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That's not what the article is about.

That's not what the article is about.

Advice for anyone on mobile: read in landscape mode if you want to be able to see the division by 256 version code example at the start.

The HTML/CSS is bad that lets it completely overflow the right edge of the page instead of wrapping.

I re-read this post three times in total confusion before I figured out the most important piece was off-screen entirely.


It's orders of magnitude more expensive to make a movie than it is to make a track.

yeah exactly

and?

Did you read the question? It was an answer to the question.

Not to put words in their mouth, but my question would be: isn't that why movies are more expensive than an audio track? Not to mention that movies have "concerts" much more regularly and in many places at once where they make money, no? I don't really have an idea of the exact economics of it all, so these are genuine questions.

Alpha is ultimately the result of analysis, of better analysis than others.

LLM's can actually be exceptionally good at research and pattern recognition, i.e. analysis. And while they aren't great at running numbers themselves, they can do exceptional work passing off Python scripts to an interpreter to generate the numerical results they need.

I'm quite sure the Robinhood AI is going to be trash, i.e. just a gimmick.

But, it's not crazy to think that with the right harness, there are big opportunities for identifying profitable strategies. Especially relying on unparalleled and essentially unlimited research capacity based on public information. More analysis than any single firm could ever hire.

And even for Robinhood users, it's entirely plausible that AI-traded stocks will perform much better than the trades a majority of users would make, since most investors are really unsophisticated.


>LLM's can actually be exceptionally good at research and pattern recognition, i.e. analysis.

No they aren't, they're good at imitating analysis based on representations of analysis in their training data. Also, Its likely that out dated techniques would over represented in training data.

Do you think Jane Street would have the returns they do if they just imitated all their competitors and everyone was using the same strategies?


[flagged]


There is a beautiful irony in being condescending about AI simply imitating training data… by repeating a meme you saw on Twitter: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=772349875124360

(which I guess I will call your training data ;) )


The difference is that a human can evaluate the meme against their real world history and experience, and make a judgement.

That sounds like more training data that the human is just regurgitating. Nobody I know has ever had an original thought, just combined existing thoughts that were in their training data, in new combinations.

Thats a sad way to perceive the human experience and the individual. Its lowkey a techno fascist psyop you're falling for if you believe this to be true.

Its a common phrase. Ive never used facebook.

You're helping their point.

This is essentially what AlphaZero is doing: https://nof1.ai/

Heh if you look at the Sharpe Ratios of the strategies/models, they're all terrible. The best performing regime there is still a Sharpe of 0.019

Yeah it looks like what uneducated retail traders would find interesting.

> LLM's can actually be exceptionally good at research and pattern recognition, i.e. analysis.

Sure but knowing where to start research is also a problem. Just saying “do research” isn’t going to work even with volumes of public information.


Well said. Lots miss this key point and it’s what I mean by alpha. Where to start, what the angle is, and LLM can help develop though I would of course argue it’s a fools errand with how crowded the space is but you could still develop an idea but it’s not going to create the idea for you.

Yeah if you have an actual really good idea for a certain kind of under analyzed data that could give you an edge but it would take too much effort or time to compile or analyze the data, an LLM has potential to make a viable strategy out of an otherwise correct but unuseful insight

I mean sure an LLM can indeed have useful ML functions BUT it is a fools errand to think an LLM at the retail level is generating any alpha. Help build a model sure. Whatever these weird mechanism of agents trading, no.

If someone is poor and doesn't have the money, sure you can't enforce it.

If it's a corporation, it's pretty straightforward. If they refuse to pay, you get a writ from the court that authorizes seizure of assets.

Usually that means you go their bank and the value of the judgment will be garnished by their bank and given to you.

Occasionally and theatrically, a sheriff will take you to their headquarters to seize property like computers and printers that you can sell at auction until the value is satisfied.

It only becomes difficult if the corporation is bankrupt, which is similar to a poor person who doesn't have the money. Then it becomes a question of prioritization, e.g. do you get paid before or after lenders, and will there be any money left.


Have you actually gone through this process? Like sure, obtaining a writ is technically part of the same case, but it's pretty much starting all over again. And you'll still be paying filing fees, dealing with court clerks, and waiting weeks or months.

Finding a corporation's bank is a whole separate issue, where you have to go back to court for a post-judgement discovery to force them to tell you. And even if they do - or you already knew - you have to get the writ served to the bank, and just hope they didn't move funds beforehand - or else you're back to start.

As GP said, it IS a huge PITA to get judgments paid, and it's particularly menacing in Small Claims. Unless the other side act on some virtue (which, they were already bad-faithed enough to have a lawsuit against them AND lose), your judgment is just an IOU, and actually forcing collection is often way more money — or time in money — than most state's Small Claims limits.

It's a broken system.


No, but my point is that it does work. It's a lot better to be delayed by months and have to pay more but still get your money, rather than by delayed by years and not get it at all.

This is a franchised retailer with over 300 locations, and this is a value of $200,000+ plus so this is way bigger than small claims.

Like I'd definitely agree with you if we were talking about a $5K claim against a single location in small claims. But this seems to be a $200,000+ claim against a corporation in regular court, as far as I can tell.


I mean yeah, but only my final paragraph is about small claims. The accountability and enforcement mechanisms to collect your money from a ruling don't change between a $200K and a $2K lawsuit, it's the same PITA either way - just a few more zeroes on paper.

I never said it wasn't a PITA. I just replied to the original commenter who was saying it can basically be unenforceable, and that's just not true.

But the end of the blog post says the man sued and won.

But the store closed to get out of paying.

Which makes no sense if the store was corporate-owned. So why isn't the corporation paying?


The store in question was a franchise so potentially the liability will be limited to just the assets of that franchise. But there's a lot of weird stuff here and it looks like the corporation may have (in a legally questionable manner) removed assets from the store to the corporation during proceedings to shield them.

A representative of the corporation, while taking over the store, expressly states that the corporation is taking over the consignment agreement, on camera and with several witnesses.

Courts are allowed to pierce the corporate veil when that happens.

They absolutely are and a good lawyer, I'm sure, could audit the accounts and find some misdeeds - the issue is that the auditing and even getting access to those records in court is extremely expensive. To my knowledge there isn't a way to trigger that kind of a discovery in small claims so you need to go through the pricey legal system.

The money in question here is the proceeds from selling a collection valued at 200k - the recovery (unless you start to get into punitive territory) is likely to be rather meager... and it's a large risk so there may be few bites on firms willing to take it on purely commission.


> unless you start to get into punitive territory

Is there not potential grounds here for punitive damages? The false police reports and harassment seem egregious even by corporate standards.

And the corporation is valued at $400 million, so it's not like the pot isn't sweet enough


In the UK you can make an order of information to compel directors of a company that is in debt to answer questions about company assets, accounts and records under oath. This can be done in County Court and my understanding it is inexpensive. I'm not sure how useful this is for carrying out an audit because I think its meant to be used for seeing if the debtor has the ability to pay. I think generally incorrect trading during an insolvency is meant to be discovered by the receivers during the insolvency process. Also, I'm not sure if there is an equivalent to an order of information in the US system.

the issue is that the auditing and even getting access to those records in court is extremely expensive.

In most cases, the bankruptcy trustee will be doing that work already.

But in a case like this, it's probably not going to be necessary. Courts usually pierce the corporate veil in situations involving the debts of wholly-owned subsidiaries. It happens frequently enough that its actually news when they don't pierce the veil. This is because corporations usually do a bad job of doing all the things that are necessary to maintain the liability shield in court.

In a nutshell: it requires treating the subsidiary as an entirely separate entity, with separate books, accounts, back office, officers/management, etc. As this is extremely inefficient, most corporations don't bother. The only corporations that do are the ones that deal with company-killing litigation regularly enough that it's worth it to absorb the cost of maintaining the liability shield.


Seems like it would be hard to know which blue Lego was Bryan’s

It was sealed sets, still NIB, not individual pieces. No one would bother selling $200k of loose bricks on consignment.

Let me rephrase: “blue Lego set”

This is a collectible market so Lego sets aren’t fungible, so being unable to keep track of that sounds like negligence.

Somewhere in one of the long videos, they mentioned that there were unique stickers on each of his items that he was selling on consignment. They had to have known which items were his.

*grey, since it was Star Wars

because, i assume, that they sued the salem location directly?

They wouldn't make any sense, if the whole thing started because corporate took over control and ownership the location.

It sounds like corporate took away ownership and gave it to a new franchisee.

The original franchisee claims to have lost their life savings in that move. I have no idea how exactly that happened. Their story really sounds like something from Russia back when western investors had their company simply taken from them by someone well-connected.

It sounds like the original franchisee doesn’t want to admit that they were losing a lot of money already. Only someone really desperate would take on a $200K lego collection and only collect a 10% consignment fee. It would also explain the corporate “takeover” if they were already behind on paying their franchise fees or whatever they might have owed to corporate.

That being said, it’s not illegal to be a bad business person, and none of that excuses the subsequent behavior by BAM corporate or the new franchise owner.


* The store's consignment fee was 35%

* They had sold about half of the consigned inventory

* The old franchise owner said they had a job offer outside the country

* Said franchise owner was current on a restructured fee schedule that, they allege, was the direct result of corporate bungling the transfer of accounts from the franchise owner previous to them


I definitely heard 10% first and only later 35%. For some reason the videos don't have transcripts and the Gemini AI isn't available, so I can't try to search for it. But I'm 100% sure that 10% was the figure mentioned first (maybe I misunderstood and it was just being used as an example). If the real figure is 35%, then I retract any comments about them making a bad business deal.

From what I understand, the original franchisee wanted to sell the store because they wanted to leave the US (for "political reasons"; I suspect they don't want to live in Trumpland anymore, but that's pure speculation). The way it appears, the moment they announced that desire to sell, B&M corporate showed up to take control of the shop. And the consignment.

> Then Bricks & Minifigs Corporate took control of the Salem location from the original franchise owner

> They were found liable in court. They closed the store rather than pay.

This doesn't make any sense. If the corporation took control of the franchise, the corporation now owns it and its obligations. They can close the store if they want, but that doesn't do anything about their obligation to pay.

What's missing from this story? Because as presented, it makes no sense.


I believe what is missing is a Brick and Minifig's attorney with a law degree.

This is why you shouldn't buy a business for 1 dollar because you can inherit its debts.


If they were smart, they took the "inventory" as payment for some imaginary debt, bankrupting the store without taking ownership of it.

Hopefully, the courts will see through that tactic, and add a contempt charge on top of all the civil penalties.


do we know the debt is "imaginary"? Was this inventory seized in satisfaction of some debt.

I don't think they won in court, B&M just didn't respond so it went to a default judgement

> B&M just didn't respond so it went to a default judgement

So they won.


They didn't win in court is what I said

The default judgment was a court decision, so yes, they did.

It is my understanding that they sued the franchise, which then closed, and not the parent corporate entity.

While they won against the franchise due to the default judgement, they didn't win against corporate. The store that is now closed is the franchise they sued.


This entire story started because the corporation took control of the franchise though

Fairly certain it was actually someone affiliated with corporate who took over the franchise, but it is still a franchisee.

Right. I was very surprised because there aren't laws against insider trading on prediction markets.

So I genuinely don't understand what he is being charged with. What precisely is the "fraud"? The entire point of prediction markets is to get people with better information to participate, i.e. "insiders".

Insider trading with public corporations has tons of specific laws around it to clearly define what is insider information and what isn't. Prediction markets don't have any of that.

And the article does nothing whatsoever to clarify what the heck the actual fraud is supposed to be.

(And I understand this is against Google policy, but that's not what this is about.)


yes notably it is also not a civil case being brought by google for breaking the NDA

> but it's not Google Search, and when I want Search I want Search.

Not me. I really appreciate having both results simultaneously. I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great. I can expand it to see if there's more.

Or, if I see that the AI mode didn't understand my brief search query, I just glance at the search results below.

And often times, when I do need to follow a link, I find the source result links in the AI mode to be a better quality than the search result links.

It's the best of both worlds.


> I can scan the first couple sentences of the AI response, and if that already has the answer then great.

But how do make the determination that the answer is good and you should stop reading the page? Vibes?


I think it depends on what you are looking for.

Most of the time I'm looking for something very specific that there are plenty of articles about, but clicking on the articles results in popups, banners and an unhealthy amount of scrolling to get to the answer.

AI overview provides me the answer instantly.

Think about suff like "does china borders afghanistan". In those cases you can be confident that the AI overview is right, and saved you time.

If it is a complex or niche question I tend not to trust the overview and go straight for legitimate-looking results


Popups, banners? What are those?

How do you make it without AI ? Are you parsing through millions of pages yourself ?

The LLM results are presented confidently and succinctly in a way that is designed to tell you “yes” OR, it not applicable, it just mashes together statements (which often leads to a response that contradicts itself one sentence later). That’s not the same as your vetting search results.

Well before Google screwed it all up there used to be some correlation between top hits and what you were looking for. SEO has muddied the waters for many years now and it’s never been truly “merit based” or “objective” or whatever we want to call it, but generally speaking, the first results were the best by default.


That hasn't been my experience. It has been working really well for what I need.

SEO optimization totally ruined google search for me for the past few years


>that hasn’t been my experience

Ok, but it’s been mine. And clearly I’m not alone.

I feel like at this point any discussion about LLM’s has an implied “my experience” because LLM’s are super inconsistent due to not being refined tools at all. I’m sure your experience has been different, just like my experience has been different. I imagine you’ll want to chalk it up to operator error, but it sure seems like a lot of people have variations of my experience. If so many people are operating it wrong, then maybe the tool is poorly designed.

Understand that I use LLM’s pretty frequently. I am not “anti-AI.” I’ve used production tools incorporating machine learning for years now. But LLM’s simply aren’t the bespoke tools that these companies want you to believe, and they are definitely not a suitable replacement for search. It’s simply too inconsistent and will hallucinate answers. Google search didn't make up answers, it presented indexed sources that you ver in real time which I find to be a far superior way to do research. I don’t like having to guess when an LLM is just making shit up as it asserts something with simulated extreme confidence. Not only that, you can take a correct answer from a LLM and just start saying “know that is not right,” and it will start apologizing to you and generating other answers. That is a huge problem! I shouldn’t be able to “convince it” to give me a different answer.

Yes SEO made things objectively worse. Doesn’t mean we need to add another layer of issues on top of that.


No, you engage in what appears to be the lost art of media literacy and abrogate high quality sources.

Right, so I have to do manual work going over 10000000 of results ? Or trusting SEO / google algorthm instead ?

No... When did you start using the internet?

great question, probably around 1998 ! How is it relevant to 2026 ?

You seemed confused about how to use a search engine combined with media literacy, thinking you'd have to parse 10,000 results.

Before AI people got the answer they needed from the snippets. That's the level most search queries are at.

Common sense.

The same way I make the determination as to whether a linked search result is good and I don't need to click on another search result.

It's not like non-AI webpages are inherently more trustworthy or anything. The internet is full of misinformation everywhere, you know?


It replaced some of my most used tools with google search. I used to be able to search "define inoculant" and I would get a definition, synonyms, and even a history of the word usage. Now it's replaced by an often mistaken AI summary. Even "inoculant synonyms" doesn't work.

Hope the answer in the AI response is right!

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