On book: Fortune’s formula

Information exists only when the sender is saying something that the recipient doesn’t already know and can’t predict. Because true information is unpredictable, it is essentially a series of random events like spins of a roulette wheel or rolls of dice.

The more improbable the message, the less “compressible” it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon’s point: the essence of a message is its improbability.

The gambler should measure success not in dollars but in percentage gain per race. The best strategy is one that offers the highest compound return consistent with no risk of going broke.

it is possible for a bettor to compound wealth at a certain maximum rate, with virtually no risk of ruin. The have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too feature of Shannon’s theory also applies to gambling.

The gamblers dilemma: if all odds are the same, you will win and lose at the same rate, but since you don’t have infinite money, you will eventually be stuck at zero and have to checkout the system

The systems to avoid the lose all dilemma of gamblers:

  1. Don’t bet!
  2. Double up until you win: 1 start, and each double will make your money back plus one dollar, but it can exponentially get you to the gamblers dilemma, unless you reserve say 10% not to go on the bet each time
  3. You bet is ALL horses, by percentage of the chances each has, based on your best bet. One of them HAS to win, so you will not go bankrupt EVER. In the long run, “bet your beliefs” will earn you the maximum possible compound return—provided that your assessment of the odds is more accurate than the public’s. But it only works if you don’t have to pay a fee for betting. And if you can in fact bet in ALL horses at the same time.
  4. The Kelly’s formula: edge / odd. Odds are what the public marketplace is telling you. This horse has 1 on 5 chances to win, therefor it gives you five times your money if you bet on him and he wins. The edge is the “inside trader” information only you have. If it is telling you this horse will win, and you trust it 30% due to equivocation or signal errors, and you bet $100, and the same horse and the same information can be applied in three bets in a row, you have the potential to triple your wager to $600, because of the 5 odds multiplier, and potentially lose $400 in the process, but you still up $100. In this case the edge is how much money you are going to make divided by how much money you bet: in other words $100 / $100 = 1. So plugging that in the final number: 1/5 , which means you bet 20% of your wager. The beauty is that even if the “inside information” was wrong, you won’t lose but 20% of your initial money. Notice that the only time you bet 100% of your initial wager is when your edge is perfect: meaning the winning horse information you possess is perfectly reliable, but you can still bet with imperfect odds, and automagically protect losing it all.

The “edge” doesn’t necessarily means cheating, it just means knowing more that the public, and assigning a decent level of equivocation to that knowledge, therefore preventing you from wagering all your money by this being a fraction, by definition.

The Kelly’s formula also guarantees the higher returns, because, as the money grows, so does the ratio of the bets. The Kelly system manages money so that the bettor stays in the game long enough, without having to bail due to hitting zero, for the law of large numbers to work (when large probabilities will eventually happen and win you the bucks)

You are unlikely to get an edge out of what you see in the news. The edge means information you have and most others don’t. It doesn’t mean illegally: your own research could be an edge. How good of an edge? your bets will tell you.

On book: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

The idea behind the book: trying to explain how does an “I” (in terms of the self) comes from things that don’t have any meaning or self?

How do a bunch of meaningless primitives get to an “I”?

Tools for thinking:

  1. Isomorphism: Two systems play similar roles on their respective structures.
  2. Recursions: A function that calls itself, with arguments on a scale proportion to the original arguments.
  3. Paradox
    • Veridical
    • Falsidical
    • Antinomy: The lier’s paradox, as “this sentence is not true”. If it is true, it is not. If it’s false, then it is true…
  4. Infinity
  5. Formal systems

On Formal Systems

String => a sequence following a certain ruleset

Axium => the starting point of the sequence (like the successor of zero is 1)

Theorum => starting with an axium, the string which results at the end on a derivation you are trying to prove. The derivation is like a proof.

Rules of inference => the rules fueling the concepts above

The levels of thinking:

Mechanical mode (you follow the rules above)

Intelligent Mode

Metathinking: go outside the rules and interactions on the system above, and “think outside the box” about them

On theoretical Physics

A black hole is a region of space-time where life cannot escape.

A possible explanation of why light can’t escape: anything that carries energy is subjective to a gravitational pull, which is proportional to its mass. Since the black hole is condensed mass, the gravitational pull is strong enough to not let the light escape.

The escape velocity is how fast you need to go to pull away from an object. For instance: rockets escape planet earth when their escape velocity is faster than what the gravitational pull is to keep the rocket on earth.

All theories are approximations that require adjustments.

Neuton laws of gravity and Maxwell electromagnetic theories are incompatible.

Quantum gravity is a theory that describes everything with great accuracy. The greatest so far humans have come up with. Describes electromagnetic interactions, weak interactions and strong interactions. The forces between them. Gravitational forces though, they don’t square with it.

String theory was suppose to reconcile, but it is not easy to corroborate it via experiments.

If you replace particles by strings, the particles interactions don’t hit as many of the contradictory behaviors where things go to infinity. It may not be right or wrong, it just accommodates those interactions better.

On money

sovereignty: the authority you act as you see fit

historically is whatever the locus of supreme power is (kings)

on modern times it has decentralized, and it is deeply rooted in money

independent from that structure: each individual has a certain amount of internal freedom, no matter their economical condition

it comes from the fact we can choose how to reply to circumstances and events

money is an extension of your mind, it is a tool we use to complexity the world

it is compression of meaning, and data

used to understand the work done to get it distilled

money is a derivation of action and speech: it is another expression of the logos

it is comparison and contrast, it seals the time and effort taken on both: action and speech, to get to a certain product

it is the ultimate tradable tool

territoriality: all life is seeking to expand its dominion over space and time, most likely because a survival and reproductive itch

mankind expresses territoriality in property rights: a socially acknowledged relationship between men and assesses

if you are adding value to a piece or land, you should have the right to that land

life, liberty and property

once you have savings, you have something that tempts others to steal. so excess inventory is when government is born

government: a protection of the enterprise equation, so we can become collectively energy efficient and coordinated. it is the network security

non-violence resolution of property disputes

the problem is that the protector is by definition on a monopolistic situation. it becomes a temptation for getting something for nothing

On global supply disruptions

Example: before, you could get a quote of how much a house will cost months prior to getting

It is affecting ALL industries

Now: you need to almost get it finished until you are almost done with it

We may have reached peak globalization. We haven’t continue it at the very least
covit was a shock to the system that shows how dependent we are on globalization

USA arbitrage labor across the world to save on cost, that started the globalization movement

On Analytics in the cloud

Separate storage from computation

Traditional data warehouse have a storage capacity constrain by default. Overtime you will get terabytes of data, and optimizing issues

They are also constrain by their batch nature. The faster you get more data, the more the box resources will be used for that purpose.

Large datasets are created one event at a time. If you can fire an event into storage for that, you can get out of the batch processing hell.

Data lake: single source of true storage, ideally as files in cloud services for cheap scalability.

 

 

 

On design vs discovery

When a UI interface is designed, it is very difficult to list all possible states that it needs to handle.

For example: what if the title is a 10000 characters string? what happens if the user’s name is so long it will be displaying on to of the update button? what happens to the white space if x and y are not provided in the data? how does it all look in smaller screens?

In the design phase, the designer tried to provide comps and information for all of these states, but there will definitely be cases that won’t be though of and covered.

Therefore it is expected to go into a “discover” phase, where those elements are flushed out and taken care of. This usually happens as the product is being developed.

on node.js, and in what cases you would use it instead of rails

  • single page apps: you can server them as static content (HTML templates and JS files that don’t change much) from a super-fast static server
  • the js in that page will talk to an API that focus in just deal with Json objects back and forth (in this case node.js is super-slim and optimized to lots of IO calls)

On Rails best use cases

What’s not good for:

– large sites with lots of traffic (scalability issues)

– small sites with static or limited dynamic content

– APIs instead of full blown apps (it could be with some gem help, and it will probably be ok in rails 5)

– Fronting single page apps

What’s great for:

– Projects where constrain is time and money, since it packs so much functionality and let you develop fast and the most obvious security flaws you could be making are covered already