Today's Shit, Tomorrow's Treasure

In November of 1802, Alexander von Humbolt first encountered bird shit in enormous quanties. As the joke goes, at second-glance, it turns out that bird shit is actually excellent fertilizer. And so began the Guano Age - where countries went to war over islands full of shit.

In June of 2017, I discovered that I could scrape all historical posts from a specific subreddit. As is customary for every college student who is just learned about computers, I attempted to use this data to make a model to better trade cryptocurrency prices. As it turns out, Reddit posts used for this purpose are actually a lot less valuable than bird shit.

Scraping all historical posts from a specific subreddit is much harder these days. With the introduction of LLMs that could be trained on enormous quanties of Reddit shit, this trash became treasure - and Reddit recently dramatically increased the price of access to their APIs.

It's impossible to know which parts of today's shit will turn out to be valuable for tomorrow's processes. For this reason, it makes sense to not give out your own personal shit without a very good reason to do so - even when you can't possibly see a reason why your shit would ever be valuable to anyone for any reason.

More specifically: don't give your DNA out to any company. And given the unfortunate shared nature of DNA, ask all your close relatives to follow suit.