and in fact inefficient market. Will it inevitably crumble to market forces as money floods into it? Time will tell.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
I'd say it's a mix of:
- Normal female social intelligence gathering. Gossip is a thing, and a female coded thing, because having knowledge of relationships is still necessary for survival in a woman's world.
- A bit of covert resistance from the mother. If mild goofy teasing causes you to back away from a would-be girlfriend, you weren't really committed in the first place. Mom wants to know if this is "for real."
- Social interaction ability decay. Everyone is "cool" in the teens, 20s, to early 30s relative to the stuffy olds in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. Then, one day, you're not cool anymore until the trends circle back around and you're in again. People who were born in the early 60s, and came of age in the 80s, are loving fashion and aesthetic life again right now. Nevertheless, I have a theory that people get "stuck" in a social interaction mode at some point in their life. It's case by case. Some people never make it past 16. A lot of PMC types top out at around 28 years old. For Moms, they may be genuinely trying to relate to their sons, but are doing it in using the social tools that they stopped sharpening years ago. So what used to have been actually allowed teasing and indirect probing has now devolved to a cringey and ham fisted embarrassment avalanche. TLDR; I'm not like a regular mom, I'm a cool mom
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
I have a lot of thoughts about it.
Do share!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
I genuinely find Bad Bunny's stuff to be weirdly totally inoffensive elevator music.
Enjoy these "inoffensive" lyrics from Safaera, the third song Mr. Rabbit performed last night
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
For top end quant stuff, you kind of need the pedigree. But the backdoor option is still good. It may take some networking, but there are a lot of "support" roles for the quants themselves that are still highly technical. In my own lived experience I saw a lot of large scale infrastructure dudes get recruited by quant firms to help manage clusters that included specialty hardware (think high throughput I/O and memory caches). They weren't making crazy bonuses s like the quant strategists / implementers, but they were competitive with FAANG peers at cash plus level.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
I'm also now realizing that if you transported, say, James H. Hammond to 2026, he'd view the halftime show and remark, "A-ha, just as I suspected! These mulattoes are full of whimsy and joy at their condition! Look how they dance about the cane fields, indulging their naturally libidinous inclinations. Why, in any other method of employ, they would find the routine stifling and quickly succumb to melancholy!"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
as well as many hours into Factorio.
Serious take: This makes you a better developer.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
See: Austrlian men sheds.
The attempt was earnest, but the fact that it's now a charitable organization so that it can take government money means it's been backdoored into female-centric Statism. Oh well.
Building a shed with your buddies is still a great idea. Just don't get the government's permission to "do it correctly"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
like drug addicted alcoholic bums but not as sympathetic.
It's funny, but, some of the greatest authors of all time realized this way before computers, let alone AI. Bukowski was notorious for more or less believing that to be a true artist, you had to be a sort of social vagabond. Any attempt at real genteelness would pollute the pure art. Spengler wrote The Decline of the West in poverty and Eric Hoffer lived in a one room apartment near Chinatown, San Francisco, for decades.
If we hit vertical takeoff and the knee jerk response is a kind of poverty level AGI, we could maybe get a renaissance of true art and philosophy. That or sex robots
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
I do not believe that LLMs can adequately program, but ultimately it won't matter what I think.
I don't think this claim has much shelf life left <-- this is a link.
It (AI) built a C compiler.
I am more than happy to list the caveats;
- there was a lot of upfront context development
- There's a rigorous test library for what "success" looks like for this particular projet
- Anthropic and independent evaluators admit it is not as performant as gcc.
But, still, it wrote a freaking c compiler! This is a programming task that is out of the reach of 90% of engineers over their entire career. It did it for about $20k (and the cost of labor to write the context) in two weeks.
I wrote an article last week about how even I think that LLMs aren't ready to refactor big legacy code bases. The recent brouhaha over Clawdbot / Moltbook also show how dangerous these things can be in the hands of people who don't know / don't care about basic security management.
But the generalized claim that "ai can't write code" is just this side of "embarrassingly false." When you then consider the pace of progress, it really seems like cope. Two years ago, LLMs would make basic syntax errors in print statements. Today, they can write fully functional programs - albeit probably bloated and often security unacceptable - with ~30 minutes of prompting and system design blueprint work.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
That was my point.
The internet means whatever your career specialization is is not longer geographically bounded.
This means we can create communities of varied occupations / occupational classes where the focus and emphasis is on the strength of that community.
Instead, as @atelier's parent comment points out, we self-segregate into enclaves of rough career equivalence; suburbs full of striver type PMC jobs, wealthy neighborhoods full of lawyers / bankers / executive types.
To be fair, this is a complex system - housing costs and class based behavioral patterns also matter. The point is that the global flexibility that the internet should've allowed got inverted so that being in tech and not living in SF/NYC/Boston and a handful of other places means you work in tech but aren't in the right tech circles.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
I hadn't seen that. The large bodega facade, nonetheless, did contribute to the feeling that this was "a salute to poverty!"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
My deep regret is that the Internet didn't let us establish specialist networks over wide geographic areas that let us stay in villages for social lives while teaming up globally for productivity. Instead we tried to turn the globe into our village which is making everyone miserable.
Hemingway levels of economy of words. Blown away by how much weight this comment holds (seriously).
I'm a remote work maximalist for this reason. There are certain companies, including new startups, that have hardcore work in person requirements. Monday to Friday, no exceptions. Not only will these places fail to attract and keep high level talent, they're literally contributing to social malaise and atomization. This isn't their intent, per se, so I stop short of assigning moral culpability here. But their anti-social and anti-family negligence is profound.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
You're not wrong. There was some subtext here.
The Amish, and anyone who's actually grown up in an agrarian society, are acclimated to that life. I was suggesting that the idea that your average western worker, who is used to air conditioning and seating, would, if forced to revert to agricultural work, face a horrific transition period.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
An interesting comparison is the half time show from 2022. This was the one with Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and a variety of other Hip Hop acts. It was, in fact, the first half time show to be centered on Hip Hop (you had had hip hop artists make appearances at previous show but all of them had retain rock or pop at their core.)
2022's show had scantily clad women gyrating and being otherwise suggestive. Much of the coreography is the wildly over-the top "look at me" motions of modern Afro American "dance." I suppose I am still struggling to acquire the taste. This has been commonplace in half time shows for a long time now.
The "gangster" image of Snoop and Dre has been continually watered down over the years. Snoop, famously, co-hosted a cooking show with a post prison Martha Stewart. Your mom probably, now, thinks "Snoop is a hoot!" Perhaps the only somewhat controversial portion was when some new rapper who's name I don't know perform his set within a church-like setting. Even then, fairly light. Most of the show centered on a kind of weird "house" that allowed Snoop, Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent to move between levels. The imagery was actually somewhat minimal - people dancing, some cars, whatever. It actually was "about the music." It just depended on if you liked the music.
2022's show didn't scare the hos. Many an eye was probably rolled and I can assume that the housewives of places like Omaha, Sioux Falls, Fort Collins, Topeka, Springfield (MO), Duluth, Spokane, and Provo may have used the half time show's duration to get a jumpstart on dishes or something. A gentle shrug. Those who likes 22's show loved it - it won the emmy for best live performance that year.
2026 is a different story.
Watching the damn thing provoked a totally unexpected lever of anger in me. If a dissident-right schizo blogger posted an imaginary Super Bowl half time show that was a faithful description of the Bad Bunny show, I would've thought to myself "Sure, right, sure ... they're actually going to do the whole thing in Spanish to a shitty raggaeton beat and pretend to fuck in the middle of a plantation while waving the Puerto Rican flag in conquering triumph"
Well, that's exactly what happened. They didn't just scare the hos, they made them (me) mad.
First, totally in spanish? The two quarterbacks in the game are some of the whitest white dudes ever. You're playing in San Francisco where, despite it's nomenclature, you're more likely to hear mandarin than Spanish anywhere outside of the Mission and possibly Oakland. It's February, black history month. Black Americans, generally, use English in their day-to-day. Finally, it's Football. Not Futbol, but Football, which is the game that best exemplifies American excess, hyper-competitiveness, ruthless capitalist competition, the last remnants of chauvinistic masculinity, and fetishized violence. Why the hell are you doing the whole thing in spanish? A bi-lingual "salute to unity" sure, whatever. But the monolinguistic exclusivity of the thing throughout was perhaps the intransigent signal of replacement over integration.
To drive the point home, towards the conclusion of the show, Bad Bunny pops up with the Puerto Rican flag over one shoulder. It's not that they're hoisting the flag of triumph over a deracinated, cucked, and conquered land, it's that they're celebrating their heritage on the land of a conquered, cucked, and deracinated people. There's a difference, don't you see.
But the part that actually got to me the most was the plantation imagery. Not because of any sort of recapitulation of slavery or classim, but because of the bizarre romance around manual agricultural work. Such work was the occupation of 95% of humanity for 95% of human history. And it sucked. It was indescribably awful. "Working the fields" is about as romantic as losing most of your teeth by 35 because of poor nutrition. You wouldn't finish a day in the sugar cane fields to come home and suggestively dance with your amor because you'd be too tired and, possibly, injured to do much more than eat and fall asleep. At some point you'd probably get kicked, gored, bitten, or trampled by livestock. Fingers, toes, and perhaps an eye would be cleaved from you via a sharp edged mishap. One bad season could mean permanent poverty and, perhaps, starvation deaths for the weaker in your family / community.
This is not shit we should be idealizing. None of this was fun.
Beyond the replacement theme - which was appalling apparent throughout - this was also a "show" about "degrowth" or, more accurately, a voluntary return to mass poverty and ill health. But, hey, at least I can rut in the sugar cane fields like the other animals around me.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
Want to fly farther?
Get that dick up, king <-- This is a link.
TLDR;
Ski jumpers, ahead of the winter Olympics (which begin, officially, today!) have, allegedly, been inflating their penises via various methods in order to expand the surface area of their ski jumping suits during official fitting.
After they've de-cocked, so to speak, the extra suit material acts as a small "sail" and they stay aloft just a bit longer.
Anything for an edge, I guess. This leaves me to mourn mostly for whichever ski jumper is legitimately packing a howitzer downstairs. That poor fellow will probably have a room full of scrutinizing IOC eyeballs on his Johnson.
Any other good sports cheating stories like this?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
Regarding deprogramming, I think it happens across generations as opposed to one group of people actually getting deprogrammed.
My Dad, mostly due to dating my Mom, dabbled in Hippy-ism in the early 70s. Long hair, Grateful dead concerts. That sort of thing.
By the time they had their first child, Dad had a typical corporate haircut, wore suits to work everyday, and smashed that like button for Reagan in the next election. He didn't deprogram so much as reverted to what he was. The dabbling was just that, dabbling.
But they still send christmas cards to at least two hardcore hippies. One still does the "ride your bike naked" around either Portland or Seattle (I forget which one) each spring. I don't know if his "employment" history is either of a) existant or b) not mostly illegal. That dude is never going to deprogram. Trump isn't on his radar because he still hasn't gotten over Nixon.
And his son is an aerospace engineer. With a crew cut. I've never met him, but Dad says that he and his father are estranged (my Dad and the hippy still catch up over zoom a few times per year).
It doesn't take much of a logical leap to think that the son grew up in a kind of fucked household because his Dad was so down with the cause. His, the son's, reaction was to, I'd bet, follow that straight and narrow path, work hard, and find a way to make some money. I'd wager he's probably half MAGA and half techno-futurist.
You see this more broadly with Gen-Z. While some of them are indeed "dinergoths" (See other top level post from this week's thread), you also have Gen-Z gym bro's who openly say "retard" and "faggot" to one another and don't care if they get tut-tutted by their post-woke classmates.
That's how deprogramming happens. I think the hard problem across generations, however, still has to do with male-female social and political relationships. That's a true capital-C Culture War which is upstream of politics and political LARPing.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
So, to save one's soul, the option would be to become a literal monk. If you have a family ... move to outside the monastery and live as survivalists? Not trying to be hyperbolic or sarcastic here. It just seems like the stakes are high in your model.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Fair and good reasoning. I commend your internal consistency.
So, again, genuine question, what do you see as the end state of capitalism?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Or would you prefer a method far more biased and value driven?
Yes, absolutely.
I'm getting the sense that what you're advocating for a kind of State management system that relies heavily on empiricism for governing. I think this is incredibly foolish advocacy for technocracy and a kind of political Scientific Management.
On the hard problem side of things, this fails because of complexity. Society, a large economy, the legal system etc. simply interact too dynamically and in too complex of a network for any central authority to effectively model the current state of things. Let alone the idea of being able to create policy and accurately predict it's outcomes. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Social Security began as a well intentioned program to help out the poor elderly. It has metastasized to be an intergenerational grift. There are simply too many variables changing too often and interacting in non-obvious ways to able to come close to accurate modeling. When the State tries to do this, not only does it fail at its own stated goals, it often actively harms its own citizens, albeit in subtle ways.
This is why I want a state that is 100% value driven based on deontological principles. The original American Constitution is a great start, but was gradually altered by amendments and fundamentally corrupted by the 14th. It isn't a very long or complicated document and has little to nothing prescriptive to say.
but it is the least arbitrary and most self-correcting method available for grounding state action in basic reality
I don't disagree with the logic of this statement, I just think it's impossible to implement. History is full of governments of various kinds saying, "no, this time it's different. We're going to be able to run the country based on hard facts and data." Number one, they can't in a very functional sense. Number 2, all decisions are at some level value based decisions. Humans can override their own hardwired instincts for self-preservation in extreme circumstances (family protection, self-sacrifice in combat, heroic deeds even beyond those two).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
There are counterexamples, right? To be sure, they're small scale and niche - mostly traditional religious communities. I'll be specific here in that I do not mean the loudest groups (i.e. evangelicals) but those with the strongest and deepest tradition - Amish, Traditional Catholic, Orthodox, Haredi Jews.
I guess the counter to the counter here is that these groups are often not exactly capitalist and are also often somewhat techno-skeptic.
Curious your thoughts on that
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
Find me the engineer with hair long enough to bun in this photo.
I rue the day that a short sleeved button down shirt + dark tie became code for "McDonald's manager" instead of "NASA meat eater that shoots his load at the moon"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
you'd get handmade zines
I've now updated by odds of this being a troll post to >50%. Well done if you got me. If not, best of luck.
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