Thanks for commenting, and congrats on the launch!

How did you come up with the idea for Aries?

Funny enough we launched one of the first free options data tools for self directed investors in 2020. After many cease and desist letters from exchanges and price reporting authorities we grew into a company which worked with many of the top brokers in the USA.

In 2021 we set out to build an international Robinhood but we didn't have the $3m we needed to get through licensing and more importantly we had zero clue if there was any demand.

So we decided to work with TradeStation on their API and in return we could use it to MVP our idea.

That MVP grew to 16,000 customers and processed hundreds of thousands of trades monthly.

But TradeStation wasn’t totally happy. Their customers started logging in to TradeAries with their TS login and getting commission-free trading on our app. It was eating on their commissions paying revenue base which meant it was time to move out of our parent’s house.

We needed our own broker dealer license. So we went to our customers and asked them to invest in us. And they responded, we raised more than $1m via crowdfund on start engine.

So we started working to get our licenses and building software.

But we quickly came to a Y in the road.

We could either build really cool cutting-edge brokerage software OR we could build really cool cutting-edge brokerage software AND totally open source the whole project.

We thought about all the developers in our space and the hurdles we all face. We thought of all of the (80+) developers that we helped onboard to the TradeStation API.

Many fintech ideas die spending millions on market data, licensing, and infra before they ever get to launch. If we could solve that with Engine it would be cooler than just building another brokerage, so we ended up here.

Amazing. Why doesn't Shopify built this natively?

I wrote the article, fun to find it here.

I thought about that quite a bit as I was researching. Image Generation Models were given an image and a caption. This allows CLIPT to work.

But then I thought, music actually has an official notation system of the Standard notation on 5-line musical staves.

Do you think this described the music? or merely informs how it is to be performed?

It describes how a person might play it, that's all. It won't help anyone identify a song they've heard or pick one out by genre or style. That information isn't really "encoded" in sheet music.

I think it is a fine number. In my experience people need a ton of reminders. More than you think. I would contact people multiple times and always someone would forget. If you are not top of their memory stack, they don't remember.

Frontier is promising to buy $925M of permanent carbon removal between 2022 and 2030.

They have criteria such as Permanence, Cost, Verifiability etc.

Seems like a great program and we need many more like it.

This is really interesting. I wonder whether they can increase their impact by narrowing the time frame and also adding repeatability to the list of criteria, so as to better motivate building capacity that can lower the price for the broader market in the years before/after.

It is really fun to try to dock in 4:06 while the Interstellar docking soundtrack plays.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interstellar/comments/gmiwgh/no_tim...

Could be. I think the most interesting part of the article is that they have identified a limit of archeology. They discovered wealthy and powerful groups that don't exist according to archeology because they didn't leave behind buildings. The royal purple dye was very interesting as well.

Yeah I would look for confirmation or sources before I start sharing this.

Great points. So how does someone know which to chose?

LOL, by predicting their own future of course!

But seriously - the most important part is saving for retirement. You can't go wrong with either choice as long as you contribute. Please don't let bike shedding prevent you from contributing.

Valid. :)