Christopher Moon

Win or lose we #stormthefield

Every game ends in a field storming and a $250,000 fine until @ArkRazorbacks fire @HunterYurachek

@DrunkBazz @DarkGOAT69

Lane Johnson after his rookie season (13 years)

- 10 total sacks (0.8 sacks/season)
- Lowest sack rate among all OTs
- Lowest QB hit rate among all OTs
- Lowest QB hurry rate among all OTs

Easily 1st ballot HOF, and maybe even the best OT in NFL history.

#Eagles

Quant firms are hiring idea guys, not quants

I've been skeptical about the whole - software is commoditized, ideas are the moat argument

But I've seen first hand the best quant and technical firms in the world hire thinkers, liberal arts grads, and generalists

I predict the trend accelerates

Letter from @AQRCapital below

Instagram turns 16 today

Bet With the Best: Strategies from America’s Leading Handicappers

acquirersmultiple.com/wp-content/upl…

Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models

“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.

“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.

“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.

“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’

“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”

Article on WSJ today noting how Warren Buffett still spends his evenings browsing through random videos on YouTube

Men truly only want one thing. A good meal, an investment portfolio of cash flowing assets, insurance operations that generate float for new investment ideas, and hours to spend on YouTube

From our interview this AM w/ @AnnieJacobsen: The death rate for pneumonic plague is 100% unless antibiotics are given in the first 24 hours in which case it drops to 17%

The death rate for COVID was 1% and it shutdown the entire world

I talked to a young man last week. He was a 6'4" Chad, 28 years old, brown hair, A10 (light blue) eyes, D2 college basketball player, tan, lean muscles. Handsome guy. But where did I meet him? He was working as a waiter at a small diner. Earning $2.13 an hour plus tips. The girls who swipe right on dating apps with height filters are the same girls (I assume) who reject his job applications when he applies to white-collar corporate jobs. I gave him a $40 tip on like a $15 breakfast, but I have no idea how he pays rent. He told me he's living in a small apartment with 3 other guys who got him the waiter job. And he said he had a hard time finding any kind of other work for several months before he got hired at the diner.

How is this young white man supposed to buy a house on $2.13 per hour? How is he supposed to attract a hot girl and settle down? This is what we're doing to our best young men. We are brutally crushing and suppressing American talent. It's wrong. It's unfair, and it needs to stop.

I was a big Public Enemy fan until they started with all this political shit

Still the best AI founders-book I’ve read this year.

The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby

The masculine urge to be an 80s corporate raider. cc: @TheIcahnist

Twenty five years ago today, a 62 year old man with cancer in his bones walked 2,687 people out of the South Tower, and then he went back inside.

Rick Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall in 1939. British Parachute Regiment in Cyprus at 18. Colonial police in Northern Rhodesia. Then he came to America, enlisted in the US Army in 1963, and in November 1965 he went into the Ia Drang Valley as a platoon leader with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry.

Hal Moore called him the best platoon leader he ever saw. His men called him Hard Core. He sang to them in the dark, Wild Colonial Boy in an Australian accent, because he had worked out that men who are singing are not men who are panicking. That is Rescorla on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once and Young, bayonet fixed.

Thirty five years later he was head of security for Dean Witter, later Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

In 1990 he brought in his old friend Dan Hill and the two of them walked the basement. He warned the Port Authority that the parking garage was wide open, that somebody could drive in a truck full of explosives, walk out and light it off. Nothing was done. Three years later the 1993 bomb went off about thirty feet from the spot he had flagged.

After that he told Morgan Stanley the towers were still a target and the next attack would come out of the sky. He wanted the firm to leave Manhattan. The lease ran to 2006, so they stayed. Twenty two floors of the South Tower, roughly 2,700 people.

So he drilled them. Every three months, everyone, no exceptions, down the stairwells two abreast while he stood there with a stopwatch. Traders pulling seven figures resented being marched down concrete stairs by a Cornishman with a clipboard. He kept doing it anyway.

8:46 a.m. The North Tower is hit. Port Authority comes over the South Tower loudspeakers and tells everyone the building is secure and to go back to their desks. Rescorla picks up a bullhorn and tells his people to get out.

He phones Dan Hill. "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people out of here."

9:03 a.m. The second plane hits the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. His people are already in the stairwells, moving exactly the way they had been drilled, and Rescorla is on the bullhorn singing to them. Cornish songs. A version of Men of Harlech he had rewritten for Cornwall. Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming, can't you see their spearpoints gleaming.

He called his wife Susan from the stairs. They had been married two and a half years, met jogging in New Jersey. He told her to stop crying, that he had to get these people out safely, and that if something happened to him he wanted her to know he had never been happier, that she made his life.

Someone told him to get out. He said, as soon as I make sure everyone else is out.

2,687 Morgan Stanley employees went home that day. Thirteen did not, and four of those were Rescorla and the men who stayed in the building with him: Wesley Mercer, Jorge Velazquez, Godwin Forde.

He was last seen on the 10th floor, walking up.

The South Tower fell at 9:59. They never found him.

Watching the Republican convention groovin’ to “Macho Man” and the ironies are bottomless.