Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall

At its core, financial risk management is concerned with quantifying potential losses to assess the downside of financial endeavors and prepare for worst-case scenarios. Perhaps the two most salient risk measures in the field of risk management are value at risk (VaR) and expected shortfall, also known as conditional value …

Jan 2025 Jane Street Puzzle Write-up

This month's puzzle asks us to find a valid solution to a Sudoku grid (shown above) with some special constraints. Here's the puzzle description:

Fill the empty cells in the grid above with digits such that each row, column, and outlined 3-by-3 box contains the same set of nine unique …

Are ChatGPT's Random Numbers Actually Random?

ChatGPT's random numbers are not always so random.
ChatGPT's random numbers are not always so random.

Large language models (LLMs) have quickly become part of many people's lives — popularized by OpenAI's publicly-available ChatGPT research release, the models excel at just about every textual task. But what about random number generation? LLMs are understandably bad at arithmetic: these are …

Does the Weather Affect my Productivity?

A lazy summer morning, evening?
Image from The New Yorker (source)

For most of us, the environment in which we work is an extremely impactful factor that contributes to our capacity for productivity. Lighting, odor, temperature, furniture — these are parameters of our environment we can tune to allow ourselves to work better.

But we can't …

Setting up & Customizing Liquid Tags in Pelican

A word on liquid-tags and Pelican plugins

Without delving in too deep, Liquid Tags are the saving grace of media integration in Pelican — they integrate seamlessly with Markdown or reStructuredText, and can be customized. For example, the following:

{% notebook my-jupyter-notebook.ipynb cells[2:3] %}

displays cells [2–3) (so cell …