gscanlon.lrn

Views are my own. Blockchain | AI | Macro | VC | ex HF | MOVE Maxi | LinkedIn: /scatman Not investment advice. Opinions are my own

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

Fans are frustrated because no one believes Stearns is the solution for the MLB roster construction but he is still there.
Fans are frustrated because the team is so bad despite the 2nd highest payroll that the prospects for even next season are dim.
Fans are frustrated because we all thought a smart owner and the 2nd biggest checkbook would produce consistent results.

Fans are concerned because the owner waited for Stearns, made a large bet on Stearns by seemingly giving him max authority and Stearns has failed.
Fans are concerned because the owner made a bad bet and there is no indication of a change or a hedge on that bet.

The owner set expectations high and missed. The owner has not changed course. The identity of the Mets organization is unclear. This furthers fan confusion of expectations.

Volatile markets are good when you can buy low and sell high. We aren’t at complete capitulation yet. @StevenACohen2 will never withdraw the public championship pursuit messaging. There will be a shift to talking about player development. End of next season is when you look to buy season tickets at a discount.

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

Stearns: don’t sign most players to long term deals because past performance is not indicative of future performance.

President of baseball operations job: select the players for the team that are most likely to perform next season

Also Stearns: the players aren’t playing like we expected them to

Next year is make-break for Stearns and he declared today that they are still trying to win (a championship).

I don’t see how they make any material changes to the team, particularly the pitching for next season.

We are monitoring the titanic.

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

@NDS1089 @alanhahn this is a master class

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

He wasn’t forced to name or cite a single learning of where/why they underperformed.

He said maybe it was all the coaching changes.

He said the players need to play better.

It’s his job to pick the players expected to perform best in the coming season. No one directly addressed this.

What do you think was achieved at the press conference?

Stearns just fired the manager because he is desperate and he is up next but he probably gets another season.

He refused to answer every question of substance.

If that was a masterclass, the media reports in Kansas City must report the weather. Lolz.

We know nothing following that press conference.

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

This makes no sense. The fans emotions about ex players don’t impact performance.

Too many changes assumes there was existing value or continuity provides value. Soto and Lindor are the team and the continuity. McClean is attempting to make a case that he is part of that core.

The average MLB team turns over 81% of its roster every 5 years. The Yankees have 4 players from the 2021 team and you know who they are.

The changes were all bad changes. That is what the problem is. And the guy who made those changes, Stearns, is firing others while staying on himself. Stearns gets 1 more season to “outperform” and then he will be gone.

The fact that we have to listen to Stearns ramble about nonsense and point to “many things contributing” is even more painful. It’s his job to identify and quantify what went wrong. He is a stats guy. But when things are absolutely awful, he won’t quantify or cite anything. No one in the media Q&A actually pressed him to name specific mistakes. Maybe this is not part of the culture.

We are watching the titanic and listening to frustrated assertions. We are living the pain of a wealthy owner make promises but learn the difficulties. I don’t yet believe SAC is that committed to success but this is what we’ve got. Loss of hope is painful.

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

Life-long @nyknicks fan. Watched the finals chip with my dad who brought me in to this previously tortured devotion.

Parade will be unlike anything nyc has seen.

I look forward to watching this team next season.

I was disappointed by the level of greed the @NBA displayed by protecting Wemby. It was clear that the Knicks were fully prepared for the NBAs game mgmt - so this is an open secret within the NBA. @MikeFrancesa claims it has to do with TV contracts but I’m not buying that.

[Tommy Beer @TommyBeer]

The Knicks went 16- 3 this postseason.

Their 3 losses:

Lost by 1 point to ATL
Lost by 1 point to ATL
Lost by 4 points to San Antonio

First team to win the Finals without losing a single playoff game by more than 4 points since… MJ’s 1998 “Last Dance” Chicago Bulls.

[Lev Akabas @LevAkabas]

The New York Knicks just played the most dominant 10-game stretch in NBA history, and it's not even remotely close

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

@thenarrator What data points to 80% as the right threshold? Sounds arbitrary and high. The entity with high accuracy is not likely human so this becomes a data and compute problem.

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

This aligns with why stablecoin chains are challenged at being interesting and useful. The utility cost of transacting on the stablecoin chain island must be less than the cost of a stablecoin transfer on the chain(s) where a user lives. Invert this to find the revenue potential of a stablecoin chain.

[Sam Blackshear @b1ackd0g]

My strongest non-Move view in the crypto space is that

The utility of a smart contract platform is proportional to the amount of interesting shared state a program running on that platform can access atomically.

I don't think this is particularly deep or controversial. Blockchains are programming platforms that allow programmers to share state with customizable levels of trust, and network effects are a thing. If you subscribe to this view, you have to acknowledge that fragmenting state (whether via L2's, subnets, or other schemes) and thereby sacrificing atomic composability between fragments is not good for the utility of your platform.

L2’s aren’t websites--they’re isolated islands of state. The gap between the islands and the mainland is visible (and painful) to devs and users. Anything you want to do that needs to touch state in both the islands and mainland will be slower, more expensive, less secure, and (sometimes) just not possible. There are consequences to this design that can't be hidden.

It would be better for everyone if programmers could fully leverage the power of atomic composability on unlimited shared state without high latencies, high fees, security compromises, or scaling limitations. IMO this is table stakes for a modern smart contract platform, and this is what @SuiNetwork + Move are enabling

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

A rebrand for who controls transaction ordering won’t change the economic reality.

Blockchains that don’t force validators to compete fail principle-agent alignment. There are solutions to this problem but the best ones will incentivize all validators to participate in what is best for the user and ecosystem instead of colluding with searchers for their own benefit.

Solana and Ethereum are the only L1s with validator client software diversity. Most of the focus has been on increasing throughput and decreasing finality because substitution for centralized products and chain stability were paramount. Throughput and speed are nearly commoditized. Client diversification remains a key measure of L1 maturity and adoption.

The next wave of evolution at validator client level will be liquidity layer value distribution.

It will be the key determinant for whether TradFi uses blockchain as a backend or a liquidity and microstructure layer.

[buffalu @buffalu__]

https://t.co/pefCw7xG7I

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

-Human UX does not equal agent UX
-Anthropic has not solved the cheapest verifiable trust ever created, blockchain did
-Anthropic MCP shows crypto how to plug in agents
-Bitcoin mining profitability does not equal blockchain technology capability or adoption

We’re ok with you leaving crypto for your bag of Claude usage tokens.

[The Smart Ape 🔥 @the_smart_ape]

https://t.co/dXY4IbpwKJ

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

While there is truth to this, the pharmaceutical companies are commercial entities themselves and are using AI for the exact use cases he describes.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

The CEO of Google DeepMind just admitted that if the decision had been his, we would've cured cancer before anyone ever used ChatGPT.

And that's not even the scariest thing he said on a recent interview.

Demis Hassabis is one of the most important people alive in AI.

He won the Nobel Prize last year for AlphaFold, the system that cracked the 50 year protein folding problem. 3 million scientists now use his tool. Almost every new drug being developed will touch it at some stage.

In a new interview, he was asked about the moment ChatGPT launched and Google went into "code red." His answer was one of the most revealing things any AI leader has ever said on the record:

"If I'd had my way, I would have left AI in the lab for longer. Done more things like AlphaFold. Maybe cured cancer or something like that."

Read that again.

The man running Google's entire AI division is publicly saying the commercial AI race we're all living through was a MISTAKE. That the industry got hijacked by a chatbot when it could have been solving the biggest problems in science and medicine.

His vision was simple:

Build AI slowly, carefully, like CERN. Use it to crack root node problems one at a time. Cancer. Energy. New materials.

Let humanity benefit from real breakthroughs while the foundational science was figured out over a decade or two.

Then ChatGPT dropped in November 2022 and everything changed.

Demis described what happened next as getting locked into a "ferocious commercial pressure race" that none of the labs can escape from. On top of that, the US vs China dynamic added geopolitical pressure.

The result is everyone sprinting toward products instead of breakthroughs, shipping chatbots while the scientific opportunity gets buried under marketing cycles and quarterly earnings.

But he's not saying progress isn't happening...

He's saying the progress got redirected away from the things that actually matter most.

And then it got even scarier:

Because when Demis was asked what he worries about with AI, he laid out two threats.

The first is what everyone talks about: Bad actors using AI for harm. Terrorist groups. Hostile nation states. Cyberattacks at scale.

But that's not the threat he's most worried about.

His second worry is AI itself going rogue. Not today's models. The models coming in the next two to four years as the industry enters what he calls "the agentic era."

Systems that can complete entire tasks autonomously. Systems that are increasingly capable and increasingly hard to control.

His exact words:

"How do we make sure the guardrails are put in place so they do exactly what they've been told to do, and there's no way of them circumventing that or accidentally breaching those guardrails? That's going to be an incredibly hard technical challenge if you think about how powerful and smart and capable these systems eventually get."

A Nobel Prize winner who runs one of the 3 most advanced AI labs on Earth just said publicly that within two to four years, we're entering a phase where AI alignment becomes a real problem, and the technical challenge of solving it is enormous.

And almost nobody is paying enough attention.

He called for international cooperation between labs, AI safety institutes, and academia to tackle the problem. He said this is the thing even the experts aren't thinking about enough.

He said the only way to get through the AGI moment safely is if everyone starts treating this with the seriousness it deserves.

Most AI CEOs give you careful PR answers about "responsible development" and move on.

Demis said something different...

He said the commercial race FORCED us into a premature deployment of a technology we barely understand, and the window to get alignment right before the next generation of agents shows up is two to four years.

If the man who built the system that might cure cancer is telling you he wishes it had happened first, maybe we should listen to what he says is coming next.

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

@TukiFromKL Cursor 2 outperforming Opus 4.6 is ngmi

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

Oracle revenues miss and it raises CapEx guidance by the largest $ amount in this cycle and stock is -10%. AI belief has withered.

My LLM consumption has only increased and I note my refresh rate has increased - a reflection of strain on LLM provider compute.

I think the only way to triangulate the ROI is to watch the accuracy curve for the LLMs on a weighted average by user count. They still hallucinate on code and other elements but even with this handicap, they scale individual work immensely = productivity gains.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

The Oracle situation:

Oracle, $ORCL, is down over -11% after hours following earnings results which have sent the entire AI trade lower.

Futures are down -1% right now. But, is it warranted?

First, Oracle RAISED CapEx estimates by $15 BILLION for 2026.

Raising CapEx guidance has been rewarded by investors all year, so what changed?

The biggest concern right now is Oracle's debt situation; investors are worried about how this CapEx will be financed.

The important point here is that Oracle is borrowing because DEMAND is skyrocketing, and debt is cheaper than missing the AI Revolution.

This is the exact playbook that both Microsoft and Amazon used in 2012-2017.

Furthermore, Oracle's debt load is still manageable with leverage multiples below a lot of its peers.

In our view, this is just another case of the sentiment pendulum swinging back in the direction of "AI is a bubble" after a hot rally and a dovish Fed meeting.

The after hours move in tech stocks seems to be an overreaction.

We still expect asset owners to win.

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

@jalenbrunson1 is on a mission tonight. Great to watch.

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

Per Goldman note, China export growth now hurts the majority of the world because the game has become zero sum.

The only bipartisan agreement in U.S. : China is our biggest threat.

If US fate is sealed, the risk is two-fold:

1) how do Americans (and the West) handle this loss?
2) where does China stop?

#china #exports #economy

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

DISCUSSION: CHINA, DYNAMICS, & COMPOUNDING
People think statically abt things dynamic. A tiny difference in growth compounds (just as with invts).

This means that one needs a miracle for China, India, & S-E Asia to not run the world economy (and accordingly, geopolitics) in 1-2 decades!

Over my adult lifetime, I saw China's GDP experience a 30 fold multiplication, while the US 3x, Europe so-so, etc. Past 15 y, US 1.8x, China >3x, India ~2x Europe ~0 (Constant $, some variations PPP)

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

Moore Threads, a Chinese company.

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

Working to cut rates.
I still think Trump will attempt some strategy to lower mortgage rates by tightening spreads.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

President Trump effectively announces that Kevin Hassett will be the next Fed Chair.

2026 is going to be a wild year.

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

There are still many who don’t believe in $BTC or blockchain technology.
Let them get paid in fiat and learn the hard way.

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Vanguard 2024: “#Bitcoin isn’t a store of value. We’ll never offer ETFs.”

Vanguard 2025: “Bitcoin trading starts tomorrow.”

[gscanlon.lrn @ggscanlon]

This is a very good advance for blockchain.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

New on our Frontier Red Team blog: We tested whether AIs can exploit blockchain smart contracts.

In simulated testing, AI agents found $4.6M in exploits.

The research (with @MATSprogram and the Anthropic Fellows program) also developed a new benchmark: https://t.co/QpGPMqlDRG