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alpark3

403 karma · joined May 15, 2022

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alpark3··on Jane Street barred from Indian markets as regulator freezes $566M
You're thinking of Optiver's The Hammer, though every HFT firm has basically done or is doing something like this. [1]

Jane Street's version of this was absolutely intentional.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/high-frequency-trad...

alpark3··on How to Leave the House
> Since puppies turn into full grown dogs quite quickly, how often do you suggest I replace the puppy?

You must complete the mission before the puppy becomes a dog. Otherwise you must wait 14 years until you can get another puppy.

alpark3··on Qwen3: Think deeper, act faster
The pattern I've noticed with a lot of open source LLMs is that they generally tend to underperform the level that their benchmarks say they should be at.

I haven't tried this model yet and am not in a position to for a couple days, and am wondering if anyone feels that with these.

alpark3··on AI Companions Reduce Loneliness
I agree. Good human friends should provide a mix of a positive/feedback negative loop, providing a good gradient to train one's behavior on.

AI seems like just a positive feedback loop.

alpark3··on Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus
They're not that good at arb. Real arb doesn't even really exist anymore. Even when it does, it's not JS that closes it. They market make, which is different.
alpark3··on Nitro: A fast, lightweight inference server with OpenAI-Compatible API
Because it's lying to the client?
alpark3··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
Maybe I should clarify that I don't think it's all that matters, but that Sam might think that.
alpark3··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
I wonder if Sam did something in the name of his own philosophy, but was financially suicide. Like vastly underestimating the costs of training/inferencing to the board, but justifying it to himself because it's all going towards building AGI and that's what matters.

But them firing him also means that OpenAI's heavy hitters weren't that devoted to him either. Obviously otherwise they would all leave after him. Probably internal conflict, maybe between Ilya and Sam, with everyone else predictably being on Ilya's side.

alpark3··on AI startups in France
It's true at last anecdotally. Related, there's a running joke in some subset of the industry about the types of exotic derivatives that are so complex and esoteric "only french banks" trade them.
alpark3··on Centimillionaires: Elites with Investable Assets of More Than $100M
1/100th of a pede
alpark3··on Falling Out of Love with Michael Lewis: Complicated Demands of Business Writing
> He was so good at finance that at his previous job at a hedge fund, he supervised its biggest day of losses in company history.

Small irrelevant detail, but nags me nonetheless. Jane Street is not a hedge fund. They don't remotely operate like one. They're a prop market making firm.

alpark3··on Disney packed big emotion into a little robot
Honestly an idea I've had with the recent surge of interest in LLMs is some type of robotic pet. I feel like LLMs can understand human language and images(hopefully soon) to the extent that a pet should be able to. Some kind of robotic dog that can not only express emotions, but understand what you say to it, seems like it would be pretty successful if done correctly.

The nice thing is that it doesn't even have to understand perfectly, a GPT-4 level of vision/language understanding would be perfectly fine. It doesn't have to hold a conversation, just be able to be happy or sad when it should.

alpark3··on Ask HN: What's the book that people in your field pretend to have read?
Natenberg
alpark3··on Does Market Timing Work?
Most derivatives traders I know in the industry do some version of buy-and-hold for their personal portfolios, but one of the best I know does something completely different. He sticks to a philosophy of scanning multiple "small" cap companies(<50-100mm mktcap) until he finds one he generally likes, then figures out absolutely everything he can about them. Every piece of information available, down to calling whoever he can in management. Then once he decides he likes it, he commits 20-30% of his portfolio into them, often becoming a small, but notable investor in the company itself.

He's made massive amounts of money from this. He admits that it's basically a second job in terms of time and effort spent, but believes that it's replicable because no institutional investor is actually looking at these stocks, leading to hypothetical mispricings.

alpark3··on Tiny Language Models Come of Age
I think the next big innovation in LLMs (sort of like the attention mechanism) will be some method of distributing work to much smaller, specialized, and capable units, rather than having one giant network.

We already see hints of this with MoE, but something entirely new wouldn't surprise me.

alpark3··on Mistral releases ‘unmoderated’ chatbot via torrent
When Meta released a highly censored LLaMa, I think it was pretty clear that over time, the market would tighten up and release progressively more powerful uncensored models until demand was met. I'm glad to see this happen in real time.
alpark3··on Llama 2 Long
I think(hope?) Llama 3 will be a MoE architecture that shows >GPT-3.5 level performance. Interesting to think Meta will probably continue to spearhead the open source AI movement.
alpark3··on We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT
> The new voice capability is powered by a new text-to-speech model, capable of generating human-like audio from just text and a few seconds of sample speech.

I'm more interested in this. I wonder how it performs compared to other competitor models or even open source ones?

alpark3··on Open source AI will win
Honestly, the current general state of software may be a good proxy for what AI will settle to. I can imagine major open-source models, trained and generated by nonprofit efforts in a roughly similar fashion to Linux. Entire businesses might be built on top of "servicing" this model, such as enterprise-grade finetuning, serving, etc. Like the author mentioned, no business wants their core functionality to be dependent on external factors. As I understand it, this is also the case for some Linux-based corporations that focus on building a business around open source software. Of course, there will be proprietary models. Will the average home user cook their own custom distro of LLaMA 10 to be their home assistant? No. They'll probably use Alexa or whatever proprietary solution is out there.

Uncertain, but I'd be willing to be that open source AI will win the way Linux won. In the ways that it matters.

alpark3··on Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
Most people confuse market making/risk holding with high frequency statistical arbitrage strategies. I'm not totally sure exactly what Knight Capital was running, but generally the only "little" mistakes that would cause HFT market takers such as Jump(for the most part) would blow up is some type of egregious technical error like this, or some type of assumption violations outside of market conditions(legal, structural, etc.). Compare this to market makers like Jane Street who hold market risk in exchange for EV, and thus could lose money just based off of market swings (not to blowup levels if they know what they're doing), and you can see the difference between the styles.

I'm a proponent of both. But generally I hold more respect for actual market makers who hold positions and can warehouse risk.

alpark3··on Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
It's interesting to note that exchanges are adding "obvious error" rules that can slash trades under certain circumstances.
alpark3··on Procreate Dreams
From the title, I thought Procreate was coming out with another crappy stable diffusion-derived AI image generator. Thank god that's not the case. Very excited for this.
alpark3··on Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan thanks to abusive users
> I mean...nothing in this world is unlimited for real.

Maybe don't call it unlimited storage then :D

alpark3··on Non-determinism in GPT-4 is caused by Sparse MoE
_If_ 3.5 is a MoE model, doesn't that give a lot of hope to open source movements? Once a good open source MoE model comes out, maybe even some type of variation of the decoder models available(I don't know whether MoE models have to be trained from scratch), that implies a lot more can be done with a lot less.
alpark3··on A collection of quant riddles with answers
Some quant jobs interview both. The fermi estimation problems are much less emphasized, but they're there nonetheless.
alpark3··on Moving AI governance forward – openai.com
>Scope: Where commitments mention particular models, they apply only to generative models that are overall more powerful than the current industry frontier (e.g. models that are overall more powerful than any currently released models, including GPT-4, Claude 2, PaLM 2, Titan and, in the case of image generation, DALL-E 2).

How is DALL-E 2 the "industry frontier" of image generation?

alpark3··on Custom instructions for ChatGPT
You have to do some intense prompt-engineering with the system prompt. The model considers the system to be trusted (roughly), some of the early 2023 exploits with ChatGPT still work if you do it on the system prompt.
alpark3··on Statistical Arbitrage – An Easy Walkthrough
XLF is a financial sector ETF. JPM is a huge bank. If JPM does badly, XLF should probably do badly, and vice versa. Then it stands to reason that if JPM falls below XLF, it will soon go back up to where XLF is. This is relative, so the same situation with XLF rising above JPM, and JPM catching up/XLF falling back down, and similar situations.
alpark3··on Commercial interests petition FCC for high power allocation on shortwave
It's worth noting NLN Holdings is a joint venture of Jump and Virtu, also some big names within the HFT space.
alpark3··on Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student
Coding? Your art is one of the most directly financially valuable skills on the planet and you're comparing yourself to starving musicians?
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