Antoine Vernet

... that research quality, in as much as it exists to the demand side, depends also on the status of its producer. Among social and behavioral disciplines, economics has best mastered this aspect of labor productivity, seems to me.

For more than a decade, it has felt to defenders of free society that we are peddling fruitlessly against the powerful current of authoritarianism. That current grew firmer, more dominant, as it swept in new nations from the shores of democracy and carried the world further toward illiberal abyss.

My Ork-id is better than your orcid #40k?

rstickr.dev - goes live on Sunday morning wherever you are. How many #RStats function and package names can you find?

OpenAI constructed an entire shadow internet for model training so they could remove all internet access they asked agents to try to communicate with each other, and they could: via the CPU cache 🤯 openai.com/index/securi...

What I love about this job is the variety: In the morning I counsel students worried about keeping up with AI In the afternoon I meet collaborators so we can plan how to keep up with AI And then to relax, in the evening, I catch up on articles about human peer reviewers failing to keep up with AI

A propos of nothing: peerless review

Some violence to start your weekend!

How do you tell if authors fabricated their research results? Sometimes: they just tell you. Read, e.g., this caption carefully. Another banger of a post by my friend Nihar B. Shah on his blog, where he found at least 20+ such #ICLR2027 submissions: researchonresearch.blog/2026/10/20/s...

I've done a bunch of work on haven recently, so if you rely on it you might want to try out the dev version: github.com/tidyverse/ha.... One of the headline features of the upcoming work is that write_sas() finally properly works! #rstats

She is right though, it's the rest of the government and the PM that should be ashamed of their line on migration

They used Opus 4.8, so possibly Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 (and Fable and Astra) all outperform 4.8.

Gary King just dropped a study showing that AI peer reviews now dominate human peer reviews on every metric they tested. gking.harvard.edu/peerless/

Player: this room looks like it has traps DM: it does now

I mean, doing math with computers was a mistake 🫠

J.R.R. Token

Have we tried turning the US off then back on again?

I'm a big fan of envelope budgeting but my preferred app's servers are down (PHP). In 90 minutes, while answering email, I vibe coded a full replacement that works on my phone and computer and syncs via Google Sheets: github.com/vaiseys/envelopes

University of Nottingham, right now, is cutting 560 jobs. Do we need to rebrand universities as very large, very clean, land-based oil rigs to get government support?

After two years of tinkering, I conclude: The dream of the local AI model is a mirage. Instead we should pursue collective solutions in the form of datacenters that can serve powerful open-source models in a privacy-friendly way

Hey, it’s the official release day for Seeing Like a Supply Chain! And of course I’m swamped with grading and lesson-planning, but maybe I can say a little about the book and the process of researching it. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

A very normal thing to say. Nothing to worry about if you are on the lower decks.

All 101 winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics are related.

I am thrilled to share my paper in American Sociological Review on the production of inequality in high-risk pregnancy! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Me doing some random stuff, having a great idea and furiously scribbling it down. Me rereading it: WTF? This is unbelievably stupid

Mercury 3: dLLMs have arrived, finally Same price as Luna-6, slightly better, but 8x faster text diffusion is here www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introdu...

That should be extra points for honesty

Ain't that the truth !

ask them what they did after leaving academia

me irl.

@dingdingpeng.the100.ci another thing we messed up all on our own. And, despite the cost to students, most universities are broke and the next 3-4 years will see plenty of them making lots of redundancies

This is Pele, my new rendering library for diagrams and charts, compatible with the latest Mermaid syntax. - 100-500× faster than mermaid.js - 6× smaller bundle - No dependencies - Easy to theme - Responsive to device width - Open source (MIT) Try it at pele.run

The fact that we are now in the "you can just build it" era of software probably means that we are building an immense pile of abandonware, you know, if I am in any way representative… 🫠

A bit meta

Stolen meme.. (I hate memes, and this format particularly is low quality, but yeah)

🎓 Teach Quarto inside Quarto! quarto-simulator is a #Quarto extension that puts a live Quarto editor in your lesson. Learners edit, render, run #R & #Python, and get feedback on exercises, all in the browser with no install. Try it: ryjohnson09.github.io/quarto-simul...

Median is the middle value of an ordered set. {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} and {1, 2, 3, 4, 9999999999999] have the same median value, 3.

Anthropic details several big safety improvements, like giving a METR member employee-level access it its internal systems ..something commonly done immediately before launching an extremely capable model www.anthropic.com/news/an-upda...