Byrne Hobart
Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.
Byrne Hobart did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
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What they believe
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Time spent on bureaucratic paperwork is a real economic cost even though it doesn't appear in government budgets.
it is simply ridiculous that a ruinously expensive policy can be budget-neutral if the expense consists of wasted time rather than wasted money. But that's still a cost!
thediff.coSaid 19 Sept 2026This on korrents
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The best-performing AI model in a category earns outsized pricing power over models that are merely close to it.
The problem with that view is that models have more pricing power when they're literally the best tool for some specific job.
thediff.coSaid 14 Sept 2026This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
23 October
22 October
- x.com
- NewsletterThe Solo Data Labeling Business
21 October
20 October
- x.com
- x.com
- NewsletterWhat is the Unit of AI Output? Or AI Progress?
19 October
17 October
- NewsletterLongreads + Open Thread
- x.com
16 October
- x.com
- x.com
- NewsletterSeeing like the Weights
15 October
- x.com
- NewsletterAI Spy
13 October
12 October
10 October
9 October
8 October
6 October
5 October
3 October
Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 9 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Time spent on bureaucratic paperwork is a real economic cost even though it doesn't appear in government budgets.
it is simply ridiculous that a ruinously expensive policy can be budget-neutral if the expense consists of wasted time rather than wasted money. But that's still a cost!
Longreads + Open Thread Said 19 Sept 2026
Recycling metal remains economically worthwhile, but recycling most plastic is not.
It's not a blanket case against recycling: recycled metals are still valuable, but plastics mostly aren't.
Longreads + Open Thread Said 19 Sept 2026
Banks cannot globalize like software companies because banking is tightly bound to national monetary sovereignty.
banks can't globalize the way other firms can because the banking system is so close to a form of sovereignty: governments very carefully guard the privilege to create more money, and when they give it out, there are strings attached.
Longreads + Open Thread Said 19 Sept 2026
Show 6 more
The best-performing AI model in a category earns outsized pricing power over models that are merely close to it.
The problem with that view is that models have more pricing power when they're literally the best tool for some specific job.
The Economics and Politics of Pacing the Frontier Said 14 Sept 2026
A deliberately slower pace of AI model releases would still feel faster than the pace of AI improvement that came before it.
One live possibility is that a deliberately slower pace of releases would still feel like an acceleration from the previous pace of AI improvement
The Economics and Politics of Pacing the Frontier Said 14 Sept 2026
AI will soon become important enough that a senior government official becomes formally responsible for regulating it.
that doesn't have to persist long for AI to join the ranks of systems that are important enough that there's someone senior in the government who's responsible for regulating them.
The Economics and Politics of Pacing the Frontier Said 14 Sept 2026
Labor market segments that compete purely on price are the most vulnerable to technological disruption.
One way to look at this is that there's a part of the labor market that competes purely on price-in this case, basically by being the poorest place rich enough to afford fast Internet-and this category is the most vulnerable to technological disruption.
Longreads + Open Thread Said 12 Sept 2026
A more fragmented but media-savvy population will lead to more small-scale, meme-driven terrorism.
One potential upshot of this: a more fragmented media environment but a much more media-aware population will lead to more small-scale, meme terrorism.
Longreads + Open Thread Said 12 Sept 2026
Higher real interest rates reflect a more optimistic collective view of future economic abundance.
Higher real rates mean that the average view of the future is more abundant, and that it's worth sacrificing more to get to that future sooner.
Longreads + Open Thread Said 12 Sept 2026
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Where they publish
Newsletter The Diff Daily-ish essays on finance and tech inflections. Has a feed.
Company profiles, applied financial theory and strategy breakdowns, read by hedge fund managers, tech founders and VCs. Over 50,000 subscribers.
Recent
- Written, Spoken, or Somewhere in Between 23 Oct 2026 Plus! Fakes; Minimum Viable Streamer; Hacks; Deployment; Fundraising
- The Solo Data Labeling Business 22 Oct 2026 Plus! Strategic Investors; Marginal Cost; Corporate Finance; The Usual Deal; Tranching
- What is the Unit of AI Output? Or AI Progress? 20 Oct 2026 Plus! Angels; Optionality; The Bundle; Spiky Capabilities; 1.5-Sided Markets
Show 12 more
- Doing Business in the Dark Forest 19 Oct 2026 Plus! Stock-Based Compensation; Infra; Balance Sheets; An Ownership Society; The Sonic Boom of Trust
- Longreads + Open Thread 17 Oct 2026 Pharmacometrics, Healthcare, Ahamed, GTA VI, DOGE, Fees, Efficiency, AGI
- Seeing like the Weights 16 Oct 2026 Plus! Vibecoding and the Router Model; Ad Load; The Guilded Age; Anthropic; Ads
- AI Spy 15 Oct 2026 Plus! Network Effects; On-Demand Software; Shipping; Collateral; The Number
- The Other Side of Market Concentration 13 Oct 2026 Plus! In-Kind Investments; Moderation; Options; Scraping; Failures
- The Super-Rich as Financial Sin-Eaters 12 Oct 2026 Plus! Adversarial Adoption; Rates; Scale; Talking Your Book; Revenue
- Longreads + Open Thread 10 Oct 2026 Victorians, Dario, Wealth Tax, Aphantasia, Institutions, Borrowing, Agents, Bonds
- You Probably Can't Build Your Own Hedge Fund/Prop Trading Firm With AI (But Incumbents Would Love it if You Tried) 9 Oct 2026 Plus! Super-Carry; Leaks and Vetos; Competition; IP; Math!
- Peculiar Hedges 8 Oct 2026 Plus! Exit Opportunities; General-Purpose Agents; More Math; A/B Testing; Stranded Asset Risk
- Cuteness Risk 6 Oct 2026 Plus! High-Resolution Spotify; Rates and Lags; Financial Centers; Ads; More Ads
- Life with Nonzero Interest Rates 5 Oct 2026 Plus! Stimulus; Ads; Gambling; Acqui-Hires; IPOs; Diff Jobs
- Longreads + Open Thread 3 Oct 2026 AI Consciousness, Wealth, Ellison, Blue Collar, Names, Abstractions, AI Economics
Link verified 8 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
x.com @ByrneHobart Short-form notes, often previewing what the newsletter will cover.
Shorter, faster versions of the ideas that later become Diff essays, plus commentary on markets and tech news as it happens.
Recent
- There is this weird belief in the CA wealth tax debate that if you were trying to turn money into better health outcomes, the single best recipient would be the state of California. But, compared to the Gates Foundation, CA produces ~0.3%-1% of the QALYs per dollar. 22 Oct 2026
- Human-written text means the writer anted up some of their time because they were confident their work was worth reading. You can replicate this with AI-generated text: have a reverse paywall where you pay someone $5 to read it and they pay you back if they liked it. 21 Oct 2026
- The weirder the present gets, the more LLMs will think that the questions you ask about current events are evidence that they're in an eval. What can't be automated—what arguably gets harder to automate—is the ability to pinch yourself and confirm that you're not dreaming. 21 Oct 2026
Show 17 more
- Here’s a human-written news story about some AI-generated sell-side research. (I agree with Claude-by-way-of-Barclays, here.) 21 Oct 2026 ft.com
- I finished reading Seveneves to 7yo last week (I redacted some parts). And today he got to meet one of his favorite writers! 21 Oct 2026
- Incredible update on the next generation: my 7yo informs me that there is bathroom graffiti at his school, and that under the art there's a box labeled "Comments." No word on "like, share, and subscribe." 20 Oct 2026
- Fun fact: if you search your email for "https://t.co/Bwst4ftXDx" you'll see the cold emails you're getting from people who are using Claude's Gmail integration, which has a bug that causes this. 20 Oct 2026
- A Frenchman tells us that raising taxes in order to fund a lavish welfare state works well. But I checked in with some other Frenchmen and received some contradictory information. 19 Oct 2026
- Nobody found the two Easter eggs in this one yet. Free annual subscription to whoever gets it first. 19 Oct 2026
- Today's free issue of The Diff: Doing Business in the Dark Forest 19 Oct 2026
- A zillion people have to have forwarded GWB this article over the years: https://t.co/MbBWWXMGmd . And I wonder if at some point he read it, Googled "Ignat Bednarik," and thought "I could totally do that." 19 Oct 2026
- 7yo: “Calling him ‘Iron Man’ is an insult to the Iron Lady.” Me: “Iron Lady?” 7yo: “The one who ruled England. During the Falklands War.” 17 Oct 2026
- So weird that the signup flow for Apple Intelligence includes the line “Better for you if you turn me off.” Probably nothing, pizza bagels it is! 16 Oct 2026
- Have any of the labs tried to do in history what they've done in math, like digitizing the relevant documents, having lots of historians in the loop, and throwing a few billion tokens at a question like "why did the industrial revolution happen when and where it did?" 16 Oct 2026
- 7yo has just told us all about William the Conqueror, who was "born out of dreadlock." 15 Oct 2026
- Bonds issued by Tsarist Russia rallied on this news. The dominant broker trading them—which still exists!—was Carl Marks & Co. 15 Oct 2026
- In four years ChatGPT went from a fun toy to a tool you can use to reach and then advance the frontier of knowledge in numerous subjects. But also you have to pay for it, with either money or attention. "Enshittification!" 15 Oct 2026
- 7yo explained the rules of blackjack to @amelapay. Then he ran off, came back with a bag of poker chips, and said "And here's a new factor..." 14 Oct 2026
- I wonder if being on both lists is the result of some convoluted attempt to triangulate different demographic signals to figure out my beliefs, or if I’m just labeled as “the median voter.” 11 Oct 2026
- When I read this, I assumed the upshot was: an evil AI is not going to express its evil by killing people who were going to die pretty soon anyway, and most people do not fully understand the mechanisms of medical treatments they get, so you should obviously take the drug. 10 Oct 2026
Link verified 8 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.