Moontower #208

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.

Find the audio here.

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)