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whyisthisinteresting
The Monday Media Diet with Margaux Black

finance is ultimately just a mirror for human behavior and sociology anyway. It’s worth paying attention to. Also, more fiction!!! I will die on this hill. The more widely you read across fiction, the better you actually understand culture, history, and people.

— Margaux Black
1h ago

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.

11h ago

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Most investors underestimate how much their early portfolio habits — the things they barely notice doing — compound into the architecture of their entire financial life.

13h ago

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

13h ago

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

13h ago
honest-broker.com
How I Became the Honest Broker

Their influence and power is built solely on a reputation for straight talk and trustworthy dealings. "They are true brokers, intermediaries between others. They aren't going to participate in your deal, no matter what it is. They are go-betweens, really. But do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage."

19h ago
noahpinion.blog
Slopulism is taking over America

Once people decide that technocrats, elites, experts, and gatekeepers aren't worth listening to, they become vulnerable to all sorts of policy scams. Slopulism that arises out of pure ignorance is very hard to correct, and social media — which elevates the dumbest and loudest at the expense of the most well-informed — probably makes it harder. But when slopulist ideas are being promoted by smart people with ulterior motives, it can be a lot harder to wake the populace up.

1d ago

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. But habit itself is not merely repetition — it is the slow carving of character, the way water shapes stone not by force but by persistence.

1d ago
themarginalian.org
Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die.

1d ago

A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price. The market is there to serve you, not to instruct you.

1d ago

The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.

1d ago

Most people think of risk as the probability of losing money. But the real risk is that you'll be forced to sell at the wrong time — that circumstances, not judgment, will determine your outcome. Volatility is only dangerous if it can compel you to act.

1d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Saturday Selection, Vol. 115

Fourteen layers of advice from fourteen years of watching where the bodies are buried, from the founder of Skift.

1d ago

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them.

2d ago

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death. But they are in fact constantly renewed, and the great events of our lives happen again and again.

2d ago

The best investment you can make is in businesses you understand, and the second-best is in your own ability to understand more businesses. Most investors do neither — they buy what's rising and call it research.

2d ago

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

2d ago
jefftweedy
Bizarre Love Triangle (New Order cover)

I think part of it was an unwillingness to let go of that joke. And I think that's probably my only valid excuse other than obstinacy and overthinking.

2d ago
notboring.co
Weekly Dose of Optimism #204

Its bet is that studying how humans engage with robots produces both better interfaces and possibly a different kind of robotic brain. The public robots.online experiment lets users try text, audio, demonstrations, and other interaction patterns while the company observes how people naturally attempt to get machines to do things.

2d ago
ai-supremacy.com
The Genius of Leopold Aschenbrenner

He essentially turned $200 million into $45 billion in two years, given back in a month and I'm not even clear what's left or what's next.

2d ago
ftav
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone

He made for them a lot of money absurdly quickly and, on the first drawdown, took the pratfall himself. There's not much new information here. It's just a reminder that when it comes to allocating risk, the best investors are the ones you'll never hear of.

3d ago

The universe is a series of collapsed probabilities. What we call history is merely the thread that happened to hold — and we mistake the thread for the loom.

3d ago

You have to be willing to look wrong for a long time before you look right. The market has no obligation to validate your thesis on your schedule.

3d ago

It is a very hard undertaking to seek to please everybody; and I think it wiser to content a few, and let the multitude go whistle for what they get from me.

3d ago

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.

3d ago
platformer.news
This AI notetaker won't sell surveillance to your boss

"If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we want to build towards," Pedregal said.

3d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Wildberries Edition

When a Wildberries warehouse burns, thousands of sellers lose inventory and take to the internet to complain, while the company — debt-laden and with razor-thin margins — threatens to further collapse Russia's economy. This concentration of value is now a feature of modern commerce. It is also not a vulnerability unique to Russia.

3d ago
honest-broker.com
Mark Zuckerberg's Empire Is Now Crumbling

Zuckerberg used the occasion to publish a bizarre opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal—proclaiming himself as a champion of human potential and an opponent of centralized power. This is the same guy who laid off 8,000 employees a few days ago, and is building a data center as large as Manhattan. By the way, Zuckerberg himself can't be fired—because he limits the voting rights of most shareholders.

3d ago
ai-supremacy.com
AI & Robotics enters Escalating U.S. Protectionism Phase

The Trump Administration is also deliberating whether to ban Chinese open-weight models. The U.S. Department of Commerce rolled out sweeping initial export controls banning the sale of top-tier AI accelerators (AI Chips) starting in October, 2022. After almost four years later how did that turn out?

4d ago
noahpinion.blog
Why did South Korean stocks just crash?

There are probably two stories regarding why this happened — one about fundamentals, and another about finance. In fact, this is typical for bubbles and crashes, not just in stocks but in every asset class. There's almost always some kind of connection to fundamentals — some story about how we're in a new economy, followed by doubts about whether that story is really true, and so on. But the big market movements are almost always accelerated by purely financial factors — "noise traders" armed with piles of excess cash, opportunistic speculators looking to ride the wave of sentiment, and so on.

4d ago

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swatter.

4d ago

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean. You will never produce a superior performance unless you do something different from the majority — and that is harder than it sounds, because the majority is usually wrong about enough things to be dangerous, but right about enough things to be seductive.

4d ago

It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats. And yet we always speak of the horse.

4d ago

The biggest risk of all is not taking one. Growth and comfort do not coexist. Every time I see a company protecting its core business rather than cannibalizing it, I know a competitor will do it for them—and far less gently.

4d ago
dwarkesh.com
Why compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming years

If a true human-level software engineer that could run on an H100 equivalent, at current market rates for software engineers, that H100 should rent for over $250k a year. That's 15x today's spot prices. Of course you might expect that if we have 10 million extra software engineers, the marginal value of a software engineer would decrease and so that H100 wouldn't necessarily be able to produce 15 more revenue than it currently does. But I actually don't know if that's true.

4d ago

We are reluctant to acknowledge the full scope of what we owe to luck, because our vanity rebels against the suggestion that our qualities cannot by themselves have produced our good fortune. It is hard to endure the thought that someone else might equally well have done what we have done.

5d ago

Invert, always invert. Many hard problems are best solved when you turn them around in reverse. It is not enough to think about what you want — think equally hard about what you want to avoid, and you will find that removing stupidity is often more valuable than adding brilliance.

5d ago

We are apt to think that our ideas and feelings are our own, and feel a sort of pride in them; but these we have been long accumulating, borrowing, stealing from the great store of the world's knowledge, and they are really the outcome of thousands of years of thought.

5d ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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