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EMAIL DIGESTS
Daily
Every morning
Weekly
Tuesday recap
Complex Systems has been acquired by… darn, a day late for a topical April Fool’s joke. No, this week’s episode is about payroll systems, with an extended riff on why government payroll revamps so often turn into boondoggles.
Interesting anecdotal report here. FWIW I'd not trust the LLMs with a high complexity tax _filing_ yet but, zooming in on one bit there, there is a tax position one needs to take about which of two calculation methods for an...
Thomas on LLMs vis software security, or, the thing that has been theorized for years is now, in the judgement of local domain experts, actually happening.
One of the many reasons to love AngelList roll-up vehicles is there is an asymmetric amount of attention paid to a) the most important transaction to date in a founder's life and b) an angel who hasn't heard from you...
This week on Complex Systems, we have compliance regimes designed to go viral in and around industries, like HIPAA and the new hotness SOC 2, and we Delve into the difference between Potemkin compliance and the messy-but-real value these regimes...
How can you not love Claude. (I had asked it approximate time to bootstrap a new loop I had set up in a Factorio mod, and it surprised me with the elegance of its approach.) https://t.co/OsvLfcOFGz
Interesting payment UX: Wife received an SMS saying “This is [medical professional]. You have a bill for $X. Reply 1 to pay the bill with your credit card ending in 1234.” No actual bill or option to see the bill,...
This is a really damning bit of investigative journalism about a Potemkin compliance startup. Hat tip to Byrne. the spectral signature is not a subtle one, and one wonders whether all companies which paid them were actually defrauded. https://t.co/upQRuWAusZ
I’ve been curious about the shape of this graph for a while, particularly because Tether has long said it intended to reduce secured loans. https://t.co/xjIBxkExHc
Work with very smart people, on top of a dataset that reporters would kill for, to tell stories about economic growth and technology, with very high cultural appreciation for craft.
As someone who has burned more hours than he wants to think on server administration, a *lot* of the cruft of it gets transformatively easier with LLMs, and in lieu of an hour doing deferred maintenance you can spend an...
Slay the Spire 2: more slay, more spire. Feels more of a content pack than a separate game, but if your complaint about StS was that the magic eventually wore off, you’ll enjoy it. Some minor observations:
Complex Systems this week is with @philipkiely , who has recently written the book (literally) on Inference Engineering. We discussed what AI adoption looks like as an engineering matter in enterprises.
Historically this has required a lobbyist, and the lobbyist’s invoice runs about $30k. (“What really?” Modal use is “get the transportation engineer to approve a curb cut which if we don’t have it blocks a 7 figure commercial development.”)
One of the most important jobs of local journalism, which it historically finds most difficult to do, is saying “There is a quotidian procedural issue which affects this community but will not rate national attention. The government is lying about...
