A dialog between Day and Night

Night: I'm the one who let the problems to remain hidden and find the opportunity to be solved.
Day: My light shines on the truth and lies of the world to be distinguished from each other.
I don't let the wolfs to use darkness and do their thing.
Night: I let the teenager thief to not be busted and have the opportunity to become better.
Day: But most opportunities are lost opportunities.
Night: I don't think you can avoid all wolfs actions by shining light either.
Day: I'm the opportunity of people showing goodness.
Night: I'm the opportunity of hiding goodness from the bad who should not see them, I'm the opportunity of hiding bad things to improve them later on.
Day: You let the bad escape and I let the selfish to feel good about oneself.
Night; We are on equal foot then.
Day; If always it was day people would think enough before action that less problems would happen.
Night: But if it was always night then people could always try new things with enough care and without worrying much to create good things out of a lot of experiences and they would never fall into deep holes due to lack of experience and knowledge. They would also be faster in trying things out and save time.
Day: Experience is the best way to gain knowledge in many situations but most still don't use it to learn and also it can be expensive and time consuming and time itself is the greatest value of all.
Night: Yeah but there are things which I think you have to gain from experience and in your light it's not always easy. time is important, if it didn't exist we did not neither.
Day: No we exist because of light, time is a name and human concept because of their lack of complete understanding, time as a concept of before and after is more ok than silly units for capturing change but we exist because of light.
Night: So we are not a thing even, we are the cause of light/time and we talk about ourselves?
Day: Yeah and funny is the fact that we want to always exist and be here.
Night: Even worse than us, like humans want to always exist as well.
Day: Humans at least can do some things, we are just the effect for some other causes and causes for some likely probabilistic events.
Night: Most humans are only the first part, they are effects of other causes without being more than a continuation.
Day: But at least they have the opportunity so it should be great to be human!
Night: With opportunity and power will come responsibility?
Day: Yes but that's a part of it, there is no way out.
Night: Most will not feel responsible and want to always have the best and fun and are stupid enough to call it justice
Day: Bad effects and wrong are required if you want to have action with REAL consequences, otherwise it's not a real action
Night: But the number of those who understand the amount that reality matters is not much
Day: These all are stories and names, the only thing that matters is decisions and actions and the thought to action relationship is a two way one
Night: I agree but the question is that , is it better to be an abstract concept like us or someone who can do action? Is it better to be this abstract concept or that one at all?
Day: Yes we went out of our way, I think being more complete is always better and every better thing is harder and deeper alongside being simple and one like their somehow abstract father which is reality.
Night: So doesn't it feel good to just sit and watch what's going on as a concept and as an effect of causes and have fun with indirect causes that we become for other effects
Day: It's fun but more fun and even great is to create new concept and being cause and effect at the same time, thoughts and actions can make you cause and effect at the same time and it's awesome
Night: You and I if we could come and go whenever we want, and exist independent of light which doesn't exist independently itself somehow , were both cause and effect at the same time.
Day: Yup, humans are not like us, they are physical, they have bodies and minds, they are limited to time and space but are not directly created from them, the thing which makes humans human and different is the combination of lost opportunities, wrongs, rights and used opportunities, mind and matter and being able to effect things and being the cause of them and also being the effect of other causes.
Night: Yeah now I understand more, without being able to choose and act you can argue that you don't even have fun, you only have the things which come to you. Even if they are fun they are not your fun. humans can enjoy funs which are not theirs because they can at least choose to ignore them and their future actions will be effected by that fun. Responsibility and choice are the cause of all fun and enjoyment in the world of them as I see it. The fact that they can have it and the awesomeness that they can make it, is the real difference.
Day: They think, they love, they get motivated and if they follow them in balance and correctly, they create new concepts which justifies all of their idiosyncrasies.
Night: Aren’t all of their idiosyncrasies because of imbalance?
Day: Yup cause they are effected by causes more than us, because the effects on them become visible as actions.
Night: Now I feel we are moving over a circle of concepts so let me finish the dialog here.
Day: No, Always a the effect of light and truth should be the last remaining they say so it’s better for me to finish it.
Night: Well you and I are not the cause of any of this so what’s the difference?
Day: nothing!

Decisions and thoughts are ...

What really is the meaning of life?
How many of us really think about it?
How many of those will really understand?
Do we even have a way to measure?
Do we know the things to measure?
Do we have the tools to measure them?
When you enter the world of thoughts, philosophy and to some extent analytical psychology you'll see the world from another point of view. Everyone needs to understand the world from the perspective of as many viewpoints and sciences as possible. This is called knowledge, this is called wisdom. At least it used to be that way. In our age there are not many whom tried to achieve this between those who were fighting in the realms of science. Einstein is the best example which comes to my mind. He is the one! He's the man! Who tried to be a man or rather an over man .

Complexity of life is sometimes really complex. The good thing is that still you can enjoy the enjoyable things. Still it's awesome to create something, some value it's still awesome to touch a mountain while looking toward it's highest point in space.
But this is a fact that we do it all in a super limited context inside space, limited to time. I hope we could understand now/instant as much as people are talking about it.
Talking is different from thinking and both are different from action. Awesome among us are those who try to make these all synchronous and create a bound between them. This is a great value to have. Values are great! They are called values because for a reason which justifies them they are called values. Invalidating the reason invalidates the value as well but I can not ignore the whole concept of value all at once.
If you create something and call it a value, it will not become a value unless there is validation for it. Looking at everything objectively is not good but it's impossible to look at everything subjectively because the subjective way of looking still requires binary values to guide it. objectivity is a part of this world which can not be seen but makes the world move, it's just like thought process itself.
The decision making process, the thought process and more mysterious than those, the process or anti process which causes a new idea to be born, a new theory to be made or a new value to be created are not understandable by human mind completely. Our mind is not complete, our arithmetical and logical systems are not complete. They can only be complete in limited contexts so we'll never understand it all.
In a practical level these thoughts will overwhelm one even more. When you want to decide if we should do something or not, when you want to sync thought with action. Worse than that is when the decision affects others. When you want to help/guide someone, when you want to know if you should help/guide or not, this is very hard.
The good thing is that with these all life is still something which can be enjoyed. Life still has great things to offer. These thoughts themselves. The value of having the warmth of people/friends/family. The value of having trust and honesty around. Existence of the truth itself and the fact that we can create at least in a limited fashion all make it nice to be alive and hug and welcome the opportunity of being. Failing to do this is failure of understanding the universe in a way.

trading or demolation in a hidden manner

The post is originally written in late september but is online now.

Recently a not that dear customer came to me and requested some info about trading robots and stocks. I’ve also seen a trading robot which was scriptable by accident in last month. In result of that I’ve started reading about stocks, stock exchanges and trading in my weekends and free times.

We have a relatively good business and team and we were not looking for changing jobs however we are always interested to take a look at opportunities and also expand our business. There were a set of technical questions and more importantly philosophical ones. I needed answers to see if we can and want to spend time and resources on robots or not.

Technically speaking trading is relatively easy. The internet is full of noises, myths and scams but good information can be found in many places which I’m not interested in linking to. Trading by definition is a simple action, somehow like gambling. You can minimize the risk and get good returns (more than 100% annually) by using sound math and statistics. There are a few good books and good articles which help a lot and free libraries and programs are available to help you in the journey. You write small programs which should decide to buy and sell stocks based on what you see in changes in prices. It was doable and could generate a safe stream of income to feed our main business. There might be people who can give you good amounts to buy the robots as well. The concept is new in Iran but is it a good path to go?

From the first day I felt some void in it. You are doing something, spending time and write a program to just sell and buy financial instruments to generate money. You are not producing any goods or providing any services. You are using your super valuable time with money to buy and sell stuff and generate money as a result of it. There are more important curves compared to price curves to be analyzed and there are really important things in this world which are not done but require attention.

I researched for problems which automated trading can make. Found out problems of high frequency trading and seen not much about automated trading with brokers as a ordinary man. I thought we can compensate the waste of the activity itself with the good that we do with the generated revenue which I can see is wrong in retrospection. I’ve overlooked something. TRADING IS FUNDOMENTALLY WRONG!!!

After I shared my findings with a few good friends to get their feedback, I received this from Amir Hossein Fassihi which caused some more research and changed my thoughts on the matter. Thanks man you’ve saved lots of my time and my soul. The email is quoted below with permission.

I hate the stock market and anything related to it. It is yet another example of the lost essence and meaning of something in this world. A lot of things have quite significant reasons for their dynamics but the reason can get hidden under piles of unnecessary dirt as time goes and people forget the main cause.

Stock markets were supposed to bring a system to specify the values of the companies and let people join in and become shareholders and be part of the profit/loss journey of a company, however, a stock market itself turns into the final destination and it becomes all people care about, not the efficiency and dynamics of the companies. Information and a lot of times fake information becomes more important the the real values of the companies.

I hate it when people get addicted to buying and selling shares and it becomes their main issue in life every second, very much like gambling. I hate it when companies are killed in the market only because of superficial reasons. I hate it how the soul of the companies gets crushed when they become public and how they can't decide the future of their company anymore. I hate how decent employees in the US save a major portion of their salary and invest it in all kinds of hedge funds, shares and all the other nonsense, leading to lost money a lot of times in a falling stock market.

 

It is a lot of times like the story of money itself. Money was created to bring a unified and common language for trades and the creation of value in societies but as time went, money itself became the main target and humanity got lost by chasing this superficial target, exactly like shareholders chasing superficial numbers in the form of stock values on a daily changing graph. 

Since I hate everything related to stock markets, I naturally hate the automated stock trade algorithms too, however they can be quite challenging and interesting technically ;).

Cheers,

-ahf

 

What can I say?

Stocks and stock markets are here to let investors put their money in hand of companies and have a share of their revenues and losses. Selling and buying stocks with the speed that traders do does no good to companies. Changes prices with no real reasons and kills companies to make some profits which it’s owners are not entitled to for sure. George Soros  and some others might think they are ok cause they are spending the earned money in good places but it’s not a good idea to do lots of bad things with your money while earning it and later on try to clean it. The people who lost jobs, companies which died and lot and lots of other stuff which just happened because of trading can not be reversed but his actions. Good investors like warren buffett say that you should invest in a company if you want to have the share for more than 10 years. Fortunately Buffett earned more than many others and investing in companies by itself can be considered a good thing. The devil is in the details here, It’s important who you are investing in but that’s another story.

A few TED videos and some articles helped a lot as well. This one just shows some of the realities of the even more harmful high frequency trading.
http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

So I happily concluded that trading by definition is harmful and should not be done. Doing it in a limited amount instead of buying houses and gold might seem a good idea but in general money should not be spent on anything which doesn’t have the value to be spent on. If you have more than what you need, There are many things which can be done with the money. Investing is one of them which is a valid, good and clean one. You can grow the money and help a business. I can not tell it as well as Amir Hossein said but, Automated or not, we’ll never ever do enter such a nasty business, life is not long enough to spend some part of it doing things this harmful and this stupid. I would rather sleep in my bed and never awake if I want to spend my time managing money for the sake of earning money by doing harm to others.

I emailed developers of one of the automated trading software platforms. He is a well respected and nice guy! When I asked him the question about goodness of trading he honestly said I’m write about trading and his argument for doing it was something like this: “We do it because it’s a reality of the world and you should either benefit from it or let others benefit from it and also because what we do mainly redistribute the money toward poor people and countries and removes money from accounts of people with lots of money.” To be honest I’ve seen a lot of bad systems made by good people but we are not talking about it at the moment. His first argument can be said about drugs as well and I can argue that drugs do much less harm compared to many financial activities. The second might seem a little compelling but you never can not be sure about it and even if small scale automated trading in a specific way does that %90 of the times you are still making problems at %10 of times and you can be sure that your problems are big enough. Also as soon as you do it in a bigger scale you have a bigger share of problems for companies and people so at best you should do it at a small scale and does not make much from it, again the question arises that so why do it? If not for money then so for what you should do this activity?

Another awesome friend argued that because companies know this and they enter stock markets with the knowledge then this is valid to be done. This argument is somehow like the first argument of the developers. Almost always when someone does something wrong or enters in situations which might lead to it is aware of it at least partly. He/she is doing that because of laziness, fear, temptation/grid/whatever you call it or because not seeing oneself in the position with ability/responsibility of changing the wrong concept. So nothing can not become valid (really valid I mean) because of that. You might be able to skip laws but not truth.

First Post

This is my first post on this blog. This is the first time that I’m creating a personal blog. I've written many posts before for my company's blog both in previous positions and in my current position. I've had blogs in Farsi for teaching game development and even had a blog for teaching in English on blog spot before. The blog was unity3d.blogspot.com Once in a while I wrote about personal stuff in those places but they were never intended for personal stuff. I wanted to do it for a while but now seem to be the right time.

This time I’m just creating this to write about my personal thoughts, experiences and things around me. Hopefully until a gravestone or something else takes from me the ability of writing on the internet this place will serve as my personal blog, where I can reflect on what I’ve thought, done and wanted to do. I'll write experiences and thoughts with the hope of improvement in me myself and then others. Readers are welcome, warming and great but this is not the regular place for stuff that I do for the goodness of others. I'll continue writing educational materials on my company website, Gamasutra and other places but you should come here if you are interested to read what I’m doing and thinking as a person. However those educational materials also help me to learn more so those are for my own goodness as well but are more related to fellow computer programmers.

Currently as I’m writing this, I’m a proud member of a game development team called NoOp Army. I do computer programming as a profession and most of what I do is about multiplayer computer games. Recently I’ve started to study more, learn more and take life much much more seriously. I don't think I write much about the past here, my past is well, passed and I’ll only write about it if it helps what I’m describing. I'm proud of being member of my team because of the team itself and my fellow troops. What we do is great and we are really enjoying it, learning in the process and improving but the important things are the values that we are creating, the humans that we are becoming and the future that we shape for ourselves. Hopefully hard work, focus and passion will help the team to stay together and do great stuff. As a member of the team which happens to lead it as well I hope to be able to gather required resources and help myself and others to do what we love to do. I've been in a team once before and failed in many aspects so with the experience gained aI should be able to do my job better this time. For now we all are united, study hard and work hard to become better than what we are, just like a real army getting ready for battle. Enough is never ever enough!