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Articles by Patrick McKenzie
Trust Networks Are the Antidote to AI Hype
A review of what the hell is going on in the AI news deluge and the importance of finding people we trust to ground our expectations and thinking. Note: This topic is desperately important so this article has no paywall. But in the next few weeks, I’ll be releasing my first book, “A Misfit Highwire Act” and annual paid subscribers will get a free copy. So if you’ve been thinking about signing up (or converting from monthly to annual), now you can get a free book out of it.
Claude Code makes several thousand dollars in 30 minutes, with Patrick McKenzie
Today Patrick McKenzie (patio11) walks through a coding session with Claude Code to demonstrate what the fuss is about. The business problem: recovering failed subscription payments that required coordinating APIs across Stripe, Ghost, and email providers, and the surprising experience of watching Claude read documentation, resolve dependency conflicts, and make sensible security choices.
Achieving results in the physical world, with Adam Jarvis of “Public Service”
This week, Patrick is joined by Adam Jarvis, author of the Public Service substack and a New Zealand civil engineer and public sector veteran. They discuss how political capital constraints, funding misalignment across government levels, and accumulated regulatory "scar tissue" make infrastructure projects extraordinarily difficult. Complex Systems now has video episodes as well.
The future of pandemic preparedness, with Joshua Morrison
This week I had a conversation with Joshua Morrison, CEO of an advocacy non-profit (1DaySooner) focused on increasing the uptake of challenge trials and other mechanisms to better fight infectious diseases. We discussed the history of Operation Warp Speed, some of the unfortunate and complicated political economy of vaccines in the U.S., and the future of improvements to the built environment to decrease exposure to respiratory diseases.
The hundred-year-old telegram worth $5 million, with Jim McKenzie
I'm joined this week by my father, Jim McKenzie, who worked in commercial real estate development in Chicago for most of his career. He has been telling me stories of deals, and what they implicitly show about the system that is Chicago, since before I knew how to spell "real estate." When I've recounted them to people over the years, I've often been asked for more, and so thought I'd let folks hear them from the horse's mouth once.
Financial systems take a holiday
All systems reflect the culture they are created in, in ways great and small. The financial system, and the human and computer systems which compose it, have inherited norms about when work is performed from the diverse societies which built (and build) financial systems. Your bank takes holidays. Your conception of a holiday is materially informed by when banks are closed.
The Long Shadow of Checks
A recurring theme for Bits about Money is that financial infrastructure is heavily path dependent. We’re (oft unknowingly) standing atop decades and centuries of work which came before. Sometimes, the specific contours of that work, and of decisions made decades ago, is a roadmap to what continues to work today and what doesn’t. Let’s talk checks.
The story of VaccinateCA
Words by 141 Mins The development of vaccines for Covid-19 was a world historical success. The rollout of the vaccines in the United States was plagued with logistical and communication issues. In January 2021, a ragtag group of technologists spun up a volunteer effort to fix some of these issues with the rollout, beginning with the State of California’s lack of a website listing where one could get vaccinated.
The Browser - Writing worth reading
Art thrives in the age of the Internet. Only the music industry has been radically disrupted, and even there the revenues are not lost, but differently distributed. “Writers, performers, directors and even musicians report their economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts 15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved. Against all odds, the voices of the artists seem to be louder than ever” (Metered paywall) (5,600 words)
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