When you have more ideas than you can afford to test, the pull is to get clever about picking the winner before you spend a dime — build something that reads all your candidates and tells you which one to run. A team at FAIR just tested that idea head-on,
Futures Friday — Thomas Adair You can spend a month making one strategy better, or you can spend it building a second strategy that fails at a different time. Those are different bets, and only one of them survives being wrong. I worked through this once already, on prompts. The trade
A Short Form note — the fast one, written on the news day. The Field Note it points to does the long work. Start with the anger, because the anger is the tell. Anthropic published evidence today that Chinese labs pulled something like 200 million exchanges out of Claude to train
A Field Note. I write these to check my own work — this one started with a company running the numbers on itself. This year Anthropic pointed its own economists at its own product and published what they found. Not a pitch deck — a technical report, with an outside panel of
The folder is the orchestrator until concurrency earns the framework.
Apple's own coreai-models repo ships every piece of on-device AI plumbing — export, runtime, authoring, compression. The bottleneck was never the silicon. It's a decision about who's allowed to put a model on your phone.
Andrej Karpathy keeps a CLAUDE.md — one page of rules for getting a language model to write code you won’t have to rewrite. Read the files before you touch them. Keep the diff small. When something breaks, find out why the value is null instead of adding a null
The piece I wrote on the verification gap in agentic on-chain finance is now up as a formal paper on SSRN. The short of it: agents are starting to hold wallets and move real money. Every drain so far happened inside their permissions — they weren’t hacked, they were
Access Was Never the Constraint A monthly field report on the modern trading landscape — where institutional method, retail access, automation, and AI collide. Free, monthly, numbered. Three dates this year, none of which got much attention outside the desks that had to comply with them. June 4. FINRA’s pattern
A Signal — one idea, checked against my own work. Reported, not signed — so hold it loosely: Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face for around $13 billion. Hugging Face is the “GitHub of AI,” the open-source hub where a solo builder grabs any model, from anyone, without picking
A Field Note on agentic money — and the layer we skipped.
A Short Form Note — the segue into this month’s Digest. A database CTO wrote a piece this week called “The End of Programming.” Paul Dix — he built InfluxDB — argues the act of writing code by hand and having other people read it is on its way out. Not because