Big Tech & HFT engineer | Consultant | AI Startup Founder | Contrarian takes on tech, AI, finance & geopolitics | Signal over noise

Sydney, NSW, Australia
Joined December 2022
I've written in my Substack a bit about credit scoring models for loans made to random anonymous strangers via Reddit of all places. This model uses the traditional legally compliant approach. This is a work in progress. I will post more when I have a better model.
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Michael Fowlie retweeted
Snap finally figured out how to lock you in for years and make money
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Uncomfortable seats, lack of leg room, a bumpy ride in the CBD, and a general feeling of cheapness. It’s a nasty car.
Why is BYD included in “comfort electric” on Uber? This is an ultra discount car. And it feels that way. The roof is too low and it bangs my head. There’s not enough space. The handle to open the door feels like cheap nasty plastic. How is anyone buying this?
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Michael Fowlie retweeted
Firing Travis Kalanick will go down as one of the worst board decisions of all time. Sure the IPO went well… but the decision by Dara to gut their autonomy (AI division) is unforgivable.
R.I.P Uber. Tesla Robotaxi is over 5 times cheaper than UberX in Austin, TX (without factoring in tips).
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Australians and kiwis care way too much about investing in property.
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Michael Fowlie retweeted
R.I.P Uber. Tesla Robotaxi is over 5 times cheaper than UberX in Austin, TX (without factoring in tips).
Many such cases
Polymarket called it.
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I remember when people were upset with ranked choice voting for the NYC primary. But ranked choice today could have saved NYC from Mamdani and the disaster he will bring.
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This is very stupid because it’s less than 0.1% (by revenue) of these big tech companies that they have a problem with.
Norway suspends $2.1tn oil fund’s ethics rules to avoid selling Big Tech stakes on.ft.com/3WHcH5E
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Michael Fowlie retweeted
VPN ban is “on the table” as the Online Safety Act could be expanded says, Digital Minister, Baroness Lloyd. We believe that this would be a step too far, and are monitoring the situation closely. The Online Safety Act has become a sinister tool for online censorship. Read more in The Express ⬇️
I would almost never retweet a Ben Shapiro podcast because it’s too divisive and not interesting to many of my followers. But this episode is important. There are many crazies trying to take over the right and they must be stopped.
No to the groypers. No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash. No to those who champion them.  No to demoralization. No to bigotry and anti-meritocratic horseshit. No to anti-Americanism. No.
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I would demand a refund, but ChatGPT will still give a diagnosis. They just added a disclaimer. Complete non issue and if anything is a good thing.
TECH NEWS: ChatGPT to no longer provide health or legal advice.
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A dual income couple each making the median income in Sydney would struggle to pay a new mortgage on the median house. This bubble is going to pop soon.
don't fear 0% deposit is near ☕☕☕☕🫖🫖🫖🫖
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Michael Fowlie retweeted
The fact that this is being floated as a serious idea means; - If they introduce it, no serious wealth creator or entrepreneur will come to the UK. - If they don’t, many UK wealthy tax payers will now plan their departure on the assumption that it’s only a matter of time. Either way, very poor judgement from a chancellor looking increasingly out of her depth.
Many such cases. Never use @Hetzner_Online if you don’t like having your account shutdown.
just got rejected from a hosting company wtf
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Michael Fowlie retweeted
Here is the story of a remarkable, independent treatment suggestion by GPT-5 Pro: repurposing a known drug for a patient with food protein–induced enterocolitis syndrome (FPIES). First, how we came to test this. My close friend, physician-scientist Dr. Oral Alpan, treated the patient described in the published report (link in the thread) for refractory allergic skin disease with the biologic dupilumab, which is approved for that indication. The patient also had FPIES, a food allergy that in his case was triggered by wheat and caused hours of cramping and watery, sometimes bloody, diarrhea. There is no approved treatment for FPIES; patients are advised to avoid trigger foods and prepare for emergencies if accidental exposure occurs. For twenty years, even a small amount of wheat set off the same cascade a few hours later, followed by days of recovery. After starting dupilumab for his skin condition, the patient traveled to France and accidentally ate a baguette. To his surprise, nothing happened! It was his first uneventful wheat exposure in two decades! On return, Dr. Alpan hypothesized that dupilumab might be responsible and supervised an oral food challenge approaching 50 grams of wheat protein. Again, no reaction! When an insurance interruption forced a pause in medication, the old symptoms returned; restarting it restored tolerance. In the peer-reviewed paper published today, Dr. Alpan and his team describe seven additional patients, ages 2 to 58, who responded to dupilumab for their FPIES condition. While this is not definitive proof and represents an observational case series, the findings suggest that dupilumab could be a potential treatment for FPIES. Dr. Alpan intends to contact Regeneron, the manufacturer, to pursue clinical studies hopefully toward FDA approval for this disease. About two months ago, as he had just submitted the paper on this case, Dr. Alpan told me this story. Until today’s publication there were no reports in the literature of dupilumab potentially treating FPIES. Around that time GPT-5 Pro had just been released, and I thought this would be a perfect case to test whether AI could infer a treatment from the clinical case alone. I remember anxiously watching it think for about 12 minutes. When the output appeared, I almost fell out of my chair! Its top recommendation read: “ dupilumab (IL-4Rα blocker).” (see attached screenshot). Just like my friend had done, it was leveraging the skin condition to treat FPIES. A key insight could be that GPT-5 Pro had recognized this drug is not only effective for the skin condition but also has a “broader epithelial effect,” while this has not been proven in FPIES patients, I think it is a plausible mechanism in this disease. It also listed other options that were mostly symptomatic and flagged one with an unfavorable side-effect profile. There were several other suggestions, though those are most obvious ones and also suggested by other models too. No other model I tried identified dupilumab as a first choice; though GPT-5 Thinking suggested it as a second or third options. Many other treatments for currently untreatable conditions may already exist and can be uncovered by using GPT-5 Pro and other advanced AI models to repurpose drugs (among 20,000 FDA approved drugs!). Of course these will still need to be clinically tested but this is how AI can help catalyze a healthcare revolution! I am very excited about what comes next and future AI models will be even more powerful to make such discoveries! Important safety and regulatory information: Dupilumab is not approved by the U.S. FDA for the treatment of FPIES. In this study, dupilumab was used on-label to treat each participant’s comorbid, FDA-approved allergic indication; the favorable FPIES observations occurred in that clinical context and should be considered off-label with respect to FPIES. Patients should not initiate or change therapy without consulting their physicians. This press release is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Also, as evidence that this was done before today’s publication, I sent a GPT-5 Pro link to friends at @OpenAI about two weeks ago to give them a heads-up, but I waited until the paper went online today to reveal this story.
Replying to @DanielLockyer
"Squashing layers" I read this as "we didn't try then it sucked so we did the bare minimum and the numbers look big because we sucked earlier" I bet it could go down even further if they actually tried. 100MB gzipped images are not hard to attain unless you have lots of assets.
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Despite the fact that there’s a ton of waste in SNAP, I know first hand of cases of US citizens who need it who do not know how to get it. This is so backwards. Many who need it don’t have it. Many who have it don’t need it.
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ChatGPT seems to have relaxed the policy of naming famous individuals somewhat.
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Michael Fowlie retweeted
Berkson's paradox. Tradeoffs don't have to exist within an entire population (and often don't) -- to exist within a selected portion of the population.
Only losers don't know sorority girls are on average the best & kindest & smartest
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