Saturday assorted links
1. Chris Blattman’s practical AI for academics. 2. Platypus Economics on red diesel. 3. Those new service sector jobs, Indian cricket edition. 4. Will AI make us more technocratic? 5.…
1. Chris Blattman’s practical AI for academics. 2. Platypus Economics on red diesel. 3. Those new service sector jobs, Indian cricket edition. 4. Will AI make us more technocratic? 5.…
1. Rewarding failure? 2. An excellent Brian Potter explainer on how matrix algebra is used in both LLMs and robotics. 3. Chat with Mircea Cărtărescu. 4. It seems the expansion…
On 19 September, Saturday Night Live UK’s ‘weekend update’ segment turned to Ed Sheeran, who had just dropped Macklemore from his tour after the rapper said ‘Free Palestine’ on stage.…
1. One way to use screens less, will it catch on? 2. Roon as cultural critic. 3. The Greenland deal sounds pretty good for America? 4. The cultures that are…
1. Critique of Villaroel on UAPs. 2. Bergen County (Korean) fact of the day. 3. AIs cracking superforecasting. 4. Gregor Benko, RIP (NYT). 5. Joshua Saxe on the increase in…
1. Joaquin Rodrigo’s Toccata. Rodrigo by the way was blind, 2. China word of the day. 3. “People Keep Sneaking Into New York City Sewers. No One Knows Why.” (NYT)…
1. Roger Myerson now has a Substack. 2. The future of higher education? 3. Another look at data centers in space. 4. “The Global Economics Lab is a non-partisan organization…
1. New publication analyzing AI constitutions. 2. Niall Ferguson vs. Iain Banks, and against some other stufff too (TFP). 3. NYT obituary for Victor Niederhoffer. 4. “Engineered systems known as…
Saturday at Bloodstock Open Air 2026 was a full-on marathon of heavy music, with barely a moment to stop, catch your breath and take stock of what had just happened.…
1. Speculative Chinese claims about Alzheimer’s. 2. Very interesting Anthropic piece on why multi-agentic systems seem to show more herd behavior and collusion than human systems. And a comment from…