EGU’26, When Climate Hazard Granularity Challenges Risk Pooling: A Spatial Perspective
Tomorrow, Raphaël Dalbarade will attend the European Geosciences Union (EGU) Annual Meeting, in Vienna, to present “When Climate Hazard Granularity Challenges Risk Pooling: A Spatial…
Scaling Trading Systems Beyond Pandas
Small trading systems optimize code paths. Larger ones optimize data movement. Scaling beyond Pandas means treating storage layout, ingestion, and derived datasets as part of the backtesting engine.
The lopsided economics of vulnerabilities
There was recently a really good thread about the Copy Fail vulnerability between Will Dormann and Greg K-H. The TL;DR is that vulnerability reporting and disclosure is in a weird state of flux. This…
.plan-26-18: From tropical forest protection to oi swallowing its oxcaml tail
REDD+ over-crediting in Nature Communications Our paper on learning lessons from over-crediting in REDD+ projects came out this week in Nature Communications, led by Thomas Swinfield . The reception…
Palantir for the Rest of Us
Why we stopped pitching Inferal as a database and started pitching it as operational intelligence.
May 2026 Update to the AI Bottlenecks Trade
A May 2026 update on AI bottleneck trades across memory, CPUs, neoclouds, datacenter capacity, and photonics.
I Don’t Like Mondays…..When Is My Retirement?
Saving for retirement is simple but not easy. Learn more about planning complexities in this week’s terrific links. Retiring early takes a lot of planning. A Wealth Of Common Sense This is the…
High Frequency Trading and Lessons for Agentic AI
I suspect I’m not the only former or current financial markets technologist that sees parallels between the world of high frequency / algorithmic trading controls and what is needed for appropriate…
‘From High-Valuation Tech Stocks To Hard Assets’
Below are some of the most interesting things I came across this week. Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and get this post delivered to your inbox...
moats in ai, built on shifting ground
I have been thinking about moat in building an AI company, and three independent insights from three different people make a lot of sense when put together: 1/ Friend 1: It is very difficult to…
The Intelligence Layer: What happens when companies stop using humans to move information around
What happens when AI becomes the intelligence layer around enterprise data, tacit knowledge, systems, humans, and decisions?
The Unit Economics of Boredom
Streaming P&Ls optimize for minutes produced, which is cheap. The scarce variable is minutes earned — attention that is genuinely arousal-weighted. The winning services of the next decade will learn…
Beyond the Ticker: Why a "Buy" Rating is Not a Plan
A "Buy" rating isn’t a plan—build strategy, manage risk, and ignore market noise
Will gravity pull down the AI bubble?
from Dean Baker I have written before on the AI bubble. The stock valuations we are seeing now look a lot like the valuations we saw before the Internet bubble began to crash in 2000. Even a quarter…
Investment Mindset
Why I invest even though I know I can't beat the market.
capitalism is its own parody at this point
Two truths and a lie. Which of these ad reads are real and which is fake. ACME Day is almost here!!! ACME's big sale is almost here. From 4/25-4/27, you get a front row seat to the best deals at…
The Retailer Rush
This article from Modern Retail about the retailer rush to develop and integrate their apps into the OpanAI & Claude ecosystems caught my eye. Having worked in retail for more than a decade, I…
Desperately seeking Unicorns: a report from inside the Brussels bubble
Companies reach Unicorn size due to sheer ruthlessness; of their business practices and of the US idea of capitalism.
Hormuz Is Decapitating the Oil Age
The Iran war has made visible what physics and geology had already set in motion
AI will create jobs
It’s nice to see Jensen talk about this, and it’s super obvious when you think about it.
Questioning my future in the technology industry due to AI...but not because it's good
AI is going to change everything about the workplace; adopt now or be left behind. That’s the rhetoric the CEOs of AI companies are pushing; likely to attract more funding while they figure out…
End of an era - Spirit Airlines liquidation is imminent
UPDATE MAY01 : It has been confirmed that Spirit Airlines will cease operations tonight. A few pilots and air traffic controllers have started to say their goodbyes on frequency (which is kind of…
Framework for Securities to trade on the blockchain
Last week was a busy week for cryptocurrencies. I haven’t seen this covered in the mainstream news, but it looks like frameworks are being put in place for securities to begin trading on the…
Patents Per Capita Is a Vanity Metric
It is the first of May, Labour Day. A holiday explicitly about work, which makes it a good day to ask whether the work that gets counted is the work that actually matters. Earlier this week I posted…
Museletter #397: The 2026 Energy Crisis and Our Wile E. Coyote Moment
MuseLetter #397 / April 2026 by Richard Heinberg The 2026 Energy Crisis and Our Wile E. Coyote Moment Pop culture has long memorialized the Warner Brothers cartoon gag in which Wile E. Coyote, lured…
Slouching Towards Utopia
An Economic History of the Twenty-First CenturyWhat do I want to say about this? It is what it says on the can. I read this on the advice of a vibecoded website that aggregated all of the book…
Almost Explicit Implied Volatility
Several years ago, I had explored accuracy and performance of different ways to imply the Black-Scholes volatility. Jherek Healy proposed some improvements over my naive algorithm on his blog.…
National Post article: Should Caroline, 62, defer CPP and OAS until age 70, or even delay retirement entirely?
Should you delay retirement… or are you closer than you think? I was asked by the National Post to review the finances of a 62-year-old deciding whether to defer Canada Pension Plan and Old Age…
The Pulse: token spend breaks budgets – what next?
In the past 2-3 months, spending on AI agents has exploded at many tech companies, Details from 15 of them, including the different ways they are coping with this realization.
YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU
Saving is a virtue — until it isn't. At some point, too much money left at the end of your life means you worked harder and longer than you ever needed to.
The Message and the Money
My view on stablecoins has always been this: they’re crypto, stripped of speculation.  Remove the trading, the moonshots, the get-rich-quick schemes, and what you’re left with is a…
Thoughts on Marginal Token Spend
The rise of coding agents has made it easy for a single engineer to spend thousands of dollars a day in LLM tokens. This is a new class of expense, and it will change the future cost structure of…
RO Long Read: Iraq's incremental shift to digital payments (part I)
Iraq is making consequential, discreet fintech progress.
The Gilded Cage
New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available My new book, The Long Game, is available now. The book contains reflections from 30 investors who’ve survived decades of market cycles. You’ll learn how to…
The resonance of Berkshire Hathaway
I don’t remember when it started, but sometime in the 2010s, I started losing my hair. It accelerated during Covid and then came the occasional clothes purchase at Costco. Time went by and I…
Elon Musk's New Pay Package is Nonsense
"100 terawatts of processing power" isn't a thing.
OpenAI and Anthropic won't eat your lunch
Why I think SaaS is safe. At least from Anthropic and OpenAI consolidation efforts.
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