Alex Rossie
I build companies and I fly aircraft. I write here about AI, markets, and history.
- Zillow and Compass are burning cash over who owns the listing. Nobody's suing over how long the closing takes.
Zillow, Compass, MRED, and the FTC are at war over the listing shelf, and every combatant already owns title, escrow, or mortgage operations. On toll-booth economics, the lead as a claim check on the closing, and the six weeks nobody with a war chest wants to shorten.
- Same model, same customer, same timeline: the frontier lab still lost
Palantir's Q2 8-K proves growth at software economics; only the earnings call supplies the cause. The better causal evidence arrived three months earlier: OpenAI paid four billion dollars for the layer Sankar says only Palantir has. On what a filing can certify, what a bake-off story can't, and why the engineer who closes got acquired instead of automated.
- The company selling 'safe AI agents' left its own front door checking a flag instead of a person
Manifold Security showed that Claude for Chrome never checks whether a click came from a person, only that one arrived. Eight releases and two months later the hole was still there, byte for byte, while Anthropic's own tracker read Resolved. What a permission gate is for, and what it costs to trust the flag instead of the artifact.
- A new MIT paper found the variable the AI-jobs debate keeps missing: the shape of the job
Five economists at MIT and Microsoft model AI automation as contiguous chains of steps, and all three of the model's predictions hold up in Claude-usage data. Skill still decides whether a step can be automated; adjacency decides whether the job around it gets swallowed. The ADP payroll gradient and a thriving radiology profession keep the claim honest.
- What the S&P 500 admits about AI (when the SEC is reading)
MIT FutureTech scored 510 S&P 500 firms on ten years of 10-K filings, the annual report a CEO personally certifies. Adoption quadrupled in three years, margins show a J, productivity shows only the dip, and the record cannot yet tell a payoff in transit from one that never comes.