Rosa Del Mar

Daily Brief

Issue 24 2026-01-24

Procurement-Aware Pricing And High-Intensity Outbound

  • Adding a highly personalized postscript referencing the recipient’s specific preferences can materially increase outbound response rates (claimed ~3x).
  • Moving contacts from email to WhatsApp can increase relationship strength because informal, personal touchpoints increase resonance.
  • A cited study is claimed to estimate that shadow work costs companies more than $1.7 trillion per year due to hours wasted on manual tasks.

Agentic Operations And Automation Patterns (Ssh, Scripts, Determinism Layers)

  • Adam built a Proxmox CLI tool called pxm that can create a new Ubuntu VM with specified IP/CPU/RAM/disk and a preinstalled SSH key in under 10 seconds.
  • TrueNAS is perceived as not yet mature enough as an all-in-one 'do everything' homelab platform compared with pairing it with Proxmox, and a single-box convergence is desired.
  • Running SQLite-backed apps on NFS is prone to lock issues that can lead to corruption.

Commodities And Commodity Trend As Inflation Robustifier

  • The energy transition shifts the economy toward metal- and electricity-intensive inputs, while new mining supply can take decades, forcing prices to adjust and potentially driving commodity trends and inflation.
  • Trend-following success depends on positive autocorrelation in underlying prices, and equities can exhibit negative short-horizon autocorrelation that reduces the effectiveness of generic trend signals compared with fixed income.
  • In higher-inflation environments, bonds can shift from providing CPI-plus returns to CPI-minus returns and become more correlated with equities, reducing diversification value.

Ai Lowes Iteration Costs And Enables Prototype First

  • AI-assisted programming reduces the cost of building the wrong thing by making implementation faster.
  • Jenny Wen delivered a keynote at Hatch Conference in Berlin.
  • A traditional design process that emphasizes extensive upfront research and artifact production before building may be outdated.

Ideation And Problem-Framing As Adoption Bottlenecks

  • For most people, a key barrier to building software is that many real-world problems are not perceived as software-shaped and therefore do not prompt software solutions.
  • Programmers are trained to interpret repeated tasks as candidates for automation, making them more likely than non-programmers to notice software-shaped solutions.
  • When non-programmers are told they can instantly create any app, they often react positively but then fail to build anything because they cannot think of an idea.