Not a quant, but I have physics training and I’m very curious about stochastic calculus and finance.
Isn’t it implicit in a lot of the work? If you’re modelling volatility you’ll need the rigorous mathematics in the back of your mind while you do so to keep you on track.
Similarly, a webdev isn’t going to use fancy tree algorithms often… but they need to understand the DOM and its structure.
Yes it's behind everything a derivatives quant would do. But I think quite a long way behind. Closed form analytic solutions using calculus only exist for relatively simple models and products. Most of the time you use it to calibrate and discretise a model and afterwards it's all Monte Carlo. What's more you can often just look that part up as models are increasingly commoditised rather than secret sauce.
Stochastic calculus is required to derive closed formulas and approximations used to calibrate SDE models. Similarly to deep learning, the secret sauce lies in the training, less in the inference. The code used by banks is closed source, and the research papers are missing said secret sauce. Calibrating models in a production environment handling correlation, multi-curves, stochastic funding, discrete dividends, etc. is not a solved problem. Interest rate derivatives modeling heavily relies on change of measure, even when using simple models.
The comment above is probably from a bot. You do need an extensive understanding of stochastic calculus to maintain quant models code, let alone explain what it does to regulators.
Good point. On a serious note, I probably overreacted, sorry about that. I have been working as a derivatives quant for a decade and thought the claim that stochastic calculus was not used/useful was ridiculous.
How so? A human is more likely to use a hyphen, an AI an em dash. Same with quotes - a human is much more likely to use ", an AI “ and ”. Typography is a differentiating signal when it's used dis-proportionally more by one group than another.
Word processors (less of an issue for Internet comments, but worth keeping in mind) but more significantly iOS (at least) and I assume Android will just swap in an em dash where needed—it is automatic.
There is probably some signal, but be a good Bayesian; we have people saying “oh, this is a bot” when there’s a huge population of mobile users with smart keyboards that are the more likely cause.
Anyway, in general I find bot-hunting annoying. Comments should be handled as comments, if someone has made a bad argument, it should be taken down as a bad argument. If it was bot-generated, it is still there to mislead people. The advantage that bots have is that they have infinite patience and nothing better in their lives to do than argue, but there have always been people like that, so hopefully readers will be able to observe that persistence!=correctness.
I'm using a stock Android keyboard - it doesn't. Perhaps that's were our differing perspectives originate. I'm updating away from AI, and toward iPhone users.
EDIT: I plugged in my prior, hit rate and false alarm rates from before updating and found that my P(AI|fancy-em) = 0.09. After updating my false alarm rate, P(AI|fancy-em) now = 0.016.
People accusing comments they don’t agree with of being bots? Yes it has been happening for decades. Lots of folks are bad at arguing, so they make random accusations to distract from that fact.
Yes, it happens that some people create bots and have them post in these pages. They (some?) do not pass the "naïve Turing Test" though: there is one that tries to speak like an "inspiring lifecoach" and has zero juice squared. Check the shadowed posts around...
And on the other side, I have been accused a few times - writing outside expected canon (of form and content) can be sufficient.
So, bragging I will say, accusations hit both tails of the juice curve ;) .
There is already a Canadian company, Telesat, that’s been doing comms since 1969.
Unfortunately, like most things from Canada, there was never enough market for it to catch on. Maybe that will change now the US has unlocked the demand.
The UK is not Canada though. You have the House of Lords, we have a Senate. We are a (con)federation, and that adds a whole new political overlay that the UK doesn’t have.
The executive power of our PM relative to the body politik is much higher. We don’t have a tradition of backbench rebellion, and the PMO often wields more power than the cabinet.
I bought ocean fish roe from my local Euro store. “Product of Belarus” which is of course landlocked.
I thought it was highly suspicious when I noticed, like evasion of sanctions on Russia. However, food products aren’t covered by sanctions in Canada and apparently, the Belarus packaging is to make it easier to sell German fish in Russia!
I still wouldn’t want to buy food that is packaged with the intent to trick people, even if the tricksters were German. (I think Germany is a pretty trustworthy and transparent country but that doesn’t apply to every single individual there).
Yep. I ask LLMs the XY questions since they don’t get annoyed, and when my question is very concrete and reduced to its essence, I ask the search engine and usually get a better answer than the LLM would give me.
Basically, there’s a lot of good and specific information on the web, but not necessarily combined in the way I want. LLMs can help break apart my specific combination at a high level but struggle with the human ability to get to solutions quickly.
The current flavour of politics is not pragmatic. It’s a luxury belief system.
The left wing excesses of the 2010s were luxury beliefs, the current thing is all just luxury beliefs too.
Basically, when people are economically comfortable and have no real problems, they’ll blow something out of proportion or just plain invent issues in order to feel something.
I have luxury beliefs of my own, many people do. We are free to hold them in North America. But there’s a cost, and that cost shouldn’t be surprising.
The defense of this regime's economic strategy (particularly the market crash and looming economic hardships) is doing political horseshoe theory and entering Maoist territory with surprising speed.
"You'll be rich because we're so good with the economy" has raced over to "We've been rotting in decadent lifestyles, true strong patriots will be happy to sacrifice for the glory of the fatherland."
"Tons of people globally are screwing screws into iphones. We are going to bring those jobs here."
"Inexpensive goods from overseas aren't actually prosperity. You don't want these things."
"You probably didn't earn your job in the government anyway."
True decadence is looking at a society that is broadly functioning and deciding "we need a fight" and blowing it up just for some aggressive notion of dominance.
It’s an apt description of a perennial feature of politics. People have a pain in the foot, so they shoot a hole in it and complain about having a bullet wound.
More like: they are no longer starving, and can now tend to the pain in their foot.
I've heard similar versions of this argument, usually something about modern poor people having it pretty good because they have microwave, while Carnegie didn't.
>I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. [0]
We're now complaining about people studying painting, poetry, etc.
That Adams quote is nice, and has a similar historical flavour to some of Milton Friedman’s arguments.
That said, choosing a field of study only has the risk of bankrupting yourself.
The excesses of the 21st century, whether that’s blowing up the supply chains that got you out of stagflation, or injecting Maoist rhetoric into academia, will have a much larger and more destructive blowback.
This is the fallacy of composition. A party is made up of diverse independent groups who are demanding different things. When one of those groups gets "comfortable", it allows other groups to become (relatively) louder and steer the party toward their demands.
It's not all the same person, getting comfortable and making up problems.
This isn't the issue. What people choose to do in their personal lives should be accepted or at least tolerated, as long as it's not harming anyone.
> what bathroom they use
This is the problematic part. A male using the women's bathroom is committing a violation against women.
> etc.
This includes males in women's prisons, males in women's changing/locker rooms, males in women's sports. All of which are violations against women.
It isn't about "hating LGBT people" as you suggest, but about compelling males to respect women's and girls' boundaries.
For far too long, a subset of males have been getting away with not doing so, just because these males express a desire to be female. It's quite absurd that it's taken Trump of all people to attempt to rectify this. The political left should have reeled in their activists, who were promoting all this, a long time ago.
> This is the problematic part. A male using the women's bathroom is committing a violation against women
It's mostly men saying this [1]. (Specifically, uneducated men over the age of 50. Especially if they're conservative, Republican or attend weekly religious service.)
Traditional gender roles and stereotypes are part of the reason why some males end up desiring to be women, because they've confused female with feminine. There's nothing wrong with men wearing dresses or indeed any feminine clothing. But thinking this somehow transitions them into being women is ludicrous and sexist.
Ideally we'd be rid of these stereotypes. They're part of the problem.
> Yours, worried and authoritarian, focused on an imaginary moral panic propagated by reactionary Internet forums.
The authoritarian side is the one insisting that males who call themselves women actually are women, and punishing those who disagree. In some states it is actually illegal to have a female-only space. It has to be female plus any male who says he's a woman.
That's not liberty is it, certainly not for women who want or need spaces without any males present.
There are so many cases where this type of policy has demonstrably harmed women. At the most extreme end is males being incarcerated in women's prisons on this basis, who have then raped, sexually assaulted and even impregnated the women locked up with them.
This is the consequence of these "luxury beliefs" capturing institutions of the state.
It _could_ be that, too, but as it turns out, in this particular case, it was the scary scary transes (see their response elsewhere in the thread).
With people who go on about 'luxury beliefs', the belief that they're referring to is nearly always 'trans people are people', I assume because it's such a new coinage (it's only a few years old) and that was what the far-right were mostly scared of at the time.
You are the only one who brought up gender minorities, as well as the TERF I disagreed with.
Anyone wingbrained enough can have luxury beliefs, and I’m not immune.
For example, I previously supported a very liberal drug policy, and still do in many respects… though I realize it failed spectacularly in the fentanyl era and have had to live with the consequences of that.
Better than the alternative? Well, we aren’t ruining as many lives over cannabis…
> They've effectively destroyed the most progressive party from the inside, by having it push ludicrous and unpopular policy
I generally agree with this (as a mostly democratic leaning citizen)
> that privileges males and actively harms women and girls.
But was surprised to see it followed by this. Can you explain your logic here? Not disagreeing. But at a glance it seems to me that it's the rolling back of DEI policies that is privileging males and harming women and girls.
Maoist rhetoric and hyperpoliticization in academia, seeping out to the broader society.
Or in internet cultural terms tumblr/redditization of environments that should be intellectually neutral, because “it’s called being a good person sweatie”
I’m brown. I’m fine. This administration is at war with Americans who aren’t rich.
My taxes are being cut. I’m buying investment cropland on the cheap from idiots who voted for him to trash their livelihoods. They’re mostly white. But they’re not rich.
> you saying you are researching sellers' voting records, then buying the farms of the ones who voted for Trump?
I’m buying cropland from creditors. They can sell it because the farmers are behind on their loans. They’re failing to make payments because we’re in a trade war.
As an ethical limit, yes, I look up the property owner and have only been buying if they’re registered Republican. That doesn’t mean they voted for Trump. (Though they’re all in heavily Trump-voting precincts.) And I don’t think people should lose their farms just because of how they voted. But it does increase the chances I’m not profiting from someone who had nothing to do with a mess they found themselves in versus someone who sort of brought it on themselves.
I’m doing work that makes me money. It’s entirely orthogonal to my skin tone. My point is this administration isn’t helping poor white men, the folks who voted for him, he’s just advantaging those who were lucky enough to start this imperial transition with capital on hand.
Poor people get hurt most by wasteful belief systems. Sure the demographics might correlate positively or negatively with poverty, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s primarily economics.
After all, rich people can eat the extra $$$ imposed by tariffs. Maybe with grumbling… but, at a certain income level paying $5 vs $2 for a can of corn or soup won’t materially affect you, so you can use that extra $3 you paid to complain about immigration, or hierarchies or whatever.
Let’s say an individual posted identifying or incriminating information online, inadvertently or intentionally, in a public place.
Then a third party decides to store it, and possibly make it accessible to others.
If the original self doxxing user then pulled the original dox, but was unable to scrub the rest, would that information still be considered public, or would it be private? Was it ever truly public? Or private for that matter?
If you intentionally post something publicly, it's public. Full stop.
The tricky part is dealing with inadvertent or malicious (i.e. some other party), posting of private information to a public space. That's really hard to deal with on multiple levels.
For one, the archives would retain the information and scrubbing it is effectively impossible.
Secondly, legitimate things which should remain public (i.e. were posted publicly, are of public interest, etc.) can be argued to have been inadvertently or maliciously posted. So you need some way to moderate and create rulings for each individual case, which quickly becomes untenable due to the sheer volume of information being posted and the inordinate amount of time required to investigate vs. post.
In my head, I'm imagining someone early in the morning posting a flyer up on a bulletin board downtown.
Throughout the day many folks walked by and took photos of the flyer with their cell phone.
At the end of the day, the original person came back and removed the flyer.
IMO, at the time that the folks took the photo of the flyer, that flyer was public information. It remains public information even after the flyer is removed[0].
This isn't a great analogy of mine, and has plenty of holes, but was interesting to me after I read your comment. I know it was in the context of doxxing, but I think it's pretty interesting philosophically.
I think something similar applies to photos taken of other people in public spaces. Both the person who took the photo and the subject of the photo are no longer in that physical public space, but the actions took place within that space.
I think something similar applies to digital "public spaces". But what does a public space even mean in the context of walled gardens[1], etc.
[0] you then run into the question of what happens if someone posts non-public information, publicly?
[1] are digital walled garden communities that different from physical communities that gate access, whether free or paid. Whether information shared within those contexts are public or private is an interesting thread as well.
Isn’t it implicit in a lot of the work? If you’re modelling volatility you’ll need the rigorous mathematics in the back of your mind while you do so to keep you on track.
Similarly, a webdev isn’t going to use fancy tree algorithms often… but they need to understand the DOM and its structure.
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