Alex Rossie
I build companies and I fly aircraft. I write here about AI, markets, and history.
- Opendoor fixed the buy button. Last quarter, the houses it sold just paid the interest on the houses it holds.
Opendoor has fixed the front half of a home sale. Its third quarter shows the cost on the back half: the profit on the houses it sold just covered the interest on the houses it still holds, and the August guide had already priced in the slow season.
- Computer science grew and narrowed at the same time
A study of 36 years of computer science finds the field's attention narrowing as it grew after 2017. Its exhaustion claim is weaker than its title, and the honest case for keeping side roads open is that nobody can tell in advance which one the next breakthrough comes from.
- The FAA would let a booster take the lightning strike if nobody is in reach
An October 5 FAA proposal would let a rocket on the way down skip lightning avoidance and hardening if physics keeps any debris inside a cleared area. It widens a practice the FAA granted reentries case by case, and its safety case rests on two legs: an engineered physics bound and a clearing the operator only has to describe.
- Landing is the default
A 767 freighter overran Runway 30 in Miami on September 6 and killed five people on the ground. On the NTSB's preliminary record, the first officer cautioned about speed about seventy seconds before touchdown and the go-around call came sixteen seconds after it. The go-around rule is sixteen years old, and it keeps losing to a default.
- The files that make a coding agent smart are the files that can take it over
A University of Illinois preprint reports end-to-end attacks on twelve agent harnesses, Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI among them. Each one assigned trust by where text sat. The fix the authors ask for, a context manifest, would tell you where a harness loads from and nothing about who wrote what is there.