Experience as a father of daughters, raised by a single mom. But set that aside, as your experience as a man cancels it out.
You seem to view women as weak victims. Your suggestion she underwent the rape as a rational decision, so she did not have to escalate a fight she would likely lose, is downright horrific to me. Maybe 100-200 years ago, a woman had her life lived to that degree, but these days they are equals.
Majority of rapists will desist if you put up a fight. You don't need to be physically stronger, to grab a pinky finger and twist it to break it. Put your thumb in his eye, and he won't be in the mood for anything. If he gets aggressive and physical after that, run to the police, and have him arrested for attempted rape and physical assault.
Not only can my loved ones and their friends trust me to call me any time, for any thing, they have actually done so. Locking yourself in the toilet is not some alpha-male fantasy. It is one of the safest places to be at a party. I'll come pick you up, and not ask any questions.
Yes, it was a long string of very bad decisions. To call anyone pointing that out "victim-shaming", is not helping. I do think that what a woman wears at night has direct influence on the risk she runs. Don't try to turn that into "she was asking for it", but also don't blame the rest of the world when you are responsible for your own safety.
> the rational decision not to risk her safety or even her life by escalating a fight she likely couldn't win
The rational decision is to get the hell out of there, then call her dad or a friend. Giving in without a fight to what you consider to be rape by a Scala programmer is the poorest decision you could ever make, and I shudder to think any of my loved ones would be panicked enough to even entertain it.
> the situation she was actually faced with
Yes, a long chain of bad decisions to end up drunk on your own wine, in a foreign country, in the apartment of a stranger you met on the internet, making unwanted advances towards you. Please don't make it worse by staying and accepting your "fate".
I don't care about illegal or not. This is my advice: If you say "No". And you repeat "NO!". And he still advances. Then he is a threat to you, and you get to hurt him badly, I'll pay the bills. If you don't want to have unprotected sex with someone, be clear about that, and make sure to hurt any penis without a condom coming close after that. If you don't want any confrontation and feel drunk or disoriented, lock yourself in the bathroom, and call someone to come deliver a pizza.
Would feel better too, to act right then and there, and not crop up all that anger to release it later in a damaging story. But the named person in this story is fucked either way, so perhaps dish best served cold.
I feel for her. I feel for him. I feel for you. I feel most of all for myself, for getting sucked into this.
I think the US has some different, more prude, views on alcohol, which causes later excesses, requiring education as above.
Alcohol lowers your inhibition and makes you do stupid stuff. When age limit is 16, you do that stupid stuff when you are 17, and know your own limit by the time you are 21 and dating.
If you are a girl at a house party, you drink beyond your limit, go upstairs, and sit on a bed with some boys, you are not responsible for any assault that happens, but you do have your own choices and a will to avoid such risks. For:
> Regardless of how drunk or incapacitated a person may be, it is never their fault that they were assaulted.
does not count for the attackers, who may be very drunk as well, and sitting on a bed with a pretty girl.
Anyway, those rules are more for having students not act out, and have the rich parents of a cheerleader sue the university, when she somehow ended up drunk in the basement of a frat house, completely unable to consent.
Such sexual assault does exist in adult life (under police, not campus - supervision), but is of the degree of completely intoxicating a person, then dragging them home. Not: I drank wine, don't know how much, could have been drunk, then he made an advance on me. Like, she had to remove her clothes herself... it is not like she was passed out on the couch and he forced herself on her.
It was not even "rape" in her own mind, because they had sex another time.
I don't even think she is at fault, and I do feel for her. From what I gather she was the victim of some extremely shady and uncouth man, who did make sure he didn't do anything illegal.
It is not going to lengths: just a few percent chance it was something more innocuous like that (or someone terribly regretting they did not forcefully say "no", so in their mind they said their thoughts out loud), and it would demand pause in our severe and career-ending charges of rape.
This Medium post is not enough. Netto, its contribution is negative, because it welcomes one-sided speculation, and paints the entire Scala community with that same brush.
If you have a trauma: Work on it with a therapist in private.
Don't write a viral public post about it, ahead of the court case, invite others to comment on it, then blame the women struggle in tech on others who don't agree on the very strong, and damaging, qualifier of rape.
Rape is when you agree to have protected sex, but the man removes the condom sneakily, or the woman punctures the condom. What happened here was consensual sex without a condom, and one party regretting that after the fact (and being unspoken uncomfortable about it during).
Imagine having unprotected two-night stands years back, and suddenly your name is in a widely distributed article, charging you with rape. Like damn, and we wonder in a few years why the overreaction and demonization of the Scala community damaged its growth and inclusion.
> Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.
Sex has always had aggressive and domination elements. Some women even request you slap them during.
> Want to hook up again later?
> I am not in the mood right now, no.
> Are you sure?
What happened after? Rape with her shutting down as a robot? Maybe she even cried during the sex, but he just would not stop? I am getting all these crazy unsavory visions, that could have been stopped had she poked her attacker's eye or broke his pinky finger or went to the police the next morning or something.
She talks like a doll lacking any kind of autonomy. It is not "we had sex", but "he had sex with me".
I don't know any woman who does not want to have unprotected sex, but just let it happen like that. Then come back for seconds, even though she is not in the mood.
Are there naive young women who lack self-authority and self-esteem to say no, to an older man who needs those women to get their fix and wants to make up for their unpopular youth? Yes. And that awkward dance of nature takes two to tango. Panicking and crying during or after sex does not a "rape" make (but the definition depends on jurisdiction anyway, and we haven't even let a court in the right jurisdiction look if it qualifies, so I'd like to avoid that term).
Unless you want to claim openly that a named person is now a serial rapist. I'd like to think it takes more than a Medium post for you to do that.
Since the pattern is so similar, I now recognize this as a form of harmful #metoo activism.
- Attack entire community, not individuals
- Court of Public Social Justice
- The charges amount to unwanted advances being made during a social interaction where that would be acceptable -- not sexual harassment, nor illegal behavior.
Make the problem about an entire industry: Holywood, Scala, MIT, Statistics. Garantuee public shaming and punishment for your target, by calling out criticism or disbelief as "victim shaming", people calling for you to lose your job, because they got angry reading a Medium post, not because you've been proven guilty by someone without a bias. Ending up in an apartment with someone in another country, drinking wine, but not remembering how much you drank, but you do remember that he did not drink anything (to play up him taking advantage over you), then crying and feeling upset, because someone makes an advance towards you, instead of feeling flattered and politely declining. Going skinny dipping at night in the sea with a bunch of clumsy rowdy tipsy researchers, then blaming an advance someone makes, on conference culture.
Go to the police, get your day in court, and let justice prevail. Not going to join a mob, because someone made you cry once. Even giving the experience sympathy would needlessly rile me up. I'd like to think about other negative things when interacting with Scala and its community, preferably technical.
As far as I can see: Bellingcat is laundromat for Mossad, after WikiLeaks became laundromat for Russian intelligence.
They still are a citizen journalist type of outfit, they don't take direct funding from government orgs. But they have to suspect some of their anonymous analysis contributors are working with a state agenda and resources.
As a result, Bellingcat unlikely to go after Israelis in Gaza, but more likely to go after ISIS terrorists, Syria, Russia. WikiLeaks more likely to focus on US politics and NATO, than to look at Putin's finances or Russian banks.
But then all of advanced journalism becomes murkey, as you can be independant, while only looking at what your anonymous sources give you. Is NYT or WP independant when it runs an article on national security by the CIA or DoD for censorship, and securing those future juicy leads?
> This isn’t quite true. Rather, any meta element declaraing a charset should occur within the first 1024 bytes, or it may be ignored.
Both correct: charset before title element, and charset within first 1024 bytes.
Older browsers would infer charset automatically if not in first 1024 bytes or undefined. So if user had possibility to change the page title (for example: profile name), they could do persistent XSS by having IE infer the title contents as UTF-7, before the actual declaration happens. Sometimes the title or other elements can also be stuffed, so the charset declaration happens after 1024 bytes.
> Older versions of Internet Explorer can be tricked into interpreting the page as UTF-7. This can be used for a cross-site scripting attack as the < and > marks can be encoded as +ADw- and +AD4- in UTF-7, which most validators let through as simple text.
Modern browsers don't fall for this, but this was a huge XSS vector back in the day (for instance, Google was vulnerable to this, and maybe still is, for its users on ancient browsers).
> Like I said, the benchmark isn't against a monkey randomly picking a stock, it's against a passive portfolio.
At least we went from beating a fair coin with a crowd to benchmarking against a passive portfolio :)
The quote just means that the winning model was overfit to leaderboard. Not that there weren't better models submitted than the baseline, for else someone submitting the baseline would have won.
> If you whipped up a script but was 10 minutes late to the party, then you'd get zero gains
See, I really don't believe this. You can use the script features for longer timelines, then there is no rush. You are also not as much competing with the smart money, as you are joining them. I really don't think those few 1000s $ someone early on spends, are taking any action of the table. And the big players can't take it all.
> that almost sounds like "timing the market", which is generally known to not work for unsophisticated investors.
but yes, would need both sophistication and time investment, else passive way more attractive. But you can use crowdsourcing on overhyped trends as information for this strategy.
> should tell you all you need to know about their "skin in the game"
I am not saying that newspaper stock pickers solved the problem of mindless hype. But skin-in-the-game or staking is an effective counter against clueless people following trends, and moves it further away from the coin flip.
> [insert joke about how economists have predicted 15 of the last 3 recessions]
[Insert fact about how those predictions cluster around the last 3 recessions]
> allows their alpha to be diluted and get front-runned
If anything, this would happen at the real front: hedge funds would contract someone to contract an expensive New York PR firm to meme and astroturf some stock, say Palantir, to something noteworthy. Then the open planning online for anyone to see does the rest. The private Discord channel of random traders (who bought into that group with 5 BTC to have skin-in-the-game) knows what's up, and quietly rides along.
In a sense, you both are correct. The stuff on YouTube is terrible, but it is also used by many (some made a lot of money and so are very vocal about it). A 1000 YouTube videos promoting a terrible coin. The price is going up. Even the one who went to YouTube to consume the drivel and act on it made some money. 5 videos were top-notch production quality, measuring itself against the top paid analysis.
A crazy thing went on early with ETH bot trading. Of course, if you are going to download a bot from Github which works on a few trends and technical indicators, you should not expect to make a lot of money. But many did -- It is easy to predict whether a rocket is going up. The features the bot used are still indicative (at other timeframes), because so many were running them, influencing the price in future timeframes.
> misleading impression that picking stocks is very easy
At least picking a stock yourself is easier than predicting what stock someone else will pick.
> MBAs, and work in fund management every day for decades...and will never come close to being profitable
That seems like a cosy lifestyle not worth bragging about, good job security. Rooting for the night janitor at a small hotel though, who put a 1000$ on doge coin when first reading about the rememe potential.
But I agree with the gambling and financial terrorism for kicks. More as a warning against financial irresponsibility, less as in "stay of my turf!".
And I think it is enough to claim that the average of the recommendations was better than any individual stock picker.
> The problem here is that all that information is public and the amount of alpha is scarce.
Not insurmountable, no? I feel these objections are often busied by finance professors, after a student rudely assumes they wouldn't be teaching if they knew how to make money.
RenTech was doing speech recognition on foreign TV broadcasts in the 90s. Can't you think of similar features you could whip up in a 100 lines of Python and the YouTube API? Some very profitable companies hire very smart PhDs to that for them. Could you bootstrap this? Work harder? Extend to some new hip platform a well-paid quant has never heard of?
> trying to get a piece of the action, diluting or even eliminating the benefit for everyone.
So join in. You are aware of the action. It's not like we are doing this for a bit of fun. The crowd wisdom is there, the hedge funds don't have a monopoly on polling it or analyzing it. Then redistribute the wealth for the benefit of everyone. Those very hard in on the action are not going to.
> but doesn't work if they're clueless and are all trying to buy into the same bubble.
Yes, this is correct, and a big problem in crowd analytics. Or at least, it has a big negative effect (you ideally want everyone to make decisions of their own accord, using their own information). But you can also again harnass this with counter trading strategies. Over the years, it has been fairly easy to call the top of a hype, and predict the obvious correction. So for instance, if the Teletubbies twitter is tweeting about Bitcoin, you know that maybe now is time to sell some Bitcoin, and rebuy back in 6 months when all newspapers are writing about how Bitcoin is a scam and a world-wide crypto ransom attack just occured.
The problem can be overcome in a couple of ways. An interesting one is: "skin-in-the-game". If your wrong hype predictions damages your reputation or causes money loss, you are more serious about it. Another is to ask: What percentage of other people do you think got this question wrong? People who answer Sydney as the capitol of Australia, think that few got it wrong. People who give the correct answer think that many will get it wrong.
> You do realize that the stock market is exactly that, right?
Partly yes. The difference with crowdsourcing is that you are building a model on top of the other participants. Many day traders with bots do not know that hedge funds have models more complex tracking what they are doing and going to do, than the bot is complex. But many day traders also underestimate how they'd stack up against an office of suits, if they worked together, and ramen-noodle hacked it.
> Maybe the people in your Discord group are really smarter than almost everyone else.
I think this is akin to the unintuitive finding that if you randomly chose someone from your friendlist, there is good chance that this person is more popular than almost everyone else. Just being in the friendlist is a positive factor to the capability of making friends.
The vast majority of day traders is not honing their skills and information sharing inside a dedicated Discord group. Especially in crypto, these groups, and not the big Wallstreet hedge funds, are the most sophisticated and skilled at profiting from smaller markets.
> If the smartest institutional traders with the best tools can't figure out the direction of SPY in the short run with any kind of certainty
This is misunderstanding trading. It is all about uncertainty and willing to take risks if EV+ situations arises. Extremely few are figuring out the short run with any kind of certainty, and these few risk being fined or charged with market manipulation. The average person can find profitable coin flips (56% accuracy), which, while far from certain, can be flipped many times. Sometimes such flips are not possible for the bigger smarter institutional traders, because their plays use way more money, and they focus on what they learned over 30 years. Anyone starting in 2010 is able to be more knowledable about crypto trading, than someone with a 50-year trading career (who pays someone a little-less-knowledgable than you, not in-the-know of Discord or Telegram, to write an analysis).
I see this as more favorable. With the internet, and with like-minded online communities, the average retail trader is way more informed and skilled than one 20 years back. The level of hubris may have corrected accordingly, not be based on illusiory superiority bias.
Incorrect risk management from investment bankers, treating highly-variant finance as deterministic physics, and a fanciness of extremely smart people to invent extremely complex solutions, which obfuscate the ever-increasing assumptions and are less robust to black swan events. This illusory superiority bias over the common man, giving too much authority and decision-making power to a set of mathematical functions, and a culture of financial optimism and realization that you are too big to fail. This is what caused the big crash of 2007-2008.
The common man, as a class, lost money from that crash. In response, Bitcoin and fractional stocks were introduced. New markets emerged, where wearing a suit or MBA seems a negative, not a value add. Now, as a class, you at least have the possibility to win money. Else you always lose (but maybe that's the natural way it is supposed to be, not everyone can be the queen ant, or has the adaptation capacity to become one). BTW: every hedge fund that opened their data to the public, saw better, more accurate, models being build on that, than any of their elite quants in-house was able to beat. The masses, when harnassed, are no match for even the biggest hedge funds.
I found private information posted on 4chan around the 28th of January 2020. It spoke of: the upcoming variant strains, the upcoming lockdowns in Italy, the downright panic with public health officials as they were made aware of how awful COVID is and the need to avoid this panic --so large cities would not find refugee in small towns, leaving only criminals and the poor, effects of "long-COVID" and teleworking on the future economy, the sad fate of those who would die after cytokine storm caused their lungs to fill with bloody liquid and choke (financial analysts are more blunt, reputation-free, than epidemiological analysts). That the financial elite was preparing for the upcoming impacts, and that all money managers were working day-and-night to rebalance and counter risks, aware of the possibility of a (malicious) lab leak (economy collapse, world war, CEO's dying, ...).
The posts said that gold would see decent increase (was around 1650$/kg at the time). That everyone with hotel or travel investments was expected to severely lose, and that most such players were putting their liquid money into other investments, to counter the blow, and avoid charges of insider trading. That the Euro would be the most stable currency, when currency trading due to localized pandemic and the lockdowns effecting purchasing power. That the US stock market will see a short boom, with Fed support, and little other investment opportunities, before a crash and world-wide stagnation will become inevitable. That you want to be in two growth niches for the next 3 years: biotech, for it will see free government-funded research & development, when it can profit in the future on new high-margin (HIV/Herpes) vaccines. Plastics industry, because everything will be wrapped in plastic, environmental regulation will be low priority, and it will be overlooked by retail and play-safe pension funds.
Not only did the financial elite predicted it, they predicted it right. Then felt bad for keeping it private, when they saw US senators selling their hotel stock positions after being informed of the situation in China and prospect of a pandemic, so they posted it publicly for everyone to see and with nothing to personally gain.
The pandemic was predicted (+5 -5 year error bars). The correction was predicted. Individual recession predictors are mostly made through survivor bias. When Goldman Sachs sees a market recession upcoming, they don't put that on Twitter or a newspaper to gain a following. They have people pay for what its worth.
It is also fun going back to 4chan /biz section 5 years. People are not saying now: see, I was right. They did better than the majority of the best, highest-paid, analysts and quants and remained anonymous. But I agree it was really hard to not hit a fish when shooting in a barrel.
The average of the coin flip will be near 50% though. If you let a 1000 people give their opinion on if a stock is up or down in a month, you are likely to do better than random guessing (opinion is a weighted coin). For instance, taking the top 50 stock pickers from the finance section of newspapers will demonstrably lead to a decent, better than random guessing, portfolio.
You are assuming that the stock market is as-good-as-random, and that you can't crowdsource aggregate market sentiment and private information (someone who knows that they will buy the next 5 Tesla cars, so they will contribute to the growth). If you have a 100 of those private information owners, and you aggregate it, you just encoded for brand loyalty. People betting on the GameStop play did so, in part because they were made aware that they were not the only one with nostalgia and hope for GameStop. They did this by pooling their private information.
Finally, if you do assume that clueless pickers are the same as a coinflip, then their noise should cancel out, leading to a very uncertain prediction of 50% (so you turned their non-knowledge into valuable information about the variance/confidence/mindshare penetration/information availability), and then the real experts votes will balance the vote in favor of the most likely prediction (you distilled their expertise).
Taken my counter-example to your spoiler to the extreme: Imagine if all Redditor stock traders gave their honest best guess on if a stock would be down or up next month. The market would become very predictable with that information. Crowdsourcing a subset, just lowers this predictability (but never down to the level of a coin-flip). This crowdsourcing for predictability is precisely the reason the bigger, profitable hedgefunds are crawling Reddit, viewing 16-year old Crypto coin pickers on Youtube, and analyzing retail trades on RobinHood.
Passive trading is the only way to beat other players with more resources and information than you. As soon as you become a market-identifiable active trader, your behavior will be monitored and reverse-engineered. More power to retail investors to play along with the big players, and increased media hype --driven by vacuous memes and unclear-value-adding cryptotech-- giving more interest, only will unfavorably balance towards to the bigger players.
I think the resurgance of retail stock trading in the last 2 years or so, is not due to the uncertain economy (again, only big players really benefit from market uncertainty), but because there really were few other places to put your money (negative interests rates, high gold prices, impossible real estate market) and the Fed printing money and keeping the market from collapsing, led to a fairly certain economy, where the Fed would garantuee your losses, but you could keep the wins. This top-down manipulation was obvious enough to trickle down to retail investors using RobinHood.
In smaller, emerging, markets, quantitative active trading has become very competitive. Some markets, still profitable to active trading, are now beaten by a "mindless" passive trading strategy. Like stocks, it makes little sense anymore.
Wallstreet bets is a non-regulated pump-and-dump group, in the upper echelons ethically worse than the owners of the biggest hedge funds (who won't take profit on some plays if they know it causes long-term damage to the economy, the economy being a matter of national security). The GameSpot play made a few of those a millionaire, lost the college funds of people too late to jump on the bandwagon, and done damage to the degree of billions, when hedge - and pension funds had to withdraw from solid businesses such as Google and Amazon, to cover the losses from this memetic war. You can also state that the drivers of the bandwagon, were doing a passive strategy spanning years. It is the active trading of the bandwagon that made their strategy worthwhile (and not a poorly-informed play based on nostalgia and potential).
Numerai also is a passive investing (3 weeks+) fund. They are not that different from a hedge fund buying prop data.
I do think the article is interesting, and adds information on a new emerging trend. But it also reads a bit too kind and objective, like a music journalist describing a new album she isn't a particularly personal fan of. Subtleties will be missed, while the overal picture still is objective and correct to the quality.
As an investor myself, both active and passive, I progressed the most when I learned how the game is played at the top level. Active meme traders should do well to investigate these top players, just like these top players are studying them. RobinHood's order book is fed to the top players. They stand to gain by promoting this active retail trend, and taking near-certified profit on top of these predictable low-information emotion-driven masses. Buy things like Tesla or social media technology, which you as a 20-year-old, see using in 10 years. That's the way to beat the 35 year old senior Goldman Sachs analyst.
You seem to view women as weak victims. Your suggestion she underwent the rape as a rational decision, so she did not have to escalate a fight she would likely lose, is downright horrific to me. Maybe 100-200 years ago, a woman had her life lived to that degree, but these days they are equals.
Majority of rapists will desist if you put up a fight. You don't need to be physically stronger, to grab a pinky finger and twist it to break it. Put your thumb in his eye, and he won't be in the mood for anything. If he gets aggressive and physical after that, run to the police, and have him arrested for attempted rape and physical assault.
Not only can my loved ones and their friends trust me to call me any time, for any thing, they have actually done so. Locking yourself in the toilet is not some alpha-male fantasy. It is one of the safest places to be at a party. I'll come pick you up, and not ask any questions.
Yes, it was a long string of very bad decisions. To call anyone pointing that out "victim-shaming", is not helping. I do think that what a woman wears at night has direct influence on the risk she runs. Don't try to turn that into "she was asking for it", but also don't blame the rest of the world when you are responsible for your own safety.