Gimpei

The Pravda parallel is a stretch. It's definitely opinion, but they do consult actual research and more so than most other English language publications. As a social scientist I think they do a better job of treating research than the NY Times or the New Yorker. Often I get the sense the journalists at those publications haven't seen a number since high school. That being said, if you think the kind of statistics based research that comes out of social sciences is all bunk, we live in different worlds and will have to agree to disagree.

Terrible article title and framing. This is just about a QJE article, the QJE by the way is famous for being a little more out there. The article takes a standard gravity equation from economic geography and finds that it fits well to a dataset they created from Bronze Age slates. In general the gravity equation is one of the successes from economics so this isn’t super surprising, but it is welcome and notable. That’s pretty much it.

To be pedantic, the Roman Empire did not fall in 472. It lived on in the eastern Mediterranean for another one thousand years. The Eastern Romans even took back a fair amount of western Roman holdings for a bit. The people who actually killed the Roman Empire were the Franks, permanently weakening it during the Latin occupation.

You could also interpret this statement in a way that has nothing to do with exploitation. A lottery winner doesn’t exploit anyone, but they don’t “earn” their money either. I’ve always thought of the founder path to a billion as a bit like a lotto game where you can shift the odds through hard work and natural ability. I don’t think this process necessarily involves exploitation (although it certainly could). You’d have to believe in the labor theory of value for that. And I’m not convinced that even Marx would, were he alive today. It was supposed to have a scientific basis, after all, and that evaporated a long time ago.

My gripe is that they constantly spam me with overlays about purchasing a family account. As far as I can tell this is unblockable. So annoying.

I don’t understand this question at all. Types are there to prevent human programmers from making a certain class of mistakes. But is the same true for AI. Because if not, static types are just needless cruft.

I’m inclined to believe that you are being too charitable to the interviewers. This is an early stage mental health startup. They totally could have been asking very personal questions. I believe this used to be standard when interviewing psychoanalysts. They could have stopped the author at any time too. That would be the most natural thing. I’m inclined to believe that it was a clown show and they conducted borderline abusive interviews. Shame on them. But also, beware early stage startups. It’s a real roll of the dice and the dice are weighted against you.

If Europe wants to pick up the slack, it needs to start pumping an order of magnitude more money into its universities than it currently does. US universities dominate because they are rich. As a holder of a PhD from a European university, I don’t see this ever happening. But I would love to be proved wrong.

My gripe is how iOS allows these companies to constantly bug us to use their stupid apps. I ended up installing the NYTimes app, not because I use it, but just to shut it up. I switched to duck duck go because I was sick of being bugged to install chrome. How many times do I need to say no?

I used to have a pro-cursor subscription, but it was way too expensive because I'd always hit my limit. I realized I could just use claude code + the free version of cursor for autocomplete and it worked even better. At this point, I'm not understanding the value that cursor is bringing. A souped up claude code? All I have to do is wait a few months and anything useful will be in claude code or codex or whatever.

I’d guess that there is less of a need for light at the beginning of the day since most people don’t farm. Personally I prefer more light at the end of the day.

I took a bunch of film classes in college and what they’re not mentioning is that sometimes the films bring assigned are crazy boring. I once had to watch an hour of footage shot from a camera in an outdoor elevator as it went up and down. One hour. The professor said it was the perfect summation of everything he’d been discussing over the term. I swear I’m not joking.

Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

Isn’t the whole point of Hamlet that he does have control over his life? At any moment he could have just stabbed Claudius and taken over. The dramatic tension comes from him being unable to get out of his own head and get down to businessto.

I like zed. I just wish they’d support running multiple agents at once + chat history. If they did, I’d pay for zed just to support them.

I think people need to chill out on this thread. LLMs are neither pure slop nor the end of the programming profession. They are immensely useful tools, particularly for tedious tasks or for quickly getting up to speed on a new API or syntax. They’re great for catching bugs too. Every now and again I’ll give an LLM a prompt and it will knock it out of the park, but that’s exceedingly rare. Most of the time, though, it just allows me to focus on the more interesting parts of my job. In short, for now at least, it is a big productivity booster, not a career ender.

Couldn’t agree more. This is actually a super useful feature. I can’t think of how many times I’ve been reading a book and some minor character resurfaces and I’m like, who the hell is that guy? Now I can know. I can also get information on historical context. Who knows, maybe I can finally read Ulysses without having to have 5 other books.

You could just give more time on tests such that it isn’t worth gaming the time limit. Aren’t we supposed to be teaching subject matter? Why do we care how quickly people can do it? If you’re worried about dumbing things down too much, make the actual content harder. Given how much grade inflation there is, I don’t understand why anyone would be gaming anything anymore anyway. And let’s be honest. Unless you’re trying to get a PhD, your grades don’t matter.

I don’t understand who commissions and who reads pieces like this. Here is a person with no expertise in housing policy, no expertise in homelessness, and no expertise in tech. The only thing he’s bringing to the table is an opinion, which, as the saying goes, are like assholes. Blame inequality and tech and libertarians all you want, but it won’t do a damn thing to solve the homelessness crisis, which is fundamentally a housing supply issue. But I suppose that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of uninformed moralizing that apparently brings such delight to the hearts of lithub readers.

So happy I haven’t updated yet. I always wait a few months for things like this to get fixed.

I feel like this is burying the lede. England needs to adapt to long dry summers? If the water situation can be dealt with, this would make it a more pleasant place to live.

This is not true. Look at median household income in FRED. It is unequivocally up for everyone across the board.

Inequality has increased but it’s no longer clear that it’s as severe an increase as Piketty and Saez once argued. So, yes, things could certainly be much better. The US could, for example, benefit from a more progressive taxation and a stronger social safety net. But at the same time, we aren’t all headed to hell.

I’m surprised the score isn’t higher. What’s to stop an LLM from training on the complete corpus of IQ tests. I assume they’d get perfect scores

A compromise would be to double the undergrad class size while limiting legacy to something less than or equal to what it is today in absolute terms. Many more deserving students would get and Stanford would get to keep its cash cow. But of course that would entail Palo Alto to let it expand, which it very much wants to do. And good luck with that.

I’ve known some people who didn’t want to learn the syntax of numpy and did it all in loops, and the code was not easy to read. It was harder to read. The fundamental issue is that operations on high dimensional arrays are very difficult to reason about. Numpy can probably be improved, but I don’t think loops are the answer.

I’m curious if any Trump voters are starting to feel any buyer’s remorse. The pain from the tariffs is only going to get worse. Soon we will have Trumpflation and a Trumpcession. Meanwhile, auto manufacturers are laying off employees. We are seeing pain with no gain. There is no reindustrialization nor will there ever be through this policy. For every economist except for Navarro, this is quite the own goal. I’m guessing you all were expecting Trump 1. Any doubts creeping in yet?

Somebody has to manage the business relationships and go out and sell. Somebody has to be in charge of marketing, payroll, and PR. Somebody has to be the public face of the company, out networking and attending trade shows. If you’re a technical founder and all this sounds like fun to you, then yeah, a non-technical cofounder would not offer much. But there’s something to be said for having more time to put your head down and build.

Given that o3 is trained on the contents of the Internet, and the answers to all these chess problems are almost certainly on the Internet in multiple places, in a sense it has been weakly trained on this content. The question for me becomes: is the LLM doing better on these problems because it’s improving in reasoning, or is it simply improving in information retrieval.

I had a similar experience where math went from being easy and fun to an intimidating and painful slog. My problem was just how focused most courses are on learning techniques for solving problems. I found all those endless substitutions that you learn in calculus to be infinitely dull and so it was difficult to do a good job. Ditto for the solution techniques for differential equations. Don’t get me started on matrix inverting. I think I had to do a 5x5 matrix once for a homework assignment. What a colossal waste of time.

Proof-based math classes came like a revelation to me. When I took Real Analysis, for the first time in over a decade, math was fun. You weren’t just memorizing and reapplying recipes. You were seriously thinking about unique problems and devising solutions. And all the while, you were learning where all these techniques actually came from and how everything connected together.

I don’t understand why we can’t have more proof heavy math in high school. Who cares whether you remember the arctan substitution or whatever in an integral; I’d always just use a solver for that anyway. I’d rather be learning about what an integral is in the first place.

I disagree. Before 538 people were still offering lots of election predictions and it was much much worse, because it was based entirely on hunches and vibes. Silvers rates the pollsters and provides confidence intervals far better than a simple average of polls does. I’d much rather read his forecasts than any number of bloviating opeds.