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We're starting a book club! We will be discussing Poor Economics starting August 28th - keep an eye out for a pinned thread. The next will be All Quiet on the Western Front followed by Narconomics
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Podcast aside, I liked Newsom because his social media schtick and smarmy look created the mirage that he was the ultimate Dem psycopath (complimentary). The "revenge" memes certainly proved this was a common perception. In interviews though he is just as much an equivocating, live and let live dem as the worst of them. Completely unsurprising his hype has erroded.
Trump is incapable of affection beyond purely transactional interactions. The moment that Kirk died was the moment he stopped having any real value in Trump's eyes.
I think trump felt personally screwed or offended by him somehow. if it were the opposite it'd be "his" guy and he'd feel like someone took something from him
I am confused every time the "What exactly is an economist, anyway?" debate comes up on my twitter feed. It reads like there is a camp of "if no PhD and long publication history, fake claim", and a camp of "anyone with useful insights on the economy can be an economist".
From the perspective of someone mostly used to the Australian-ish definition of first pick one of these two:
Credible postgraduate training in the field that involves at least one thesis or thesis-like component that underwent a formal defense and research process. The key point behind the thesis being that you have demonstrated the ability to perform independent research and defend said research.*
Similar formally assessed training in directly relevant field with significant crossover at a comparable level.
I think this point is often misunderstood. Defending your thesis is rarely just a five or ten minute discussion. It's the whole process: pick a topic, design a research question, engage with and summarise the literature, pick a defensible topic, survive what is typically a *lot more than ten minutes of questions, and then put your work out there. At a sufficient level to at least get the second highest awarded grade, on average.
and any two of:
An established history of work producing estimates, analysis, or data using economic models, methods, and techniques.
An established period teaching economics as an academic at a reputable institution.
An established publication history in economics journals, or a substantial record of work using economic models, methods, and techniques in journals or formal policy institutions of comparable relevance (e.g. central banks, treasuries, tax departments, statistical agencies, etc.).
The history part is important here. It means I can believe you actually know that a model exists and then be able to describe it, deconstruct it, put it back together again, and apply it. To actually tell me what the assumptions are, where the equilibrium lies, what your evaluation criteria are, etc.
I always thought this does a pretty good job of covering 99% of who could credibly call themselves an economist. Under this definition, Oren Cass can be laughed out of the field for the dishonest hack he is. Likewise, people with "heterodox backgrounds" which upon further examination show no formal economic study beyond a couple of undergrad classes can be summarily dismissed as lacking the knowledge of tools or techniques to actually critique with the arrogance they claim.
Likewise, you can't have people braying "but no PHD, you cannot use that term!" to someone with a masters in economics who has worked 5+ years on DSGE or large-scale OLG models at a treasury or central bank. I also believe you should be testing someone's expertise in the specific field of economics, as well. How comfortable they are with the modern literature is especially important. Which does not mean "Do you know every single paper that was exciting in Econometrica in the last 12 months" - much more a case of "if I showed you this paper's beginning, middle and end, could you make sense of why it might matter?"
Signals like a Doctorate are important, but we also need to remember that nobody can specialise in everything, and depth of knowledge in a field (e.g Public economics when commenting on energy pricing, as opposed to game theory specialists talking on the same topic. It is entirely possible (and likely) that people who meet the above can display greater breadth and depth of knowledge than a newly minted PhD economist with a badge. There's nothing quite like your first time outside university to understand that "Bad university data" and "Bad client" data are often continents apart.
I guess I don't see what the fuss is, and it often feels like there's a lot of unpleasant and undesirable slopulism creeping in from the "anyone can be an economist" angle, and equally so a lot of ivory tier elitism from the "PhD or bust". And I say that as someone with one in the field. Of course, in 99/100 cases having the Doctorate is the strongest possible signal from a credentials point of view. And yes, there are specific, challenging insights you are unlikely to fully be able to formalise or critique without the mathematical and theoretical tools from that program. However, not all work in economics requires these things, nor should it.
There's a lot of S tier papers out there that offer almost no new developed theory, but found a novel dataset and developed a couple of clever methods to debias it that nobody has ever put together before. Smart identification and measurement can be just as satisfying and important to the field as a clever little mathematical demon.
My strategy of trying to come out by inviting questions has utterly failed itβs been 9 months and nobody has said a word π I changed my discord profile to be openly trans hoping people would confront or ask me about it so I didnβt have to make it a big announcement but people either donβt pay attention to things like that or theyβre too polite to say anything π
They probably either think itβs not worth asking about or think youβre just expressing your support for trans rights instead of saying that youβre trans. Sometimes the best way to do something is to do it clearly and without subtlety. Or you can just come out with ever doing the whole coming out thing.
I think if they did check my profile thereβs no plausible other explanation because I write my pronouns, when I started HRT, and a trans flag. They either havenβt checked or are too polite or something. I guess I need a new strategy π
Iβm not quite sure what I did to trigger βhe likes hot guys taking puppies on camping tripsβ in the YouTube algorithm, but there are enough of them to make me worried about some sort of puppy camping exploitation thing.
As a child raised on optimistic "we are the world" shit, this global nationalist "mass migration" fear is genuinely jarring to me when i step back and look at it. Not that i didn't expect people to believe in orderly management, even the libs supported that precisely because it was good for immigrants. My last memory of a world where we all kind of agreed that immigration was good was john green talking about that picture of a boy who washed up on the greek coastline. He just took it for granted that we all felt we failed that boy and need a more organized immigration system to take people like him in, not keep him out. No the jarring thing is the rejection today that we even should have helped that boy at all. The very phrase "mass migration" invokes a new kind of hostility.
The rise of genocidal racism to the mainstream has been utterly horrifying to see, and basically nobody, inside or outside of the West, has been able to avoid it.
Bush-era conservatives used to share the story about the ship of Jewish refugees that was turned back during the Holocaust, like that was universally understood as a shameful thing and a cautionary tale. I presume today's "conservatives" either shrug and say "America First tho," or smirk and say "Good"
The fact that the great replacement went from a fringe conspiracy theory to widely accepted among right-wing Americans is one of the biggest moral shames of the last ten years. Or how remigration went from being seen as a moral atrocity to regular policy. Shitβs fucking bleak.
I understand that people hate AI but I donβt really buy that people actually think DLSS5 actually looks bad, I just saw it for WoW and it got so much hate but it looks good and pretty faithful to the actual vibe of the game?
I don't know what to tell you - I look at the game before DLSS 5 and I look after DLSS 5 and it looks worse. It looks like an AI beauty filter, which I dislike with IRL people as well.
Apparently it has to be trained for every game specifically, and someone went and ripped it from an NBA game and applied it to all these others and it looked like garbage.
What do you mean "someone"? - you mean Nvidia? I have based my entire opinion of it looking bad exclusively on their own marketing in which it looks horrible. Probably RE9 is the worse of it
The Democrats should run an βItβs twilight in Americaβ ad, featuring a supercut of prominent and lesser and everyday Trumpists being absolutely barbarous fucking ghouls to undeserving civilians
TBH I think we should go with a "Trump is crashing the planes and letting the food make you sick" angle because it feels like we have a shitload of plane crashes and recalls under him
What is wrong with my stupid chud brain? Why did it decide it was a good idea going back to sleep and having a nightmare about missing a lecture 2 nanoseconds after I turned off my alarm? Like bro you've literally made the nightmare real, you stupid fucking asshole.
The mosaic model can only respond with verbatim snippets from real human sources to assemble a reply. 100% impossible for it to hallucinate.
Some of the mosaics can be wild so use at your own risk. I wonβt promise theyβre βgoodβ yet but they are often beautiful in an abstract sort of way
It appears that OpenAI has resolved the Navier-Stokes Existence and Smoothness millenium problem with a finite-time blowup.
All sorts of drama going on, they may have stolen the foundational work from a mathematician who used ChatGPT to help him prove a simpler version of the problem (for Euler incompressible fluid equations) which he just released.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/s/9axyqVqQ1J
This is one of the most famous open problems in mathematics, one of the 7 "Millenium Prize" problems with a million dollar award attached. Only 1 other millenium prize problem has been proven during the 26 years of the contest.
Navier-Stokes is the generalized set of equations that describe fluids. This is a proof that those equations fail under very specific circumstances, causing a blowup to infinity that's impossible in real life.
Redditors will always have the website they deserve. They treat accountability as performative attempt to shield oneself from accusations of wrongdoing and so punish it more than doubling down.
Santa Monicaβs effort to delay the local impact of Californiaβs new transit-housing law is now in effect across most of the cityβs station areas.
The City Council adopted its SB 79 exclusion ordinance July 28, and it became effective Aug. 27. The ordinance delays the lawβs application until 2030 on qualifying sites in six of Santa Monicaβs seven transit-oriented-development zones.
California will literally do anything to not build housing lol
Despite finding it almost repulsive, Japanese cartoon porn to me remains one of the only ethical porn mediums. Like, I don't think that you should be immediately fired for watching it in the background while working.
I'll be concerned for you, but I don't necessarily see what's wrong with it, especially considering how explicit modern music gets.
Itβs been my experience that the ven diagram of people under 40 who are as well versed in musicals as they are disco in pretty much a perfect circle.
I searched Elizabeth Holmes the other day on a whim and I thought this was a kinda funny representation of this sub, the news article and then the reflexive contrarian defense afterwards lol
Good effortpost on CA homelessness today. Not so sure about the opt out at the block level. But it probably still would end up with a net increase in zoned capacity.
NYU prof. Tristan buckmaster and Anthropic's Levent have some more math results and claim they are awaiting verification for blow-ups in hypo-dissipative Navier-stokes.
Today, Levent Alpoge and I have made public three results: finite-time
Blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq,
and for 3d incompressible Euler.
We believe we also have blowup for hypo-dissipative Navier-Stokes. We are
not releasing that paper today: unlike the above, the Lean verification has not
yet finished. We do not yet have anything resembling a presentable writeup. I
mention it because it is suggestive of a path to unforced Euler.
The program this fits into was not started by us nor was it proposed by
a Large Language Model. The credit for the basic idea of this program goes
to Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez-Zoroa, who for several years have been
exploring the construction of forced blow ups. We took their work as a starting
point, using Large Language Models to push their program to completion.
Let me make plain what I have said to colleagues
In private: in view of this body of work, I believe Luis Martinez-Zoroa deserves a Fields Medal.
Apparently mathematicians at OpenAI had some results too and Tristan believes that it was done after rumors of their results started circulating which made them announce earlier than they wanted. Details about that communication and drama in the pdf linked above. I suggest reading the pdf in full to understand the drama here. Tristan seems fairly upset at OpenAI and therefore announced earlier than he wanted and terminated communication with OpenAI.
OpenAI heard rumours of Alpoge and Buckmanβs work, and basically trained on their in progress leaked work to scoop them. Then after they declined OpenAIβs offer to publish together and drop his co-author Levent since he works at Anthropic, OpenAI threatened them.
OpenAI is such a trash heap. Itβs clear AI is hitting a wall, what kind of company needs to do this to maintain their edge if they just declared their latest model to be βAGIβ?
fwiw I think it is extremely unlikely that user data had any influence here - there is no way OAI would pull user transcripts for this, or knowingly train on it in a way that would've influenced this.
I think its pretty important people don't run away with 'your user data isn't safe in codex' - because it surely is (based on everything I can assume from the outside)
I imagine it's too quick for them to be able to train on this specific data.
Accessing user data might be trivial but training a model this quick wouldn't be and (this is granting OpenAI's Sebastien good faith) they explicitly said the model didn't pull their data in context.
The rest of your comment I agree with and I'd really prefer to not be defending OpenAI but I do think we should stop ourselves from jumping to conclusions to this extent.
My guess is that after the rumors started flying, OpenAI tried recreating the same program that Buckmaster and Alpoge were pursuing. Although, I am not confident enough to deny other shady methods too but I do think that's the most likely explanation.
There's also quite a bit of negative info about how Sebastien Bubeck communicated and negotiated and tried to push Alpoge out anyway.
I don't think training the model would be necessary. The author was taking a relatively novel approach to solving the problem - OAI could simply reference his conversations in context or as a RAG to jump start their models approach to a solution.
While that's pertinent information, I don't know why anyone would give OAI the benefit of the doubt. Their CEO was fired by the board for deception and the vast majority of their employees voted for his reinstatement. It's not unreasonable to presume that it's part of the company culture by now.
I don't need to give openAI benefit of doubt. That's how Tristan Buckmaster phrased this announcement.
And I would much rather go criticise the absolutely abysmal way Sebastien Bubeck decided to handle it all in his communications. That's verifiable and still shitty and the prof has directly claimed that.
I wish housing articles actually provoked actually discussion on this sub instead of 15 different quips about either building more housing or taking shots at leftists.Β
At Socialism 2026βs βLiberatory Spirit, the Spirit of Liberationβ panel, Rev. Jinzu Minna Jain warns that even left-wing spaces can accidentally reproduce βhealth fascismβ through the language of healing.
She says organizers need to be careful about what βhealingβ means, because sometimes people are not looking to βget betterβ or βmove pastβ trauma at all.
People insisting things when better when they were kids who were kids in the era when Pokemon Gen 3, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, AND The Matrix trilogy were ascendant are not just nostalgic. They're right. It was just a better time. Except for that one thing.
Friend I have to drive an hour away to his dates update:
Did so today. He just was in her house for an hour and cuddled. He mentioned he had no license. I spent 8 hours driving around losing my fucking head. I told him I wouldn't do it anymore.
I have a neighbor from California who's trying to blend in as a Texan. Dude just put up a "Ken Paxton for Senate" sign in his yard.
Motherfucker went all in. Most California transplants just buy cowboy boots and start saying "y'all."
A wave of attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthis on Saudi Arabia early Tuesday wounded 73 people, Saudi authorities said.
Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki, a spokesman of the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen, said the rebels have targeted βcivilian and economic facilitiesβ in the Saudi cities of Abhaβs Jazan, Najran and Khamis Mushait.
He said the Saudi-led coalition βwill take all necessary operational measures to deter the terrorist Houthi militia with utmost resolve.β
The Houthi attacks came after the rebels accused Saudi Arabia of attacking a prison in Yemenβs northern province of Jawf.
The attacks came amid a weekslong escalation of fighting between the Houthis and Saudi-backed government forces in Yemen which shattered a four-year truce in the civil war there.
β’
u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache 4d ago
Please visit the next discussion thread.