I've always thought of the investment analyst's job as information engineering. You take a world of messy, incomplete inputs and you build something from it: a view, a thesis, a decision. The raw material is everywhere. The work is in the structure you give it.
It's not so different from being an intelligence analyst, with somewhat lower stakes. Nobody dies if you misread an earnings call.
Jennifer E. Sims spent over a decade in senior intelligence roles at the State Department and the Senate Intelligence Committee. She then wrote what I think is the clearest book on information engineering. In Decision Advantage, she argues that intelligence isn't about secrets. Secrets help, sure. But the real differentiator is competitive purposeful learning. That's the kinetic factor. Practitioners start with natural advantages and disadvantages in what they know, but what separates the winners is making better sense of a mosaic of mostly available information, with a set purpose, faster than your opponents.
The purpose of information is action. Not knowing more, but knowing enough to act. Knowledge that doesn't reach a competitive decision is inventory.
What counts as useful information is also not what most people assume. In information theory, information gain equals surprise. In finance, people hear "surprise" and immediately think proprietary data: an expert network call, a channel check nobody else ran, some hidden dataset. A secret. But the most informative material in practice is rarely secret. It's existing information, better curated, better articulated, with a clear and actionable destination. The surprise is in the clarity, not the data. And clarity is expensive. It's the residue of a thousand small decisions about what to leave out and what to elevate. Simple on the page, not simple to produce.
Take Andrej Karpathy. Former head of AI at Tesla, founding member of OpenAI. His biggest impact on most of us isn't the models he built, though. It's how he explains them. He takes concepts and products that already exist and makes them legible, with a precision and clarity that, on a relative basis, makes him more useful to most people than the actual creators. They speak through the product. He speaks to us. Curation and articulation aren't secondary to creation. For the audience, they're often the main act.
That's what this blog is about. Taking the big messy terrain of markets, technology, software, and cranking through ever-changing unknowns like an icebreaker. Not always graceful, but forward.
A conversation for people who look at all the uncertainty and feel curiosity, not fatigue. Who are drawn to figuring out what's coming next, and know that's better done together.