When the Kitchen Table Was the Internet
Some of us of the Baby Boomer generation grew up when the kitchen table was the internet, and everyone had an opinion. (Lars visited with his brother yesterday at a local noodle restaurant in Mountain View, so these recollections are at least a bit fresh.)
A few things about the Toomre family:
Sunday Evening Market Update: Precious Metals in Full Flight
What an extraordinary evening in the precious metals markets. As Asian trading opens this Sunday night, the screens light up with the kind of price action that forces even seasoned observers to sit up a little straighter.
In this environment, tools like Standard Business Report Model (SBRM) and Bullshit Detection (BSD) agents are not just "features" — they are survival protocols.
SBRM as a Guardrail: SBRM can help AI adhere to rigid, machine-readable business logic rather than relying on statistical guesswork. As a scaffolding, it prevents the "hallucinations" that could lead a central banker to make a trillion-dollar error.
The assassination of MIT Professor Nuno Loureiro this week in Brookline is a tragedy of the highest order. While the mainstream media chronicles the event as a local crime story, those within the scientific and energy sectors recognize it for what it truly is: a catastrophic failure in the human infrastructure of the global energy transition.
On Meta Privacy Concerns and Choosing Secure Communication Platforms
More than a few contacts on this platform have, for reasons unknown to me, decided I am their personal technology oracle (also known as "geek," "nerd," or "gearhead"). While I am generally happy to help with occasional queries, please understand: I am not looking to quit my day job.
On Resilient Teams, Disrupted Systems, and the Next Generation
Lars has been profoundly fortunate in his career — blessed to work with truly exceptional individuals and to have formed and led several remarkable teams that consistently exceeded expectations by wide margins. Although most team members have transitioned to other professional vectors, many of those colleagues maintain contact, particularly around the holiday season.
Rebooting AI in the Age of Hallucinating Agents
A former client – now a good friend – and Lars exchanged holiday greetings this morning. He observed that conversations between them have become far less frequent than they were during the years when he managed billions in fixed-income for a large institution, and Lars ran a fixed-income trading desk on Wall Street as one of the original “bond vigilantes.”
When your AI agent recommends a $50M acquisition, underwrites a million-dollar credit line, or drafts language a regulator will scrutinize, a question becomes unavoidable: Who is liable when the model is wrong?
Not the model. Not the cloud provider. The person who deployed it.
During this year's Thanksgiving festivities and gatherings, the BRC FinTech team had several conversations about the current state of Large Language Models ("LLMs") and the future of Artificial Intelligence ("AI"). Almost everyone expressed wonder at how "good" and relatively complete model responses have become, often giving near PhD-level answers that sometimes sound more knowledgeable and confident than their information retrieval and knowledge warrants. The conversations then devolved into various LLM prompting strategies and advanced learning discussions.
As we start the year of the 2024 American federal elections, there is significant uncertainty. One thing though is virtually certain: the year will be much more volatile than what is currently being priced into the Capital Markets.
There are considerable geopolitical issues, at least one of which is likely to shift economic outlooks. Wars are currently raging in Ukraine and Gaza with other tensions in the areas around the Red and South China Seas. These conflicts will require economic and political resources, both of which seem to be in more limited supply today than earlier.
