Kids picked Masters of the Universe for movie night. Very strange film, whose message is that there is an appropriate level of camp (a lot) but also Skeletor just takes it a little too far and ruins it for everyone.

7yo has been alternating between reading "What If?" by the XKCD guy and reading an illustrated military history book. So he'll periodically come over to me and say something like "What if I was on a plane, and there was a hijacker, and I had an XM25 grenade launcher, and..?"

I wonder if chatbots have made the domain name market more efficient because you can ask them "Why would someone suddenly be interested in owning this" and maybe discover that there's some hot startup that uses get|try|with|use|yourdomain dot com.

Watched Jumanji (1995) with the kids, and I’d forgotten how much of it revolves around a supernaturally durable Victorian hunter who obsessively stalks his human prey. It’s a steampunk version of Predator.

Douglas Adams joked about the Electric Monk, a robot that would believe things for you so you didn't have to. It turns out that in our post-religious age, one of the killer apps is the Electric Minority-You-Can-Use-Slurs-For-Without-Social-Consequences.

As Andrei Fastolokov of People's Natural Gas Prop Trading once explained, booking a purely accounting gain from existing changes in assets and liabilities in order to hit your numbers for some arbitrary financial period is the purest expression of Marxist-Leninism.

The 8n+4 most dangerous words in finance are appending n instances of "the 8n+4 most dangerous words in finance are" and then subtracting one from n, until n = 0 at which point you append "'This time is different.'"

You might think that this is an absurd way to claim helplessness while engaging in antisocial behavior, but that's just presentism. We lived in a very different world before Koss popularized headphones.

I was trying to track down a quote from a famous tech commentator, and ChatGPT told me that the nearest direct quote was only vaguely similar to mine. But! There was a forum post from 2009 attributing a paraphrase of that quote to the commentator. I made the forum post in 2009.

We just raised a $120 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation, led by @khoslaventures, to pursue the full-stack approach to legal AI. Blackstone, Bain Capital, Craft Ventures, Coatue, Vanguard, New York Life, TIAA, Tony James, and Jeff Hammes (former Chairman of Kirkland & Ellis) also participated. Norm Ai (@normativeai ) has now raised more than $260 million since I founded the company less than three years ago to build agentic law. We’ve built a team of more than 200, primarily engineers and attorneys, to embed law into AI agents. Norm Law, an affiliated AI-native law firm running on the Norm Ai platform, uses those AI agents to serve clients like Blackstone as outside counsel, with attorneys supervising and improving the agents. Because Norm Law runs natively on Norm Ai’s agentic law technology and prices based on outcomes rather than hours, benefits of AI can now flow directly to the client. This creates a client-aligned incentive structure, unlike model providers, whose revenue is driven by token usage, and traditional law firms, whose revenue is driven by billing hours of human labor. The key distinction is the integration of the pricing model, the technology, and the people. Norm Law is chaired by Mike Schmidtberger, the former Chair of the Executive Committee of Sidley Austin. Other Partners include the former Global Head of Real Estate at Sidley Austin, a senior M&A Partner from Ropes & Gray, the General Counsel from Bain Capital Ventures, and key attorneys from Kirkland & Ellis, Simpson Thacher, Paul Weiss, Davis Polk, Skadden, Cleary Gottlieb, Latham & Watkins, Paul Hastings, Proskauer, and Pillsbury. Clients representing more than $30 trillion in assets under management use Norm Ai software, deploying legal AI agents directly for their in-house legal teams. Norm Ai’s technology is increasingly deployed to supervise other AI agents operating in regulated environments. When companies deploy their own AI agents in high-stakes roles like communicating directly with clients about investment products, Norm Ai's agents check that those agents are in compliance. The Series C will accelerate expanding practice area coverage and advance our supervisory agents.