Randall Lucas
@rlucas-sea.bsky.social
seattle rlucas. currently deleting the other place @rlucas
lending, Seattle, software. Current: bolster civil institutions, mix rationality w/ heart, cycling. Formerly: VC, risk scores, coding
@rlucas@c.im
lending, Seattle, software. Current: bolster civil institutions, mix rationality w/ heart, cycling. Formerly: VC, risk scores, coding
@rlucas@c.im
Niche Worcester, MA content: the city’s 311 complaint app doubles as a handy resource for finding the hook-up on delicious PR Xmas treats. Need to monitor it for a Lechon connect as well.
December 4, 2025 at 1:31 PM
Niche Worcester, MA content: the city’s 311 complaint app doubles as a handy resource for finding the hook-up on delicious PR Xmas treats. Need to monitor it for a Lechon connect as well.
My t shirt about the risks of private credit being overblown is raising a lot of questions that are already answered by my t shirt
Marc Rowan wants to convince Bloomberg readers that they are deluded about private credit risks >> Fears of the private credit market are vastly overblown, writes Apollo CEO Marc Rowan www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
Private-Credit Fears Are Based on Four Myths
In Charles MacKay’s 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, he highlights how mass human behavior can lead to irrationality: “They go mad in herds while they only recover ...
www.bloomberg.com
December 3, 2025 at 1:36 PM
My t shirt about the risks of private credit being overblown is raising a lot of questions that are already answered by my t shirt
Reposted by Randall Lucas
So I know everyone is going to say AI here, but the obvious standout is the SVB bank failure/rising interest rates, and then interest rate cutes. Graph not precise enough but you can see things fall off in 2023, stay bottomed in 2024, and start to rise at the end of the year.
The US tech job market remains extremely weak—overall, employment only increased by 2k last month and is down 7k over the last year
That's not as bad as the worst of the 2024 tech-cession, but extremely bad compared to the 2022 boom or even pre-2020 norms
That's not as bad as the worst of the 2024 tech-cession, but extremely bad compared to the 2022 boom or even pre-2020 norms
November 20, 2025 at 1:55 PM
So I know everyone is going to say AI here, but the obvious standout is the SVB bank failure/rising interest rates, and then interest rate cutes. Graph not precise enough but you can see things fall off in 2023, stay bottomed in 2024, and start to rise at the end of the year.
“The Medium is the M[e]ssage.”
Interesting theory: if video is passive, priors-reinforcing medium, vs text an active, persuasion/change inducing one.
But now we are beyond hypertext (interlinked) and on to ekatext, where it (LLM) morphs itself back to echo your priors - what then?
Interesting theory: if video is passive, priors-reinforcing medium, vs text an active, persuasion/change inducing one.
But now we are beyond hypertext (interlinked) and on to ekatext, where it (LLM) morphs itself back to echo your priors - what then?
frankly, this is a lot of why the media environment is the way it is. the first to leave the written word were people who are primarily looking to reinforce their view of the world. the people who are left are all extremely disagreeable and looking to change their mind or pick ideological fights.
right. exactly. someone should say that! basically no one believes this whole thing. just, like, factually. but, like, am I actually going to read through the whole article?
November 20, 2025 at 12:54 PM
“The Medium is the M[e]ssage.”
Interesting theory: if video is passive, priors-reinforcing medium, vs text an active, persuasion/change inducing one.
But now we are beyond hypertext (interlinked) and on to ekatext, where it (LLM) morphs itself back to echo your priors - what then?
Interesting theory: if video is passive, priors-reinforcing medium, vs text an active, persuasion/change inducing one.
But now we are beyond hypertext (interlinked) and on to ekatext, where it (LLM) morphs itself back to echo your priors - what then?
This week saw at the gym in rural New England two cable TV ads for FB and AMZN — neither saying “buy our product/service” but rather “hey, you should like us coming to your town and giving you rubes jobs, you should feel kindly toward our data centers”
NEW from me: a new report found that national resistance to data centers skyrocketed between March and June of this year—especially in red states like Georgia and Indiana:
The Data Center Resistance Has Arrived
A new report finds that local opposition to data centers skyrocketed in the second quarter of this year.
www.wired.com
November 15, 2025 at 12:31 PM
This week saw at the gym in rural New England two cable TV ads for FB and AMZN — neither saying “buy our product/service” but rather “hey, you should like us coming to your town and giving you rubes jobs, you should feel kindly toward our data centers”
Personalization of commerce is a social ill.
The impersonality of common (commodity) relations is a precondition for an open, high trust society.
Do you want to haggle over the price of a banana based on whether the grocer knows your cousin?
See also, “Violence and Social Orders”
The impersonality of common (commodity) relations is a precondition for an open, high trust society.
Do you want to haggle over the price of a banana based on whether the grocer knows your cousin?
See also, “Violence and Social Orders”
Fred Goodwin (for it was he) once told me that RBS developed one of these systems but threw it away because it caused nothing but problems. Every Category 1 customer has a friend or relative who is a Category 5 and when you treat them obviously differently it always angers both.
Companies are working overtime to stratify consumers, separating the haves from both the have nots and the have yachts
on.ft.com/4p6brF8 How the American dream turned out to be pay to play
on.ft.com/4p6brF8 How the American dream turned out to be pay to play
November 14, 2025 at 12:09 PM
Personalization of commerce is a social ill.
The impersonality of common (commodity) relations is a precondition for an open, high trust society.
Do you want to haggle over the price of a banana based on whether the grocer knows your cousin?
See also, “Violence and Social Orders”
The impersonality of common (commodity) relations is a precondition for an open, high trust society.
Do you want to haggle over the price of a banana based on whether the grocer knows your cousin?
See also, “Violence and Social Orders”
guys I don’t think six digits is secure enough for one time text codes at login, shouldn’t we be using 12 or 16 digits? You know to be MORE SECURE???
November 13, 2025 at 9:04 PM
guys I don’t think six digits is secure enough for one time text codes at login, shouldn’t we be using 12 or 16 digits? You know to be MORE SECURE???
The big guys in private credit have been overt about how their growth in AUM this year has been “the wealth channel” and “the wire houses.”
Institutional CIOs view on private credit this year has ranged from cautiously optimistic to overt disgust.
Draw your inferences accordingly!
Institutional CIOs view on private credit this year has ranged from cautiously optimistic to overt disgust.
Draw your inferences accordingly!
UBS Chair Colm Kelleher isn't the only person worried about credit ratings arbitrage and optimization or weak insurance regulators. Marc Rowan of Apollo disagrees. Here's why Kelleher is right. Via @opinion.bloomberg.com >> www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
November 6, 2025 at 12:05 PM
The big guys in private credit have been overt about how their growth in AUM this year has been “the wealth channel” and “the wire houses.”
Institutional CIOs view on private credit this year has ranged from cautiously optimistic to overt disgust.
Draw your inferences accordingly!
Institutional CIOs view on private credit this year has ranged from cautiously optimistic to overt disgust.
Draw your inferences accordingly!
Reposted by Randall Lucas
A president who can tear down 1/3 of the White House can tear down the entire White House. A president who can steal $230M from the treasury can steal $1T from the Treasury. We have both legalized and tolerated Trump’s crimes, so they will only get bigger.
October 24, 2025 at 12:54 PM
A president who can tear down 1/3 of the White House can tear down the entire White House. A president who can steal $230M from the treasury can steal $1T from the Treasury. We have both legalized and tolerated Trump’s crimes, so they will only get bigger.
Whether they know it or not (or are staying willfully blind) a lot of AI growth even in B2B is driven by activities on the grey-to-black hat continuum
The most successful real-world application of genAI continues to be scams. It's scamtech.
Hackers using AI to scam more people, faster: expert
Artificial intelligence has led to a new era of cyber security risks, a new report from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) released Thursday has found.
www.ctvnews.ca
October 20, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Whether they know it or not (or are staying willfully blind) a lot of AI growth even in B2B is driven by activities on the grey-to-black hat continuum
Enterprise SaaS contracts now starting to contain clauses like "vendor shall not perform any of the services or create any deliverables using generative AI without the prior written consent of purchaser."
October 17, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Enterprise SaaS contracts now starting to contain clauses like "vendor shall not perform any of the services or create any deliverables using generative AI without the prior written consent of purchaser."
Reposted by Randall Lucas
ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...
October 12, 2025 at 9:43 PM
ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...
You can like wrenching on your ride and taking road trips and still think that pedestrian safety outweighs urban speediness.
You can be a “car guy” and not like car dependency. You can be a “car guy” and get that too many cars in cities is bad for everyone, including drivers. You can be a “car guy” and be tired of lies & manipulations like “the war on cars.” You can be a “car guy” and know more choice means more freedom.
October 13, 2025 at 2:43 AM
You can like wrenching on your ride and taking road trips and still think that pedestrian safety outweighs urban speediness.
There’s a 100% chance a team in an activist hedge fund is using AI vuln scanning to read bond documents and local laws to find double dip opps
financialpost.com/investing/ho...
financialpost.com/investing/ho...
October 10, 2025 at 1:50 PM
There’s a 100% chance a team in an activist hedge fund is using AI vuln scanning to read bond documents and local laws to find double dip opps
financialpost.com/investing/ho...
financialpost.com/investing/ho...
Reposted by Randall Lucas
Little data point about school phone bans from my beloved local newspaper
October 4, 2025 at 3:06 PM
Little data point about school phone bans from my beloved local newspaper
AI will be deployed against your consumer surplus.
Recent studies reveal Large Language Model pricing agents autonomously achieve supracompetitive prices, raising algorithmic collusion concerns. Instruction variations affect pricing behavior, emphasizing the need for regulators to address AI complexities in pricing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00806
Algorithmic Collusion by Large Language Models
ArXiv link for Algorithmic Collusion by Large Language Models
arxiv.org
September 13, 2025 at 10:42 PM
AI will be deployed against your consumer surplus.
States could also just let pharmacists prescribe and dispense all medications, with specific exceptions, instead of making politically charged carve outs on a one off basis. Like, you know, in most civilized countries.
BREAKING, from NY Playbook PM: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul will sign an executive order allowing pharmacists to prescribe and administer Covid vaccines to New Yorkers who request them.
September 5, 2025 at 11:40 AM
States could also just let pharmacists prescribe and dispense all medications, with specific exceptions, instead of making politically charged carve outs on a one off basis. Like, you know, in most civilized countries.
An AI you don’t control is an adversary
feels significant that mass-market LLMs like ChatGPT are now capable of generating extensive natural-language dossiers about a given user's interests, location, preferences, identifying information, and more
simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/...
simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/...
I really don’t like ChatGPT’s new memory dossier
Last month ChatGPT got a major upgrade. As far as I can tell the closest to an official announcement was this tweet from @OpenAI: Starting today [April 10th 2025], memory …
simonwillison.net
September 5, 2025 at 1:35 AM
An AI you don’t control is an adversary
Reposted by Randall Lucas
Cars, like guns and the internet, tell us that other people aren’t real. The subway, bikes, books tell us that other people are real, the basis of community and a new imaginative horizon
August 23, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Cars, like guns and the internet, tell us that other people aren’t real. The subway, bikes, books tell us that other people are real, the basis of community and a new imaginative horizon
Honest q: when a city has two NPR affiliates, and it was already a bit dicey as to having both be funded, how do you choose who gets to be the face of “saving” local public radio? Kind of non trivial. Jazz heads vs the Prairie Homies.
The Knight Foundation and other top organizations are aiming to provide $50 million to stabilize the stations most at risk from the recent federal government funding cuts. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/b...
The Race to Rescue PBS and NPR Stations
www.nytimes.com
August 22, 2025 at 1:11 AM
Honest q: when a city has two NPR affiliates, and it was already a bit dicey as to having both be funded, how do you choose who gets to be the face of “saving” local public radio? Kind of non trivial. Jazz heads vs the Prairie Homies.
Whatever happens in the streets, or in the backwoods hollers, the only thing that really matters is to whom the primary dealers send China’s money after the auction. Be the coalition that China and JPM agree are most governmentish and you’ve won.
You want to be the legitimate United States government and you really want to be issuing the currency that seems like a dollar
August 17, 2025 at 3:23 AM
Whatever happens in the streets, or in the backwoods hollers, the only thing that really matters is to whom the primary dealers send China’s money after the auction. Be the coalition that China and JPM agree are most governmentish and you’ve won.
We need an interstate compact on anti-gerrymandering similar to the electoral / popular vote compact. If blue states are going to respond to the Texas attack with counterattacks, they should also create the compact as an offramp.
August 15, 2025 at 3:25 AM
We need an interstate compact on anti-gerrymandering similar to the electoral / popular vote compact. If blue states are going to respond to the Texas attack with counterattacks, they should also create the compact as an offramp.
Honest question, are people who are giving AIs shell access bothering to run it under a restricted UID? Or are you letting the AI run with the same UID as owns your mbox, ssh keys, sudoers privs, etc?
Used Claude Code to build a simple tool tmux-cli that lets CC puppet your terminal -- i.e. interact with CLIs expecting user input -- useful to let CC autonomously run debuggers, test CLI/UI scripts, spawn other Claudes (fully visible unlike black-box sub-agents) github.com/pchalasani/c...
August 13, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Honest question, are people who are giving AIs shell access bothering to run it under a restricted UID? Or are you letting the AI run with the same UID as owns your mbox, ssh keys, sudoers privs, etc?
Reposted by Randall Lucas
“The AI in the study probably prompted doctors to become over-reliant on its recommendations, ‘leading to clinicians becoming less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance,’ the scientists said in the paper.”
AI Eroded Doctors’ Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study
Artificial intelligence, touted for its potential to transform medicine, led to some doctors losing skills after just a few months in a new study.
www.bloomberg.com
August 12, 2025 at 11:41 PM
“The AI in the study probably prompted doctors to become over-reliant on its recommendations, ‘leading to clinicians becoming less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance,’ the scientists said in the paper.”
Reposted by Randall Lucas
2 key lessons for other cities from the mobility justice transformation of Paris:
1. No good reason you can't do this too.
2. A "we just need more police to catch the dangerous drivers" aproach is a dead end. Infrastructure is the solution.
1. No good reason you can't do this too.
2. A "we just need more police to catch the dangerous drivers" aproach is a dead end. Infrastructure is the solution.
“In Paris, cycling continues to break all records!
In 2024, cycle path usage jumped by 34%! Nearly 15,000 cyclists used Boulevard de Sébastopol every day!
And we're going to keep going; brand new lanes will be completed by the start of the school year.”
— Paris Mayor @annehidalgo.bsky.social
In 2024, cycle path usage jumped by 34%! Nearly 15,000 cyclists used Boulevard de Sébastopol every day!
And we're going to keep going; brand new lanes will be completed by the start of the school year.”
— Paris Mayor @annehidalgo.bsky.social
À Paris, le vélo continue de battre tous les records ! 🚲
En 2024, la fréquentation des pistes cyclables a bondi de 34% ! Près de 15 000 cyclistes ont emprunté le Boulevard de Sébastopol chaque jour !
Et on va continuer, de toutes nouvelles pistes seront livrées à la rentrée.
En 2024, la fréquentation des pistes cyclables a bondi de 34% ! Près de 15 000 cyclistes ont emprunté le Boulevard de Sébastopol chaque jour !
Et on va continuer, de toutes nouvelles pistes seront livrées à la rentrée.
July 31, 2025 at 8:15 AM
2 key lessons for other cities from the mobility justice transformation of Paris:
1. No good reason you can't do this too.
2. A "we just need more police to catch the dangerous drivers" aproach is a dead end. Infrastructure is the solution.
1. No good reason you can't do this too.
2. A "we just need more police to catch the dangerous drivers" aproach is a dead end. Infrastructure is the solution.