Rosa Del Mar

Daily Brief

Issue 17 2026-01-17

Large-Object Caching Failures: Oom, Fragmentation, And Mitigation Via Disk-Backed Cache Plus Tuning

  • From Oct 17 through the end of the year, the Changelog Pipe Dream experienced 43 out-of-memory crash events.
  • A pragmatic mitigation is redirecting a specific abused episode URL via a Location header so it is served directly from Cloudflare R2 rather than their CDN path, but there is a risk an abusive client shifts to other episodes.
  • A separate ongoing issue was confirmed where MP3 requests intermittently hang in the Newark (EWR) region and later recover, and this behavior was difficult to reproduce.

Design-Levers-Driving-Dispersion-Speed-And-Universe

  • Changing quantitative strategy design reactively in response to recent overperformance or underperformance is a mistake because it undermines process discipline.
  • Niels plans to potentially raise the referenced paper in a future conversation with Katie to contextualize Crisis Alpha.
  • Investor narratives and thematics can influence asset-allocation decisions and investor views.

Operational Ai In Regulated Workflows (Underwriting/Kyc Automation Via Agents)

  • Brex's operational AI deployment approach relies on decomposing work into granular, auditable SOPs that map cleanly to LLM prompting, often solvable with simple tool-using agents or single-turn completions.
  • Brex built an internal LLM gateway and prompt management infrastructure starting around January 2023, including prompt versioning, evaluations, data egress control, model routing, observability, and cost monitoring.
  • Brex expects corporate AI tooling across business functions to deliver roughly 10x workflow improvements.