Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | perkolator's comments login

I wanted to love Mastodon.

While slightly better, both seem to me like an utter waste of time to me.

There is just an unsolvable, signal to noise problem when it comes to a personal optimal feed for me.

The content I will like best will not be popular. If that is true then it is hopeless for me because of the scaling properties of the assumptions of the system and incentives for users of the system.

I am better off just talking to chatGPT4o and it isn't even close.


The trick to Mastodon is to follow hashtags instead of people. I have a couple of people I follow but I mostly follow hashtags relevant to my interests. The signal-to-noise ratio is very high. This also means it is critical to include hashtags when you post or comment to attract attention.


> The content I will like best will not be popular. If that is true then it is hopeless for me because of the scaling properties of the assumptions of the system and incentives for users of the system.

I don't understand. The content you want is accessiblto you and anyone who wants it, where is the scaling problem ?


"Better yet, we should give it to me and my friends.

I promise we are just morally superior and better people in my unbiased opinion."


Why are post like this even aloud on here?

Anything economic related is ruined on this board by what sound like ignorant 14 year old children on economics. Ignorant 14 year old children with an axe to grind with daddy.


Why are post like this even aloud on here?

Anything economic related is ruined on this board by what sound like ignorant 14 year old children on economics.


There is nothing really surprising about this.

Jim Simmons that recently passed away did exactly this in finance decades ago. He didn't build a team of the brightest minds in finance.

He hired brilliant people that specifically did not work in finance. I think he even mentioned that astronomy was one of his favorite areas to hire from for finance.

I am sure we highly underestimate the indoctrination against new ideas that anyone at the top of a field has been subject to.

Humans love to turn everything into a high school prom king/queen popularity election though even when it is obvious the best people for the job didn't even go to the prom.


Structured finance is a math gig where the only constraint is legality. And as history shows, math nerds have no clue how to constrain the runaway damage their structured instruments can cause.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that AI development appears to be heading the same way.


Anyone who has read many financial statements would understand this whole idea is already useless outside of financial statement education.

LLMs could help a person learn to understand financial statements better, that is it.

There are not all these hidden gems in financial statements though that are being currently missed that language models are going to unearth.

Financial statements are already intentionally vague and often intentionally misleading.

Corporate CEO/PR/Marketing are already the masters of writing many words while saying absolutely nothing.


Still, if you use GPT-4 it gives you 60% of accuracy in predicting if it's going to go up and down, which is considerably better than median human forecasters. Stop being so dismissive and start reading the numbers.


My browser history seems to work fine for this.

Recording everything on the screen for this use case is completely absurd.


I absolutely loved college and can understand the dilemma.

Most the social aspect for me though came from living near the college and not the actual classes.

If I was in this situation, I would just move as physically close to a major university as I could. Most of my social interaction at college came from eating lunch and all the people I met during lunch.

Actually paying tuition though for this reason is as bad an investment as I can think of.


>I would just move as physically close to a major university as I could

Actually not a bad idea, thanks.

>paying tuition though for this reason is as bad an investment as I can think of

True, but my 'smart' financial decisions have led to a life I'm pretty unhappy with.


Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: