I wakened at 2am so like every rational individual grabbed my telephone fairly than attempt to combat again to sleep and as an alternative attempt to empty round 70 or so open hyperlinks off my telephone, a number of of which had been about our blizzard in Boston yesterday. Thanks once more everybody in your help! In the event you get pleasure from this substack, think about turning into a paying subscriber! It’s solely $5/month which is the bottom value level substack permits.
In the event you haven’t seen Chris Cornwell’s dialogue of utilizing Claude Code and Cowork for skilled work as a social scientist, it is best to. There’s issues in right here not generally mentioned such because the relative deserves of Cowork, plus collaborating with coauthors and college students utilizing it, and plenty of different distinctive issues I’ve not seen. It’s additionally a slick design.
Boris Cherny encourages groups to shrink on the intensive margin (that means fewer individuals) to let Claude Code choose up the distinction. That’s the partial equilibrium — the overall equilibrium when all fastened prices are variable prices is an entire different readjustment.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms completed its brief however glorious first season the opposite day. I extremely suggest it. It’s a recent contribution to the GoT materials by HBO. It additionally confirms a concept. I was so obsessed in regards to the varied theories however now I don’t actually care. I did and do love his character although.
The reforming of the unique X-men as the brand new X-Issue is an emotional heart for me in my very own private story as a result of that’s after I transitioned from amassing Archie Andrews, Transformers and GI Joe comedian books to mutants based mostly comics. It’s the previous few years of residing in Brookhaven when X-Issue #1 got here out. In it, they uncover that Jean Gray continues to be alive. I used to be 11 years previous and would spend hours and hours sitting beneath a comic book ebook rack at a pharmacy down the road from my home studying stacks of comics and the emotions I felt discovering X-men to at the present time fill me with feelings I don’t assume I really feel or have felt wherever else. The story of Madeline Pryor has due to this fact alway been particular to me, but in addition random that it could. They retconned her into being a Jean Gray clone and step by step she grew to become evil in the course of the Inferno crossover story. Apparently they’re doing one thing along with her once more. I don’t learn comics anymore nor can I simply get via tremendous hero stuff anymore however I’ll all the time be protecting of these reminiscences.
Boston bought both a blizzard or a Nor’easter relying on which web site I learn. Right here’s two movies I filmed of me out yesterday in it strolling to lunch to satisfy a buddy for pizza. Completely divine. I felt like a child.
It even broke a document! we bought 32 inches of snow.
Harvard lessons had been distant yesterday and so I taught in regards to the conditional expectation perform and a tiny bit about sampling on-line. Right here’s my slides.
Extra individuals predicting the demise of relationship apps. There was additionally a factor about it on the every day.
Is AI bearish or bullish for the market? Possibly it’s so bullish it’s bearish? I already can by no means bear in mind which animal means which factor so I’m in all probability now ruined with this concept that may imply the identical factor if excessive sufficient.
AI, machine studying, banking and finance and why “mo fashions, mo issues”.
A brand new Ryan Murphy present about JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette. Solely purpose I’d wish to watch it is because it could fill in among the tabloid associated holes in my human capital from this relationship which I for some purpose adopted closely-ish as a child. I used to be most of my life very concerned about Hollywood and for causes I’ll by no means actually perceive, that curiosity tended to being the Kennedy household into my purview of curiosity. It might have been due to the film JFK by Oliver Stone, but it surely appeared like extra typically, Hollywood was all the time within the Kennedy even earlier than then. May’ve been the Marilyn Monroe connection, who I additionally was fairly concerned about studying extra about. Anyway, I bear in mind JFK Jr dying, crashing his airplane into the ocean, along with his fiance and her sister. I had beloved he, like his sister, appeared to be extra concerned about phrases than politics.
Teen hashish use and psychosis. Are they associated? Is that pattern choice bias? Is it causal? One factor is for sure — individuals who work in regulation enforcement and psychological well being inpatient services appear to deal with the hyperlink as causal and such an apparent one which to even query it, you sound like somebody denying the earth is spherical. That’s the one factor that has all the time struck me — that the hyperlink is accepted as truth and unquestionable by these professionals on the intersection of regulation enforcement and psychological well being inpatient services.
Claude Code is an electron app. Additionally Boris nonetheless replies to questions on the hacker information.
Invoice Gates informed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that betting a billion on OpenAI was not going to be worthwhile. Now they’ve a virtually 30% stake within the firm, value $135 billion, and after a reworked deal that lets OpenAI get away from completely utilizing Azure will get them 20% of their annual income into the mid-30s.
Two individuals went on a date and a journalist requested them the way it went. If AI eliminates this type of pop journalism job, I gained’t cry.
Jason Fletcher is doing a sequence of his ideas on utilizing Claude Code, and AI extra typically, for empirical analysis. Right here he says that AI didn’t make analysis sooner — it simply moved the bottleneck. The fastened price of beginning a challenge is now practically zero, so your record of promising concepts explodes, however you continue to solely have the identical variety of hours to truly end papers. Add within the new price of verifying AI output, and also you’re extra congested than earlier than, simply at a distinct stage. Jason’s repair: use RAs to not evaluation AI code however to independently replicate what the AI already discovered, so that you by no means assign a dead-end challenge once more and your verification downside solves itself.
Talking of Jason Fletcher, right here’s two new papers at NBER on NAFTA and mortality. One by Jason and his coauthor, Hamid Noghanibehambari, and one other by Amy Finkelstein and coauthors.
Wikipedia black listed a blogger who runs a preferred website that allows you to entry gated materials without cost. The blogger started inserting issues into the hyperlink to trigger a denial of service assault in opposition to somebody who had outed his id, amongst different issues.
5 {couples} who’ve been married for 20+ years share tales about survivor bias. I imply about what makes marriages final.
Stepping again from offering emotional labor in relationships can reveal among the craggy rocks and peculiar sealife hidden by the tide.
This text about AI went viral and a few say it spooked markets. See earlier publish above (linked once more right here).
Individuals appear to love the third season of Evening Agent. I couldn’t end season two regardless of loving season one. And I can’t appear to get via one episode of the brand new season. I primarily watch it for the face the primary actor taking part in the Evening Agent makes. He additionally looks as if a candy man, virtually like a giant child.
Predictions by Nick Bloom and a dozen different coauthors about agency demand for labor and AI, productiveness and different issues about AI.
A new AEJ: Macro makes use of a customized constructed text-based measure of Fed coverage stance from a educated language mannequin on staff-drafted dovish/hawkish different FOMC statements, then decompose every assertion into anticipated versus shock elements utilizing high-frequency monetary knowledge. The payoff is a framework that may run counterfactuals — exhibiting how totally different Fed communication selections would have moved markets. I could attempt to run the evaluation via OpenAI like I did with that PNAS and see whether or not zero shot is far totally different (see half 5 in that 5-part sequence I did).
Vital developments within the gender hole amongst professionals.
Attention-grabbing sounding new paper on blood donation by Evan Rosenman and coauthors. Utilizing a discontinuity in hemoglobin eligibility thresholds for blood donation, they discover that deferring donors reduces their future volunteerism — however the catch is that medical workers manipulate reported hemoglobin ranges across the threshold, which invalidates commonplace RD designs. To deal with it, they develop a partial identification strategy that produces legitimate bounds even when the working variable is manipulated, with broader applicability to different RD settings going through the identical downside.
MacArthur Basis is placing $10 million into Humanity AI, a coalition of ten main foundations (Ford, Mellon, Mozilla, Omidyar, and others) committing $500 million over 5 years to make sure AI is formed by individuals fairly than simply Silicon Valley — funding researchers, journalists, and coverage organizations engaged on AI governance throughout democracy, schooling, labor, and the humanities.
A popularly demanded use of LLMs by teachers is the lit evaluation. However LLMs can’t reliably attribute concepts to their authentic sources — they favor well-known, highly-cited authors and replicate current quotation biases — so letting them deal with attribution would disproportionately erase underrepresented students whose work is already undercited. The authors reject the “collaborative human-machine authorship” answer and as an alternative insist researchers should stay totally accountable for each declare, manually tracing concepts again to their authentic authors.
Attention-grabbing critique of AI at a substack I discovered. AI isn’t only a instrument that helps you’re employed sooner — it’s a “meta-temptation” that quietly removes the situations underneath which actual pondering occurs (one thing I’ve warned about too on right here). By outsourcing deliberation (summarizing the paper as an alternative of studying it, drafting the e-mail earlier than you’ve determined what you assume), you step by step erode the very school you’d want to acknowledge you’re doing it, so the rationalizations (“I’ll evaluation it anyway,” “the concepts are mine”) really feel affordable even because the boundary between trivial and significant duties blurs past recognition.
However level counterpoint: these authors say science needs to be machine readable and suggest one thing to make it extra simply extractable by AI.
However after you learn that, learn this, and ask your self the arduous questions in regards to the isoquants’ form round skilled work from machine versus human time going ahead.
Researchers constructed a 322-question benchmark of expert-level, “Google-proof” virology lab troubleshooting issues — and high AI fashions like OpenAI’s o3 rating 43.8%, outperforming 94% of PhD virologists on their very own specialties, whereas the human consultants common solely 22%. The alarming implication is that publicly accessible AI already features as an skilled virologist, which raises pressing biosecurity governance questions on dual-use misuse.
As Claude Code advances throughout the worldwide economic system, and automation causes a shift within the interception of mixture manufacturing, not everybody can take part resulting from proprietary knowledge, knowledge use agreements, and privateness. Till extra licenses and protections are afforded researchers and companies, possibly a bandaid answer is to get a machine off the grid with its personal primitive model of Claude on it.
Fed researchers on the Federal Reserve Board apply NLP and sentiment evaluation to 55 years of Beige Guide studies and discover that the anecdotal textual content really carries significant sign — even after controlling for lagged GDP and different commonplace metrics, Beige Guide sentiment outperforms the yield unfold in nowcasting GDP progress and forecasting recessions. Subject modeling provides additional worth by revealing the shifting narratives driving financial situations throughout totally different historic durations.
Once more this jogs my memory of the relevance of my little 5 half substack sequence I did during the last month utilizing gpt-4o-mini and one shot batches to categorise 300,000 speeches for under $11 and a pair of hours. Right here’s half 1:
Has Claude Code and different AI brokers prefer it shifted the economics of AI from GPU-intensive compute to native CPU-intensive compute, and if that’s the case, are we about to see a rise in demand for extra CPU, and extra advances there?
Some tea about the way forward for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
And with that, I’ve formally gotten my browser tabs right down to solely 3 hyperlinks, one in every of which is a Google search results of queso recipes that I can neither publish nor delete. Have an amazing day, keep heat, play within the snow!
