u/jailoutsoon

I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but I’ve had enough.

Every day, I get rushed messages from students like this guy who think they’re "networking," when all they’re actually doing is being a total pain in the ass. How do you think it's a good idea to send messages like that to people you don't even know? There isn't the slightest bit of effort to seem even remotely interested in the person you're writing to. How do you expect to break into an industry as elite as high finance?
I worked my ass off to get where I am. There are no shortcuts to landing these roles, you have to start from scratch (unless you're a nepo kid, in which case, stay the hell away from me).

If you genuinely want to start building something that will help you land a role at a BB, here are three piece of advice:

First: Take a genuine interest in the person you're reaching out to and realize that their time outside of work is valuable and limited. At the end of the day, there’s a human being on the other side of the screen. Of course it’s a transactional relationship, but at least have the decency to show some respect to someone more senior.

Second: There are dozens of associations and communities where you can start networking in finance with other students without spamming us associates. Start networking with like-minded students in your uni or at other target schools. A lot of them have already done internships or have older siblings in the industry. They are the easiest referral you will ever get. I was in one created by an alumnus from my university. Start there.

Third: Learn to act like professionals while you're still in university. The whole point of uni is not just learning how to build a DCF, you MUST become industry professionals. Act accordingly!

Sorry if I was too direct, but I wish I’d had someone tell me these things when I was younger.
Best of luck.

EDIT: ok, now I’m full of DMs asking me the community I was in. My bad, here you go

A research team analyzed 1,723 real-world MCP applications on GitHub and found that while 90.8% log what AI agents do, only 37.2% require human approval before an AI can actually execute a tool. In other words, most MCP apps will happily let the model call any enabled tool without someone clicking “Approve” first, a surprising security tradeoff that many developers probably don’t realize they’re making. The study also found that although the ecosystem has mostly standardized around official SDKs and config files, there’s still no agreed naming convention, making MCP projects oddly inconsistent despite using the same protocol. It’s a good reminder that the hardest part of AI agents isn’t making them smarter, it’s deciding when they should not be trusted to act on their own. If anything, MCP’s biggest challenge right now isn’t capability; it’s convincing developers that “autonomous” shouldn’t mean “unsupervised.”

References I used:
An Empirical Study of Model Context Protocol Applications
6 Critical Challenges Facing the MCP in 2026
The MCP 2026-07-28 Rewrite: What Breaks and How to Migrate

AlphaFold is the AI system that solved one of biology’s biggest challenges, predicting protein structures, and even helped earn a Nobel Prize. Yet this week, reports revealed that Google DeepMind has largely reassigned the original AlphaFold team to newer projects centered on Gemini, AI agents, genomics, and drug discovery. I guess that’s the AI industry in 2026: even Nobel-winning projects eventually become “legacy code.” 😭 Makes me wonder, are AI labs moving too fast to build on breakthroughs, or is this exactly how progress is supposed to work? (ft.com⁠)

I genuinely thought this was an internet joke, but deodorant companies have long used trained odor evaluators to sniff volunteers’ underarms and rate how effective products are. There are even scientific standards (ASTM E1207) for conducting these sensory evaluations, and studies dating back to the 1980s describe trained assessors rating underarm odor in controlled deodorant trials.(ASTM Store⁠)
Imagine your parents asking, “How was work today?” and your answer is simply… “Smelled Shawn’s left armpit. Product passed.” 💀 What’s the weirdest real side hustle or job you’ve ever found out exists?

I’ve been seeing people mention Claude, MCP, and MCP servers everywhere lately, so I finally decided to see what the hype was actually about. After reading through the docs, watching a few demos, and scrolling through what developers have been building, I realized the interesting part isn’t really Claude itself…, it’s MCP. There are already plenty of AI models that can write, summarize, and answer questions, so another “smart chatbot” doesn’t exactly feel groundbreaking anymore. What seems different is that MCP gives AI a standardized way to connect with tools like GitHub, Google Drive, Slack, databases, and even local files, so it can work across the apps you’re already using instead of keeping everything inside one chat. I can see why developers are excited because it solves a pretty real problem: every AI tool used to need its own custom integration for every app. That said, I don’t think this suddenly changes everything overnight…, it’s probably one of those things that’s more exciting for people building AI products than for everyday users right now. Still, it’s one of the few AI developments I’ve read about recently that actually feels like it’s pushing the ecosystem forward, rather than just announcing yet another model that’s “smarter” than the last one.

I recently read about a team of researchers who had been stuck on the same math problem for years. The people behind the work were Giorgio Parisi, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, and physicist Francesco Zamponi. Claude didn’t solve it outright, but it suggested a different way of looking at the equations that eventually helped them reach a proof. It made me think: if AI keeps helping experts make breakthroughs like this, how should we even think about its role going forward?