slan's blog

Loneliness or short time relief?

14 days glucose monitor

14 days glucose monitor

record

Day 1:

  • The gray line is yeasterday I start wear my glucose monitor device
  • Yesterday's dinner is 土豆沙锅粉,add on eggs, mushroom in it, glucose is quick peak at 7.8, then I eat sneak at 21:00 make my glucose slight up and quickly down.
  • Breakfast is sanwich , glucose peak at 7.4.
  • Lauch is 花菜,山药,青椒炒肉,with little rice, and I start walking 50 minutes, the glucose is very healy, you can see the glucose line slightly up to 5.8 then down.
  • Dinner is eat late at 8:00,煮泡面+鸡蛋+海带苗。 that is very terriable , my glucose fast soar to 9.2. I should eat less and healthy in Dinner day 1 monitor glucose

Day 2:

  • Breakfast: sanwich + a apple. glucose peak at 8.3, I think I should reduce apple, maybe half apple is better.
  • Other Data lost, because the monitor problem,

Day 3:

  • Breakfast: 水果麦片+milk+half apple.
2024-10-23 09:19:51 +0800 +0800
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Personal Coupon growth

Personal coupon growth formula:

Personal Coupon Growth = Body × Knowledge: (Language & Logic) × Information × Action
  • Information and Action make me go faster.
  • Body and Knowledge enable me to go further.

move less, train more.

2024-10-20 22:39:48 +0800 +0800

Steady but boring: My selling put strategy

Steady but boring: My selling put strategy

graph TD
    A[Start] -->|Bullish or Neutral on NVDA| B{Sell NVDA Put at<br>OTM 2-3%  }
    B -->|Premium Received| C[Buy QQQ]
    B --> D{Monitor Put}
    D -->|Premium < 30%| E[Close Position]
    E --> F[Reassess Market]
    F -->|Bullish on NVDA| G[Sell New Put]
    F -->|Neutral/Bearish| H[Wait for Better Entry]
    D -->|14-21 DTE| I{OTM by > 3%?}
    I -->|Yes| J[Let Expire]
    I -->|No| K{Consider Rolling}
    K -->|Roll| L[Roll to Next Week/Month]
    K -->|Don't Roll| M[Prepare for Potential Assignment]
    D -->|< 14 DTE & ITM| N[Roll or Prepare for Assignment]
    N -->|Roll| O[Roll to Next Week/Month at<br> Higher Strike]
    N -->|Assign| P[Sell Covered Call on NVDA]
    P --> Q{Monitor Call}
    Q -->|Premium < 30%| R[Close Call]
    Q -->|Near Expiration| S{ITM?}
    S -->|Yes| T[Roll Up and Out]
    S -->|No| U[Let Expire]
    B & P --> V{Weekly Review}
    V --> W[Adjust Strategy if Needed]
    W --> B

2024-10-19 10:04:55 +0800 +0800

Investing in A-Share Stock Market: My 2 Strategies

Investing in A-Share Stock Market: My 2 Strategies

In Comparison to the U.S. Stock Market, The China stock market is notably riskier than its U.S. counterpart. with its performance often closely tied to government policies. to avoid high risk. I've two strategies:

  1. Tracking Policy Updates and Market Sentiment

    • Stay Informed: Closely follow policy republish meetings and key announcements.
    • Experience-Based Insight: Utilize your market experience to assess whether these updates will likely draw significant investor interest.
  2. Contrarian Approach: Timing the Market

    • Peak Identification: Pinpoint moments when the market reaches exceptionally high levels.
    • Sentiment-Driven Action: Consider short positions when market enthusiasm peaks, indicating potential over-optimism.
2024-10-18 15:50:54 +0800 +0800
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Enduring Loneliness

Whenever I reach my goals or await the outcome, a profound emptiness settles in, leaving me uncertain about my next steps.

The wait is unbearable - isolated and unsupported, I find myself irresistibly drawn to distractions, constantly refreshing for updates to kill time, and craving conversation. Yet, waiting is an indispensable life lesson. I must harness this time for introspection, learning, and self-improvement.

For if I succumb to the allure of fleeting gratifications, I risk forfeiting the potential for true liberation.

When emptiness:

  • ❌ Surfing and refreshing for updates, seeking talks.
  • ✅ Reading, Listing podcast, Reflective Writing.
  • ✅ Exercise, Meditation, Walking.
  • ✅ Planing.
2024-10-18 10:32:33 +0800 +0800
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The Pain of Selling Puts

Selling puts is a good strategy to earn money when the price is steady or slightly up. The pain comes from:

  • When the price goes up quickly, you see that the profit is much smaller than if you had bought the stock.
  • When the price goes down, you lose money equivalent to the price drop.

If you can bear the pain of not getting as much profit as buying stock, that small and steady profit will start to accumulate, and you will see the power of compounding.

2024-10-17 16:07:13 +0800 +0800
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New Blog Template Again

I just changed the blog template to make it simpler. I also added a cat to my blog, so I'm not as lonely now 😊.

from: alt text

to: alt text

2024-10-16 17:57:49 +0800 +0800
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Long time no write

What I need to do in the short term to recover from training:

  • Training Body: Recover from running, keep weight under 70kg.
  • Training Mind: Build a system to listen, read, and write. Try to build models.
2024-10-07 16:28:00 +0000 UTC

Howard Marks interview with Nicolai Tangen

Howard Marks interview with Nicolai Tangen

Howard Marks, the author of the book "Mastering the Market Cycle" and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management. He is joined by Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, discussed investment philosophy, cycles, and how he absorbs information.

Investment philosophy

Howard marks introduced his investment philosophy:

  1. Risk control.
  2. Consistency.
  3. Market efficiency, only target less efficient markets.
  4. Specialization, know more than everybody else about a few things.
  5. Not relying on macroeconomic forecasts.
  6. Not timing the market.

Thoes philosophy was coming from his experience of the limits of knowledge. because investing is not a science, it's dealing with a lot of people, people have feelings, their behavior is unpredictable. Randomness is a big part of investing. Especially in the short term, stupid people get rich, you can't verify the quality of the decision by the outcome.

Howard think the key element of success is aggressiveness, timing, and skill. If you aggressive enough and in the right time, you don't need too much skill, but if you want success repeatedly, you need skill.

Howard believes that the market is cyclical, because people's greed and fear. When market is crazy high or crazy low, he think it's chance to make money based on the foreacst. The only problem is extreme high or low is too rare.

Risk management

Howard Marks emphasized that risk management is not risk avoidance, risk avoidance usually means return avoidance, if you want to profit, you have to take risk. and you can't take money just by taking risk, you have to do it skillfully.

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. Under any sets of circumstances, any outcome is possible. excessive certainty is dangerous. Aknowledge the limits of knowledge is our friend. If everything looks perfect, it's dangerous. Example:

  • In late 2023, the consensus think Fed will cut 6 times in 2024, but the Fed only said they will cut 3 times. the consensus is too optimistic.

In Oaktree, Howard resisted having risk control department, because he think risk control is the responsibility of everybody.

Games

Howard think games is very helpful to investment:

  1. It's risk taking
  2. It's all about probabilistic, assessing the probability is very important.

Annie Duke, a PHD in decision analysis, also a poker world champion, wrote a book called "Thinking in Bets", she approached poker professionally, analytically, and with discipline. She helps people to think about the structuring bets. Example:

  • In basketball game, when you bet on the popular team, if you win, you don't get much. but sometimes the payoff is better when you bet on the unpopular team.

Contrairianism

Contrairianism means beting against the consensus, usually the payoff is better. It's doesn't mean routinely think what is the consensus think and do the opposite, you need to think what is the consensus think, why they do that and why they are wrong. why they do that way.

If you want to be a contrarian person, you need to be comfortable with loneliness, you have to dare to be different. you have to dare to be wrong. Howard has a good partner, Bruce Karsh, they support each other, that make them more easy to overcome the loneliness.

It's more easy to be contrarian in the frothy than in the fearful market. Howard use a barometer to measure the market, like the temperature. He look at the oppinion of the people, how uniform they are, how satisfied they are, how strong they are.

Information flow

Howard's information flow is very simple, he read a newspapers, he consume 2-3 newspapers a day and read "The Economist", what the most important is not what happened, but what it means, why it happened. He try to figure out what is the temperature of the market, what is the position of the cycle.

Howard is keep eye on Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Stan Druckenmiller, Seth Klarman

Advice

Howard's advice to young people is:

  • If you want to be a good investor, you can't be right all the time.
  • Investing is a great puzzle, you have to equip your philosophy to deal with it with many many considerations.

Book mentioned

  • "Mastering the Market Cycle" by Howard Marks
  • "Thinking in Bets" by Annie Duke
  • "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2024-06-15 11:39:00 +0000 UTC

Memory - Charan Ranganath in podcast with Lex Fridman

Memory - Charan Ranganath in podcast with Lex Fridman

This Article is my notes from Fridman podcast, link: https://lexfridman.com/charan-ranganath

Charan Ranganath, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California. His research focuses Memory, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuroimaging, EEG, fMRI.

preview

Remembering self

What we remember is not the record that we experienced. We remember the highlights, the best parts, and the bad parts. it's missing a lot of the details.

Our brain is optimized for learn what is most useful in the past and knowning the present and to predicting the future. We usually predict the future right, the bus which you take will not exploded, so you get a illusion that you know everything what will happen. When the illusion is broken, we find something error, that error is the key to learning. the error is where the learning happens.

Do things that are very unpleasant in the moment, because they can potentially provide meaningful memories, stories, or lessons that can be appreciated and enjoyed for many years afterward.

If you having shared difficult, unpleasant, or trying circumstances with other people. Those are the things that you remember the most, and make people feel closer to each other.

Why we don't look back enough? Because we often lack the confidence that they can successfully overcome or face the challenges that they have faced in the past. the actual capability to accomplish tasks or get things done in difficult moments is better than just believing that you can do it. The darker it gets, the better the story will be if you emerge on the other side.

Adolescence

Adolescence is much more important than many people realize. Teenage years are so important for the development of the brain.

People think parents consequential in forming child by making every decision. It does, but not all, children are also forming themselves.

children is learning how to get along with other people, learning who they are and how they function at the adolescent stage. that's more important than the content that children are learning in school. if they get an perfect parent working on them, that can be terribly traumatizing.

Why human don't remember much of the first few years of life?

  1. hippocampus taking some time to develop.
  2. neocortex is developing rapidly and changing.
  3. child's self-sense takes time to develop.

In the first few years of life, kid's internal model if changing rapidly. that is not a bad thing, actually, brain is very evolved to optimize for different stages of life. like prefrontal cortex which is helps us use our knowledge to archive our goals, its takes forever to develop.

  1. childhood, frontal cortex is massively reforming. as a child they wander around, they need to learn about the world the culture, the language, the people, the rules. they need to explore. they want to be free, they don't want to be tight, they didn't know what their goals are.
  2. young adult, 10 years prime functioning, because they have to hunt and forage, they need to raise child, they need stay focused on the big picture and the long term goals.
  3. older, going down and end up being losing all that frontal function. in our society, older is no longer responsible for hunting for studying, they are responsible for teaching, for guiding, to pass on the knowledge to the next generation.

Different types of memory

Episodic memory, semantic memory, working memory, short-term memory, long-term memory, what are the differences between them?

Researchers want to model things for experimental purposes, but in reality, they are all interconnected.

Working memory was coined by Alan Baddeley, its a short-term memory to keep and control the flow of that information in mind, to manipulate it, to use it, to make decisions based on it. we have the alibity that passively storing information, but what is more important is that we also have ability to control the flow of information that's being kept active based on what we are doing.

This working memory, some researchers call short-term memory, is not at all independent from long-term memory.

Working memory help us create internal models of events, help us predict, interpret, example: when you at a child's birthday party, when you just see a candle, you can predict the whole events that happens later. but to build that model, you need to retrieve the knowledge from the Semantic memory, and you need to retrieve the memories for specific events that happened in the past, that's Episodic memory.

How to improve memory

You don't want remember more, you want remember better. brain is designed to use the least amount of energy to get the less information. so if you want to remember everything, it's already failed. It's all about reusing information, making the most of what we already have.

When you are suprise, fear, stress, etc, your brain is realsing a lot of chemicals like norerpinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, those improve the priority of the information that you are processing, and help it memory better.

Attention is a big factor in memory. and attention is something that you can train. How we allocate our attention and how we hold attention on a thing is important. If you are an expert in something, you are training attention.

Memory Palace is a good technique, it's provide a structure for the information, give you the clues to retrieve the information.

Space repetition is another good technique, if you repeat the information over time, you can retain the information better. what behind this is memory is compete, if you remember this information in different times in different places, it's more accessible to you.

Test yourself, when you test fail, you get the error, you get the mismatch, that error is the key for our nerual network to learn. If you constantly pushing yourself to your limit, you will retain the information better. If you are feeling comfortable, you are not learning.

Find the error may let you feel uncomfortable, unconfident, lost hope, You may very very don't want to do it because of this fear, it's hard, but when you get over it, you will realize, that's the best way to learn.

Imagination and actual memory

where did the mental experience come form?

what is the diffrience between we remember something that is happen, and we thinking about something.

prefrontal cortex foucusing on the sensory information

we don't replay the past, we imagine how the past could have been by taking bits and pieces that come up in our heads.

imagination is fundamentally coupled with memory in both directions.

Memory sport example

A guy named Scott Hagwood, he has a cancer, he should treat it by chemo, but he afraid that chemo will badly affect his memory, so he want to train his memory skills. He buy a book, and practice it over and over again, and then he go to the memory competition, and win the bet.

The competition usually competition on the arbitary thing, like long list of numbers, words, or cards.

When rats puts in a box and chase the cheese, their cell in the hippocampus fire when in diffrence places in the box. So hippocampus forms a map of the box.

And our brain is effectively learning new things based on the old experiences. If you familiar with your local IKEA, you can easily know navigate in another IKEA. you can use the old map everywhere.

Rather than bascially mapping every coordinate in a space, the brain is form a graph of the space economically. It connects the major landmarks, important things, fill blanks with the details. It contains verifiable details and lots infrences.

Explain FMRI, how it measure brain activity

blood flow in the brain, blood didn't have oxygen on it, is magnetic than blood with oxygen. so we can use the magnetic to see the blood flow in the brain.

When we get a movie of the brain activity, we can observe the brain activity in different regions of the brain.

You can measure brain activity by FMRI after 6 seconds of the actual event. Because the blood flow is slow and so much back and forth in the brain.

Most of cells in the brain are not neurons, they are glial cells, they are supporting the neurons.

Major discoveries in memory

there is so many discoveries and hard to summarize, Charan mentioned a few:

  • Our continuous experience is broken into discrete events and stored in memory.
  • Study of how much we forget.
  • Study of how expertise can memory so much things.
  • Discovery of act remembering and change the memory. Strenthen the memory, or weaken the memory, or distort the memory by misinformation.

What is the similarity in humans and mice.

Human is not a big mouse, we got a lot of differences.

  1. sensory information is very different. rats explore the world largely by smell.
  2. we have language, and social structure.

How does deja vu work?

Deja vu is a experience of feeling like you have been in there before. experience this moment before.

Its artificial memory, mixed things fire together, make you feel like you have been there before.

How do false memories form?

Some times little distortion in filling the blanks in the memory.

If a person think he has a cancer, and he see a doctor, the doctor say things is as your expect. the person will remember the doctor say he has a cancer, but the doctor didn't say that.

The act of remembering can change the memory. if you remember something, and I told you something about the thing you remember, and then somethimes you might remember the original thing and mix it with the new thing I told you.

Social contagion is misinformation spread like a virus. we remember same thing, but I give you a little bit of wrong information, that information become your story of what happened. You and I share memory, I tell you the experience, you tell me the experience, we share the memory, and that become Our memory. The more you trust that person, or the more powerful that person is, the more they can influence your memory.

False memory implant example: During McCain vs. Bush Jr. primary, a poll asked voters: "if they'd still support McCain if he had an illegitimate black child". Many remembered this false info, and McCain lost the election.

People's sense of collective identity is very tied to shared memories. if we have a shared past, we will feel more socially connected. When some people weponize the history, that's scary.

When a group have people who are very dominant, group remembers less from the past, remember more of what the dominant person said.

When a group have a diverse group of people, and give everyone a chance to speak and everyone s being appreciated for their unique contribution, we can get more accurate memory and get more information. but that's require tolerance for discomfort, it's hard especially when we are tired, stressed.

Constant state of wanting

When you get a paycheck every month from your job, you wouldn't get excited about it. That adaptation is a major way connected to strive and not be happy. We are designed to be constantly wanting.

Dopamine is not a pleasure chemical, it's discomfort that energizes you to seek a reward. You can both use the dopamine to motivate you to do things, or you can study this discomfort and tell yourself that you don't want to hear it, its disgrees with your beliefs.

Torture can make people remember anything

CIA, and other justice department, has long history let people say that they want to hear, not necessarily the truth through torture. Their is serval reasons:

  1. People get tired of being tortured, they just say whatever.
  2. They set a authority figure, keep pressure and keep telling the person he is do this, and the person start to question himself. People in weakened mental state and be guided to remember the false memory.

Heartbreak

Memory is designed to capture things that biologically significant, and relationship is a big part. Sometimes heartbreak comes with massive changes in your beliefs about somebody or regret about what you did.

Lost not only comes from the relationship is over, but also from all the good things. You can change the perspective and grow to new ways.

Feeling of time

Mermory does weird things to time, if you think now and one hour ago, you may sense many differences. But if you think one year ago and one year and a hour ago, you may feel like it's the same time.

During the pandemic, people feel days are long, but weeks are short. Because people are doing the same thing at the same context. nothing is changing, memory is little, so they feel time is short in the long term.

That is because memory shapes our sense of time, and context is so important for memory.

Nostalgia

Felipe de Burgarde, think of nostalgia as a disease, because it bringing people extraordianry unhappiness. But when people get older, nostalgia can be an enormous source of happiness, but it may has the opposite effect if you thinking old days are better than now, and it's over.

Brain computer interface

BCI is developing very interesting techonology like surgical robots. And it has lots of innovation in the future.

Can we modify memory?

In some sense, we can do it behaviorally. like giving pressure, giving misinformation, etc.

But we didn't know what is the memory, Memory is so complicated.

LLM

Social system is complex, like a intersection, every intersection has its own personality, In Boston vs New York vs rural town they are all diffrerent. people are behave dynamically.

What LLM do to solve the problem is to collect a huge amount of data, they don't understand human behavior and what they think, but they can represent how people cross streets.

attention is the core to be intelligent.

Connection between ADHD and memory

Charan is been told he has ADHD, ADHD is associated with differences in preforntal funciton. Attention is shift easily, memory tends to be poor.

People with ADHD often have great memory for the things that they're interested in, and poor memory for the things that they're not interested in.

How to learn, remember things better

Be a science is enormously enabling of ADHD, you're constantly looking for new things, you're constantly seeking dopamine hit, and people tolerate your late for things. You can freely follow your curiosity.

Structure activities is important, you should learn how to allocate attention. set event boundaries, avoid switch, and goofing time is not wasting time, its an investment for attention.

Multitasking is very bad for memory, according Melina Uncapher's research.

Cal Newport wrote a book called "Deep Work", it's about how to foucs and how to allocate attention.

How Charan become a musician

Charan play trumpet in school, and he start to play guitar, but he just can't got it. it's different from trumpet, he got a lot time to practice, but it's now work.

Since Charan saw bands like Sonic Youth, it blew his mind, he was struggling because he try to write popular music at the time, and what sounded like other bands. he didn't enjoy try to play stuff that other people play.

So he start play what he like, didn't follow others style, and explore the possibilities of different sounds. it's actually fun, the whold world opened up to him.

What Charan like most about human mind

The idea of the internal model, every thing you see, you touch, is connected by internal model.

People needed to hear from scientists, and people didn't get the uncertainty of science and how much we don't know. So he write this book.

difficult unpleasant experiences cause meaningful memories and

2024-05-28 14:50:00 +0000 UTC