Blog
Written for people to read and for AI to cite, so every claim keeps its source, its test and the way it could be proven wrong.
Harmony Breeds Life, Sameness Does Not: Notes on a Japanese DEI Episode and the Cost of Homogeneity
Listening notes on Investor's Sunday, 2026-09-20: twenty-five years of DEI in Japanese companies, why opinion diversity is harder than headcount ratios, and whether investors should watch the board or the executive officer tier. Educational, not investment advice.
The Fed Hiked After All — A Tightening the Economy Forced
Notes on MacroMicro After Meeting EP 214: the Fed raised rates a quarter point after three years, 12-0. The added sentence in the statement, why the dot plot and SEP must be read together, and two researchers publicly dissecting why they called it wrong. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Los Angeles Doesn't Have to Build Anything: Odd Lots on Existing Assets, M&A, and the 2% AI Number
Notes from Bloomberg Odd Lots, 2026-09-19, with Gene Sykes — Goldman Sachs co-head of global M&A and president of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. How existing venues underwrite a 'privately funded' 2028 LA Games, why this is the biggest M&A year on record, and how to read the claim that only 2% of companies see AI in their EPS. Educational, not investment advice.
You Are Not a Knowledge Worker. You Are a Cognitive Athlete.
Reading Tommy Wood's The Stimulated Mind: why a day chopped into fifty-second fragments costs your brain more than long hours do. Educational and methodological notes; not investment advice.
The Five Years Exxon Tried to Beat IBM — Notes on an Asianometry Episode
Asianometry's 2026-09-17 episode tells how an oil giant walked into the office equipment business and squared off against IBM. These are listening notes on separating a diagnosis from its prescription, how resources turn into ropes, and one question for deciding whether something is worth your time. Educational, not investment advice.
He Buys Stocks After They've Already Run: David Gardner's Thirty-Year Method
Notes from Behind the Balance Sheet #63 with David Gardner: why he buys high, why 'wildly overvalued' makes him more interested, and how the 'sleep number' turns position sizing into a question you can actually answer. Educational reading notes, no stock recommendations or price targets.
Everyone Says Slow Down, Nobody Stops: AI Safety as a Game, and a Trade Show Full of Undecided Technology
Notes after listening to the Statementdog podcast (2026-09-17): why the market shrugged when AI labs collectively called for slowing down, what compliance costs actually looked like in banking and crypto, and what an optical trade show with no settled standards means for reading the industry. Educational, not investment advice.
When Everyone Agrees Something Is Doomed — Notes on Tom Lee and Dan Ives
Listening notes from The Compound and Friends, 2026-09-18: how market narratives get repriced, the interests behind the AI safety debate, and how to turn 'when does the bull market end' into conditions you can actually check. Educational, not investment advice.
Ten Thousand Agents on One Problem: The Most Counterintuitive Line in the Noam Brown Episode
Notes after listening to Dwarkesh Podcast's interview with OpenAI researcher Noam Brown on multi-agent systems, alignment, and recursive self-improvement. Educational reflections on credit attribution, timelines, and evaluation windows — not investment advice.
Gooaye EP697: When Three People Who Can't Stand Each Other Suddenly Agree
Notes on Gooaye EP697 — unpacking the motives behind Big AI's call for regulation, how regulatory capture works, and why 'slowing down' may consume more compute, not less. Educational; no stock picks or price targets.
What the Market Was Actually Pricing on Hike Day — Notes on MacroVoices #550
Notes on MacroVoices #550 with Harley Bassman: ten-year breakevens, mortgage convexity, and three traps hiding inside ETFs — what the bond market is really pricing. Educational, not investment advice.
The Math Is Simple — So Why Isn't Everyone Rich? Notes on Roger Ibbotson
Listening notes on The Meb Faber Show #651 with Roger Ibbotson: a century of stock and bond returns, human capital and age, popularity-based pricing, and what he found when he graded his own fifty-year-old forecast. Educational commentary, not investment advice; no stock recommendations or price targets.
America Is Full of Rich People, and They Aren't on the Forbes List
Notes from Odd Lots, 2026-09-18: pass-through businesses, car dealers and dentists, and the missing layer in America's wealth distribution. Educational, not investment advice.
War on the Rocks | After the Iran War, What's Left in the Magazine
Listening notes on War on the Rocks, 2026-09-17, 'A Body Blow? The War on Iran and U.S. Military Readiness': interceptor stocks down 60%, why cheap drones don't close the gap, a carrier at sea for 200-plus days, and what China is watching. Educational reading notes, not investment advice, and not a recommendation on any security.
Bipartisan Data Center Backlash, Underestimated Solar, an Underrated Grid: Notes on a Catalyst AMA
Listening notes on the 2026-09-17 AMA episode of Catalyst with Shayle Kann: why the data center backlash crossed party lines, how much the Iran war moved EV sales, why fuel cells caught the AI power wave, why solar forecasts keep coming in low, and why the grid is underrated. Educational commentary, not investment advice; companies mentioned are examples only.
Mac mini or a GPU for AI at home? First figure out which machine you're missing
A Chinese tech YouTuber explains why Mac minis are selling out: Macs can run language models but struggle with video, and he bought his for stability, low power and a complete software ecosystem, as a desk for directing AI agents. My own setup splits the same way: one machine directs, one old 8GB GPU does the heavy lifting, and training goes to rented cloud GPUs. A plain-language guide to what a control desk needs versus what compute needs. Personal notes, not buying advice.
What Francis Fukuyama Sees After 'The End of History': Why Well-Fed People Are Still Restless
My takeaways from Bloomberg Odd Lots' 2026-09-17 interview with Francis Fukuyama. It covers the last man, the desire for recognition, AI and the dignity of work, and Tocqueville's reform paradox, plus how I use these ideas to read market sentiment and political noise. Educational only. Not investment advice, and no stock recommendations.
One RTX 4090, from 20 to 184 tokens a second: when a local model is slow, find where it's stuck
A Chinese AI YouTuber took Qwen3.6 27B on a single RTX 4090 from 20 tokens a second to a peak of 184 with three moves: quantization, predicting several tokens at once, and diffusion-style drafting. Each move clears a different bottleneck. My old 8GB AMD card needed a different fix entirely: a differently shaped model took it from 1.8 to 23. A plain-language breakdown of what each move rescues, and what to check before buying a GPU. Personal notes and measurements, not buying advice.
Between Knowing and Doing, What's Missing Is an Experience — Notes on Caibaogou Ep. 564
Caibaogou episode 564 hosts clinical psychologist Huang Tien-hao on the boundaries between guidance, counseling and therapy, how to pick a therapist, and why a changed thought is not a changed person. Personal listening notes; educational content, not investment advice.
Apple Silicon's 2nm Year: Peaks Look Good, Sustained Performance Counts | The Circuit EP 192 Notes
Notes on The Circuit episode 192 with Apple's silicon and product teams: process nodes are a tailwind, while thermals, packaging, memory bandwidth, software orchestration and security design decide what users get. Educational only, not investment advice, no stock recommendations.
Six Months In, the Buffers Are Gone: Notes on Columbia Energy Exchange and the Widening Iran War
Listening notes on Columbia Energy Exchange (2026-09-15): seven months into the Strait of Hormuz crisis, inventories, strategic reserves and bypass pipelines are running out, and diesel is tighter than crude. Educational content on how to read the situation, not investment advice; markets carry risk.
The Judge Stayed, the Cattle Trader Left: Michael Moritz on Family, Reading People, and the Price of Obsession
Notes after listening to Invest Like the Best EP.491 with Michael Moritz: two grandfathers and one decision, a mother who predicted doom, the first-fourteen-years interview method, the cost of monomania, and the venture advantages that have disappeared. Educational only, not investment advice, no stock recommendations.
Hot Chips and SEMICON Taiwan, Three Days Apart: One Room Talks AI, the Other Ships Orders
Notes on the Supply Chained episode from 2026-09-15. Two semiconductor conferences ran three days apart: one focused on AI chip startups, the other on the engineering problems of panel-level packaging and memory. These are educational industry notes, not investment advice.
Picking a GPU for Local AI: The New Cards Worth Buying, and the Old Ones to Skip
Two back-to-back videos from the YouTube channel 掄錘者: one ranks the four cards he keeps recommending, the other talks people out of cheap 48GB veterans. My own Windows desktop runs an older AMD card, and this month I logged what worked and what needed a detour for image generation, video generation, and local language models. A plain-language look at the two specs that matter first: video memory and BF16. Personal notes and test logs, not buying advice.