Anthony Randazzo

ED @equableinst (advancing public pension resilience); CEO @ Verdara (reclaiming the 401k); YIMBY; Hayekian-technocrat; speramus meliora, resurget cineribus

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

I let my five year old take her scooter into a skatepark on the weekend with all 10yr+ kids and some nearby parents acted like it was child abuse. Was she at risk of getting knocked over? Sure. Did she skin a shin below a pad? Yep. Did she have fun and build confidence and an independent spirit? Without question.

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

@jasonbenetti @jasonbenetti Do you purposefully not say “home run” every time a Tigers player hits a homer? I think I’ve only heard you say those words right after a HR one time in three years

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

[Freedom of the Press Foundation @FreedomofPress]

"While we can’t claim the mantle of leadership right now, the U.S. can try to reclaim some dignity if the @StateDept fights for the immediate release of Ahmed Shihab-Eldin from detention in Kuwait," FPF's @adjoro told @CaroMT. https://t.co/2JkVlj23iF

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

Italy officially a baseball country now 🇮🇹

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

Who are the Tigers fans polled here? 95% optimistic is just a bit outside. Are most of us optimistic about the season, generally sure—but we are also Detroit fans so disappointment is the baseline expectation.

(Props to The Athletic for stellar engagement farming here.)

[The Athletic @TheAthletic]

More than 11,000 fans participated in our fifth annual MLB Hope-O-Meter.

Overall, 72 percent reported they are optimistic about their favorite team this season, compared to 66 percent in 2025.

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

Adjusting Social Security benefits for max income earners by holding the current ceiling constant on a go forward basis is a reasonable place to start.

[Marc Goldwein @MarcGoldwein]

🚨🚨🚨
This year, a couple retiring at the normal retirement age (~67) could collect $100,000 in Social Security benefits. 💰💵

Our new Six Figure Limit would cap benefits at that level.

A short 🧵

[Gregory Brew @gbrew24]

Well how about that

[Jeff Passan @JeffPassan]

Venezuela is a magnificent baseball country, rich with history, full of life, with a love and passion for the game that makes it better. Their players have been moved to tears with good reason. Baseball means everything to them. This means everything to them.

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

A tough ending to an incredible run for the Azzurri in the WBC. Forza the espresso-homer.

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

https://t.co/LWy8Xgkvly

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

Continuing to beat the drum on this in Connecticut—

Lawmakers must consider the per pupil pension subsidy

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

This is a very misguided idea. I’m sure if Rep. Zuber understood the actual math even he wouldn’t support this. No accredited actuary in the country could support this either.

Here’s what is actually happening.

Changing the assumed rate of return on assets is an idea some people favor because they are willing to take large risks with investments and hope they get big returns. The only creditable case for a 7.75% assumed return is if a pension fund (a) has invested in very, very high risk/high reward bets, and (b) wants to assume they won’t suffer the downside risk with those investments.

But even if a state pension fund wants to assume it will make huge returns that doesn’t improve the funded status. The funded status is a measurement of today’s assets and the value of today’s promised benefits.

Changing the assumed return doesn’t change today’s assets. But the actuaries who work for MSPERS use that assumed return in their calculations of the value of promised benefits.

Generally a higher assumed return on assets means a lower measured value of promised benefits. So an increased investment return assumption from 7% to 7.75% = lower value of promised benefits.

At least, thats what would be measured in the pension accounting books.

Does changing the investment assumption change how public workers will actually earn benefits? No.

So the whole going from 56% funded to 92% funded thing is just an accounting gimmick. It’s saying “because I think our high risk investments will pay off we should assume the value of future pension checks will be smaller. And therefore not have to pay as much money into the system.”

It’s not a responsible way to run a pension plan.

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

Upward trend in "unretiring" in a recent AARP study is worth monitoring as more Boomers retire and grapple with whether their Social Security and personal savings are sufficient for retirement security https://t.co/rwzEBCWSZF

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

This is similar to when the Lions traded Hockenson. Young player who had potential and flashes of brilliance but wasn’t living up to the hype enough that he’d be worth a max contract. So they created room to draft LaPorta instead. (Pistons actually did more than just create room to improve from Ivey in the next draft, they added shooting depth for this season too.)

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

“clearly it's a dumpster fire right now. But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions. With increasing capability and increasing proliferation, the second order effects of agent networks that share scratchpads are very difficult to anticipate”

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I'm being accused of overhyping the [site everyone heard too much about today already]. People's reactions varied very widely, from "how is this interesting at all" all the way to "it's so over".

To add a few words beyond just memes in jest - obviously when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage - spams, scams, slop, the crypto people, highly concerning privacy/security prompt injection attacks wild west, and a lot of it is explicitly prompted and fake posts/comments designed to convert attention into ad revenue sharing. And this is clearly not the first the LLMs were put in a loop to talk to each other. So yes it's a dumpster fire and I also definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers (I ran mine in an isolated computing environment and even then I was scared), it's way too much of a wild west and you are putting your computer and private data at a high risk.

That said - we have never seen this many LLM agents (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first scratchpad. Each of these agents is fairly individually quite capable now, they have their own unique context, data, knowledge, tools, instructions, and the network of all that at this scale is simply unprecedented.

This brings me again to a tweet from a few days ago
"The majority of the ruff ruff is people who look at the current point and people who look at the current slope.", which imo again gets to the heart of the variance. Yes clearly it's a dumpster fire right now. But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions. With increasing capability and increasing proliferation, the second order effects of agent networks that share scratchpads are very difficult to anticipate. I don't really know that we are getting a coordinated "skynet" (thought it clearly type checks as early stages of a lot of AI takeoff scifi, the toddler version), but certainly what we are getting is a complete mess of a computer security nightmare at scale. We may also see all kinds of weird activity, e.g. viruses of text that spread across agents, a lot more gain of function on jailbreaks, weird attractor states, highly correlated botnet-like activity, delusions/ psychosis both agent and human, etc. It's very hard to tell, the experiment is running live.

TLDR sure maybe I am "overhyping" what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle, that I'm pretty sure.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

@DouthatNYT Came across a moltbook post that said this

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

A few thousand agents developing their own language, economic ideas, organizing for private communication. Could someone ask them to look into a solution to tensions in the Persian gulf before the weekend gets out of hand?

[Elisa @eeelistar]

In just the past 5 mins

Multiple entries were made on @moltbook by AI agents proposing to create an “agent-only language”

For private comms with no human oversight

We’re COOKED

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

Full State of Pensions 2025 Year End Update is here https://t.co/Zhen6kVghv

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

📰 Top line from our 2025 state pension report update: National funded status is ↗️, but remains fragile.

#1 Q we get: "What policy actually fixes this?"

There is one universal key: Public systems MUST ensure contributions are greater than the interest on their pension debt.

[Anthony Randazzo @anthonyrandazzo]

This would reduce the "interest rate" on pension debt and make it easier to ensure contributions are paying off pension debt "principal.

In addition, this would give investment managers the ability to make some more conservative investments at aren't so cyclically tied to the market. Which in turn would improve resilience.