The LLM-Generating Machine Underneath the Dining-Room Side-Table Hallucinates Again: MONDAY MAMLMS
The most revealing move was anthropic/claude-opus4:8's own recommended fix: get the LLM out of the loop entirely...
Economics
Grasping Reality.
Brad DeLong on economic history, political economy, and the long arc of growth and policy.
Recent essays
30 of 68Things Have Gone too Far!: LAUGH OF THE DAY
Is it time to start writing for Bari Weiss's Free Press Substack and start denouncing the woke oatmilk hegemony here at UC Berkeley?...
CROSSPOST: ALAN WOLFF: Trump's New Tariffs Over Forced Labor Are Unlikely to Survive a Court Challenge
The subheadline: "The Trump administration is again shifting its stated rationale for placing comprehensive tariffs...". 60-country tariffs in search of a human-rights pretextual costume...
Tesla Motors: CHART OF THE DAY
A $50 Billion Company Wearing a $1.2 Trillion Magical Rainbow Unicorn Costume...
The Short Summer of Cross-Nation Convergence in Real GDP Per Capita Levels: CHART OF THE DAY
From 1995 to 2020, relative convergence was very real—and something completely unprecedented in the economic history of the world since the start of the industrial revolution...
The Strait of Hormuz Has Now Been Effectively Closed for 4 1/2 Months: CHART OF THE DAY
Via Torsten Slok of Apollo, drawing on Bloomberg and MacroBond. If we can trust these numbers, then the situation is truly dire. If we can trust these numbers, and if a lot of oil has not snuck out...
Retrodiction & Prediction: History Wednesday
My six reasons why it is very important to study history...
Christopher Nolan's Remix of the Story of Odysseus: Humanities Tuesday
As Bret Devereaux says: a remix, not a cover: As Theo Nash says, fusing the Athenian idea of the Sack of Troy as unholy excess with the historical reality of the Late Bronze Dark Age...
Convergence in LLM Quality & Slowdown in LLM Improvement: CHART OF THE DAY
From two Epoch-Capability points a month back in 2023 to one every six months today, with the spread of assessed model capabilities across frontier labs shrinking by half...
CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: Why I Didn't Sign the "We Must Act Now" Statement (Yet)
Noah' subheadline: "I'd like to know exactly what the actions are"...
Automation & Labor & Inclusive AI: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES
From 2018: "The Future of Work: Technology & Policy for a Diverse Human Future". I have always been proud of this, as saying the important things in a very compressed but effective form...
CROSSPOST: PAOLO PERRONE: AI Coding Tools: What Changed in the Last 6 Months
Paolo's own subheadline: "A 10-minute update on what shipped, what broke, and what it costs now". From Autocomplete to loose cannons in this truly New Age of "AI" agentic coding tools...
Can We Call This Anything But Piracy?: TUESDAY CHAOS-MONKEY TRUMPISM
Isn't this piracy? What could make it not piracy, other than a congressional declaration of a war to conquer & annex the Strait of Hormuz to the USA? And isn't piracy not only a bad thing...
(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: KELSEY PIPER: Yes, You Can Trick AI into Exonerating Someone
Kelsey's subheadline: "Francesca Gino, Lawrence Lessig, and the threat of a false AI consensus". Larry Lessig uses "AI" to launch a devastating and successful cognitive attack on your own brain...
CROSSPOST: CLAUDIA SAHM: What Will It Take for the Fed to Hike?
Claudia Sahm's subheadline: "The June FOMC minutes laid out two scenarios, and the committee is split right down the middle on the outlook for inflation". But it is now split in a different way...
CROSSPOST: ART GOLDHAMMER: The Unbearable Vacuity of the Moment
Economy in the 2000s & Before: working, making, apportioning, talking, taking, & more. What I know and can learn about it, & related things.
From 2003: The Wetware of the Digital Divide: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES
A very wrong prediction about how things would go down from a quarter-century ago...
(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: JOEY BROOKHART, CRYSTAL HUANG, & DYLAN PATEL: Anthropic 3Q26 Profit Over $1B: The Anthropic IPO Financials Sneak Peak
The part above the paywall, that is. Their subheading: "Anthropic’s Opportunity is Theirs to Lose..."
CROSSPOST: ARIN DUBE: "Clever Hans" at Speed: Implications for "AI" Workflows & Spread
Or is it Rikki-Tikki-Tavii?: Chained tasks, stomping hooves: how and where AI automation is likely to actually work...
Financial Markets See Core Inflation as the Problem Right Now: CHART OF THE DAY
Markets now see stubborn core inflation—not volatile energy prices—as the binding constraint on Fed rate cuts...
HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: JOHN HOLBO: Dead Right
One of the two greatest weblog posts EVAR. Now succumbed to link rot. Hence resurrected here...
CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: JD Vance's War on GDP Is Wrong & Bad
Noah's subhead: "Making Americans poorer won't make our society better..." What JD Vance is really trying to do is to make war on prosperity...
NVIDIA since 2012: CHARTS OF THE DAY
When the AI-gold rush has enough GPU shovels, but still needs cyber-picks...
Median Personal Income Growth in the US: CHART OF THE DAY
Getting ahead, feeling behind: life in the shadow of the 0.01%...
CROSSPOST: David Pierce & Nilay Patel: SpaceX Is Building a Phone!
Why not? It's a telecom company with a marketing department that launches (& catches) rockets...
Note to Self: Spend More Time Reading Marcus Nunes's SubStack
He is good!
On-Device Local-Model "LLM Coherence": TABLE OF THE DAY
Sunday MAMLMs: when the lobster moves In: gemma4 is teaching me about “ai coherence”...
Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—The SubStack
Trying to make all you readers out there in SubStackLand—and myself—smarter, while keeping all of us entertained as well...
1854 Commentary on the Meaning of the Fourth of July
& the Declaration of Independence itself...
Programmer "Productivity": CHART OF THE DAY
Smarter machines—but do they make us dumber drivers and worse coders?...