Sjors Provoost @sjors@m.sprovoost.nl
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Joined Aug 2018
One of the more sneaky things the bird site does, is to lock you of your account, but keep that a secret to the outside world.
People can still see my profile, reply to my tweets and even send me DM's. But I can't open them, can't reply to them and need to use alternative channels to even inform them what's going on.
"all" I need to do is remove the tweet though, then they'll stop the extortion. Very nice high pressure technique.
Bird site link to the thread: https://twitter.com/provoost/status/1533068807232794625
My bird site account was locked in the middle of the night, seemingly out of the blue, for something I said deep inside a thread two weeks ago.
The thread consists of me analysing video stills of Putin, particularly the lightning, which strongly suggests he is not in his normal office.
I attached the entire thing, including the "offending" tweet. I find it totally implausible that Twitter itself feels the victim of "targeted harassment". Yet they denied the (first) appeal. So what's going on?
And they're digging in. Are they trying to clean up negative press due to their stock crashing?
If you enjoy the Bitcoin, Explained podcast, you may want to check out my new book! It covers softfork activation mechanisms, what's cool about SegWit and Taproot, how nodes bootstrap to the network and find their peers, what an address really is, how AssumeUTXO can make initial block download suck less, how UtreeXO could compress the entire UTXO set into a kilobyte of merkle forest, how Guix makes reproduceable builds great again, and more.
More details and preview at: https://btcwip.com
Russian Orthodox Church in Harbin and it's ice sculpture cousin. And Psy, to give a sense of when this was 🙂
Exhibit 3:
First Taleb writes a paper demonstrating that Bitcoin is extremely volatile and that this volatility has not gone down over the years.
Then he calls a little bear market "Imploding" (without demonstrating that this somehow exceeds the volatility we've seen before).
Perhaps he's referring more to the fact that Bitcoin is not very uncorrelated to other assets, as some hoped for. But past results don't guarantee future performance. And again: Bitcoin hasn't been killed yet.
Exhibit 2 in the context of some(!) trucker funds being in custodial wallets and/or hard to liquidate.
What he's not noticing: the other funds, the option to just HODL through it (assuming the situation in Canada isn't permanent, the fact that a supply of Bitcoin that can't be sold on a KYC exchange will eventually meet demand.
Let's see if Taleb lives long enough to do the same. So far is his head is still way past the third sphincter.
(what he fails to notice here: the price action did not kill Bitcoin)
Stocking up on Russian Earl Grey while it's still legal...
My usual creditcard already failed this morning for this payment, though I suspect that's just because electronic fiat systems are crap (no the shop doesn't take Bitcoin, last time I mentioned it they were not excited about the idea either).
Very interesting read. I spent quite a bit of time in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and visited Beijng a few times as well. So that adds some color to the reading. The book ties together some pieces of news I remember over the last decade. It is reason for both pessimism and optimism, as always with China.
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Roulette-Insiders-Corruption-Vengeance-ebook/dp/B08VJP821L/
You see this waving hand? It means stay away from these imbeciles. #RealNamePolicy
Allow me to plug https://pletdecurve.nl here as well. It displays a "fire chart", as Yaneer Bar-Yam from endcoronavirus.org calls them, for all Dutch provinces. You can drill down on a province to see how its municipalities are doing.
Built with Ruby on Rails, initially hosted on Heroku, but I moved it to my own Ubuntu server, which was easier than I expected.
It's open source, and should be easy to adapt to other countries; happy to accept PR's to make maintaining a fork easier.
Meanwhile Draper is still actively putting lives at risk, both through his direct actions and insane policy recommendations. But clearly getting people killed is fine by Twitter policy. As long as there are no guns involved.
Which brings us to the S&P chart. If it was Gaussian, it should stay under the blue line. It's not even close, so it must a scarier distribution. But what's in the chart?
Well we can plough through 3 pages of Taleb's math, or check Wikipedia for (non nuclear war) MAD: "In other words, for a normal distribution, mean absolute deviation is about 0.8 times the standard deviation"
That's where the sqrt(π/2) blue line comes from. QED-ish; not a normal distribution.
First thing to understand is that there's hierarchy of statistical distributions, our high school friend Gaussian being near the friendly bottom.
Unless you understand the underlying process, like in some areas of physics, you can measure all you like, but you can't prove something is in the lower left. You can however *disprove* it, often with a single observation (after you check your instruments). Falsification at work.
As you disprove friendly distributions like Gaussian, you move up.
Why the S&P 500 is not Gaussian
I'm trying to keep up with Taleb's new technical book, but I have neither his background in trading nor mathematical rigor. In a previous life I was a physicist; they are notorious for skipping math steps based on intuition, expecting mathematicians will prove their intuition correct.
I may do some out loud thinking here, starting with a TL&DR of this chart.
The book Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails is here: https://www.academia.edu/37221402/STATISTICAL_CONSEQUENCES_OF_FAT_TAILS_TECHNICAL_INCERTO_COLLECTION_
"Naive Probabilism" - Harry Cane
For the less mathematically inclined I recommend this essay. It may save your life, as it tells you which pundits and policy makers you should assume are dangerously incompetent.
https://www.researchers.one/article/2020-03-9
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Joined Aug 2018
