Many Founding Fathers wrote under pseudonyms Pseudonyms afforded the protection needed to write things that were controversial, to engender debate over things they didn't themselves believe in, and to encourage focus on ideas over reputations Thread of their known pseudonyms🧵

Srsly - he takes my work chair for this?

The Risky Business of Hiring Stars // Years ago this study was done to see why stars in banking do not seem to retain their star status when they change firms. Maybe it applies or maybe it doesn't because of many reasons. link after the break.

If it’s too hard to believe this was filmed in Gaza two days ago, just scroll to the end. You’ll find a screen recording and clips of the owner walking through ruins into the café☕️

We are excited about the CLARITY Act. This is a watershed moment for crypto and America. Years of uncertainty have stifled innovation, exposed consumers to harm, and favored profiteers. The CLARITY Act could be a generational law. When our legal frameworks are designed to foster innovation and protect consumers, America leads, and the world benefits. Here’s more about CLARITY and why it matters.

Lots of really bad economics in today’s NYT op-ed on grocery store competition. Take this passage for example:

Our infra team breaks down the concept of “context engineering”: @martin_casado - “If you are going to call a model, you have to know what to put in the context… At some point you’re probably going to use traditional computer science." @JenniferHli - “What’s the new form factor of infra that needs to become part of this context engineering?... How do you have agencies, tools, or infrastructure that will provide discovery and guarantees of observability of these systems as well?” “New infrastructure pieces create new patterns and methods of software and building systems. This is a great example of it emerging before our eyes.”

UK moving on new penalties for Apple and Google amid trade discussions with Trump // Literally the goal and only path forward for business is highlighted.

It was a setup. They arrested the wrong person. I’m sure of it.

Something I worry about with generative AI in business and commercial use: almost no one fully reads anything in those environments. Now imagine when even the author hasn't read what was written... yikes. How does AI writing and reading impact this reality? I used to write long memos—significant ones—maybe once a year. I'd send them to thousands. That scale alone signals, "someone else will read it." I hoped direct reports and close colleagues would read them. I could count on 2 or 3 people to definitely read them. Bill would read. Steve would read—but only if we discussed it in person, because that's how he worked. I knew this, so I always made a slide version. I'd use it in dozens of team meetings. But even then, for months after sending a memo, I'd be referring members of the team back to what was in it. Could I have done better, of course. I did the best I could at the time. I figured once a year people could read 20-30 pages for their job. People want context. They want the big ideas. But getting an organization—of any size—to actually read is almost impossible. The only reliable thing people read? Org memos. And even then, if one (as I often did) didn’t include an org chart picture—rather than just words—people would skim or skip and wait for (hopefully) a tree graph in the email. And these were from the “big boss,” sending out “big strategy.” So if you think folks in big orgs are reading 40-page PRDs, budget plans, new product proposals, or deal docs deeply and regularly… you're probably kidding yourself. I know how the Amazon process has evolved from friends there. It too is breaking down which is a bummer as I am a huge fan of that. Now enter AI. What happens when it's doing the writing—and not even the author has deep knowledge of what was written? That’s like a compiled or multiple author memo no one ever actually read end-to-end. And if people are asking AI to summarize—but the summary is lossy or invents data—what then? I say all this as part of the "TV" and later "MTV" generation. Back then, we were told that fast-paced, cut-cut-cut media made us incapable of absorbing anything. Meh...ok boomer, I know you can't follow the plot of "24" but that's your problem not mine. So maybe this is just old man yelling at cloud. But for me? My entire career has been defined by the reality that people in business don’t really read. And this isn’t just a tech or big-company problem. Take science: the reproducibility crisis is, in substantial part, because almost no one—not even reviewers—carefully reads full research papers. Same for grant proposals. They look quickly for pet issues (like statistics, sample size or technique, or if their own work was referenced). They skip over what is outside their domain. They miss explicitly fraudulent work which takes effort to detect (maybe AI reading helps with that?) Take Wall Street. Every day analysts output 30 page write-ups on companies with detailed financial modeling. Almost no one is checking all those. People consume them for B/S/H and mostly for narrative confirmation one way or another. Tens of billions of dollars change hands on these that few read and even the authors don't always know the entire thing deeply. Just thinking…