Sortino ratio: a measure of risk-adjusted return; basically how much more return per unit of downside risk
On AI hallucinations:
OpenAI’s technologies had the lowest rate, around 3 percent. Systems from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, hovered around 5 percent. The Claude 2 system offered by Anthropic, an OpenAI rival also based in San Francisco, topped 8 percent. A Google system, Palm chat, had the highest rate at 27 percent.
Some David Goggins quotes from his appearance on Joe Rogan:
-I don’t like doing ’em so I gotta do ’em. That’s my life
-I wanna be uncommon among uncommon people
-There’s no trophy on the mantle… there’s a trophy on my fucking brain
-Most people quit at 40%
-Through work ethic I developed self esteem
What is gradient descent:
Algorithm for finding local minimum of a function
Opposite is gradient ascent
Used in machine learning to minimize cost / loss function
“The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant”
Only cement and steel are manufactured more widely than plastic, and 22% of plastic evades waste management systems, ending up in uncontrolled dumpsites or lost directly into the environment
There is no such thing as medicine that is not also poison (the Greek word “pharmakon” means “drug” and “poison”). There is no such thing as virtue that is not also vice (and vice versa)
Gendarme = gens d’armes (men at arms)
Maddi’s definition of what it means to be good at stress—the courage to grow from stress—is still my favorite description of resilience. To be good at stress is not to avoid stress, but to play an active role in how stress transforms you.
Aliyah: immigration of diaspora Jews back to Palestine / Land of Israel
The First Aliyah — aka agriculture Aliyah — a major wave of Jewish immigration to Ottoman Syria between 1881 and 1903
Your best decisions come from stillness. Stillness is amplified in nature & meditation.
The Ethernet design was inspired by the Additive Links On-line Hawaii Area network (ALOHAnet), a radio-based system at the University of Hawai’i. Computers transmitted packets, prefaced by the addresses of the recipients, over a shared channel as soon as they had information to send. If two messages collided, the computers that had sent them would wait a random interval and try again.
Japanese does not allow any syllables ending with a consonant with the exception of /n/ (ン). English has thousands of words ending with consonants like cat, look and ship but they are simply unpronounceable in the Japanese phonological universe
Complex syllables like strength, sixth and clothes are even more unpronounceable for Japanese speakers because the Japanese phonology doesn’t permit two or more consonants to be squeezed together. The English /th/ sound is totally impermissible in Japanese — in fact, in most human languages 3 — and therefore needs to be replaced with the closest Japanese sound /s/ as in surī (スリー) “three.”
A study from the 1990s showed that over 35% of all vocabulary printed in 70 Japanese magazines were foreign loanwords, most of them being of English origin. A 2010 book about wasei eigo (Japan-made English) also indicated that Japanese people use 3,000 – 5,000 loanwords in daily conversations, and 94% of them are of English origin
Mouthwash is the biggest dental scam. Kills your oral microbiota. Avoid
Patriot (whichever PR man thought up that name should be getting a million bucks a year) missiles intercepting evil Scud (ditto for that PR man) missiles.
Good bye is contraction of god be with ye
“If you don’t accept excuses you wind up in much better places”
I was at Goldman when they did the GSCI. Now everyone things of Commodities as an asset class. In the 90’s I was very active in emerging markets. Now everything thinks of EM as an asset class. Blockchain will be just like that. The existence of an ETF is a very important step in becoming an asset class. Once an ETF exists, if you don’t have exposure, you’re effectively short.
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The SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) ($54.6bn) and iShares Gold Trust (IAU) ($25.3bn) represent almost 90% of the US gold ETF value, with no other competitor over $10bn.
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The table below shows these cycles. The rhythm is amazingly steady. The rallies are within 23 days of the 1,076-day average bull market (2.95 years). Same tightness on the downside – bear markets end within 24 days of the 382-day average (1.05 years).
Writing is the fastest way to growth hack your understanding of anything
Over the past 5 yrs, the return of a 4x levered gold position would be like Bitcoin.