Andrew Vilenchik @[email protected]

This is a strange thing to be impressed by, but a video of a ScanRobot doing 2,500 pages an hour got me. I watched the whole thing twice.
A camera goes down into the gutter of the book, a vacuum pulls the page flat against a glass prism, then a puff of air flips it. The book only opens 60 degrees so old bindings don't crack. They run 14th-century material through it.

Last winter, I had a 40-page document with encoded fonts and lost two days to it. The table of contents came out as symbols. Three passes with different OCR settings before I had text worth anything. Forty pages.

But the scanner isn't really the impressive part. Google was doing this at industrial scale in 2005. What's different now is what you get at the end.
Back then, you got a PDF. You still had to read it or already know which page you wanted.

Now you OCR it, split the text into chunks, embed them, and ask a question the way you'd ask a person. You get back the relevant paragraph with the page number attached. That's not really search anymore. Search assumed you already knew what you were looking for.

So I keep thinking about everything that's technically preserved but practically unreachable. University collections. Twenty years of engineering test reports and failure analyses. Journals that stopped at microfilm and never went further.
None of it is lost. It's just not findable, which for most purposes is the same thing.

The catch is that OCR is still bad at exactly the material you'd want most: handwriting, stamps over text, fax artifacts, two languages on one page. That's where my two days went, and a fast scanner doesn't solve it.

That's mostly changed in the last year. Layout and OCR run as one model now instead of a stack of stages glued together. Marker 2 does about 2.9 pages a second on a single GPU, Docling is in the same range. That's roughly four times faster than the robot turning the pages. The software isn't the bottleneck anymore, now its just a paper. #RAG #OCR #DocumentAI #Digitization #AIEngineering

It's July 4th, and everyone in tech seems to be negotiating a different version of the word "independence."

Crypto was born to be independent, to have no central authority, no permission needed. So there's a certain irony that its big holiday milestone is a deadline for a law: the White House wants the CLARITY Act signed by today. The freedom movement is lining up for a rulebook.

Robots, meanwhile, are gaining theirs fast. Figure is building humanoids at one an hour. Boston Dynamics' electric Atlas is reporting for its first real shift at a Hyundai plant in Georgia. China's UBTECH says it's already booked 13,000 orders for a $17,600 companion robot.

The AI labs are trading theirs away. The quarter's defining story is the government getting "a desk inside" the frontier, reportedly including talk of Washington taking a stake in the biggest labs. Strange thing to be reading on the one day the country celebrates not answering to a central power.

Happy 4th.

A Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas just announced that 80% of his liquid portfolio is in Bitcoin. Most people read that as a crypto headline. I read it as a window into how the wealthy actually think about money, and a signal of where a certain kind of capital is quietly heading.

The billionaire is Ricardo Salinas Pliego, founder of Grupo Salinas, which is the conglomerate behind Banco Azteca, TV Azteca, and the Elektra retail chain. To understand the bet, you have to understand the man. He was born in 1955 into a family that argued about gold at the dinner table. His father and grandfather were gold advocates who watched Nixon end the dollar's convertibility to gold in 1971, which Salinas still calls "the fiat fraud." The lesson he absorbed young: scarce assets hold their value, and currencies governments can print do not.

So Bitcoin didn't convert him. It confirmed something he'd believed for fifty years.

His allocation tells the story of conviction compounding: → 2020: ~10% of his liquid portfolio → 2022: ~60% → 2025: ~70% → 2026: ~80%, after buying aggressively into this year's drawdown.

His framing is worth sitting with. He calls Bitcoin "an asymmetric bet to the upside." He holds no bonds and no outside stocks, only Bitcoin, a few miners, and gold and silver miners. His advice to ordinary people is almost monastic: dollar-cost average, ignore the noise, and never sell.

One honest caveat, because it matters: this is 80% of his liquid sleeve, not 80% of his fortune. The vast majority of his wealth is still locked in his businesses and hard assets. This is a high-conviction allocation, not a man betting the whole empire. Anyone who tells you otherwise is misreading the number.

So why do I think more wealthy investors follow this path, even if a few say it as loudly?

1. They measure in decades and purchasing power, not quarters. When your time horizon is generational, the slow erosion of fiat is the risk, not volatility.

2. They've watched the debasement firsthand. Every wealthy family that lived through a currency crisis in Latin America carries that memory into how they allocate.

3. Bitcoin solves a problem the rich uniquely feel. It's portable across borders and hard to seize. For people in unstable jurisdictions, that's not ideology, it's insurance.

4. The plumbing finally exists. Regulated custody, ETFs, and institutional-grade infrastructure removed the operational excuses that kept serious money on the sidelines.

5. Peer signal is powerful. Conviction from one credible billionaire gives cover to ten quieter ones.

I'm not telling you to copy his allocation, concentration like that isn't a recommendation, and Bitcoin's swings are brutal. What I'm pointing at is the direction of travel.

It's what they understand about fiat that the rest of us are still pretending not to.

#Bitcoin #Wealth #Investing #Macroeconomics