Jerry Neumann

We’re killing people for no discernible reason again

Me: Where did wittgenstein say this? Claude: Good challenge. I was being somewhat loose there.

Claude was pretty sure it was a safe bet to make up shit about Wittgenstein BUT I AM TOO SHARP FOR IT

YouTube video by The Schelling Point Podcast by GSBN Why AI Won't Make You Rich? | Jerry Neumann, VC, Early-Stage Investor

Talked about my essay "AI Won't Make You Rich" with Bertrand Chen on the Schelling Point!

YouTube: youtu.be/WRDIvXlo6W0
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7z3q...

The problem with the Citrini Research AI doomer article that caused markets to crash yesterday is how much it assumes the big problem in many markets is how hard it is to write an app.

It argues anyone can now vibe code a delivery app so DoorDash is doomed.

That’s silly. Network effects matter.

The weird assumption that building the product is the moat

Building the product is the moat pretty much only when you're building a product that requires insanely high precision or tacit knowledge. Neither of these is generally true of most software and both of them are things that AI is bad at

Busted it

Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say A Stanford University team have tested their nasal spray vaccine in animals but still need to do human clinical trials.

Why isn’t the right excited about technology?

If a slider is just a hamburger to a smaller stature being, and their species also has a concept of a slider, then given the size of the universe we can assume there are a series of much bigger and smaller sandwiches than we can imagine.

“One of the biggest mistakes investors make is to look at the last few years and assume that’s the new norm.” -- Francois Rochon

The AI Vampire This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.

"With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value.

For someone.

But who actually gets to keep that value?"

The AI Vampire

steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampi...

This just makes me sad

go off jack white

This is what passes for a well-regarded historian, at least among non-historians.

The world, notoriously predictable!

Billy Bragg - City Of Heroes Listen to City Of Heroes by Billy Bragg.

CITY OF HEROES, my song celebrating the courage of the people of Minneapolis defending their community from Tяump's goons, is now available to stream on numerous platforms via this link: bbragg.lnk.to/cityofheroes

Co-sign

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free

Science magazine: US government has lost more than 10,000 STEM PhDs since Trump took office. [science.org]

Okay I think I've mapped out ICE politics as of Monday night

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

- George Orwell, 1984

Bruce Springsteen Dedicates ‘Promised Land’ to Renee Good, Decries ‘Gestapo Tactics’ Leading to Citizens Being ‘Murdered’: ‘ICE Should Get the F— Out of Minneapolis’ Bruce Springsteen dedicated 'The Promised Land' to Renee Good, decried 'Gestapo tactics' and said 'ICE should get the f--- out of Minneapolis.'

Springsteen dedicated “The Promised Land” to the “memory of slain Minneapolis woman Renee Good, decrying the ‘Gestapo tactics’ that he said have resulted in a climate where citizens can be ‘murdered for exercising your American right to protest.’” variety.com/2026/music/n...

Quote from Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward", 1988: It appears to me, Miss Leete, I said, that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and cease to strive for further improvements.

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case.

"My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

Thank god Chuck Schumer isn’t alive to see this.

Something very funny about de santis praising Coolidge for “immigration.” Coolidge’s immigration policy was that people named de santis shouldn’t be allowed to come here bsky.app/profile/anth...

Opinion | Obama Supported It. The Left in Canada and Norway Does. Why Don’t Democrats?

This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

Literally the status quo:

Does this MJ Lenderman song sound exactly like Magnolia Electric Company

Embedded in the hacking shopping carts video, a Terry Pratchett quote that is new to me:

"It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it." 😂

ICE is staging in a garage on Centre St & Howard in lower Manhattan ahead of what neighbors believe is a planned large-scale raid of Canal
Street this afternoon.
Estimated 20-25 agents inside, with more steadily joining, some taken by surprise and caught with their masks down.