kasey_junk (u/kasey_junk)

kasey_junk commented on Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock wsj.com/opinion/uncle-sam... · Posted by u/aspenmayer

> Thanks for clarifying! I misspoke there, but from my standpoint (portfolio manager/equities investor) that's better.

From a national security point it really, really isn't. Like, I'm not a fan of the Trump administration, but having basically all chip manufacturing in Asia is not a good idea if you think there'll be a war with China in the next few decades.

kasey_junk · a day ago

The CHIPs act passed Congress during the Biden administration. The only thing Trump added was this weird non-elected post hoc equity grab.

kasey_junk commented on Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City cnbc.com/2025/08/22/waymo... · Posted by u/achristmascarl

tptacek · 2 days ago

I've been pulled over in Chicago within the last couple months, for whatever that's worth. In Oak Park, this is a hotbutton issue, the belief that since COVID traffic enforcement is sharply down, and, apparently, by the numbers, it isn't.

kasey_junk · 2 days ago

When I looked into the stats for cpd it was a mess. They got in trouble for monkeying with the stats, so they are already suspicious.

But by their numbers stop rates went way up for the 10 years between 2014-2024. But that was during the period when traffic stops were a primary strategy for crime prevention, that is the pretextual stops they got in trouble for.

Sadly, there was no checkbox for the officer to mark if it was a pretextual stop or not for study purposes.

I could probably isolate by stop location to some degree if I really wanted to do some digging. Maybe I can nerdsnipe ‘chaps into doing it for me.

kasey_junk commented on Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City cnbc.com/2025/08/22/waymo... · Posted by u/achristmascarl

tptacek · 2 days ago

I'm in Chicagoland too, and they're doing basically what they've always done: issue tickets --- automatically, now, as well as manually. What difference are you seeing?

kasey_junk · 2 days ago

Anecdotally, I have not seen a car pulled over on LSD south of the loop in _years_. That used to be common (my first year in Chicago I got 2 tickets there and don’t think of myself as particularly speedy).

I’ve not seen a single person pulled over in my neighborhood in the same time, another activity that was common.

Meanwhile traffic behavior has reached staggeringly wild levels.

My impression, which is certainly not backed with data, is that CPD no longer polices traffic violations. My cynical view is that it’s a work slow down in protest over all the trouble they’ve gotten in for pretextual stops.

kasey_junk commented on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn't try AI immediately techcrunch.com/2025/08/22... · Posted by u/ed1024

kasey_junk · 4 days ago

At a Saturday meeting…

This is not a story about AI.

kasey_junk commented on A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers stochasticlifestyle.com/a... · Posted by u/ChrisRackauckas

jackblemming · 4 days ago

I always wonder what kind of slop people are creating when they say they have a bajillion Claude instances all churning out code.

kasey_junk · 4 days ago

In my experience you would not be able to identify code I wrote by hand from code I generated with an asynchronous agent, because I wouldn’t let it get to you if something stood out as off.

But I don’t “vibe code” anything. I understand and review all the code that gets generated. Most of the stuff coming from my agents is either boilerplate or extensively uses libraries and static analysis tools that make it easy to verify.

I kill aggressively any code the agent outputs that doesn’t match my standards unless it’s obvious that I can get it up to par quickly. This is one of the big advantages of the llm. I can do that without navigating inter personal conflict.

But the output is mostly indistinguishable from what I create by hand.

kasey_junk commented on Margin debt surges to record high advisorperspectives.com/d... · Posted by u/pera

underlipton · 5 days ago

You think that there might be a "quality to the quantity" wrt deposit levels after years in an ultra-low interest rate environment? IIRC, deposits in SVB, FRB, and Signature combined outsized WaMu, with the difference being that WaMu was one of the largest banks in the country, while the average person had not heard of Silicon Valley Bank et al. until the day "Silicon Valley Bank Fails," lit up headlines.

kasey_junk · 5 days ago

At least in the svb and frb case high ldr contributed to the bank runs that ended them. But note in this context frb at .96 was seen as bad and svb at 1.6 was disastrous(.7 is good).

Thats the real brake on money creation by banks, not the reserve requirement.

kasey_junk commented on Margin debt surges to record high advisorperspectives.com/d... · Posted by u/pera

827a · 5 days ago

Yeah its important to decompose those two sources (among others) of "money printing". The obvious one people think most about is when our federal government does it. But a more concerning one is: Enforced banking reserve ratios. If a bank holds a trillion dollars in assets and is allowed to hold a reserve ratio of 10%, they can print $10T out of thin air, because they're allowed to issue debt up to that amount.

As far as I'm aware, in 2020 the reserve requirement in the US was set to 0%, and it has not been changed since then.

kasey_junk · 5 days ago

Reserve ratios have not been the major capital constraint for a very long time. Loan to deposit ratios have been. And those have stayed in normal bounds since the great financial crisis. Both bank regulators and importantly bank investors keep on top of this because they are the ones to lose the most if it gets out of wack.

The reserve requirement had to be loosened because banks became too conservative, largely because their investors were skittish about ldr.

kasey_junk commented on Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy polygon.com/steam-paypal-... · Posted by u/SilverElfin

diath · 11 days ago

Considering the fact that these payment processors are still happily processing payments from PornHub, OnlyFans and other big real porn platforms, I don't think your explanation about the networks not wanting to be associated with porn holds any ground. They're targeting video games specifically.

kasey_junk · 10 days ago

Payment processors don’t happily process pornhub payments they’ve been largely cutoff from the networks.

kasey_junk commented on Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy polygon.com/steam-paypal-... · Posted by u/SilverElfin

rictic · 11 days ago

You're speaking out of ignorance here. Steam has a long-term relationship with its customers. They can and will remove a title from a user's library if the payment is charged back, as well as placing restrictions on the account.

kasey_junk · 11 days ago

I'm a long term customer of Steam _and_ work in the payments industry. In the _easiest_ Steam payment there are 7 different parties extending or receiving credit from each other. Most of those counter parties have no relationship with each other at all (I certainly don't maintain close ties with the game publishers bank), do you?

The rules that are being invoked around porn exist to protect different parts of that chain, from each other.

The argument about Steams ability to revoke the good in question doesn't help with that. What it does is provide an alternate path if Steam wanted to extricate themselves from that chain of 7 counterparties. Steam could stop being involved with all those other players and become a payment network unto themselves. They could demand ach (or cash in the mail as the parent suggests). Give the game with the understanding they would rapidly revoke it for bad customers, and limit their exposure to the publisher by giving them very delayed payment terms. Of course, then the customer is taking on more risk and losing choice and Steam has to account for that in their sales numbers.

kasey_junk commented on Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy polygon.com/steam-paypal-... · Posted by u/SilverElfin

immibis · 11 days ago

By this reasoning every transaction involves credit, since there's a time period between me swiping my card for the apples, and me walking out of the store with the apples, during which time you could tackle me and take my apples. And if it's a word that applies to every transaction, then it's meaningless.

kasey_junk · 11 days ago

Every transaction _does_ involve credit risk (specifically counter party or settlement risk) but the amount of it changes based on the difference in time between when payment happens and the transaction is completed. So for most purposes a cash transaction where I give you cash and you give me the goods is viewed as riskless (even though it's not as you point out).

But in your example, you don't need to invoke a security guard stealing your apples. There is a _ton_ of credit risk already just by the invocation of the electronic payment. Your funds will not hit the account of the merchant in question for _a long time_ (usually modeled as 1-3 days for risk purposes in the US). All kinds of things can happen in that time. The merchant has extended you credit and has taken on credit risk. They've done so because of the chain of credit and agreements that the banks, processors and networks have worked out.

If Mastercard gets a bunch of its transactions reversed because a Congressional panel gets huffy about pornography, that potentially blows up transactions for apples miles away. That's why this is mostly a conversation about risk management, not morals. To the apple vendor's bank, they largely don't care if you buy porn, they just don't want their settlements caught up in the blowback.