Patrick McKenzie

I expected LLMs to become the Everything API. I didn’t expect good tooling for that to exist *this year.*

Crikey. https://t.co/aUM3V8CJxS

we are starting our rollout of ChatGPT plugins. 

you can install plugins to help with a wide variety of tasks. we are excited to see what developers create!

https://t.co/NQ684Yp2LK https://t.co/m7b6vJrj5D

Sam Altman

“Everything API?”

The whole enterprise of taking objects from your own program and then serializing them as JSON so you can map them to the particular verbs a 3rd party allows on their API then parse their output to… should obviously be eaten by LLMs, yesterday.

They are almost preternaturally good at simple text transformations, and some very not simple text transformations, and so one expects that API docs are pretty close to everything they need to interface with many well-designed APIs.

And now it appears OpenAI is doing something to let you basically hint for the LLMs how your API expects to be used, to give it ~native capability to interoperate with it.

I work for the Internet and am an advisor to @stripe. These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.

Tiny little detail from Tsutaya's coworking space: they festooned a lot of the walls and alcoves with artwork on loan from a gallery, with price tags attached, which seems like a really inspired choice assuming it works.

"Your home office probably isn't as pretty as this workstation cubicle, but for 207,900 yen you could at least have this original piece by Mariko Isozaki sitting on your desk."

(It is marble and, out of concern for social norms about  reproductions of works, no photo, sorry.)

The short game is attempting to drum up sales of galleried artworks but I think the longer, smarter game is attempting to convince people that "Congratulations, if you work in coworking space in a desirable neighborhood, you are The Type Of Person Who Buys Art From Artists now."

"You might have thought that art was for rich people, and who cares what rich people do. Comfortable people like yourself support the arts by buying tasteful, understated pieces such as we happen to have on display by some neighborhood artists who you could meet for coffee here."

(You'd think that a forward thinking gallery or two in a tech center might contact some Workplace teams and say "Hey, want to *really* increase the visual impact of a few areas of your office at no cost to you? We have a proposition for you.")

Two views from the street this morning. https://t.co/yguc5rfrPC

I suppose the laws of Twitter memes require me to say “This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities.”

This is unfortunately literally accurate. If you look at the buildings on the left, try to estimate their setback from the street, which starts as soon as blacktop does. My estimate is measured in centimeters. Requirement for Chicago in similar character zone would be 15 ft AFAIK

Anyhow, urban planning minutiae aside: a necessary precondition to having nice things is the will to have nice things.

Note an explicit rejection of the notion that you enjoy a property right in nice things outside your actual property and can therefore exclude others.

There is a constituency for “Well sure the sakura and river are beautiful but if we make that area walkable it will attract undesirables and foreign tourists. Think of the impact on neighborhood character!”

They just… lose the argument here.

(This is a subject much discussed in the neighborhood and while I do not have the franchise in broader Tokyo, to the limited extent that being on the register of deeds gives me a voice for a few centimeters of frontage, I say “Let there be nice things.”)

Interesting fact I never knew, per Matt Levine, with relevance to bank rescues: acquiring a bank will result in new bank needing to mark the acquired assets (loans et al) accurately, which semi-artificially realizes the problems which have been a bit swept under the rug.

One wonders if there will be a proposal for relief where large banks buy up the troubled banks but are, by special dispensation, allowed to ignore the reality of their assets being underwater in the same fashion the troubled banks were able to ignore it for so long.

Accounting: far more fun, and subjective, than people realize.

Less fun: specter of $13.5 billion of capital needing to be injected to get a bank back to zero.

One single bank, and generally considered to be a well-operated one.

(Yes, not naming the bank intentionally, though identity is well-known publicly, including through that column.)

“What problem does that solve?”

Restores capital backing the troubled banking operations (by diluting capital of the rescuing bank across the now-wider set of risks) and gives the assets time to age. This decrease in outstanding duration with cause value to recover towards par.

There is something like a "general factor of infrastructure" and if you get it, you can see around corners of issues like this without knowing the exact shape of the issue in advance.

Seems like it would be an interesting subfield for e.g. operations research. https://t.co/idkEPdqPUT

Matt Levine

@patio11 shot / @matt_levine chaser #svb https://t.co/Z47N1ZOJlK

Matt Needham

I wonder if it is institutionally easy to acknowledge that because I think you can more easily intellectualize e.g. queuing theory, in the sense of "yes, obviously worth a paper", versus intellectualizing "common pitfalls in multi-party software deployments."

Anyhow: if you've been around computers and finance a while, and you see a problem where it would be really helpful to have near real-time understanding of complicated data, you can immediately start speculating on which subsystems will find "real-time" to be... challenging.

Also if you've been around for a while you could speculate pretty confidently about which parts of banks define real-time in which ways.

Example: real-time in credit card processing implies probably more than 2 orders of magnitude slower than real-time in equities trading.

And thus you know that at least one party somewhere in the system has said "Ah yes, as a result of a huge technical project in the late 2000s, we have that very important data newly available in real-time: 99.9% available by close of business the following day!"

"Wat."

Well it is real-time by comparison to previous system, where it was 80% available by the monthly close, and a mid-level manager thought "real-time" was a good buzzword to get it approved by higher-ups, and now this SLA is that suborg's understanding of what real-time is.

Anyhow, downstream implications of this include "If you want to make data-driven decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty and urgency you have to have good intuitions for what data that collects quickly is most likely to be upstream of the truth."

Some surprising implications include "I bet the team that counts mobile accesses has a better estimate as to outflows in the last hour than the team that counts actually money" and "Put the stock of ourselves and contras on the dashboard because that will often be early warning."

One upon a time I got a push notification from my brokerage saying that a particular stock was now subject to SEC Rule 201. I called an executive immediately; that was in context an obvious Big Red Button issue raised by a very non-obvious pathway.

To save you a scintillating dive into circuit breakers and not say too much: there are some stocks which one expects to be volatile and there are some stocks which one expects to not be volatile. Sudden volatility in one's upstream providers could conceivably be worth a war room.

One fun emerging form of social organization in tech-adjacent spaces: draw attention and talent into underserved spaces by doing patronage on a bounty model. Sometimes the patronage is distributed. https://t.co/JDIz7Is7cJ

🔥 Ladies and gentlemen, the Vesuvius Challenge is officially a $1 million dollar contest. 🔥

Huge thanks to @JosephJacks_, who has pledged $250,000.  We are in awe.

$700k grand prize, $1M total.

No excuses now. It's time to read the scrolls!

https://t.co/KYVyona2fW https://t.co/RjgVv06EC6

Nat Friedman

It’s slightly more capital efficient than donating money to a university with the hope a postgrad eventually publishes the thing you want to see in the world, since the University won’t fritter away $1B while waiting to find a single sufficiently motivated postgrad.

More broadly, tech has some experience with “Wait, smart people are cheap, miserable, and obviously underused. … Seriously?! Is no one else seeing what I’m seeing?!”

On the one hand I should not be surprised, and on the other hand I am surprised, and on the gripping hand I wonder whether it can do stylometric analysis accurately given cases which are not obvious layups. https://t.co/3b9LwwSQdm

Stratechery

GPT-4 is able to infer authorship from a passage of text based on style and content alone.

Given the first four paragraphs of the March 13, 2023 @stratechery post on SVB, GPT-4 identified Ben Thompson as the author.

https://t.co/G9ObYbvOTX https://t.co/Ecjv83O8No

Applied AI at Databricks. Language & networks; neurophysiology, wilderness navigation, emergency medicine. Formerly SkipFlag, LinkedIn.

Mike Conover

Not even clear that it is doing stylometric analysis, of course; it can be roleplaying someone who has done stylometric analysis, or even doing something Much Weirder Than That.

One of the most common questions I’ve gotten since writing about bond math, which I thought I already answered, is whether it affects loans as well.

Yes, it does. A fixed interest loan decreases in value if interest rates rise. It is not worth the balance (and wasn’t on day 1).

I think that might conceivably be News You Can Use for borrowers and imagine people have complicated thoughts on that.

“How would I use it?”

Call the bank and offer to buy the loan back.

“Big deal everyone knows you can repay loans earlier.”

Yeah that was not the suggestion I just made though.

“Spell that out for me.”

I mean if a bank did you a favor in 2021 and wrote a loan at 2.5% with a duration of 5-10 years you could do them a favor and offer them to buy the loan back at, oh, 90 cents on the dollar of your outstanding balance.

“That’s risible.”

I mean, the person you talk to might be surprised by the offer, but *not paying your loan as agreed* would be morally interesting. Making an offer to renegotiate a contract is Tuesday.

And then there exist some fun institutional details like “How do you communicate internally that one should be open to this in loan servicing, including pricing it appropriately?”, “Is this still a good idea if people can learn it is a transaction you offer? Confidence, etc”, …

… “While you presumably think early repayment option has de minimis impact on credit quality of seasoned portfolios would you still think that if you offered this transaction given that most sophisticated/best borrowers might take it preferentially?”, etc.

“Do banks ever let retail users renegotiate loans?!?”

All the time, most commonly because credit quality is impaired and they’d suddenly prefer getting X immediately to having a claim on Y eventually where expected value of collection is very dubious.

Back in my days of helping people through banking troubles N years ago sometimes the problem was that, for whatever reason, they had far less ability to pay than they actually owed, and would ask whether banks would accept partial payment and then a plan.

I would frequently tell them “It’s commendable that you want to repay the bank, and they very well might be willing to negotiate here. So why don’t you ask whether they would accept, say, 40 cents delivered immediately ‘in full satisfaction’ of the outstanding debt?”

There is a flowchart at the bank for distressed consumer debt, and by this stage in the game, that person’s debt was frequently sitting in a CSV waiting to be sold to a debt collector for 3-20 cents, and so surprise recovery is obviously incentive compatible.

“How did you feel about that?”

Clearly obtaining a debt with intent to not repay it would be dishonorable, but mostly this was just life happening between opening credit cards and the present day. If bank willing to negotiate, I support their moral right to freedom of contract.

Is there a word to describe the phenomenon of a statement carefully worded to be entirely literally accurate, absolutely unreproachable on legal or similar review, inevitably cause people to read entirely the opposite meaning, with this being intentionally designed?

I feel like I'll allow someone (or an organization) maybe one of these per lifetime because there is some risk of confusion and compounding errors accidentally creating something which is outwardly indistinguishable from this.

But two, no. You get a bozo bit.

In Kyoto briefly almost twenty years exactly since I first visited here (and Japan) and the nostalgia is almost overpowering.

Also, as if scripted by the universe, hearing people who might as well be me from 20 years ago.

Down to the disbelief about how much Green Cars cost for how little difference there is from the base offering, expressed in almost exactly the words I used ~16 years before deciding “Oh the green car is amazing; so much more relaxing and only $50 more!”

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