I spent one weekend with my college buddies, and now I have my AI agent working on my Github repo in a Codespaces instance. Bro, I got another free trial CD from Compuserve has really come a long way.

Some initial thoughts, and a complicated mix of feelings. Wow. I mean, Erdos problems are cool (I genuinely mean that), I didn't know about the Jacobian conjecture before it got disproved. But this newest batch from OpenAI hits home in a way the previous announcements did not.

allow Golf carts in bike lanes, and we all Win

Matthew Lewis -- living in the era of cults and consequences@mateosfo.bsky.social · last wk.

Listening to the Berkeley City Council debate whether it should allow drivers to continue to assault and kill people on Hopkins Street, and the violent drivers in the room are booing loudly when a council member talks about the benefits of saving lives. Berkeley's NIMBY drivers are trash.

I haven't read the LRB takedown of the Odyssey, although I might once I've seen the film. But it's reminded me of one of the definitive Nolan videos, by the genius that is @michaelspicer.bsky.social

That Scene in a Christopher Nolan Film When You Give Up Trying to Follow the Story

YouTube video by Michael Spicer

youtu.be

I just heard somebody refer to Lich McConnell, and I just, wow.

what if… eliminate the cap on Social Security tax; make realized capital gains subject to the tax; rejigger the PIA, bend points, etc. so benefit go way higher but maintain the pattern of redistributive progressivity (replacement rate weakly declining in contribution)

My brain just translated איכה as WTF and it makes so much sense.

Free will might be an illusion, but it feels real, and it seems like the more functional viewpoint to adopt is that it is real.

1/12 John Baez et al. have just published a paper linking decades-old #mathematics to a new way of thinking about quantum mechanics. 🔭🧪⚛️ The result? The Standard Model (SM) of particles seems to emerge naturally from certain mathematical structures. Here’s a simple explanation, I hope. #physics

hello all!! Big Drop Today we are launching a manifesto for our framework for the next US supply-side economic consensus -- The Productive State -- at Forces of Production www.forcesofproduction.com/p/the-produc...

The Productive State

On Governing The Supply Side

forcesofproduction.com

What is going on with Senator Koopa?

Early stage investing is cool. You meet inspiring founders, see incredible technologies, and never have to worry about paying capital gains taxes.

This headline sounds like the teaser for the next Knives Out movie: NATO leaders came to Turkey to discuss security. Erdogan gave them each an engraved revolver.

OH: The usual process is a Chinese Room, so they will probably never find out that I am a dog.

Americans now pay about as much in profits to disproportionately wealthy shareholders as they do to the Federal government, up from as low as a third in the 1980s. fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1X1WA

Are You Closer To The Sea or Outer Space? This map shows that most of Earth’s land is closer to outer space (just 100 km/62 miles up) than to the sea. But 40% of the world’s population lives in that thin red coastal strip on the map. More: brilliantmaps.com/sea-vs-sa...

I'm quite taken with this measure bruited by @cynamon.bsky.social & co., though I'd very much like to see it with (my perennial spoon banging on highchair) accrued/accumulated cap gains included. +Assets from that is def +HHs' sustainability! shorturl.at/jKUzA

Sustainable consumption and the economic well‐being of American households

“Sustainable consumption” defines a comprehensive measure of household economic well-being that integrates income, assets, debt, transfers, and rates of return to estimate a feasible lifetime consump...

shorturl.at

Single-factor metrics like income or wealth can paint an incomplete picture of well-being. @cynamon.bsky.social and coauthors propose "sustainable consumption", a unifying metric integrating lifetime resources, taxes, and asset returns to map household economic health. Read: tinyurl.com/sp2e38a4

I think the bigger problem with your property value going up is that it’s connected to everyone in commuting distance having a more expensive rent, which means everything you buy in person and every service you consume will be more expensive.

Joe Friday I'm In Love@ultramod2.bsky.social · last mo.

There are actual complications of having your assets be disproportionately something illiquid which you live in. But it's more "Good problem to have" than an affliction. I don't think all those people who cashed out their Brooklyn real estate and moved to Atlanta thought it was a bad deal over all.

New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜

It worked, the code compiles successfully, and you should now have a mouth and be able to scream. Just say the word and I’ll push to production.

Maybe he will drain the swamp in the end.

Mark Lemley@marklemley.bsky.social · last mo.

Welcome to Trump's America

Reptiles with longer Wikipedia pages tend to be bigger. The relationship is a power law with exponent = 0.85. I guess humans really like writing about big lizards? The longest article is the Komodo Dragon.

Using computing metaphors for human cognition is fraught, but I am going to go out on a limb and say sometimes I feel like a bunch of while loops in a trenchcoat.

so uh. um. two posts, two different universes, and I know which of them actually makes sense to me: openai.com/index/harnes... claude.com/blog/running...

Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

By Ryan Lopopolo, Member of the Technical Staff

openai.com

Remember that conversation we had at the playground at Sea Ranch, @jugander.bsky.social? It was basically this, wasn’t it?

Robert (Bob) Kubinec@rmkubinec.bsky.social · last mo.

For example, suppose a treatment increases survival by +25% for one subset of the population and decreases it by +25% for another subset, and these two subsets are roughly equal in size. The RCT will say the treatment is "ineffective."

man it would be funny to start calling "applied mathematics" "number engineering"

New working paper finds that tightening access to Parent PLUS loans from 2012-15 particularly affected HBCUs, which reduced spending on instruction and student services, coinciding with declines in retention and graduation rates edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1483

Unequal and Persistent Effects of Student Loan Policy: Evidence from Parent PLUS Reforms

Federal student loan policy is designed as a uniform intervention, yet institutions differ in their reliance on specific sources of financing. We study how these differences shape the transmission of ...

edworkingpapers.com