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.
What Happens After the Quota Runs Out: CodexBar Reads It, a Regency Protocol Hands Over, and the Schedules Slim Down
The last piece showed how one line of quota readings sets the daily roster for four AI subscriptions. This one is about what happens when the quota actually hits zero: who takes over, what the caretaker is allowed to touch, how control comes back, and how the scheduled jobs slimmed down to match. Includes the GitHub repo for the regency protocol and five things I only learned by paying for them. Technical notes, not investment content.
The Beginner's herdr Handbook: If You Just Started with Claude Code or Codex, Here's How to Put Several AI Agents in One Window
Readers who just started with Claude Code or Codex kept asking how herdr works. This assumes you've only ever opened a terminal and have no feel for folders or config files yet: five terms in plain words, one install path, three keystrokes for the first session, and a second agent opened from the keyboard alone. Scripting sits at the end and can be skipped. A technical tutorial, not investment content.
You Can Lock the Shelf, Not the Whole Truck: Odd Lots on Organized Retail Crime
Notes on Bloomberg Odd Lots' interview with Home Depot's VP of asset protection: how shrink breaks down, why products get locked up, and where stolen goods end up. Educational commentary, not investment advice.
Apple Will Never Ship Another iPhone, and It Has Never Made More Money: Reading Apple: The First 50 Years
A friend asked me whether Apple is still worth holding now that it has stopped surprising anyone. After reading David Pogue's fifty-year history of the company, I think that is the wrong question. The book records the market sentencing Apple to death four times, and today's Apple earns its money not from new products but from tolls. Every headwind hits the toll booth. Educational reading notes and reflections, not investment advice.
Washington Buys Into Venezuelan Oil: A Very Big Deal That May Not Matter Much
Notes from a Columbia Energy Exchange conversation on shortcuts versus institutions, and how to read a headline when the investment cycle outlasts the political one. Educational only, not investment advice; no tickers or price targets.
Expensive Is Not a Feeling You Measure With
Notes on The Compound and Friends, September 8, 2026: what it means that only 27 S&P 500 stocks trade above 40x forward earnings, why 'invest in what you know' keeps failing, and the one ingredient this mania is missing. Educational, not investment advice.
No One Is Coming: Reading Crisis Engineering, Then Checking Whether My Stocks Are Actually in Crisis
Three engineers who rescued HealthCare.gov wrote a field manual for crises. The most useful part for me wasn't how to fight fires. It was their five indicators for deciding whether you're in a crisis at all. Six of my holdings are down by half, so I ran each one through the five boxes. Educational reading notes and extensions, not investment advice.
Natural Capital: The Things You Think Are Free Are Sending You an Invoice
Personal notes from the MacroMicro (財經M平方) knowledge-point episode of 2026/09/09, on natural capital, biodiversity, the EU's CSDDD, and how pressure travels down a supply chain. Educational reflections only — not investment advice, and no individual stocks are recommended.
Micron's Name Is in Idaho. Its Capability Lives in Taichung.
Notes from Supply Chained, 2026-09-08: why an 'American memory company' keeps its capacity and leading-edge nodes in Asia, why buying capacity and building capacity are opposite businesses, and how long a stopgap like HBM can hold. Educational, not investment advice; no tickers, no price targets.
Launch Is Not Solved Yet — Notes on Andy Lapsa and the Threshold Nobody Has Crossed
Notes after listening to Valley of Depth (2026-09-08) with Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa: why full reuse is the one variable that matters, a different road for heat shields, and how to tell 'not solved yet' apart from 'never will be'. Educational, not investment advice; no tickers, no price targets.
Forty Days of Rain, Two Years of Expensive Hard Drives: Supply Chain Lessons from Thailand's 2011 Flood
Notes on Asianometry's 2026-09-06 episode about how Thailand's 2011 floods took out 40% of global hard drive capacity — and what it teaches about concentration, second-order dependency, and sticky prices. Educational, not investment advice.
NAND Flash Stays Short Through Mid-2027: Slower Price Gains Are Not a Closing Gap
Notes and reflections after listening to the Statementdog podcast episode from 2026-09-06. On the direction of China's new capacity, the split between consumer and server demand, and what changed inside those five-year supply contracts. Educational, not investment advice.
The Layer You Can't Model: Broadcom's Quarter, Supply-Chain Depth, and Agents Running Loose
Notes after listening to The Circuit Ep 191. Custom silicon has turned from a single-winner market into a mix-and-match menu that resists modeling; the bottleneck trade has run its course; and an AI assistant just offered 'skip' as a menu option. Educational, not investment advice.
A Dynamic Country Inside a Collapsing System — Notes on Walter Russell Mead and Why America Keeps Winning
Notes from Invest Like the Best EP.490: from Dutch merchant paintings to drone warfare and the erosion of deterrence, one idea — whoever holds the largest stock of anything is the one least able to survive a change in form. Educational, not investment advice; no tickers or price targets.
Record Earnings, and a Rumor About a Guarantee Knocks It Down 4.5%: NVIDIA's Three Hats, and the Half Last Week's Gooaye Post Left Out
Kelly Tsai's September 4 video lines up NVIDIA's guarantees, financing platform, and convertible purchase this year and argues it is now supplier, shareholder, and guarantor at once. I set that against last week's Gooaye post, which said the MediaTek deal is not circular, ran the numbers from SEC cash-flow filings, and propose a sharper test: can the party receiving the money borrow on its own? Educational notes and method, not investment advice.
Take Over Your AI Agents from Anywhere: Tailscale + Herdr + Moshi, Step by Step
Fred's method: three replaceable components that bring the AI agent windows running on your computer straight to your phone. A Windows laptop installation guide, including two gotchas and how to fix them, plus a comparison with the UU Remote setup popular on X.
GPT-6 Astra Is Absurdly Good (Most of the Time): When Tools Catch Up to Your Hands
Notes after listening to Tech Wave EP153. On 3D modeling, computer use, and security benchmarks — how far this generation jumped, where it didn't, and what's left once skills and prompts get absorbed into the model. Educational, not investment advice.
The Chip in Your Mac Nobody Looks At Just Made AI Inference 1.8x Faster: Xiaotian's Test, and the Number I Ran on Windows
Xiaotian spent a week on an entry-level Mac mini and cut video-to-vector indexing from 127 seconds to 70, using a part of Apple's chip most people never notice: the Neural Engine. I put his numbers next to the same kind of job running on my own Windows machine to answer a more practical question: when your computer is slow at AI, do you swap the machine or swap the model? Educational notes and extension, not a buying guide.
Does an AI Only Behave When You Swear at It?
A Chinese hardware YouTuber says swearing at AI works: DeepSeek eats it up, OpenAI ignores it. I take his rant apart and find two things inside: pulling the decision back, and asking only for the result. Then I check it against the twenty-three indicator tests I sent out today. No swearing needed, but hand the model a broken ruler and it will politely measure 100%. Education and methodology.
What's Really Blocking the Fed's Balance Sheet Isn't the Fed
Notes on the Macro Musings conversation with Stephen Miran: why the Fed's balance sheet stays large, how bank regulation manufactures reserve demand, and the case for money aggregates as a cross-check. Educational, not investment advice.
Why Money Launderers Love $100 Bills
Notes from an Odd Lots conversation on money laundering: the paradox of record cash in circulation, the scale of trade-based laundering, and a compliance system that costs a fortune and doesn't work. Educational, not investment advice; no stock picks or price targets.
A Contract Signed Through 2031 — Seven Days of Upstream Posts, Laid Side by Side
An independent researcher who watches only the upstream of AI infrastructure left forty-odd public posts this week. Put them in order and what surfaces isn't a ticker — it's four lines of reasoning about capital picking winners, growth rates truncated by supply, time turning into an asset, and which country the real chokepoints sit in.
Same Model, One Leaderboard Says 62.7, Another Says 99.9. Which One Do You Trust?
Caleb Writes Code takes apart the GPT-6 Astra launch: of fourteen benchmarks in the announcement, only one overlaps with the popular composite index, and the same model on the same test jumps from 62.7 to 99.9 depending on whose harness runs it. He offers a new yardstick: token-efficient is not the same as cost-efficient. I checked my own week of usage and found output tokens are 8% of my bill. The slice the leaderboards measure is the slice that hurts me least. Educational notes and extension, not a purchase recommendation.
Four AI Subscriptions, One Line of Quotas: How I Decide Who Gets the Work
Paying for four AI subscriptions means four kinds of quota windows: five hours, a week, a month. Dispatching from memory left one account empty by Wednesday and another half unused at month end. I wired the open-source CodexBar meter into a single line of traffic lights that appears before every message, and now the line decides who does the mechanical work, who writes code, and who makes the judgment calls. Four rules that ignore quotas entirely are in here too. Personal workflow notes, educational.