I think it 100% depends on what markets you’re looking at.

If you’re betting/trading on sports (80% prediction market activity by volume, you are 100% up against Susquehanna. Doubly so if you’re predicting combos because there is not nearly enough liquidity.

There are multiple parties involved when you place a trade on a prediction market and all of them get paid.

I’m not stating that there’s no market a relatively unsophisticated investor can take advantage of just pushing back on the idea that PMs are PvP

I mostly agree. Sports are mostly very well priced (live sports not so much). Many new markets that are just invented by polymarket/kalshi though SIG are basically on an even playing field with you in terms of coming up with a way to price it (and if it's a niche low liquidity market they probably don't pay much attention to it anyway so you can easily come in and price it with a large edge). Personally lots of my money is probably coming from SIG itself in fact given that I mostly take liquidity that are placed at poor prices where I've spent many weeks on trying to figure a more informed way to price it.

I'm just assuming here, but I'm sure they have cameras or some other type of data in the stadium, and vision models running on those to make instant trades when a home run has been hit, touchdown scores, etc. and have a huge edge on retail money.

At least on the two big sports gambling sites, they lock the app from making bets during these moments so you can't. I can verify this because I like to go to sports games and had that idea. "Oh I'm here live I wonder if this will work?" Doesn't work.

Can't speak to prediction markets, haven't touched 'em.

Yeah I have heard about gambling sites doing this, but for prediction markets I dont think they can do that. But also how can they lock it before a home run happens unless they're just locking it on every at-bat and rejecting/holding bets if a HR happens? These prediction markets have APIs and work the same way as the stock market, there are sellers and buyers in the market so messing with that process would be explicitly unfair and probably illegal.

Yes they lock it before the snap, or before the pitch is thrown. All I can figure is that they have someone at every game, or somehow have a "live-er" live feed than genpop.

It’s possible this is the future of the industry.

The big money maker in prediction markets is combos or parlays in traditional sports betting. The market for these types of bets is tiny so you need Wall Street firms like Susquehanna to come in and provide liquidity which is what they do for Kalshi.

What this means in practice is you don’t place a bet with fixed odds, it’s more like placing a market order on a stock.

If a Sportsbook could effectively give custom odds on each bet for each player based on the market it would essentially be what prediction markets do today.

I have worked in gaming before so feel free to disregard my opinion but I truly do enjoy occasional betting and while its hard to argue it’s a net positive in my life it has never caused any financial hardship.

Betting $25 on a game hijacks something in my brain that treats it like a fun problem to solve. It gets me interested in teams that I’d otherwise have no interest in. I’ve been betting on sports since the days of offshore betting sites and I can’t say I’ve ever lost or gained more than a few hundred dollars a year.

I’m an adult and I enjoy being able to gamble on sports. It’s never been a problem for me and I suspect it never will be because of the way I do treat it, strictly something to be done for fun.

I grew up in a household where family members also went to casinos and bet on sports responsibly so it was drilled into my head that you can’t ever beat the house and you should never bet what you couldn’t afford to lose.

What business do you have telling me what I’m allowed to do with my own money for fun?

I'm someone who thinks corporations shouldn't be free to prey lawlessly on emotional weaknesses.

What business do you have telling everyone your personal experience justifies the horror others experience?

If you couldn't put down that $25, would you really not be able to find some other way to entertain yourself?

Making gambling illegal doesn’t make it just go away. My Grandfather used to bet on sports in 40s and 50s with a local bookie. The bookies even ran sweepstakes which resembled the modern day lotto which my great grandmother played every week.

People like to gamble we need it legalized with reasonable regulations.

What my big problem is that Wall St and the wider market seems to be trending to the least ethical companies (Kalshi, Polymarket, Bettr) are running unregulated gambling operations, providing 0 tax money to offset societal costs and are denying what they’re offering is gambling at all and even promising you can make money off it.

The fact that you and the industry try to call it "gaming" is still such a scummy thing. It's gambling. Call it what it is.

Some of what you’re saying is likely true but quality is something that will never be optional. There is quantitative data suggest that LLMs perform better on higher quality code base which makes sense. Code that is well organized and coherent will make better use of the context window.

Software refactoring and tech debt is absolutely where LLMs will shine as is evidenced by the Bun rewrite.