What We've Been Covering: From Forward Deployed Engineers to WiFi Physics

A running list of recent explainers worth revisiting, spanning AI hiring trends, market sentiment gauges, semiconductor competitive positioning, and the practical physics of home networking.

AI and the Enterprise

The forward deployed engineer has quietly become the fastest-growing job family in AI, and the role's rapid spread says something uncomfortable about the gap between a polished demo and a working deployment inside a real customer environment.

Reading Market Sentiment

Two of the market's most quoted numbers get the same treatment this cycle. The CNN Fear & Greed Index compresses crowd psychology into a single 0-to-100 score, while the VIX is often mistaken for a sentiment poll when it's really a formula-driven price on S&P 500 insurance. Knowing the difference is the difference between using these tools and being used by them.

Scam Landscape

Bitdefender's 2026 Global Scam Intelligence Report puts a hard number on a soft problem: 14% of consumers were victimized by a scam in the past year, with finance-themed fraud now dominant across every major channel.

Semiconductors

The bull case for Marvell usually starts with custom AI silicon, but that's the part of the story where the company is structurally second to Broadcom. The real moat is somewhere else entirely.

Networking Deep Dives

A cluster of pieces on home and enterprise WiFi worth bookmarking together:

• 60 GHz WiGig isn't dead — it just quietly moved into the use cases where it actually makes sense.
• 802.11r, 802.11k, and 802.11v are the three protocols working together behind the scenes to make walking between access points feel invisible.
• Mesh WiFi vs. access points comes down to installation convenience versus raw performance, and which one wins depends entirely on your home's existing wiring.
• The Raspberry Pi case studies here aren't hobbyist toys — they're production systems running in agriculture, aviation, and industrial monitoring.
• And the cheapest performance upgrade in networking remains the simplest: get your router off the floor, since the inverse-square law doesn't care about your decor.

Reference Terms

Two glossary entries added recently: the accordion feature in credit agreements, which lets a borrower expand an existing facility without renegotiating the whole thing, and agrément, the quiet diplomatic approval every ambassador needs before taking up post.