GenAI is not a machine and shouldn't be modelled as such. Given the range of tasks it can do if properly supervised, it is more like a coworker. We explore the economics of GenAI adoption among knowledge workers in a new paper: koren.mk/publications...
The Directions of Technical Change
Generative AI is directional: it performs well in some task directions and poorly in others. Knowledge work is directional and endogenous as well: workers can satisfy the same job requirements with di...
koren.mk
Vinyl skills: 1. What is vinyl? 2. It has two sides. 3. Can place the needle right before the bridge of Karma Police.
Our paper with @gaborbekes.bsky.social @julianhinz.bsky.social and Aaron Lohmann is/was on top of HN. 15 minutes, I guess.
My favorite German veterinarian jargon: tier spezifisches Eigengeruch I keep repeating it to my dog.
Vibe coding kills open source. Our most direct title yet. @koren.mk @julianhi.nz @aaron-lohmann.bsky.social Theory paper with numbers and policy recs. First at arxiv.org/abs/2601.15494 Comments welcome. @ceu-economics.bsky.social @kiel.institute
Words you only hear in a vibe coding session: "Now let me deploy and test"
My rainbow window sticker approves of the music. Prepping for KGLW concert tomorrow.
I had an AI agent refer to SQLite as "noSQL-like DB." Looks like it was trained on Medium/LinkedIn bullshit but I told it in no uncertain terms that this does not pass with me.
Today I was playing with econometrics (matrices and stuff) as well as relational data modelling (how are different entities related) and realized something. > Econometrics is data modelling without the data. I made a similar point in a talk some years ago (github.com/korenmiklos/...)
github.com
This morning I heard my son hum Nirvana in the bathroom. Not sure if I should be proud or worried.
I subscribed to Google Gemini and cancelled it within 5 minutes. I wanted to create a Google Form from a survey instrument in Google Doc. Gemini cannot do that. It suggested to go to Google Forms and create one myself, using the Doc as a guide.
Super stoked about Krasznahorkai's Nobel Prize. A beautiful interview with him from a couple years ago: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/a...
László Krasznahorkai interview: 'This society is the result of 10,000 years?'
The Hungarian writer behind the formally experimental Satantango talks punctuation, inspiration and money-motivation to Richard Lea
guardian.co.uk
When you start your commit message with bigfux: instead of bugfix: you can be sure it was a major bug.
Great summary of research on AI coding agents. www.cerbos.dev/blog/product...
The productivity paradox of AI coding assistants
AI coding assistants promise speed, but do they deliver? Explore data, developer insights, and security risks showing why AI feels faster but often slows production. Learn where tools like Cursor and ...
cerbos.dev
How to make sure you ran reproduce all steps of your research months later? We demoed our CLI tool bead.zip that saves code and data together at RSECon at Warwick. Slides bead.zip/rsecon25
I have been working with coding AI agents several hours a day in the past couple of months. You get to know their style. Grok is like Elon Musk. Moving fast and breaking things at 10x speed. Not apologizing either.
For the narrow subset of #econsky people clinging to their Stata and crunching big datasets with @duckdb.org, I have vibe coded a DuckDB extension that reads .dta files. koren.dev/software/ Give it a spin and report issues! (Thanks, @anthropic.com Claude Code and the Python Pandas implementation.)
Always excited to hear Elhanan Helpman. If you're in Vienna, come by. events.ceu.edu/2025-05-07/p...
Public Lecture: Elhanan Helpman
events.ceu.edu
Why I love OneDrive, part 78. My local folder is called /Users/koren/OneDrive\ -\ Central\ European\ University\ \(CEU\ GmbH\ Hungarian\ Branch\ Office\)/ Luckily, I can symlink.
Austrian Airlines is pitching Budapest for me. I mean, I love the city. But as long as this is how well AI understands us, I feel safe.
I see a lot of scripts where the file name encodes some structure. Like analysis_this.do, analysis_that.do and plot_this.do, plot_that.do If you have such a clear structure, you are best served by folders. It just as easy to write "src/analysis/whatever.do" as "src/analysis_whatever.do".
To me this seems similar to the early days of the internet. A promising technology with no product. Once the initial bubble bursts, we may yet see fantastic products leveraging the tech.
Ed Zitron@edzitron.com · last yr.Newsletter: Generative AI is a marketing con perpetuated by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei through a mixture of lies and half-truths carried by a tech media that fails to ask the right questions. Outside of ChatGPT, generative AI companies barely get any traffic at all. www.wheresyoured.at/longcon/
New level unlocked: typing an email, three letters into a word in the second sentence, get distracted, then go back and try to figure out what words begin with those three letters. #adhdlife
Why did we develop Kezdi.jl and what can you do with it? Watch my presentation at JuliaCon in Eindhoven. #juliacon #juliasky #econsky youtu.be/JklbLwgePis?... docs.koren.dev/Kezdi.jl/dev/
Kezdi.jl: A data analysis package for economists | Koren | JuliaCon 2024
YouTube video by The Julia Programming Language
youtu.be
The fact that i’ve been listening to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Donovan and John Lennon these past days doesn’t mean I won’t defend capitalism in a degrowth debate. koren.dev/events/2025-... I like to keep my music out of my science.
Why not just set up a national firewall? Blocking terms like, you know, Tiananmen Square.
Judd Legum@juddlegum.bsky.social · last yr.1. EXCLUSIVE Today, the NSA is planning a "Big Delete" of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including "privilege," "bias," and "inclusion," a NSA source tells Popular Information. The massive purge is creating chaos, taking down "mission-related" work