Snacks

@jwmza 531 followers 236k views

JL @jwmza – 5 Aug '20

I was supposed to receive a new laptop today as my screen broke (this one was getting very old, anyways). No real surprise, FedEx fucked up the delivery so now I have to wait another 24h and hope nothing broke.

They also straight up lied on the tracker. Fun times.

On a related note, I love Amazon Prime now. Only recently started using it but it's fantastic. Much better service than FedEx.

JL @jwmza – 5 Aug '20

That last snack was a bit of a bruh moment in hindsight but whatever. Still up well over 400% overall. I don't have as good of an intuition over the current market narrative as I have had in recent months, but the long term picture is crystal clear. Just wish I had some more capital.

Also pretty bullish on $BTC at the moment.

JL @jwmza – 22 Jul '20

Lmao just bought more $TSLA at 3:56 PM before Q2 profitability was announced

JL @jwmza – 16 Jul '20

If you're young, you're $e^x$, your grandparents are $c\in\R$ and COVID is $(d/dx)$.

JL @jwmza – 16 Jul '20

One fun part about the modern internet is you can be in the news while it's being made. Twitter last evening was crazy.

JL @jwmza – 15 Jul '20

Taleb quote from fireside chat with Naval:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb – 14 Oct '18 at #BLOCKCON

‘Science is not about proving, science is about disproving and having something that has not been producing a result – that has not yet been disproved or superceded by something else. So, it's a process, not a result.

But science is minority rule, by the way. When someone tells you “300 Nobel Prize winners say this”, okay, it doesn't count, because one counterexample can destroy the whole argument. Consensus doesn't matter – the system is there to protect that minority, which is right, against the majority.’

JL @jwmza – 15 Jul '20

How cool is this thing?

Elon Musk @elonmusk – 15 Jul '20

Giga Berlin

JL @jwmza – 14 Jul '20

Considering two approaches to inline blocks in Polymath:

Firstly, “shorthand”, like `\int_a^bf(t)\,dt, and second, regular brackets like {x \int_a^b f(t)\,dt} – both of which would generate $\int_a^b f(t)\,dt$.

Shorthands will probably be custom user-defined, or ship with specialized versions. Should be noted that they terminate at the next whitespace, which is a limit compared to bracketed inline blocks.

E.g, you could define *bold, >kbd, _underline to give the equivalent of {b bold,} {k kbd}, {u underline}, rendering as bold, kbd, underline.

Why? I think this would help reduce non-content markup for specialized documents. If you're a mathematician or physicist or something like that, using 1 character per inline $\TeX$ is way faster and more source/render accurate than 3 characters.

JL @jwmza – 14 Jul '20

upload thoughts

Just wrote a script that runs Polymath to render my whole site into HTML/CSS/JS, uploads new articles & snacks to the cloud (except Polymath source code for the articles), and invalidates the CDN cache.

Costs me like $0.01 and saves me three minutes of time :) I'm about to run it again, so this snack will be up within 5 seconds of me writing it.

JL @jwmza – 14 Jul '20

In light of $TSLA going insane lately, I'd like to adjust my previous targets. I think fair value for the stock right now is around $3200 – however, I think the market has a laggy memory and will struggle to reach this short term. Expecting >$2000 within the next month if Elon announces a Q2 profit, otherwise, probably a return to the ~$1200 area.

If Q2 was in fact profitable, there's a good chance Tesla will join the S&P 500. If we do, there will be an almost guaranteed heavy rally as trillions of dollars are rebalanced to fit $TSLA into index funds and ETFs. If that happens, there will almost definitely be the largest short squeeze in history – over $20 billion today in short interest, which may mean something like $25-$35 billion dollars loss for shorts after the post-earnings rally.

The stock could potentially shoot at high as the $3000s, but don't count on it. I'm expecting $2000s, with a small probability of $1000s and $3000s.

JL @jwmza – Jun 30

In life, the things we tell ourselves we want to do and the things we really want to do are two completely separate categories.

Our narrating self tells a heroic tale of our life, while our animal brain (who is really in charge) goes and wreaks havoc.

This is why people are so perplexed (sometimes) at why they seem to be their own worst enemy, undermining their own grand plans, maintaining bad habits etc..

Who you think you are is really a servant to your animal brain. If you exert a lot of power, you can flip this temporarily.

JL @jwmza – Jun 27

I wish that I could comfortably bookmark an important tweet I want to keep instead of screenshotting it, but I don't trust Twitter to not delete them. Censorship sucks. :(

JL @jwmza – Jun 27

The only reason fiat currency has value is because you must pay your taxes in them.

The only reason tax rates are so high is to maintain the value of the fiat currency, which allows banks/govts to print valuable money for free. The government doesn't even need your tax money.

The past few months have shown this. They can print arbitrary amounts of money with pretty much no repercussions.

JL @jwmza – Jun 26

Everything in life is basically about time.
Time is what you want most from other people, fundamentally.
Time is what you care about.
You have so much of it, but you waste most of it.
All money really does is buy other people's time.
The goal is healthy immortality.

JL @jwmza – Jun 25

It is orders of magnitude more difficult to manufacture a machine than to design/prototype it.

Mass production is an undervalued trench in today's markets, even though it's been around. Automation is far less prevalent than one might expect. There is plenty left to automate.

JL @jwmza – Jun 18

What really annoys me is people who see things in binary. Shit like "we have 6 months to save the world from a climate crisis" or "your brain stops developing at 25".

Nothing in the natural world happens suddenly. Everything is gradual, everything is continuous. There is no 1&0

With regards to the climate: we have already caused permanent damage - this was already true centuries ago. Each day the damage is a little worse or a little better than before. There will never be a single moment where we have won or lost this war. We will never be fucked/saved.

This has broader implications in your personal life. Nothing is ever really too late or too early. You can get fit at any time in your life, over any time frame. You can get wealthy at any time. You can get happy at any time. Anyone. There is no black and white in the real world.

JL @jwmza – Jun 18

As much as I think Nikola is a stupid company, it would be dope if Tesla acquired them and the merged company was called Nikola Tesla $NKTS

JL @jwmza – Jun 16

Idea: instead of democracy (1 vote / 1 head) or corporate governance (1 vote / 1 dollar), what if a country was controlled by tax (1 vote / 1 dollar in tax paid)

By the way I'm not saying this is a good idea but I'm interested in how effective it could be

JL @jwmza – Jun 15

Food $500
Internet $100
Rent $1800
Domain names $17,500
Utility $50

someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

JL @jwmza – May 31

Endeavor

Take the leap. Dare to go further. When you push yourself forward into that great deep abyss, the frontier that is the future, you bring us all along for the ride. We must never let go of that pioneering nature that is so uniquely human.

JL @jwmza – May 30

The reason why qualitative properties of a physical system are often not predicate on its reductionist model is that they are generate of your subjective experience thereof, not well-defined properties inherent to the system or systems in general: qualia, only loosely common.

JL @jwmza – May 29

Fellow $TSLA shareholders, please no paid advertising. Foolish way to spend money. Let's not undermine the advantage we've been building for the last decade.

Paid advertising and dividends are the worst ideas for a modern automaker, and why Ford & GM are fucked. Stay focused.

Our customer base is a far more powerful advocate of our products and brand than any advertiser ever could be, and we get it for free as a consequence of investing income in improving product, NOT buying clicks.

This should be obvious, but apparently, it is not. Sad to see.

JL @jwmza – May 28

Greta Thunberg is a great example of the dangers of ignorance in celebrities and activists.

From what I see, she is a great person - genuinely passionate about defending a world she feels is under attack. However, her lack of technical knowledge is already causing real damage.

Activists like her who do not have a sufficient understanding of the complexities of human society, energy technology, etc. mean well, but have created a world where a large chunk of the global population irrationally fears nuclear energy, the safest, and cleanest source we have.

To expand on this: we have, in the last several decades, already lost what amounts to millions of innocent lives and irreparable damage to the ecosystem due to the societal friction against nuclear power.

We could have been globally carbon neutral decades ago, but we fucked up.

I think @ShellenbergerMD serves as a great role model here: he did the same thing in his youth, but now has a much stronger understanding of reality and is today one of the leading voices in espousing realistic climate progress and nuclear energy, the *only* long term solution.

In conclusion, we should be extremely careful about empowering the voices of young activists. Some of the smartest & most capable people are very young, but we can't allow people with a flawed understanding of technology to fuck up the world by accident.

Ignorance is dangerous.

JL @jwmza – Apr 29

We should call people who support the lockdown “pro-life” and people who want to end the lockdown “pro-choice”