I work for the Internet and am an advisor to @stripe. These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.
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Jan 19 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Correspondent: *situation* So how is it that my credit card at A shows a payment has posted but by checking account at B shows it as not withdrawn yet?
Me: That’s usual behavior for U.S. bank transfers. Each is an extension of credit, with various risk controls.
And now I’ll continue this with a character.
X: But the money is in two places at once. It cannot be in two places at once.
Me: Extension of credit creates money, yes.
X: Good thing this only happens for credit cards and not for checking accounts.
Me: Built into every account.
Jan 17 • 36 tweets • 7 min read
Seems like the SEC finally got around to fining DCG for lying through their teeth repeatedly in 2022.
I think this finally lets me cash in a very old hash. Most is very old news, but there's one discussion topic that is perhaps not public yet.sec.gov/newsroom/press…
So back in November 8th, 2022 I dropped this hash on Twitter.
That is not actually a book, but let’s say there is a very rich subgenre of advice, much of it written by and for very successful people, which says what that book would say, in some cases literally by way of extended D&D metaphors it assumes the audience will grok.
Jan 16 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
I sometimes get asked "Why don't you have a tip cup? I'd like to support you, but don't want to commit to a subscription." My macroed response is that I appreciate the gesture and suggest a donation to a local charity.
I do not take donations because I sell things to businesses.
Businesses do not customarily tip or donate to professionals. When they see someone with a tip cup, they think "Not a professional."
This is not something I want a business to think about me when quoting rates.
Jan 15 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Matt Levine has a great entry today about the bank which motivated this tweet thread, which apparently ran afoul of the CFPB. He is… appropriately skeptical of their theory that this is improper in a way which should be illegal.
Two years ago I would have been pleasantly surprised that an LLM could math out what a QSR manager was and provide fictional examples. Today I’m pleasantly surprised one just extrapolated cultural commentary on why PMC values chefs more than QSR managers… without me asking.
Claude 3.5, FWIW. I am very new with Claude and have minimal system prompt or context it could be going on, unless it's cross-connecting with my public corpora.
The setup:
Jan 14 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
You’ll notice that in society we have many competing classes of prophets. The ones who actually have to be right about the future are despised, while the ones who are never scored on that continue being invited to the nicest parties.
Not at the nicest parties: insurance underwriters, prediction market users, conversion optimization specialists.
At the nicest parties: politicians, journalists, and people who publish in fields where replication is a thing you ask only of your enemies.
Jan 9 • 31 tweets • 5 min read
In this thread you have a crypto firm doing a soft freeze of a crypto VC’s account, an executive escalation, CEO involvement, and a swift rescinding of the freeze.
Pointing to it because a) all of this happens in the non-crypto side of finance b) unusually publicly documented.
And now for some commentary, which I will make broader than this particular firm/incident:
“Why don’t financial institutions flag certain accounts as belonging to responsible adults?”
In fact, they frequently do so, either implicitly or explicitly.
Jan 9 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
A conversation I have frequently about ACH speeds.
Me: The most important factor to understand is Reg E and the broader constellation that makes banks liable for consumer accounts being drained.
X: But other nations manage this without slowing down bank transfers.
Me: Which one.
X: Take India for example.
Me: UPI is an extremely impressive payments system and public/private partnership. What will a bank tell you if you are abused using it?
X: ‘LOL skill issue bro’
Me: Yes, really important to understand that American banks cannot do that.
Jan 9 • 39 tweets • 7 min read
“We” could change this but “we” have not prioritized changing it, for a variety of reasons. The “we” is more complicated than people often model “us” to be, and has crosscutting preferences implicated here, such that velocity increase is not good in all circumstances.
Many people erroneously believe that banks keep transfers slow primarily to earn interest income on “the float.” This is basically because they learned the financial industry from regurgitations of the career of Warren Buffett. In insurance, float is a very, very big deal.
Dec 30, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This would have been straightforwardly true at a major U.S. research university in 2004, and I doubt facility with the command line has increased in the intervening 20 years.
Being able to use any source control system put you in top 1% (not exaggerating) and THAT I would predict has actually changed, thanks primarily to git and GitHub-centric OSS development and deployment.
Dec 28, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I continue to think there’s a fairly titanic gap between the tech industry (as broadly understood) and someone in Columbus working as Network Administrator I at a mortgage company.
Often they end up talking past each other and/or assuming away existence of the other side.
One’s perpetually on the hunt for talent. The other’s perpetually an email away from losing their job, and the expectation they will take months to line up a new one.
Dec 13, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A contractor said something during this project which I thought was both compassionate and the sign that he was a skilled professional, and I thought I’d share:
Scene: My mother, who has some mobility challenges, is sketching out what she wants in her kitchen. He listens.
Then he takes me aside. Following conversation is indicative.
Me: All sound reasonable?
Him: I’ll build whatever you two decide on, but I wanted to have a conversation with you in private first.
Dec 11, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Ruriko: I asked at the train station how to use the automated gates to get the child’s rate for Lillian.
Me: OK.
Ruriko: That was really hard.
Me: OK.
Ruriko: Then I asked the attendant how old children could be and still receive the child’s rate. Do you know what she told me?
Me: I will bet it did not include a correct answer.
Ruriko: How can you work as a train station attendant and not know that answer.
Me: *sigh* America.
Dec 9, 2024 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
So, debanking.
I try to be non-partisan in professional spaces. That is due, in no small part, to the acceptable spectrum of opinions in tech spaces as having been about 70 nanometers or so wide for much of the last few years.
Dec 5, 2024 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
We’re going to hear many, many more stories that round to this one.
One subvariant of them is that early adopters of LLMs outside of companies are going to tell those companies *things they do not know about themselves.*
Dec 2, 2024 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
A thread on identity theft pervasiveness (and unpleasant remediation processes) in a population which experiences many challenges.
I'll observe two things which are counterintuitive:
1) You might naively assume that "identities" get more valuable as one moves up the socioeconomic ladder, but there is a discontinuity, because certain societally-favored identities have payment streams associated with them.
Nov 21, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Meta comment: this is going to be one of the longest and most heavily cited research results in the software industry.
As to the object level phenomenon, eh, clearly happens. I don’t know if I have strong impressions on where the number is for various orgs.
Nov 11, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It is useful to understand when you are dealing with a person who can be persuaded and when you are dealing with a state machine which has formal transitions for some things you could say and literally no emotional response per policy.
The second is a much better model for many large bureaucracies than the first.
This drives some people to hate bureaucracies, which is an aesthetic reaction they are welcome to. And it causes some people to return to the interpersonal maneuvering script that they expect to work.
I once had a conversation with California about counting. They were counting shots delivered. Bloomberg had published a league table which showed California ~48th in nation on delivery versus shipments, a fed number.
Oct 25, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is sort of a niche financial product but I’ll explain mechanics since plausible a few readers will eventually be able to use it:
Banks want you to have ~20% equity in your house to protect them against default risk. (Lower down-payments are subsidized by USFG through GSEs.)
That equity will almost always be in the house but for wealth management customers it could be in many other things. You could pledge a CD (hah) or basically anything you keep in your brokerage account. (Some restrictions apply.)
