Brian R. Demsey
The Information
Our mission
build insight from correctly sourced, analyzed, and reported data.
To my friends at The Information,
I have written more than twenty pieces for The Information’s forum. You have read none of them, or if you have, you have kept it to yourself. That is fine. I am an eighty three year old actuary in Spearfish, South Dakota, a slightly above average pickleball player, and a patient man.
But patience with a good argument eventually asks for a hearing, so here is mine.
Your mission is to write deeply reported articles about the technology industry that readers won’t find elsewhere. You carry out that mission with excellence. I have spent decades getting financial numbers right, first in actuarial valuations and lately in building with AI, and I have landed on one conviction: the notion of trust as we once knew it, today, no longer has meaning.
Here is the gap I see in the thing you do so well. The Information reports what has happened, deeply and honestly. What it does not yet do is show the moment as it turns, live, on numbers a reader can trace to the source. Your subscribers want to be in the know. Being in the know is a real time condition. The archive, however excellent, is always a step behind the moment.
So I built an app about what I know best, data. At TI.demsey.com you will find a working tool. Choose from nineteen authoritative data sources, pick a date range, and it fetches each series live, indexes them to a common base so unlike units sit on one chart, finds the statistically significant inflection points, and matches them against the events that caused them. Correctly sourced, analyzed, and reported data, building insight. No slush, no faith required. Every figure traces a path back to an origin.
I am not asking you to publish me. I am offering to build and run a new thing for The Information: real time live analysis, a living layer alongside the reporting you already own. It deepens Pro, it gives your readers the one thing the archive cannot, and it does it in the only currency you have ever sold. Not the old trust, the kind built on take my word for it, but the kind a reader can verify, source by source.
The demo is running now. A few minutes is all it takes to see it. The pickleball court is open too, there is a seat open in the outrigger canoe, wherever you decide I might fit.
Sincerely,
Brian Demsey
Spearfish, South Dakota
Founder, hallucinations.cloud
bdemsey@demsey.com · 949 291 1422
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For years I’ve paddled six person outrigger canoes, and it taught me something about where a person belongs on a crew. In an OC6 you don’t pick your own seat. The coach places you, and where you sit depends on the water that day.
Seat one sets the cadence. Everyone behind follows your timing, so you read the conditions and set a stroke the whole boat can hold: steady in flat water, quicker when the swell asks for it.
Seat three is the power seat, the engine room; the job there is to pull hard and move the boat.
Seat six steers, reading the water ahead, holding the line, keeping the crew on course.
I’ve been put in all three, and I learned to trust the coach’s read over my own preference.
I’d say the same to you about where I fit. I can set the cadence: the standard and the rhythm a data quality effort runs on. I can be the power: the one who does the hard, hands on work of getting the data right. Or I can steer: reading what’s ahead and holding the course on data trust. Tell me where the conditions call for me. You know the water better than I.
What I have proposed supplements your research and writing.
Imagine a large number of measures down the left axis, time along the bottom axis, the amassing of large quantities of data, inflection points and insight propelling your reader to a unique discovery.
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