Can't wait for 3 weeks from now when the Bluesky media blitz putters out.

My dad subscribed to these for many years from the 50s-70s. I used to sit in our attic reading old issues, with projects based around vacuum tubes, transistors, lasers (!) and even surveillance. It seriously ignited my love of engineering.

I came across new issues in the 90s as an adult and the articles seemed to be quite dumbed down. It had lost the magic of those old issues.

Same here but from the 80's. Lots of early home computers and peripherals which were obsolete by the time I read them (early 90's)

As pretty much any professional trader or quant knows, there are degrees of efficiency. Ex-US markets are significantly less efficient than the US. Some US securities are less efficient than others. Certain instruments and exchanges are less efficient than others.

Markets become more efficient as a result of entities who make them so. It is possible to make a very good living by being one of these entities.

And it follows that making a market inefficient through nefarious tactics allows said entities to continue to make a very good living.

At what time scales would you say these inefficiencies are easiest to make a good living from?

I think OP is referring to brokers and market makers, whose role is to help match buyers and sellers and to maintain liquidity in certain securities, respectively. In which case the time scale would be small (you don’t want to be caught holding something for too long if you’re just a middle man)

I loved this retell. Brings back the old days, especially the Google and Yahoo parties of the late 2000's. Those were crazy. They literally carried one of my employees out of a basement rave who had passed out from drinking too much.

Somehow, even on the opposite side of the globe software company parties also were not very timid. I spent a whole morning in 2009 in an ambulance and then in hospital with my colleague who passed out in a bar after a full night of drinking.

For maybe different reasons or circumstances. Nevertheless cheers, mate.

VC backed passing out was way different and not in the somewhat elitist sense that prevails in Europe.

Play hard, party hard mixed with friendly and open nerd frat house mentality in California is one of a kind compared to then cold and dark winters in Europe. People forget that there is essentially always sun, a huge difference.

Some had a 17:00 party break every weekday, loud music and food 17:00 sharp no exceptions, a phenomenon what became after work parties in Europe, but were more or less barbecue parties for casual idea sharing and bonding.

Catering costs for a month alone would have killed every startup or company in EU.

And then imagine special occasions somewhere else. These people knew how to have a good time - to pass out one way or the other.

Happy times.

Europe is big. Some parts get almost as much sun as California, and get hotter in the Summer. And other parts, like Russia, where the described events took place, have deeply ingrained alcohol culture not that far from frat mentality.

Sounds like something better left in the past

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Banks would actually be of primary concern after a nuclear war. Without them, there would be little economy to speak of.

Interesting story but I have a bit of anecdotal evidence to share. Back when I was a Freshman at UIUC in 1989, I was given a campus tour and told that one of the buildings there was designed to collapse outwardly in order to protect the equipment in the basement. That equipment was a national computer network (not yet called the internet!)

So at the very least, the origin of this story predates 1991 by at least two years.

I don't recall the name of the building but here it is on Google maps.

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.106201,-88.2268272,3a,75y,91...

Edit: It's not clear from my original comment but the reason for collapse would presumably be a nuclear strike. I remember this because this was a time when we grew up with a constant fear of a Russian nuclear strike and I couldn't help but wonder why anyone on earth would want to nuke Champaign.

Edit: Ah, here we go! It is the Foreign Languages Building (FLB), later renamed. I remember having to trudge here at 7ams on snowy winter days to listen to Japanese language cassettes.

https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincam...

Edit: And here's a contemporary article about the FLB, which also cited some of the crazy rumors about this building.

https://imgur.com/HXenjnt.png

I was going to share this story but you beat me to it. They're still claiming this in tours ~2017.

The building was called the Foreign Languages Building until very recently and is now called the Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics Building.

Relevant info from the UIHistory site:

"Located on the site of the former Old Entomology Building, ground was broken on the Foreign Language Building (FLB) on December 18, 1968.

A popular myth is that the building's distinctive architecture was a result of its being designed to house a supercomputer on campus called Plato. The building was supposedly designed so that if it was bombed, the building's shell would fall outwards, protecting the supercomputer on the inside. It is also rumored that the building's interior layout was a result of trying to confuse Soviet spies and prevent them from stealing secrets from the supercomputer.

In reality, the building's architecture is not actually all that unique and was a popular style of the day. In fact, just a few blocks to the west, one may find the Speech and Hearing Sciences Building, which a 2-story clone of the building. Plato itself was real, but refered not to a secret government program, but rather to the first "modern" electronic learning system, the forbearer of course software like WebCT and Mallard. The mainframe computer that ran the Plato system was located in north campus, in a building which used to reside on the west side of the Bardeen Quad." [0]

[0] https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincam...

Hilarious that the myth extends to the interior design - the basement really is a maze the first few times you visit.

Plato was in fact real... I used it many times! Looking back, it was pretty impressive technology for its day but was quickly becoming obsolete. I hated having to walk all the way to campus to get some physics units in that I missed.

I vaguely seemed to recall that sometime around the Gulf war, I was able to modem in and connect remotely. Shortly after, I stopped getting Plato assignments!

My parents worked at UIUC in the early 1970's.

Plato was an early interactive learning system, the supercomputer was called the Illiac-IV.

The building was called the "Center for Advanced Computation". I don't know if the computer was in that building, but I don't think they were exactly hiding it from the Soviets.

I wonder how long that equipment would survive being exposed to the elements after the collapse

My guess is that something that important was protected by reinforced ceilings/floors.

It's not easy to make things stay waterproof after such an event. Water will find a way. The simplest thing will likely be the Achilles heel of such thoughtful engineering.

It doesn't mean that should stay there, as-is, forever. Like most failover solutions, it gives you a bit of time during an incident to come with a proper solution for the future.

Having it not fully waterproof (and maybe they also took that into account) has probably been seen as an improvement over totally crushed by rocks and bricks.

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Calling all elite developers who are ready to make their mark in the markets: Valley View trading is not your typical trading firm. We're a small team of successful trader/engineers looking for an inventive, entrepreneurial and detail-oriented developer who wants to master the equity options markets.

If you're a self-starter with serious C++ chops, a track record of moving fast and a hunger to excel in the ultra-competitive world of options trading - let's talk. This is a unique chance to reap the rewards of your talent.

The right candidate thrives as an individual contributor, has 5+ years of experience creating high-octane, low latency code and a clean background. You'll hit the ground running and have 60 days to ace the Series 57 exam on us.

If you're ready to trade Silicon Valley politics for the chance at Silicon Valley paydays, this is your opportunity. Show us what you've got - reach out with cover letter and resume at valleyviewoptions <AT> gmail.

Please do so! This would be a fascinating experiment and perhaps a famous one, given that similar answers are the knee jerk reaction of armchair skeptics the world over.

This is an impressively irrelevant calculation, regardless of whether or not GPT did the arithmetic correctly. If you want to calculate something similar but actually useful, you could get a list of all "cathedrals" dedicated to st michael, find the line for each combination of 2 cathedrals, and then calculate the probability that 5 more also fall on that line.

But it turns out that we don't even have to go that far. The line found in TFA is about ~50km wide. Any given 50km wide line covers approximately 1% of europe's area. There are allegedly 800+ locations dedicated to st michael in the UK, so let's make a conservative estimate and say there are ~1000 in all of europe. This means that in any given 1% of europe's area, there are on average 10. Therefore literally any 50km wide line that crosses a substantial portion of europe has a solid chance at having 7 or more st michael dedications in it.

Edit: actually via a generalization of the pigeonhole principle, if we assume that europe is 3000km tall and contains 1000 sites dedicated to st michael, there must exist at least one 50km band that contains at least 17 sites.

Doesn't the first point have a probability of 1? It's the subsequent ones that become less and less likely.

Maybe my question was not right then. But my question was how likely is it that 7 randomly chosen points fall within a given 50 km band across europe. Because I want to test the hypotheses that the 7 cathedrals fall randomly in line that we see. And that one random point falls in that band is not 1.

Yes, but I suppose even if you have 7 that line up, they may not fall in your band.

To remove that constraint, so it's just any band, I think it should be more like: given a cathedral is in a particular place, how likely is it that six other cathedrals fall in a 50km wide band aross Europe.

Okay, GPT4 said there a just 189 non-overlapping 50km bands (horizontal, vertical, and diagnoal) in Europe and then continued to calculate the chance to land those 7 points in any of the 189 bands and gave a result in the order of 10^-12.

You could have two points in 2 of your non overlapping bands that are less than a band's width apart.

Also, the probability of the first 2 points will always be 100% because they define the line.

Also, it's not 7 random points, it's 7 of thousands of random points.

> Also, it's not 7 random points, it's 7 of thousands of random points.

Ah - I missed this one.

Alright, I suppose it's not as simple to formulate the question accurately and correctly.

But diagonal at what angle? :)

I think if you set the probability of the first one at 1, then the rest works perfectly at any angle of band. I could be wrong, but intuitively that seems correct.

search box tells me 600 choose 7 is 5e15, which implies (if google and GPT4 were correct) that there ought to be on the order of thousands of fat lines containing 7 actual cathedrals

It's pretty easy to Monte Carlo, even if you can't get there analytically.

Neat but what is this useful for?

Making people think you're smarter than you are. That's about it.

What do you mean, what knowing the day of week a date is useful for ?

Yes, that's what people typically use a calendar for. So you agree that this trick isn't useful for anything?

I'm reminded of the scene in Back To The Future II in which people in the 19th century scoffed that someday someone might "run for fun" despite the ubiquity of motorized transportation.