Friends,
I decided to do an experiment this week. I recorded my thoughts. It’s a mix of life and Money Angle. It’s about making yourself future-proof.
The thoughts were a mix of some ideas I discussed at Cal a week ago and a recent New Yorker article by polymath James Somers:
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft (7 min read)
It’s a fantastic piece with an evergreen message:
So maybe the thing to teach isn’t a skill but a spirit. I sometimes think of what I might have been doing had I been born in a different time. The coders of the agrarian days probably futzed with waterwheels and crop varietals; in the Newtonian era, they might have been obsessed with glass, and dyes, and timekeeping. I was reading an oral history of neural networks recently, and it struck me how many of the people interviewed—people born in and around the nineteen-thirties—had played with radios when they were little. Maybe the next cohort will spend their late nights in the guts of the A.I.s their parents once regarded as black boxes. I shouldn’t worry that the era of coding is winding down. Hacking is forever.
I’ve linked to Somers before. He (was/is?) a developer at Jane Street but also an exceptional writer.
From 2011:
On the Floor Laughing: Traders Are Having a New Kind of Fun (The Atlantic)
And then a pile of ridiculous writing on his own blog. Word nerds will love:
You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (jsomers.net)
A few relevant references from the audio file:
- Byrne Hobart on Tradables vs Non-Tradeables (Capital Gains)This is the chart I reference:
- PMarca’s Guide To Career Planning (from 2007)
- My notes on Euan Sinclair’s Positional Option Trading (Moontower)
- A transcription of the audio for Future Proof (Moontower)
Stay groovy ☮️