💪 Mighty Brief

Monday, May 11, 2026 — 4:30 AM CT

Notes: BM unread Gmail scan failed this morning with Google auth drift (invalid_grant / invalid_rapt). Shipping the brief anyway.

Start Here

  1. AI infrastructure is colliding with real-world constraints. Memory pricing is spiking hard enough that people are openly comparing the next phase of AI compute to a mainframe-timesharing reset. That matters if you think cheap inference is a permanent assumption. X
  2. The vulnerability window just got shorter. The old 90-day disclosure norm looks increasingly obsolete if LLMs compress both bug discovery and exploit development. Security moved one notch closer to realtime. X
  3. AI displacement is likely to hit admin labor before elite knowledge work. Brookings' framing, via the FT, is that clerical and administrative roles are among the most exposed and least equipped to navigate the shift. That is a systems problem, not just a jobs headline. X
  4. Cheap creation is not the same as scarce distribution. The leaders list had a good mini-debate: AI animation may nuke production costs, but Belsky and Levie both pushed the harder truth that taste, IP, and distribution still bottleneck outcomes. Tools expand supply; they don't guarantee signal. X
  5. Macro risk is back on the board. The top political story this morning is that Trump and Netanyahu both say the Iran war is not over, which keeps global risk elevated even if tech tries to ignore it. NYT

BM

Unread scan for dan.wick@blankmetal.ai did not complete because Google auth drifted overnight, so there is no clean inbox-based BM read this morning.
Memory still says the active BM stack is Rally, HR&A, Tungsten, Great Hill, Sentinel, Orbis, Care Providers of Minnesota, and Edmunds Govtech. That's enough surface area that sequencing matters more than new input.
The real tension has not changed: BM keeps winning on practical brownfield adoption while the deeper thesis is AI-native redesign. Good business. Easy to let motion masquerade as leverage.

Munger Observer

Opportunity Cost: the open task list is carrying stale March items. Old priorities still consume attention even when they are no longer the best bet.
Margin of Safety: the dated Minnebar reference is stale, but the principle survives. Protect slack early so the day does not get fully claimed by other people's urgency.

Personal Thought

This feels like an editing morning, not an adding morning. The outside feed says everything is accelerating. The smarter move is probably subtractive: kill a stale loop, tighten one priority, and keep optionality high.

Quick Scan