Blog about Personal Projects, Articles and Papers on Economics, Finance and Technology
Smartphones haven't had a compelling upgrade story in years. On-device AI models, distilled from frontier systems like Gemini, are about to change that. Parameters are the new megapixels.
5 min read AIAI
IsoDDE doubles AlphaFold 3 on hard benchmarks and beats physics-based gold standards. But no AI drug has FDA approval. What $4B in pharma deals actually mean.
6 min read MedicineMedicine
The transformer's limits are now mathematical proofs, not empirical hunches. Hybrids are in production. AI is searching for its own replacement. Here's what comes after.
6 min read AIAI
MCP leads with 97M monthly SDK downloads and 10,000+ servers. A2A fills a different layer. Analysis of the agentic AI standards war with historical parallels.
8 min read AIAI
Qwen 3.5-35B runs on a gaming PC and matches Claude Sonnet 4.5. When the commodity version is 95% as good and 97% cheaper, you have a pricing problem.
7 min read AIAI
Alphabet's free cash flow is on track to fall 90% in 2026. Amazon's is at $11B. $690B in AI capex is cannibalizing the cash that justified these valuations.
8 min read InvestingInvesting
METR found experienced developers 19% slower with AI, despite feeling 20% faster. At 92.6% adoption, organizational productivity gains remain roughly 10%.
9 min read TechTech
Peter Thiel says physics stalled in 1972. Then GPT-5.2 proved a new result in theoretical physics. The 75:1 AI compute gap between commerce and science.
8 min read AIAI
The Anthropic-Pentagon standoff isn't an ethics story. It's a replay of the 1993 Last Supper that consolidated 51 defense primes into 5, at Silicon Valley speed.
8 min read AIAI
I read 12 AI research reports from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, UBS, and 6 other banks. Here's the consensus they're pushing, and what they're not saying.
10 min read AIAI
Prices rose 25% since 2020 and won't come back. The levels-vs-rates problem explains the vibecession, the Stewart-Thaler debate, and why nobody trusts economists.
7 min read MacroMacro
Novo Nordisk lost 75% since June 2024. CagriSema failed vs Zepbound, US pricing is resetting lower, and Lilly leads on every axis. Full breakdown with numbers.
10 min read MedicineMedicine
A Google insider made $1.15M on Polymarket in 24 hours. Israeli soldiers bet classified strike timing. Why prediction markets need insider trading regulation.
11 min read InvestingInvesting
A 30-second Super Bowl spot costs $8M. The real price is $16–23M. The ROI evidence is mixed. A deep look at the pricing, the prisoner's dilemma, and the NFL.
11 min read EconomicsEconomics
AI converges to the mean by design. Ninth-power scaling costs and a 53-point gap on Humanity's Last Exam show domain expertise is appreciating, not declining.
10 min read AIAI
The EuroPA alliance connected 130 million users across 13 countries overnight. But this isn't really about sovereignty. It's an infrastructure arbitrage exploiting a 100-120bps spread between card network fees and SEPA Instant rails, accidentally protected by the EU's own regulation.
14 min read MacroMacro
One River's data shows beta-adjusted long volatility outperformed the S&P 500 over 40 years. Goldman, AQR, and Universa agree on the mechanism but disagree on implementation. A synthesis of the evidence.
12 min read Quantitative FinanceQuant
AI capex failure and AI replacing all software are mutually exclusive. Why the 2026 SaaSpocalypse is a $2 trillion pricing error, not an extinction event.
8 min read AIAI
The enterprise AI agent stack is stratifying into six layers with different winners at each. Models commoditize; context — your organizational world model — compounds. A framework for agentic AI architecture decisions.
7 min read AIAI
Apps overtook games in mobile IAP revenue for the first time in 2025, driven by $3.5B in GenAI growth. Analysis of Sensor Tower's State of Mobile 2026 report.
3 min read AIAI
Variance drain is the hidden cost of volatility: why a portfolio averaging +10% can lose money. The ½σ² formula explains the gap between paper and real returns.
4 min read Quantitative FinanceQuant
Claude Opus 4.6 brings a 1M token context window, 68.8% ARC-AGI-2, and Agent Teams to Claude Code. Full benchmark comparison vs GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro with pricing analysis.
6 min read AIAI
a16z sees AI fundamentals thriving with 80% GPU utilization. AQR sees the CAPE at the 96th percentile. Both have data. Both may be right.
4 min read AIAI
How hybrid recommender systems balance multi-armed bandits against LLM inference cost economics in 2026. A deep dive into Netflix recommendation algorithm architecture and Spotify's AI DJ recommender system.
5 min read AIAI
AQR's 2026 data shows private equity returning 4.2% versus 3.9% for public equities. The 30bp illiquidity premium barely justifies years of lockup.
4 min read Quantitative FinanceQuant
Britain faces strategic isolation: locked out of EU defense cooperation, unwilling to join Trump's coalition. The mid-Atlantic bridge has nowhere to land.
3 min read MacroMacro
At Davos 2026, Carney told allies to take down the signs of the liberal order. Middle powers are learning to navigate between giants without illusions.
4 min read MacroMacro
Sara Hooker's research challenges the trillion-dollar scaling thesis. Compact models now outperform massive ones as diminishing returns hit AI.
4 min read AIAI
85% of AI projects fail. Only 26% translate pilots to production. The winners automate the coordination layer where employees spend 57% of their workday.
2 min read AIAI
Japan holds $5 trillion in foreign assets. With 30-year JGB yields now above 3%, the carry trade that defined Japanese investing faces new friction.
2 min read MacroMacro
Cornell research: GLP-1 users cut grocery spending 5.3%, fast food 8%. With 16% household adoption and savory snacks down 10%, food stocks face headwinds.
4 min read MedicineMedicine
AI was supposed to free us. The Jevons paradox plays out in real time: efficiency expands workload, not leisure. 77% of workers say AI added to their work.
2 min read AIAI
New OFR data reveals $12.6 trillion in daily repo exposures—$700 billion larger than previous estimates. The plumbing of modern money remains poorly understood.
5 min read MacroMacro
Steve Eisman explains how U.S. equity markets have structurally decoupled from everyday economic reality through concentration and passive investing.
4 min read InvestingInvesting
Context windows aren't memory. Explore EM-LLM's episodic architecture, knowledge graph tools like Mem0 and Letta, and why vectors fail for sequential data.
3 min read AIAI
Buffett exits after paying $26.8B in taxes. What 60 years of letters reveal about admitting mistakes, insurance float, and why Abel inherits $300B in cash.
5 min read InvestingInvesting
Apple's $157B cash pile and Gemini-powered Siri shift show a restrained AI strategy. Analysis of whether Apple wins as AI models become commodities.
3 min read AIAI
Rebalancing for 2026: reducing S&P 500 at 40× CAPE, adding Europe after Germany's €1T pivot, and bonds at 4.2% yields. Full allocation rationale.
10 min read InvestingInvesting
Netflix's $72B Warner Bros deal vs Paramount's hostile $30/share tender. Deal mechanics, aggregation theory, and why internet distributors win streaming.
7 min read InvestingInvesting
Nike lost $28B by weakening product development, athlete partnerships, and marketing simultaneously. Data-driven analysis of how complementary assets collapse.
7 min read InvestingInvesting
Michael Burry launches Substack warning AI markets mirror 1999. His Nvidia-Cisco comparison, the GPU depreciation debate, and what hyperscalers need to justify capex.
5 min read InvestingInvesting![Is AI Really Eating the World? AGI, Networks, Value [2/2]](https://static.philippdubach.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=360,quality=80,format=auto/ograph/ograph-eatingtheworld2.jpg)
AGI predictions miss the point. Multiple competing models means price war. Value flows to applications, customer relationships, and vertical integrators.
7 min read AIAI![Is AI Really Eating the World? [1/2]](https://static.philippdubach.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=360,quality=80,format=auto/ograph/ograph-eatingtheworld1.jpg)
Hyperscalers spend $400B on AI, API prices drop 97%, and DeepSeek builds frontier models for $500M. Value is flowing to applications, not model providers.
5 min read AIAI
Four-day forecasts now match one-day accuracy from 30 years ago. How AI models like WeatherNext 2 use CRPS training to preserve extreme weather signals.
2 min read AIAI
A phase 2 RCT shows low-dose semaglutide reduces alcohol craving and heavy drinking with effect sizes exceeding naltrexone. What GLP-1 means for AUD treatment.
2 min read MedicineMedicine
Build an LLM agent in 50 lines of Python. Why context engineering and emergent behaviors are best understood through hands-on experimentation, not theory.
1 min read AIAI
OpenAI lost $11.5B in one quarter. But Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argues each AI model is independently profitable. Here's why the math is complicated.
4 min read AIAI
Diffusion models corrupt data into noise, then reverse the process. Learn the math with Stefano Ermon's Stanford CS236 course, free on YouTube.
1 min read AIAI![Pozsar's Bretton Woods III: Three Years Later [2/2]](https://static.philippdubach.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=360,quality=80,format=auto/ograph/ograph-Pozsar2.jpg)
Gold above $4,000, Treasury holdings below $7T, but the dollar still dominates 88% of FX volumes. What Pozsar's Bretton Woods III got right and wrong.
6 min read MacroMacro![Pozsar's Bretton Woods III: The Framework [1/2]](https://static.philippdubach.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=360,quality=80,format=auto/ograph/ograph-Pozsar1.jpg)
How freezing Russian reserves sparked Bretton Woods III: Pozsar's framework on inside money, outside money, and the shift to a commodity-backed monetary order.
7 min read MacroMacro
Michael Mauboussin's argument that every cash-generating asset is valued through a DCF model. Why this Morgan Stanley paper changed how I think about value.
1 min read InvestingInvesting
Agent-based modeling shows how random market transactions naturally produce extreme wealth concentration, and why even a small wealth tax changes everything.
2 min read EconomicsEconomics
A Rutgers study finds news sentiment embeddings from OpenAI models cut stock price prediction errors by 40%. Time-independent models perform just as well.
2 min read AIAIAmycretin's Phase 1 data shows 24.3% weight loss, beating Wegovy and Zepbound. How Novo Nordisk plans to replace its $20B Ozempic franchise before 2031.
5 min read MedicineMedicine
The zero price effect explains why politicians love free transit proposals. But making buses free might weaken the rider advocacy that protects service quality.
4 min read EconomicsEconomics
Are stock returns normally distributed? Formal normality tests reject this assumption for most equity indices, with major implications for risk management.
2 min read Quantitative FinanceQuant
Apple's Illusion of Thinking paper found AI reasoning models collapse at high complexity. But critics argue the methodology, not the models, may be flawed.
2 min read AIAIKalshi's CFTC-regulated exchange now offers sports betting nationwide. If you can bet on oil futures, why not NFL touchdowns? The line is thinner than you think.
2 min read InvestingInvestingLLMs excel at parsing market sentiment and writing reports, but finance demands audit trails and explainable decisions that black box models cannot provide.
1 min read AIAINew NBER paper shows optimal Fed policy should partially accommodate tariff inflation, exposing a fault line in the dual mandate when prices and jobs conflict.
1 min read MacroMacroUBS paper uses Transition Probability Tensors to bridge machine learning and arbitrage-free derivatives pricing, offering a faster alternative to Monte Carlo.
2 min read Quantitative FinanceQuantResearch shows passive investing makes markets more volatile as index fund growth amplifies each trade's price impact while active managers lag behind.
2 min read InvestingInvestingGoogle released AlphaFold 3 for free, predicting molecular interactions beyond proteins. But is this generosity or a cloud platform play to own drug discovery?
1 min read MedicineMedicine
Statistical analysis of 20,000 crash game rounds verifies the 97% RTP claim. But 179 rounds per hour means expected losses exceed 500% of wagers hourly.
4 min read Quantitative FinanceQuant
Training RoBERTa to predict Hacker News success revealed temporal leakage inflating metrics. How temporal splits, calibration, and regularization fix it.
5 min read AIAI
Sentiment analysis of 32,000 Hacker News posts shows 65% skew negative and earn 27% more points. Six transformer and LLM models tested, full data included.
2 min read AIAI
Build an open-source ML RSS reader with swipe interface. Uses MPNet embeddings and Thompson sampling for personalized feeds that escape the filter bubble.
4 min read AIAI
Build a privacy-focused newsletter with Python, Cloudflare Workers KV, and Resend API. Zero tracking, zero cost, full control. Open source code included.
4 min read TechTech
Cursor AI deployed YOURLS on Azure via SSH in 15 minutes: server config, MySQL, SSL, and a custom plugin. Full transcript and tutorial available.
2 min read TechTech
Build the right mental model for gradients with this PyTorch visualization tool. 2D surface plots with gradient vectors show the direction of steepest ascent.
1 min read TechTech
How I trained a YOLOv11 model to detect playing cards at 99.5% accuracy and built a real-time Monte Carlo blackjack odds calculator using computer vision.
6 min read TechTech
A hands-on project predicting postprandial glucose curves with XGBoost, Gaussian curve fitting, and 27 engineered features from CGM data. Code on GitHub.
6 min read TechTech
GPT-3.5 matched RavenPack's 41% returns in a sentiment analysis trading strategy using 2,072 news headlines. See the full backtest results and comparison.
6 min read AIAI
Built a CGM data analysis tool with Python to visualize Freestyle Libre 3 glucose data alongside nutrition, workouts, and sleep for endurance cycling.
3 min read TechTech
How I built a crypto mean reversion trading bot using PELT change point detection on Kraken, targeting altcoin price overreactions with automated execution.
3 min read InvestingInvesting
How I built Python portfolio optimization tools, tripled the Sharpe ratio from 0.65 to 1.68, and published the results as an academic paper on MPT.
2 min read InvestingInvesting
A Hugo blog tech stack with Cloudflare R2 image hosting, responsive WebP shortcodes, Workers AI social automation, and GitHub Pages CI/CD deployment.
4 min read TechTech