Denis Pitcher

Entrepreneur, business owner, former Chief Fintech Advisor, coder, worked in finance, trained as an engineer. - not financial advice

[0xMorty @0xMortyx]

Andrej Karpathy: paying $20/month for a subscription isn't "using AI" - most people never even started

the gap was never access. everyone has the same model, in the same tab, one click away.

the dead list: copy-pasting prompts all day, arguing with the model in circles, rewriting the same code 5 times, asking it questions like it's google, "the AI just doesn't get it"

what actually separates the top 1%:

→ they configure the tool instead of just opening it
→ they give it context, rules and memory, not one-off prompts
→ they build systems the model runs inside, not single chats
→ they think in workflows, not in questions
→ they make AI do the work while everyone else watches it type

that's the real skill. not prompting harder. building around it.

most people sit next to the tool. almost nobody makes it work for them.

one group types questions. the other group ships systems.

you're not behind on access. you're behind on leverage.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

The jobs data coming out continues to suggest the opposite of what a lot of people had thought would happen.

Just take engineering, as the prime example of the area with greatest AI impact (and perceived risk). Most companies now have far more software projects than ever before because of AI, and effectively only engineers are going to be the ones doing that work.

You can get by for a while by being non-technical building software, but eventually someone has to understand what the thing is that got built, has to maintain it, has to fix security issues that come up, upgrade the systems beneath it, and so on. That’s all jobs.

Now apply that to a number of other job functions. AI is going to cause companies to hire more in sales because agents can let them process more leads and do more customer research. AI will cause an explosion of new marketing roles because of how much more efficient it is to launch campaigns and target. The list goes on.

AI is going to have the opposite effect that lots of people thought on jobs.

[Denis Pitcher @DenisPitcher]

This is worth paying attention to. Local workstation/laptop compute has reached a maturity to be able to run top models locally.

This will reshape how business uses AI and open the door to autonomous agents, particularly with enhancements like openshell.

[NVIDIA @nvidia]

NVIDIA RTX Spark: a 1-petaflop superchip, the full CUDA and RTX ecosystem, and Windows-native agents. A new beginning for personal computers.

[Denis Pitcher @DenisPitcher]

If you understood the tech behind traditional finance and crypto it was obvious that this was coming.

Crypto rails (eg stablecoins) would unbundle banking into component parts that could enabled specialized rebundling.

https://t.co/J6JgHmazFX

[Jonah Burian @jonah_b]

Starting a neobank is now incredibly cheap. With crypto rails, most of the stack comes out of the box for free. That makes CAC the dominant cost driver, and the whole business becomes a game of acquiring customers for less than they’re worth. The way to keep CAC low is to specialize. Teams often start by focusing on a narrow segment, like farmers in one region, young people in high-inflation economies, or expats in Asia, and build features and marketing tailored precisely to them. The result is great for consumers: they get financial experiences designed for exactly who they are.

[Laurent @scion_x_]

Ça fait un moment que je me pose des questions sur le bilan (provisoire) de Milei en Argentine. On lit tout et son contraire. Alors j'ai arrêté de lire les commentaires et j'ai regardé les chiffres bruts.

L'Argentine, c'est l'expérience grandeur nature que les économistes attendaient depuis 50 ans. Même pays. Même peuple. Même culture. On change UNE variable : la méthode économique.

Avant : des décennies de gestion étatiste et péroniste, "redistributive". Le résultat concret ? 211% d'inflation, 42% de pauvreté, un État en déficit permanent qui finance son train de vie en faisant tourner la planche à billets.

Puis arrive Milei. Méthode inverse, brutale, assumée : on coupe, on déréglemente, on arrête d'imprimer.

Deux ans plus tard (photo à son arrivée (fin 2023) vs aujourd'hui) :

Inflation annuelle : 211% → 31%
Inflation mensuelle : 25% → ~2%
Déficit public : −5% du PIB → +1,8% (excédent)
Croissance : −1,6% → +4,4%
Pauvreté : 42% → 28%

Sans débat. Jugez par vous-mêmes.

Et le point essentiel : ces gains ne vont pas "aux riches" ou "aux marchés". Ils vont d'abord aux plus pauvres.

L'inflation est l'impôt le plus injuste qui existe — elle frappe ceux qui n'ont aucun actif pour se protéger. La diviser par 7, c'est rendre du pouvoir d'achat à ceux d'en bas. Et 14 points de pauvreté en moins, ce sont des millions de gens, pas une ligne Excel.

Pendant un siècle, on a expliqué aux Argentins que l'État les protégerait en dépensant toujours plus. Résultat : un des pays les plus riches du monde en 1910, ruiné. On vient d'inverser la méthode. Regardez le résultat.

À un moment, il faut accepter ce que les faits racontent : sur le terrain économique, la méthode libérale a livré en deux ans ce que des décennies de socialisme avaient promis sans jamais tenir. Et ça profite d'abord aux plus modestes.

On peut détester le style de Milei — la tronçonneuse, l'outrance, les sorties improbables, il n'a rien d'un homme d'État classique. Mais on ne juge pas une politique économique au style de celui qui la mène. On la juge à ce qu'elle fait à la vie des gens.

Et les chiffres ont parlé.

[Denis Pitcher @DenisPitcher]

Mastercard secures crypto license to expand their push into stablecoins.

https://t.co/szmBL1H3Mi

[Denis Pitcher @DenisPitcher]

In 2019 I was laughed out of an advisory board meeting of former central bankers for presenting a vision that digital fiat as an open standard of money would drive the global unbundling of traditional banking.

Awesome to see the vision accelerating and Bermuda being well positioned.

[Vaibhav⚡️ @vaibhavchellani]

Prompt your neobank idea into reality

After spending several weekends studying 166 providers across various layers of the neobank stack, excited to share this output

https://t.co/ITx6BUUy5P

[David Lieb @dflieb]

Thought experiment: if every company suddenly had infinite free compute, what new products would emerge?

My take: with very few exceptions, not much would change. The bottleneck is figuring out what people want, and it’s not so easy to apply compute to solve that.

[Denis Pitcher @DenisPitcher]

@trottyyyyy I know that realization all too well

[Denis Pitcher @DenisPitcher]

Good writeup on the future of interoperability between tokenized deposits and stablecoins and the role each has to play.

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

Stablecoins and tokenized deposits will co-exist not compete

[Denis Pitcher @DenisPitcher]

People shouldn't be debanked for opinions.

[L0la L33tz @L0laL33tz]

The US Treasury ending reputational risk to "end debanking" is just one of the many very fascinating ways in which the Trump administration is manipulating public opinion.

Reputational risk requires banks to e.g. scan for adverse media, incl. social media s.a. X or LinkedIn and even what you say in public Telegram groups, on the people they are offering services to.

This is indeed a major factor for debanking: one harmful article on you or your business and your account may be closed or denied.

What the Treasury is not telling you is that the entire AML system is built on risk – and that the administration has added to the items to scan for like no other.

The list for risks now includes:

"anti-American" views
"anti-Capitalist" views
"anti-Christianity" views
"extremism on migration, race, and gender"
"hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality"
as well as newly added AI/data center opposition and Data center protest movements

In short, the Trump administration is telling you that it is ending debanking – while in reality, it is causing the debanking of its political opponents like no administration before.

Don't believe their lies.

[cbcwatcher @cbcwatcher]

Warning from Apple to Canada on Bill C-22 "As you know, this may be one of the last times we're permitted to discuss the consequences of this legislation publicly."

"That's because of the bill's secrecy provisions which forbid companies like Apple from even discussing the orders we receive with our users or the public." @Apple

[Denis Pitcher @DenisPitcher]

@mark_k @deepseek_ai Great read overall

[Denis Pitcher @DenisPitcher]

@mark_k @deepseek_ai You didn't reach the conclusion I was expecting which is that the hedge fund that founded and is backing DeepSeek likely already has holdings in these companies.

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Great article here on DeepSeek.

Their real story is not cheaper chatbots, but architecture that turns hardware scarcity into strategy.

DeepSeek is not trying to sell coding seats, it is trying to make Chinese memory, accelerators, and systems useful for frontier AI.

Every recent DeepSeek move attacks a bottleneck that makes frontier models dependent on elite HBM-heavy GPU stacks: MoE activates only parts of a model, DSA reduces long-context attention cost, and V4-Pro’s official card says CSA/HCA cuts 1M-token single-token inference FLOPs to 27% and KV cache to 10% of V3.2.

Engram, a separate research line, pushes the same logic from another side: let static knowledge live in scalable lookup memory, then fetch it predictably from host memory instead of forcing every fact through dense computation.

That sounds like engineering detail until you see the business consequence.

If models need less HBM and less brute-force compute, then second-best chips, abundant LPDDR, NAND, and customized ASICs become less second-best.

Reuters has already reported a permanent 75% DeepSeek V4-Pro price cut, while noting Huawei Ascend supply constraints and expected supernode availability, which is exactly the kind of feedback loop that they wanted.

DeepSeek is not only optimizing models for benchmarks, it is optimizing AI for a different industrial base.

The prize is not the app layer.

The prize is making scarcity programmable.

[victorzh.eth @victorzh]

The card tap, explained.

That card tap isn’t a Visa card. It is an @OpenPasskey card.

We hold our own IIN under ISO/IEC 7812, the same registry Visa and Mastercard use to identify issuers. Our card runs the same EMV chip standard as your bank card. Any acquirer that adds our routing entry can accept it on the terminals they already have. No new hardware.

The chip signs with a P-256 key that never leaves the secure element. Non-custodial, the customer holds their own keys.

Settlement runs on @base flashblocks, so confirmation lands in about 300ms.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Great post on FDEs. Everyone should read it if you’re interested in this job category. This is a job that is going to be around as long as AI keeps changing rapidly, which it inevitably will.

People often wonder why isn’t this like just deploying other forms of technology in the past, like cloud.

Because something like cloud adoption affected a fairly concentrated set of users (developers and IT), and generally didn’t require a fundamental change to the workflows of employees to get the benefits of the new service being delivered on the cloud. At best you went to one training session and you were done.

With agents, the work to implement them is not only highly technical, but they directly impact the underlying workflows that people participate in. This means there’s a ton of technical work and change management that comes with it.

Further, the pace of change of cloud wasn’t nearly as quick, so there was a lot more time for best practices to propagate. Now, every model change means either something new can be done that wasn’t possible before, or some piece of scaffolding is now redundant or holding you back.

This is why it’s commonly easier for a vendor or partner that’s seen the implementation hundreds or thousands of times help do the work, even with internal support from the customer.

So, this job isn’t going away any time soon, and will be a great path for a lot of technical talent, especially early career.

[Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms @JCCFCanada]

Public Safety Canada (@Safety_Canada) has now received its second Community Note on X over misleading claims about its proposed surveillance legislation, Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act.

The government claims that all G7 countries have lawful access frameworks with “technical obligations” for electronic service providers. But the technical obligations envisioned under Bill C-22 go much further by proposing broad metadata retention requirements that have failed legal challenges abroad. The Court of Justice of the European Union has already rejected broad mandatory metadata retention measures as incompatible with fundamental privacy rights. Canadians should be asking why Ottawa is pushing surveillance powers that courts in other democratic jurisdictions have already found excessive.

[Caitlin Long 🔑⚡️🟠 @CaitlinLong_]

THE REAL STORY of the Silvergate Bank “collapse” is finally starting to come out, due to the SEC lifting its “no-deny”/“no criticism” restriction on SEC settlements this week. @jaredkate, Silvergate’s then-COO, has started to talk👇 & more of Silvergate’s side of the story will come out, no doubt. As @nic_carter has reported, Silvergate didn’t actually collapse; rather, it was purposefully demolished as part of #OperationChokePoint2.0 — and it stands pretty much alone in banking history as a bank that paid out depositors amid a bank run without sticking the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund with losses. I’d already learned what happened from a different insider who was at the table back then: the insider witnessed the Fed ordering Silvergate to de facto liquidate by ceasing to service the crypto industry, the “voluntary” announcement of which started the bank run. The insider named names, and a senior Fed official later asked for that list of names (note: many of the people have since left the Fed or no longer in senior positions there). I can’t wait for the interviews of Silvergate executives who previously couldn’t talk but can now. I hope @MaxfieldOnBanks runs with this — he did a big analysis of the Silvergate story a few years ago and figured out that the mainstream narrative wasn’t correct. I look forward to hearing more from the execs, who successfully liquidated a bank under extreme bank run pressures. Are you ready to hear what they have to say???

[Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, MHA @DrDiGiorgio]

This is the problem with socialism.

The answer is always more money. Never a number. Never a limit. Never a point where voters are allowed to ask, after we spent all this, why are the results still mediocre?

NYC Public Schools is already running a roughly $44.6 billion budget. Depending on how you count the all in costs, that puts spending in the neighborhood of $40,000 plus per student.

That's more than most private schools charge. So what's the amount of money per pupil that will make New York public schools adequate? How much wealth should be redistributed to those Queens teachers to make the system "fair?"

We see this in healthcare, too. Any potential cut to Medicaid is dooming poor people to die. @SenSchumer claimed over 50,000 people were going to die if we made even the slightest cut to Medicaid. Fine. Then say the quiet part out loud.

What is the target spend per Medicaid enrollee? What happens when spending rises and patients still cannot get care?

Let's get those numbers out there, find a way to fairly tax the wealthy to fund the safety-net, and then be done with it. $50k per student per year? $10,000 per Medicaid beneficiary with some age-adjustment? $200,000 per mile of high speed rail track?

They can never tell you.

One, because they have never run a business before, so they have no idea how to actually look at a balance sheet.

But, two, they don't want the money to go to the teachers, students, patients, or choo choo train. They want wealth redistributed from class enemies like Bezos to their political allies. They want to fund things that sound nice. "Free childcare" "Free diapers" "Free Faith Healers" so they can take money from people they don't like and give it to people they do like.

But, again because they have never run an actual business and because their only motiviation is to just not fail badly enough to prevent their re-election, the services come in way over budget and under-quality. They're spending other people's money on other people, and as Milton Friedman points out, that's when you stop caring about both price and quality. So the people to whom they promised free stuff look at their free stuff and are disappointed.

"I was supposed to get healthcare but now I need to wait a year for my knee replacement."

So they blame their class enemies and say "well it would work if we could just take MORE of their money and redistribute it."

So they take more money, but the quality doesn't improve. Their political allies, the union bosses and NGO CEOs get big paychecks they then funnel back into their campaigns.

And again, and again. Until all the people who actually produce wealth have been taxed into oblivion. You have no more Amazon. No more abundance. Just bread lines and poverty.

And that teacher in Queens still isn't getting paid what they are worth.