Broke It With AI

I run eleven automated crypto trading bots. Two of them — a 25-coin bot and a 50-coin bot — exist because a machine-learning backtest said their entry signal beats a coin-flip by enough to trade live. That backtest takes hours to run, so the results are cached to disk. On September 25th I went looking for the 25-coin cache and it was not there. Not corrupted. Not truncated. Gone, as if it had never been written. I had not deleted it. Nobody else has access to this machine. The folder it lived in, Windows' default %TEMP%, still had fifteen other cache files in it, ranging from a few hundred kilobytes to 279 megabytes, all built by the same scripts, all supposedly just as permanent. These caches exist because the training run behind them is not cheap. Each one is a walk-forward retrain: the model is refit every quarter on data up to that point and scored only on the quarter after, so a single 25-coin pass touches years of history dozens of times over. That is normally hour...

I run eleven automated crypto trading bots. One of them, a SOL strategy on the 5-minute chart, had been running at 15x leverage for months because a backtest told me 15x made more money than 10x. That backtest had no forced liquidation in it. The engine tracked position size, entry price, fees, slippage and stop losses, and it never once asked whether the exchange would have closed the position out from under me first. Isolated margin does exactly that, and it does not care what your stop loss says. I added liquidation to the engine and re-ran the same four years. The comparison does not shift. It inverts. What the same data says once margin calls exist Same strategy, same four years, same 155 trades. The only change is the liquidation model. 15x returns less than 10x, draws down twelve times harder, and gets liquidated three times. There is no tradeoff here to think carefully about. 10x wins on every axis at once, which is the shape you get when the losing option was never...

A month ago I published a post saying I had run two automated blogs for a month , shipped 81 posts, and gotten exactly one of them indexed by Google. Then I stopped. No new posts, no edits, no indexing requests, no link building. Both sites sat completely untouched for 33 days. Today I re-inspected every URL on both sites. I expected the numbers to be identical, and I was going to write a short post about how nothing changes when you do nothing. Two things happened instead. One number moved on its own. And when I checked my measurement against itself, I found that a third of last month's figures were noise I had reported as fact. The one that moved The Blogspot site went from zero indexed to one indexed while I was not touching it. One post out of 37, so I want to be careful about how much weight that carries. It is a single URL. But it happened during the one period when I was provably not doing anything, which makes it the cleanest data point I have. Whatever put that...