Data Engineer 🇺🇸🇵🇷keeping a log for myself; opinions my own
Austin, TX
Joined January 2016
- Tweets4.5K
- Following1K
- Followers523
- Likes32.2K
Pinned Tweet
You might like this book. It discusses cycles in depth. He argues there’s 4 major cycles (54, 18.3, 9, and 3.4 years).
It too tracks with major booms and busts
People, unironically, asking Claude to build them a portfolio after copy/pasting the Manidis/Roberts piece today.
Low key kinda hope they slipped in a prompt trap…
Jake Grosek retweeted
The europoor meme can be funny, but it's also midwit and wrong.
As someone with both EU and US passports who's lived in both sets of elite poles (SF/NYC and BCN/BER/PAR), let me just give you the TLDR:
-The percent of GDP spent on welfare in the US is the about the same as the EU (smidge under).
-The effective tax rate in the coastal US is about the same as the EU (smidge under).
-Both are (former) middle-class societies where much of society feels the social contract is broken. In the US, elites abandoned the middle-class decades ago, and the well-to-do in states like CA/NY have reconciled themselves to paying almost half their paychecks and getting nothing in return, planning to insulate themselves from the suck by paying for private everything: neighborhoods, schools, medical care. If their earnings keep on rising, they're OK with it.
In France, that bourgeoisie hasn't been decimated yet, and they still expect (delusionally perhaps) basic social infra like schools to function (which is what these protests were initially about). The infra in Europe is a lot better than in the US, despite the GDP delta (New Yorkers can only dream of a subway like Madrid's). But that's clearly eroding in time, without the wage growth (or private social infra) to allow for a paid workaround.
-The free healthcare blah blah meme is fake: the public health systems in Europe have collapsed to the point it's mostly a public/private hybrid, for anyone with a solid paycheck, and fuck you if you're poor, go to the public system (which is the ER in the US). Guess what? In Europe you've got deductibles, in/out of network and all the same shit as in the US (though yes, the cost is still lower, though more or less correlated with wages).
-Boomers on both sides of the Atlantic are living in a dated lala land, but they vote to keep the system in place. In Europe it's legislation and printing money to prop up pensions; in the US, it's legislation and printing money to prop up housing prices and the stock market, which is the American 'free market' version of pensions. Rampant inflation and cost-of-living problems in both, with youth locked out of housing and living in precarity.
-Both are struggling with having been historically middle-class societies
US better positioned only because it has more economic growth (hello 80 hour weeks), and (obviously) leadership in critical fields like AI. But the foundational problems of an out-of-touch elite, incoherent immigration policy, and general social malaise that sees no meaning or purpose at the End of History is absolutely the same in both polities.
Americans who mock what's happening in Europe simultaneously believe some X mirage about what Europe is (and have never lived there), as well as don't understand what's going on in their own country. The French Revolution happened a few years after the American one, and once again, the two countries are echoes of each other, as similar countries tend to be. France is probably the most 'American' country in Europe, in all the republican senses of the word (and no the Yookay isn't in Europe).
Jake Grosek retweeted
its really worth pausing on how different this is than the the giving pledge. the giving pledge was zero sum, focused on giving away your dollars at the end of your career, seemingly entirely outside the US. trump accounts are positive sum, make america an equity holder, etc.
Susan Dell, wife of Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell, encouraged families to register for Trump Accounts while speaking alongside the president on Wednesday. After Mrs. Dell’s speech, President Trump asked Mr. Dell whether his wife was considering running for office and gave her his "complete and total endorsement." The Dells previously pledged a donation of $6.25 billion to the Trump Accounts.
Jake Grosek retweeted
Excited to announce Options 101!
It's a site that provides free, no-ads, no-shill education on financial options (calls + puts).
The first course is one I'm now teaching this fall at Charles University in Prague. Lecture notes, videos, assignments.
options-101.com/
Really miss the days where the worst influence an athlete could be was selling shoes or some political opinion.
Now it’s just drip drip drip messaging of players encouraging you to gamble on sports. I don’t, but teens are subconsciously seeing this every game.
From @TheAthletic: LeBron James will make nearly four times as much promoting the Polymarket prediction market as he will from playing basketball. The deal may not break NBA rules, but it raises uncomfortable questions. nyti.ms/476hxP5
Jake Grosek retweeted
The only generation that knows how computers work is also the most relaxed about AI:
It’s a shame Ridley Scott’s show Raised By Wolves jumped the shark end of S1 (IFKYK), because the set up below could be the cold open to the prequel about how the interplanetary crusades started between the techno-Christians and the AI-atheist sectarians.
This is deeply disturbing:
Anthropic secretly invited religious leaders to SF to advise them on AI safety, had them sign NDAs, but then primarily tried to convince them Claude has a soul & moral standing, all while wining & dining them to the max. 1/ tinyurl.com/preview/296b5z8z
Almost to this day in 2024, I was visiting Chicago. A friend and I posted up at the local dive bar to watch TNF where by happenstance the private room off to the side advertised a “COVID Awareness Rave” for $20 entry. Blasting the worst edm track selection you could imagine. Transitions were awful. Masks required of course.
Surely I thought it was a joke but the bartenders grumbled that it was indeed serious. No one could order a drink (let alone drink one) without taking off their mask to tell the bartender what they wanted. Pointless they said.
Anyway, just a reminder and microcosm of how insane the world was 2 years ago, let alone 6. The western mass lesbian bar are the final stranded soldiers who can’t believe the war ended.
A lesbian bar in Greenfield eased its stringent mask mandate, a decision that has splintered the queer community in the city and beyond. trib.al/FyZjBWs
Jake Grosek retweeted
Iran / oil prices is a short term driver but broadly this is due to demand pressure from extremely attractive ai capex opportunities that are borrowing at nation scale
Growing up in Puerto Rico the mall was 🔥San Patricio? Had a roller coaster outside you might die in. Plaza Las Americas? Probably 1/10th the island’s population was there at all times. JC Penny, Build a Bear, and many others were literally the top selling franchises globally. Then you step outside and it’s kill or be killed (on rare occasions literally) in the parking lot. Incredible formative years.
It’s actually criminal how many of these are gone. Amazon and private equity killed so much of American life.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This video is AI generated. The Sears logo shown was intreoduced in 2004, not 1996. In 1996, Sears was spelled in all caps. The date overlay misspells the month DEC as DIC.
logos.fandom.com/wiki/Sears
In 2010 I was on the college bus to class. At the time ML was gaining steam and the big banks, law firms, etc said they’d hire 1/3 of the paralegals they did before the GFC. I distinctly remember on that cold Boston ride that I had to pivot from pre-law into tech. I’m glad I did.
Astra for Law seems like an even more profound change.
Jake Grosek retweeted
Yesterday I was in Austin, TX to announce the Airbnb Housing Accelerator, a $250 million commitment to help get more homes built.
Airbnb started because of a housing problem. My roommate and I couldn’t afford our San Francisco rent, so we rented out airbeds in our apartment. Today, housing is unaffordable for millions of people around the world.
If you step back and ask why housing has become so expensive, the biggest problem is pretty simple: we don’t build enough of it. America is short more than five million homes, more than all the housing in New York City and Los Angeles combined. We build fewer homes today than we did in 1950, even though the population has doubled.
Airbnb has been part of the housing debate, and we understand why communities have concerns. Dedicated Airbnb listings are a small share of the housing supply—about 0.5% here in Austin and 0.3% across the U.S. Restricting short-term rentals is an understandable response, but the evidence shows it doesn’t address the underlying problem.
New York City effectively banned Airbnb, and rents have risen about 30% since then. Austin took a different approach and passed reforms that made it easier to build more housing. Rents there are down 18%. Every city is different, but Austin is a clear success story.
We believe building more homes is essential to making housing more affordable. So we asked ourselves: what can Airbnb can do to help? We found a few places where we can.
Today, around 750,000 homes in the U.S. are ready to break ground, but are stuck because they can’t get the final piece of financing. That’s where we can help.
We’re doing four things:
1. Putting $250 million behind housing projects that unlock $5 billion in development.
2. Supporting local housing advocates working to modernize zoning, speed up permitting, simplify building codes and reduce unnecessary costs.
3. Creating a $5 million Housing Innovation Prize for technologies that can make homes faster and cheaper to build.
4. Launching the Airbnb City Index to make it easier to see which cities are building housing, becoming more affordable and adopting policies that work.
Our first project is in Austin. We’re investing $6.4 million to help build 201 affordable apartments in St. John, a neighborhood where the land has sat empty for nearly 20 years. The community fought to turn this lot into affordable housing and won. But construction stalled for nearly five years because the developer was a few million dollars short. Airbnb came and played a small part to unlock this project.
None of these Austin apartments will ever be on Airbnb. Short-term rentals aren’t permitted. We’re investing anyway, because the goal is simple: help build more housing.
We’re starting in the U.S. because it’s the market we know best. I want to prove this works here before taking it further. But housing affordability is a global problem, and I hope we can eventually take what we learn here and apply it globally.
This is new for us. We’ll get some things wrong. And $250 million won’t close a five-million-home gap on its own.
I know there will be skepticism about this, and that's okay. Airbnb only works if communities trust us and feel good about our presence in them. We can’t ask people for that trust. We have to earn it. The best way to do that is to help solve problems in the communities where we operate.
That’s what the Housing Accelerator is about.
Brian
Now that most everyone agrees the West needs to reindustrialize (which requires more energy production to power said industries) we’ve swapped climate change hysteria for AI hysteria.
TIME’s new cover: This summer, AI showed how frighteningly capable it has become. Now researchers, CEOs, and governments are sounding the alarm like never before time.com/article/2026/09/15/…
Jake Grosek retweeted
Texas produces nearly twice as much electricity as any other state in the US.
And the gap is growing...
Breaking my Twitter hiatus this week to, among other things, share this very nifty new data explorer from @Arnold_Ventures & @IFP.
They’ve pulled the very-good-but-hard-to-use @EIAgov data and created a clean, straightforward new website.
Recommend y’all take it for a spin!
Jake Grosek retweeted
FYI there are already regulatory frameworks in place to govern and oversee exactly what OAI, Anthropic, Alphabet are asking for. They likely know this
reading the tea leaves here is my take:
1. Demand has likely outpaced the upper bounds of most cost models the labs are using to qualify market subsidy, and compute resources are approaching true scarcity. They likely all know this
2. My theory on recursive self improvement is that it has extended the runway for new models, and is providing incremental model improvements, but isn’t the scary breakthrough it is being sold as due to data entropy. There is no algorithmic (mathematic) way around this
3. Open source models are indeed closing the gap, and I believe the recent Kimi disclosures that got their team pinched by the CCP was a honey pot, set by Anthropic. Lots of subterfuge going on there.
4. Elon is supportive of the regulatory moat because of the compute, energy and data center shortage and because he can much more easily catch up and maybe even surpass when the battle becomes more about UI and marketing
5. Regulatory moats aren’t moats, at all, for all the reasons discussed. China won’t stop and I don’t think the labs actually care about that as long as they can lock 1pm people in the west and western allied countries into their regulatory system and create massive legal and technical friction for Chinese labs getting to those users
6. AI risks are real, and could be extremely harmful. I do not believe they are imminently existential in and of themselves. I believe in the hands of a small powerful group of people who believe they are a chosen group to decide what good and bad is, what right or wrong is and who gets to be wealthy and who gets locked out of the economy is bad.
In the history of mankind power imbalances of resources have been sold as virtuous to those being governed but ended up with incredible evil being done in the name of ideological purity. We have too numerous examples to ignore.
This is the actual threat of AI. Not the technology, those with the impunity to wield it over others
I believe Democracy likely ends entirely and we enter a full on technocratic authoritarian state eventually under the governance models proposed by these labs. This to me seems much more likely a doom scenario than a rouge agent swarm deciding to take the power grid down or launch nukes.
Evil always comes with a promise of safety. And like my mom always said, when someones rushes you into a decision, they are usually hustling you
Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point @FTC emphasized repeatedly during my tenure.
1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity.
2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same.
As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed."
3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre…).
Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead.
4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my @FTC tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible.
this.weekinsecurity.com/doze…
ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre…
5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.
Jake Grosek retweeted
It was great chatting to @JacobShap on 🇨🇦, economic statecraft, neomercantilism, realpolitik, geopolitics, geoeconomics, Grand Macro Strategy (vs tactics),… and parents wanting their kids to marry lawyers & doctors vs electricians and plumbers.
⬇️ Link below ⬇️
There’s not even dozens of them to complain
Ride prices vary, but one comparison favored Uber over Tesla on launch day. statesman.com/business/techn…
