Headworx

I've had a number of very interesting (private) discussions following the last week's post on The Wall Of Money . One important take away has been to also mention the shadow banking system as the key contributor to the wall of money. If traditional central bank money printing is the visible high tide, the shadow banking system is the massive underwater current that amplifies that tide. It plays an enormous, often hidden role in inflating and sustaining asset valuations. A fund can take $100 million in Treasury bonds, pledge them in and borrow $95 million in cash, and immediately use that cash to buy equities. The lender who took those Treasury bonds as collateral can turn around and use those same bonds to back a different loan for someone else. Rehypothecation - rinse and repeat. This generates an immense amount of purchasing power that flows directly into financial markets. But it is a liquidity mirage. [Traditional Central Bank] → Creates Visible Money Supply [Shadow Banking...

I'm in the middle of a yet another round-the-world trip. Started two weeks ago in Europe for the Milan Bluetooth Member Summit , followed by the ultra dense in meeting Guangzhou International Lighting Exhibition in China. Next week I'll have a number of customer meetings in the USA. Luckily there is a short weekend pause in between, which I decided to spend in the "TikTok city" of Chongqing. It is a 6-hour high speed rail ride from the coast (the CR400 "Fuxing" at 350 km/h ), which I spent almost entirely glued to the window, with my brain working in the background to aggregate and generalize the inrush of information of the past 14 days. One of the puzzles I was trying to solve was the explosive SpaceX IPO, which, on the surface, has never made any sense to me. Everything I know about SpaceX, plus what I read in the S-1 filling, is a pure fiction (with the exception to the Falcon rockets that represent the solid part of the business). That is on the surface...

No, I cannot tell the details. Development of Bluetooth ®  specifications is governed by the confidentiality rules. So the only way to learn more is to be a Bluetooth SIG member and join the Working Groups. As I write this, the June Members' Summit in Milan, Italy is getting to the end. The week has been really packed. And as I have been excited about the progress on many fronts since I joined the SIG in 2012 (and then started to lead the Mesh Working Group in 2015), the excitement this week has reached all time highs. These things are complex and may seem to move slowly for casual observers "when will Bluetooth finally do X,Y,Z?", I've been super happy with the progress. To be honest, the progress is the one thing, but entirely more important is the spectrum of opportunities and the roadmap ahead. For the last couple of years, in parallel to development of Mesh / NLC - specific features (like the HVAC Integration Profile) , we have been doing a lot of ground work on ...

This one is generally nothing new. I think I get quite a lot of things done. Am I always motivated? No. Discipline is the other factor and there are - I think - three aspects of it that help: Imagining the results. This itself kicks in the right chemistry (literally) - dopamine - the needed neurotransmitter. Dopamine is sometimes confused with endorphins and incorrectly considered the satisfaction molecule. People thought dopamine shot up because you got something good (like winning a game). But dopamine actually spikes before you get the prize. It is the fuel for motivation: it drives the internal incentive processing. It creates the craving, the focus, and the energy required to go get the thing. Making lists. Richard Branson's favorite: " I have always lived my life by making lists ". I too make lists all the time. To help my aging memory and remember important things in the exploding galaxy of interests and distractions. I don't use paper lists but several electro...

Bikerafting in the Abel Tasman National Park is now on my bucket list. Still very uncertain at this point as I first need to find a company - this activity is not easy alone. But first things first, I've placed it on the bucket list. And started sone preparations. If not Abel Tasman, there are many options elsewhere.  I had a mountain bike some 25 years ago but never went on a multi-day offroad trip. That bike is now barely functional and bikes in general have changed a lot. They are now much more capable to ride (hydraulic disc brakes do make a difference) and comfortable (the modern shifters reduced the complexity - just the rear shifter does it all with 11-12 gear cassettes).  I started building the bike with the help of AI (Gemini) as initially I even did not know what to ask for. It guided me with selection of frame and drive options as well as recommended a great local shop that beautifully put it all together ( Peak Bike in Krakow - highly recommended). And then I've ...

The Wallet app is one of the reasons I use my phone more often. For touch payments: when done by phone they don't require a PIN code: faster and more secure. For other card types: mostly as an organizer to have them all in one place. And then for airline boarding passes: not only for convenience, but more importantly as a backup. Airlines love their branded apps. Some of them are barely usable, just being mostly web views on responsive web pages with (almost) no offline functionality. Some are really good - like the often mentioned United Airlines app. But it turns out even the best ones can fail unexpectedly. Just last week my United app lost all my flights . Fortunately this was just the app. It was a bit scary moment, but of course GMail is the mother of all backups. So I retrieved the booking confirmation code of my upcoming trip, then manually added the flight to the app and was able to check-in. The check-in went fine and I added the boarding passes to the Apple Wallet. That ...

Automating customer support has ben the thing for the last 15 years. Or may be more. And has always been super annoying. But it seems recently the bots - mostly thanks to LLMs an much better backend integrations - have actually been quite good. Not all of them of course, but there are some good examples. Revolut is - at least in my experience - leading the pack. I don't have too many issues with Revolut in general, but when I do, the only way to star resolving them is through the "Help" option in the App. And actually with my most recent issues - all of them have been resolved by the automated bot. It is quite good on the front end - in the chat you can seamlessly add attachments and paste screenshots, which simplifies the process. It interprets images quite well. To the point that in many cases it is not even necessary to explain what the problem is - it gets it. But then it has also very good backend integrations. It can analyze the transaction history etc., and also ma...