Matt RuckmanBlog
Long-form thinking, half-formed ideas, and the occasional rant. Mostly I write to figure out what I think.
The Chicken in the Fridge
I had a story about why I stopped eating mammals. It was about parental care. It survived approximately one afternoon of mildly curious poking, mostly because of what chickens turn out to do.
The Cousin Mysteries
On Fritz Zwicky's terrible personality, Vera Rubin getting locked out of the Palomar Observatory, the catholic priest who proposed the Big Bang, the largest discrepancy in the history of science, the fact that the vacuum is the most full thing in the universe, and what it means to spend a hundred years looking at a five percent minority and pretending we know what we're talking about.
The Concrete Will Take Longer
Roughly $750 billion in data center capex is being committed in 2026 against the assumption that moving KV cache data around will remain expensive. A Google Research paper from March just made it quietly cheaper.
A Magic Trick, Performed By Computer, On Me
A 200,000-word dictionary contains nearly every short string you could throw at it. That single fact is the engine behind a century of failed Voynich decipherments, AI hallucination, and every face anyone has ever seen in a coffee stain.
Does Your Cat Really Love You?
The question 'does my cat love me' is not really a question about the cat.
The Retention Benefit
Amazon filed 268 H-1B visa petitions the quarter it announced layoffs. The next quarter, it filed 4,250. Across 308 layoff events at 110 S&P 500 companies, the same pattern repeats. Every dataset involved is public. Nobody had put them in the same spreadsheet.
Who Shows Up
What happens when you measure not how Congress votes, but whether Congress bothers to show up when the vote is close. The answer involves two rooms, one species, and a question about courage that the data raises and cannot answer.
The Universe Is Hanging from Something
On watching three YouTube videos and discovering that a 13th-century friar and two 21st-century physicists arrived at the same unsettling claim about reality, why the glass of water matters more than the Big Bang, and what happens when you ask both sides what's at the bottom.
The Plumbing
A technical companion to 'Every Dollar Counts, Every Vote Counts.' In which the construction of a machine that measures money's influence on Congress turns out to reveal something about the architecture of American transparency that the machine itself cannot measure.
Every Dollar Counts, Every Vote Counts
What happens when you feed 36 million campaign contributions into a machine learning model and ask it how much money predicts congressional votes. The answer is about 6.64%, which sounds small until you learn the model is right 97% of the time.
What I Think the Voynich Manuscript Is (and Isn't)
I spent months running computational analysis on the world's most mysterious book. Here's what the data says, and what it doesn't.
The Great Data Divide (RIP Fragmynt)
I started looking into how the data economy actually works and it's weirder than I expected.