The Curious Engineer

The Diff

2019–2026

170 posts

2026 158

October 2026

  1. Argumentum ad LLM
  2. Why Do AI Labs Follow the Zaibatsu Model?
  3. How Fast Does Software Depreciate These Days?
  4. Robots Are Coming for Jobs That Don't Exist Yet
  5. Longreads + Open Thread
  6. Written, Spoken, or Somewhere in Between
  7. The Solo Data Labeling Business
  8. What is the Unit of AI Output? Or AI Progress?
  9. Doing Business in the Dark Forest
  10. Longreads + Open Thread
  11. Seeing like the Weights
  12. AI Spy
  13. The Other Side of Market Concentration
  14. The Super-Rich as Financial Sin-Eaters
  15. Longreads + Open Thread
  16. You Probably Can't Build Your Own Hedge Fund/Prop Trading Firm With AI (But Incumbents Would Love it if You Tried)
  17. Peculiar Hedges
  18. Cuteness Risk
  19. Life with Nonzero Interest Rates
  20. Longreads + Open Thread
  21. Corporate Finance for Publicly-Traded Sports Teams
  22. A Sketch of Meta as an Enterprise AI Company

September 2026

  1. Modern Pricing
  2. How Far in the Future Should You Be Trying to Live?
  3. Longreads + Open Thread
  4. AI Agents Save Users Money But Probably Won't Raise Savings Rates
  5. Market Breadth and Transformative Technologies
  6. Blurred Minds
  7. Forward Deployed
  8. Longreads + Open Thread
  9. In AI Exposure, Sometimes Worse is Better
  10. The Meta Safety Model
  11. Airbnb's Mezzanine Financing Strategy
  12. The Economics and Politics of Pacing the Frontier
  13. Longreads + Open Thread
  14. Audio Fixed—Oura: Moats, Bundles, Complications
  15. AI Growth is Visible in GDP, If You Squint Right
  16. Staying Calibrated
  17. Longreads + Open Thread
  18. Deflating Trust
  19. AI Doom as an Accounting Problem
  20. Imperfectly Enforced Rules Create Bad Local Maxima

August 2026

  1. The Surprisingly Weak IPO-Housing Effect
  2. Longreads + Open Thread
  3. The HuggingFace Post-Mortem: Entomological Agents
  4. Legislating from in Front of the Bench
  5. Data Flow
  6. Ad-Supported Platforms are a Unique Antitrust Problem
  7. Longreads + Open Thread
  8. Bootstrapping Humanoid Bots
  9. Does Nvidia Want to Own Some Mercor or Subsidize It?
  10. Data Scarcity
  11. Financial Entrepreneurship in the Indexing Era
  12. Longreads + Open Thread
  13. Customers as R&D
  14. Holtec's Very Roundabout Drop-In Replacement Model
  15. Toll Collectors on the Road to Abundance
  16. FP&A as the Telemetry and Counterespionage
  17. Longreads + Open Thread
  18. Convergent Evolution in the Architecture of Intelligence
  19. The Politics of Visible and Invisible AI
  20. What Does it do to Crypto Prices if Everything's (Temporarily) More Hackable?
  21. Who Hedges Where?
  22. Longreads + Open Thread

July 2026

  1. Situational Awareness, Revisited
  2. "Natty-or-not" for Everything
  3. Catalysts
  4. What We Periodically Relearn About Rent Control
  5. Longreads + Open Thread
  6. The Market Doesn't Sell Off on Excessive-Capex Concerns at the Top
  7. The Runaway Models
  8. The Baumol Bounce
  9. The Lots-of-Low-Satiety-Calories Business Isn't What it Used to Be
  10. Longreads + Open Thread
  11. Adversarial Inference and Emily Post
  12. An Overlubricated Economy
  13. AI as a Conscientiousness Prosthetic
  14. The Bad Apple Problem
  15. Longreads + Open Thread
  16. Has AI Art Been Tried?
  17. Nomentum
  18. The Ghost-in-the-Finite-State-Machine Design Pattern
  19. Cultural Stasis? Or Just Rising Budgets, a Limited Supply of Good Movie Release Dates, and the Kelly Criterion?
  20. Longreads + Open Thread
  21. In the Future, Every AI Lab is a Neocloud for Fifteen Minutes

June 2026

  1. Skilled Labor Supply Chains
  2. The Mythical Agent-Minute
  3. Longreads + Open Thread
  4. Court Philosophers
  5. Gamblers and Data Gatherers
  6. Should You Trust the Hacker News Peanut Gallery?
  7. Blind Extrapolation as a Powerful Force in Finance
  8. Longreads + Open Thread
  9. The Megacap Era
  10. N > 1
  11. What Does it Mean to Have a Trillion Dollars?
  12. Longreads + Open Thread
  13. Bending Spoons' High-ROI Nostalgia Menagerie
  14. What is an Index For?
  15. The Median App and the Median User-Minute
  16. It's Maturity Transformation All The Way Down
  17. Longreads + Open Thread
  18. AI Hardware Dutch Disease
  19. The Era of the Vol-Farming Celebrity
  20. Funding Sources
  21. Using AI for Writing like a Responsible Adult

May 2026

  1. Longreads + Open Thread
  2. Subscriptions and Credit
  3. The Coasian Margin Frontier
  4. The Rocketship
  5. Longreads + Open Thread
  6. Pod Shops Got Many Shots to Get AI Right
  7. The New Escape Velocity
  8. Productivity Paradoxes
  9. What Can You Learn from a Deterministically Chaotic Market Simulation?
  10. Longreads + Open Thread
  11. The Transparency Sonic Boom
  12. In the Court of the Technoking
  13. An Investment Banker's Kind of Investment Bank
  14. Why does Resource Extraction Produce Such Concentrated Wealth?
  15. Longreads + Open Thread
  16. Investor Relations Goes Retail
  17. When Will Chrome Decapitate the Internet?
  18. Deployment
  19. Dead Airlines
  20. Longreads + Open Thread
  21. The Market for Contrarian Talent Doesn't Clear

April 2026

  1. Could There be a Forward-Deployed Engineer Supply Crunch?
  2. Libraries and Language Culture When AI Writes the Code
  3. Are the AI Labs Ready for the AI Backlash?
  4. Longreads + Open Thread
  5. Reddit as a Reinforcement Learning Gym for Persuasion
  6. Trading Infrastructure, Trading Volatility
  7. LLMs and the Techno-Traditionalist Turn
  8. Ad-Based Platforms Have Mostly Solved Optimal Taxation
  9. Longreads + Open Thread
  10. The Browser's Extended Phenotype
  11. Building the Biotech Router
  12. Paying Up for the Right to be Sued
  13. Ring, Cloudflare, and the Supply Chain of State Capacity
  14. Longreads + Open Thread
  15. Decentralized Pundit Calibration as a Vision of Long-Term Economic Growth
  16. Mythos and the Long-Term AI Lab Model
  17. Can Your Business IPO When Part of It's on Fire?
  18. Uncanny AI
  19. Longreads + Open Thread
  20. When Labor is Scarce, Equity is the Mezzanine Tranche

March 2026

  1. The Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Problem in Regulation
  2. Handy Robots
  3. Longreads + Open Thread
  4. Focus
  5. Founder/Funder Fit
  6. AI and Corporate Necromancy
  7. Apple, Occasionally a Commodities Trading House
  8. Longreads + Open Thread
  9. Why Didn't Outsourcing Crush Software Engineer Salaries?
  10. America's Viral Financial System
  11. BuzzFeed as Hazel Kirke

2025 1

October 2025

  1. Routers, Apps, AGI

2023 1

February 2023

  1. Why Great Investors are Bad Quitters

2019 10

October 2019

  1. Fracking: The Alchemy of Turning High-Yield Bonds into Low-Inflation Growth
  2. Financial Bubbles are the Gnostic Heresy: The Voegelin-Minsky Synthesis
  3. Alpha Buybacks and Beta Buybacks
  4. The Socially-Awkward Social Network Paradox
  5. Volatility: One Theorem, One Lemma, Zero Paradoxes
  6. Modern Life Skills: Recognizing ML Weirdness
  7. Wrong But Coherent
  8. The Itchy Trigger Finger of the Long-Term Investor
  9. Modern Life Skills: Reverse-Engineer the News
  10. Your Life is More Financialized Than You Think