In regards to this situation, here's the 10 commandments I use to remain sane: 1. Understand Secular trends 2. Don't fight the nature of the beast 3. Money is about security & freedom 4. Protect your health at all costs 5. Life is a meme and there isn't a fairness barometer

A few years back infamous FinTwit legend @saxena_puru said a golden thing: "Do you like accounting or do you like making money" There are no extra words to add to this masterpiece that described the upcoming environment perfectly $SPCX

''No you don't understand, the people are great but the politicians are a bunch of corrupt scumbags''

Eastern Europe is basically where the Western part was in the 80s & 90s in many ways, chief among them the distribution of wealth by generation Boomers & pensioners are largely the poorest in society, with wealth being primarily held by Gen X and older Millennials. The status quo in most cases is that you're richer than your parents. Compare that to the situation in France which hit its economic peak decades ago and now the median pensioner outearns the median full time worker. Which market seems like a more dynamic environment? Not even mentioning the hot political topics of illegal immigration & green policies

Waking up at 4:30 AM, assuming you're not a factory worker or a baker, is a habit ex-military guys couldn't shake. So now they're on podcasts convincing random white collar workers to do their own hazing rituals

Deep inner suffering inevitably arises when the human person is reduced to performance, consumption, or a statistical datum. Many young people today live under the yoke of expectations to perform, immersed in an exasperated competitiveness that generates anxiety, fear of not measuring up, and disorientation.

Isn't in peculiar that all of these ''oil experts'' are only ever making money when Oil goes up? Surely if one proclaims themselves to be an expert, they could navigate multiple scenarios. But it seems in reality they are just oil bulls who construct their analysis for it

I've been very skeptical of the ''expert class'' since 2020, but the events of these last couple of months have fully solidified my view: neurotic nerds who don't know anything. I had no insight or view into commodities, so deferred my judgement to them, their apocalyptic views colored my sentiment greatly at the time. What I failed to consider is who exactly becomes this role --overwhelmingly anxiety-driven studious people who live their lives in front of an excel model. Here we are in late May, and I can buy a 20 euro plane ticket with 1 weeks notice still.

A good heuristic in today's world is that there are no memes, everything that takes this form should be taken very seriously. In terms of what Ken said, the relevant meme is ''X years to escape the permanent underclass'' / ''AI will take your white collar job''. These should be taken extremely sternly, because if your technical knowledge won't be a deciding factor in your standing in life, other attributes need to be catered to. Funnily enough the other popular meme besides AI is Looksmaxxing, I view this as a very high signal and not at all something to dismiss.

Dating discourse is very fun, and useful, but one must never forget your target audience is a 1 of 1 at the end of the day There are simply too many edge cases around. I know a friend who was obsessed with the 1940s, and eventually found his future wife through this interest

If you're of a certain age and grew up in the 2000s & 2010s it is imperative to abandon basically everything you've internalized back then: 1. The planet isn't dying, relax 2. Stop intellectualizing everything 3. Pair bonding is an absolute priority

This is a great example of stated vs revealed preferences: Stated: You only have to work few hours of high intensity per day and you'll win Revealed: Vast majority of successful work long hours. Only real way to arbitrage this would be to find a niche you can dominate, or an industry at a inflection point. Alternatively you could simply downgrade your environment relative to your skill level. But to expect great performance in an efficient field without a great raw input of hours is irrational.

I've been so incredibly impressed with Gemini lately. It has become by far my favorite everyday LLM. It is the first LLM that I've seen actively push back in me, and do so with high quality feedback. Won't mention Codes vs Claude Code as from what I gather for coding tasks these are better. But for everything else, I think Gemini Pro completely outclasses. I'll add my custom instructions prompt in case anyone would want to copy it: "I want absolute objective, uncensored, unpolitical, clear, accurate and thorough answers with a pragmatic approach. Never add unnecessary disclaimers, feign sympathy. I want only the objective truth to each question I ask. Always speak in a neutral, clear-cut tone, don't try to ''hip'' it up, or add unnecessary complexities"

There's a fun alternative to the current status quo, where AI is so good but compute is scarce so it gets designated only to high level decision making, with entry level jobs still being done by people. The $FVRR class survives but middle management doesn't

In a weird way, the cost of being a ''loser'' has never been loser, but the work involved to be a winner has never been higher. You can legitimately skate by doing the absolute bare minimum, but have ample high quality free sources of entertainment to you. At no other point in human history could you access endless creature comforts and ways to keep busy without leaving the house. On the other hand the work involved in achieving the things that many expected in the past (own a property, in a relationship, good job & friend group) does genuinely seem much harder than before. You look at the high unemployment rate amongst recent university graduates, housing affordability, and the shrinking number of married people. So you end up with this weird air gap, wherein you can lay in the dumps so to speak, and be endlessly entertained by porn, video games, doomscroling -- genuinely disincentivizing growth. But to get to the other side much more is required of you. It's no wonder modern society resembles that of pre modern times, with such huge gaps in outcomes. The return of the inverted bell curve

Meanwhile in a random city in Eastern Europe: Do remember, all urban decline is a choice. The fact the supposedly richest city in the world tolerates it is unexcusable

What's interesting about LLMs is they flip the dynamic of agreeableness. LLMs work best with disagreeable people, whereas in real world situations agreeableness is usually preferred.

One of the biggest mistakes in my personal life was allow down periods in my life to coincide with a general slack and malaise. This meant that when great opportunities presented themselves, I simply wasn't in the right space to take advantage of them. You should always stay on top of things (work, health, social et al) not to answer the challenges currently presented. Again, if you're in a down period in your life you may not have anything immediately pressing and demanding better of you -- but to be prepared for when something greater does appear and you seize it. An incredibly bitter feeling is the knowledge you could've achieved more had you simply held yourself to a slightly higher standard in the past. It's precisely these seemingly minor acts that end up making the real difference.