While the provost may have approved it, this whole thing is another example of administrators running roughshod over faculty (who are, admittedly, disinterested in this sort of thing). I do (hazily) recall that back when I was a frosh, there was some sort of professional program that focused on engineering management and was a joint effort with places like Hughes and The Aerospace Corporation. Given Caltech's long history with the Southern California aerospace industry, this is at least plausible. This was done through the Industrial Relations Center (page 21 here: https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/121/1/1992-1993.pdf)

I agree wrt outreach. It should be Watson lectures and setting up telescopes, etc. This isn't outreach, is an obvious money grab.

You've got faculty calling it a major embarrassment[0] and alumni aligned 100% against this grift. One has to ask, if faculty and alumni (and I presume current students) don't want this program, then who is advocating for it? One can only assume the worst.

[0] https://x.com/CFCamerer/status/1840545142006288667

One should also note that "[s]tudents from families making $90K or below, will receive a no loan financial aid package (package will consist of grants and work-study)" and "[a]t least 20% of first-year students in the past three incoming class were Pell eligible students." [2]

[0] https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/typesofaid/loans/disclosure

[1] https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/documents/25301/2324_tuitionf...

[2] https://www.admissions.caltech.edu/afford

[0] https://www.admissions.caltech.edu/afford

Ships for the US Navy (including the Military Sealift Command) are also built in the US. So, shipbuilding hasn't stopped, but the US's comparative advantage is not really in shipbuilding.

I am unaware of fixed precision types that have hardware optimized (other than FPGAs which are used for feed handling in HFT anyway). If you are modeling discrete things like Minimum Price Variations, then yes, use fixed precision, or even encode it in a way that saves space. But if you're numerically solving a partial differential equation, e.g., Black Scholes, it's difficult to see how fixed precision numbers are going to have an advantage.

This wholesale dismissal of floating point for "financial" systems ignores the real business needs which might point you toward fixed or floating point numbers. Always ask yourself - do you need to know this number to better than 1 in 10^14? Are you going to find its square root at some point? Also remember that storing fixed point numbers usually takes more bytes than double-precision floats.

Of course everyone starts smaller than their end state, but as far as I can tell, Addepar still focuses on client reporting. There's a lot of data aggregation, etc., that goes into that, but from their website: "Addepar gives you a competitive advantage. By eliminating the manual burden of aggregating your financial information, and making it easy to generate customized reports in just seconds, we free you up to spend more time designing and advising on client investment strategies." If there's more there, like portfolio construction/rebalancing, order generation and execution management, clearing and settlement, etc., it's not easy to apprehend from publicly available information.

Look, I think Addepar is amazingly beautiful software, exceedingly well executed (though it may be pearls before swine.) It also has tremendous hype (which is often seen as an unalloyed good in the Valley). Is it a viable business? Is it revolutionary, or is it a much-better executed Advent with the advantages of no legacy code- and userbase? I think those are interesting questions.

This is perhaps a cynical and short-sighted view of Addepar (and I've been told as much by Addepar's management), but based on my experience in the investment management industry, I feel it's more true than false.