Enjoying the process of learning about code and finance | Not Financial advice| currently qwant
Joined January 2024
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One document to view it all for the public includes all the threads I found, summaries of videos, and interview questions I hope this is helpful
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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There's a book that changed the way I talk to myself, and it's how I want all my athletes to talk to themselves too.
It's called Permission to Feel, by Marc Brackett. He's a professor at Yale. 🧵
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In my 20’s, I used to work on Wall Street.
People my age now (45) said they were working 70, 80, 90 hours a week for their families…but all their families actually wanted was their presence.
They didn’t understand why their families resented how much they worked when they lived in a nice house, and their kids went to private schools.
It was just the world we all lived in. We knew nothing else.
I decided early in my startup journey that wasn’t going to be me.
My co-founders and I have always had a policy of quitting at 5 or 5:30.
By that, I mean:
> Shut off my laptop
> No more work talk
> Go home to my family
Frequently I’m out even earlier - 3-5, depending on whether I want to do something with the kids.
I rarely travel for work and don’t entertain for work.
My family life gives me energy for my work.
My work gives me energy for my family life.
I'm trying to stay not burnt out and excited about this for several decades.
Can every founder choose this?
Maybe not everybody, but more people have the choice than realize they do.
There is great reward that comes from designing a business around the life you want.
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One of the most underrated habits that made Michael Phelps one of the greatest of all time was learning how to relax.
We started when he was 11. 🧵
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The great Terence Tao in the @NewYorker:
'Tao compared learning mathematics to watching “Emily in Paris,” a show that he and his wife enjoyed. “It’s completely ridiculous fluff, but it’s also fun. You learn the tropes, and you can kind of see how it’s going to go,” he said. “But if you’re just given a synopsis of the plot, like, ‘Here’s the premise, and this is what happens’—that’s not the point.” And, if you want to learn how to write your own show, “then it’s not helpful at all.”'
newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
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People bemoaning the state of education (primary, secondary and tertiary) have at least one of these mistaken beliefs:
1. It's the teachers' fault.
Have you tried being a teacher in 2026? It's a soul-destroying job. They deal with:
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Imagine believing that the SAT is the problem, instead of a mere symptom of the rot inside both school and higher education. And that replacing the SAT with... what exactly... will fix it.
I am speechless. Thomas Aquinas College just dropped a study on the rigor of the new SAT.
It compares the 1980/87 test with 2026. The findings should terrify every parent and teacher...
Vocabulary has collapsed.
Old SAT: 70.6% of questions tested vocab.
New SAT: 15%.
The old test forced students to know a wide range of words through analogies, antonyms, and sentence completions. The new test abandoned that. Most vocab questions now just ask students to fill in one blank from context.
Reading passages also got radically shorter (average ~97 words vs 300–340).
The new test uses short expository passages and hands you the necessary background knowledge inside the text. The older tests leaned much more heavily on argumentative and persuasive writing, assumed far more historical, scientific, and cultural knowledge, and penalized students who lacked it.
This is a redefinition of what "college readiness" means.
If you believe that kids should develop rigorous vocabulary, be capable of sustained reading, and possess background knowledge, I have bad news for you. The SAT no longer measures these.
If you want a future where children can actually read difficult texts and construct complex arguments, the SAT must be replaced now.
This cannot go on.
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Ratatouille is such a great movie because it’s ruthlessly in favor of meritocratic inegalitarianism. “Anyone can cook,” not “everyone can cook.”
The duty of Chef Linguini is to forfeit his arbitrary inherited status as a human and serve to elevate the deserving übermaus Remy.
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The goal of education is NOT to make every student retrace thousands of years of dead ends that took geniuses to overcome.
The goal of education is to help students inherit genius-level insights in a way that does not depend on the students themselves being geniuses.
It’s not multi generational households are better but something that the western mine cannot comprehend
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"This is something I've wanted for a very long time."
On Tuesday, Frankie Cucchiara (@FrankieCucc) accomplished a dream four years in the making by winning his first @WSOP bracelet.
Click👇 to read about his thoughts on the victory and what's next.
brnw.ch/21x6A57
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We’re expanding access to the IPO market, so that more of our customers can participate. Starting today, October 19, we’re reducing the eligibility minimum to participate in IPOs, Follow Ons and Secondary offerings to $25,000 in retail assets (e.g., brokerage accounts, etc.). Learn more or sign up for alerts: go.fidelity.com/0aLSU8
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Your greatest advantage over LLMs is your long-term memory. You can efficiently move new information into your weights. They can't. They basically have dementia and use an elaborate system of sticky notes like that movie Memento.
The way you hardwire information into your long-term memory is by doing your damn reps. If there's knowledge that you need to build on top of, then you better do your manual reps until mastery. Otherwise you'll never consolidate it into long-term memory and you'll never be able to incorporate it into your systems thinking.
Imagine if everything you know about your best friend was not hardwired into your brain, but rather dumped into some markdown document system that gets bigger and bigger as your relationship gets deeper and deeper. Even with a million token context window, that would place an extremely shallow limit on your relationship with them.
That is today's reality for anyone trying to use LLMs in any serious capacity. When you are doing something serious, you are developing a relationship with it that is as deep as a human relationship with a true best friend. You go through so much shit together, you have thousands of inside jokes, millions of things that nobody else knows, uncountably many bytes of rich context... all with this serious thing that you're doing.
The only system that can absorb and integrate all that information is your literal biological brain. The information in your biological brain is what determines the ceiling of your capabilities.
The lack of "doing things by hand" has become a prevalent and structural crisis in software engineering. This is true for both junior and senior software engineers, btw.
Problem solving is hard; you only get good at it by solving enough problems, running into walls, making silly mistakes, making your fundamentals strong, etc. You need to do repeat this process several times to get good at it. Repetitions increase retention of a skill and make learning last longer by physically strengthening the connection between brain cells through neuroplasticity and signalling the brain that this information is important enough to keep.
Combining repetitions with deliberate focus and feedback makes you understand what "good" actually looks like.
Why?
When you first start learning a skill, you can't see your mistakes because the brain is overwhelmed with the new information. Over time, repetitions lower this mental tax, and now you can observe the work objectively. This is what helps in building a mental model where you know what a perfect execution sounds, feels, or looks like. Unless you know what "bad" looks like, you can't claim what is "good".
Now, when you use AI to generate solutions, the psychological + physical friction that forces the human brain to adapt is bypassed. You just accept AI output because it "feels right" without even understanding it deeply. If you do this all the time, how will you build intuition? This is also a type of "brain-rot".
I am not being a Luddite asking you to abandon AI but simply urging you to use it judiciously:
> Ask conceptual questions to AI ("why does this framework use this pattern?")
> Come up with an approach to solve a problem, then ask AI to find loopholes in it. Debate its output with your understanding.
> Use Socratic debugging. Ask it to walk you through the root cause of a bug without giving a solution.
> Write the code yourself and ask AI to generate a few obscure, adversarial unit tests for that code. Fix the failures.
> If you are learning a new concept, implement it 100% manually. Ask AI to only do things that you have mastery of.
> ... so on.
I personally do coding/design by hand everyday for 1 hour at least to keep my intuition strong.
Don't fall to the tech Twitter doom and gloom of "software engineering is dead" and build your learning muscle.
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Why do so many students get crushed by proofs in college?
The problem is that they're learning two really hard things at once.
You're taking matrix algebra, and you're learning all this brand new math while also having to write proofs about it?
That's like learning Shakespeare while you're still learning how to even write an essay.
It's ridiculous, and this jump is just way too big for most students to make.
See, students need to master a topic at the concrete level first.
For instance, they should master calculating eigenvalues and eigenvectors and performing operations on matrices before proving properties about them.
Then when the proofs are introduced, they're not trying to understand the math and work out the proofs at the same time.
They already know what these objects do.
And now they can focus on proving the why.
Further reading: justinmath.com/the-necessity…
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Chipotle Mexican Grill shares jumped after it was reported that Starbucks has worked with advisers in recent months on a takeover proposal for the burrito chain bloomberg.com/news/articles/…