Sharp and noticeable uptick in let's call them oddities, or weirdnesses occuring around me since I started blogging again. I don't want to get into much detail, but sometimes it's best just to note it and move on. Hopefully things will settle down a bit in due course. #
I see Polymarket is adding perpetual futures, otherwise known as perps, to their platform. I can‘t say I fully understand how these work over and above the notion that you can bet on future prices of things which you can use to hedge against things happening or not happening to you, or your investments. Polymarket has been making headlines the past few months, people are up in arms about all this "crazy" betting that is going on everywhere. It strikes me that all these angles are missing the real story, that regular people can start hedging things, something previously only really available to high net worth individuals.
What will the world look like when literally everyone is hedging everything? I find this notion mildly terrifying, but I'm not sure if it's terrifying because of the craziness or terrifying because of it's opposite. Maybe if everything is perfectly hedged, nothing is interesting and exciting. How likely is all this to have an impact?
In the short term probably not huge, but a few weeks back I spent a few hours talking with an LLM about all this and throwing around some ideas about creating a home grown hedging application, all written in Typescript. I have to say it was quite interesting, and the LLMs have all the patterns analysed and know about all the best ways of tracking things, and they are incredibly good at coming up with some general rules, throwing things into buckets, so you can actually make some interesting allocations and stay on top of things.
But I also go the sense that it could very easily become all consuming. Do we really all want to become AI powered traders? #
More very very bizare internet connecivity issues. Just another note into the void in case this is the end again, so someone knows how it went down. :( #
Today’s links:
Martin Fowler on tech debt in an agentic world and the importance of verification systems. martinfowler.com #
Google release TPU 8t and TPU 8i, their new training and inference focussed powerhouse AI chips. blog.google #
Polymarket launches perps, perpetual futures contract trading. www.cnbc.com #
John Gruber on Cook standing down as Apple CEO. daringfireball.net #
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