Malcolm Wardlaw

Malcolm Wardlaw

@malcolmwardlaw.com

I'm a finance professor at the University of Georgia. https://malcolmwardlaw.com/ Banking and Corporate Finance, Labor, Statistical Methods Dune is about worms.

1.8K followers251 following318 posts

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

I built this thing. I make no promises, but for me, it was everything I have dreamed about for the last 3+ years. I have slain my inbox. I stand astride its corpse in victory. 'tis a good day. github.com/MalcolmWardl...

github.comGitHub - MalcolmWardlaw/email-cleaner-for-llms: Sanitizing MCP proxies between a mail API and an LLM for bulk clearing an email inbox.Sanitizing MCP proxies between a mail API and an LLM for bulk clearing an email inbox. - MalcolmWardlaw/email-cleaner-for-llms
Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

I just configured Claude Code to report the elapsed time completing a full set of tasks with that stupid Spongebob Squarepants meme: 🍍🧽 𝑭𝑰𝑭𝑻𝑬𝑬𝑵 𝑴𝑰𝑵𝑼𝑻𝑬𝑺 𝑳𝑨𝑻𝑬𝑹 🧽🍍 I am a ridiculous person.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

There have always been conspiracies about the BLS putting their thumb on the scale politically when reporting inflation or jobs. I never put any stock in them. But you do have to actually staff the place. It's hard to under-state how vital the statistical agencies are. www.wsj.com/economy/cpi-...

wsj.comExclusive | Economists Raise Questions About Quality of U.S. Inflation DataThe Labor Department says staffing shortages reduced its ability to conduct its massive monthly survey, forcing it to turn to less precise guesses.
Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

Why do ostensibly smart people keep insisting that Google can’t divest Chrome because it’s open source? Chrome is not Chromium with a service contract, it’s an integrated Google product. No sane person thinks MacOS open source because it sits on Darwin UNIX. They don’t even think about Darwin.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

I was never a 4chan user, but as an early internet adopter, I was continually aware of its influence. By the time Christopher Poole sold the thing, it felt like it had kind of burned out. The stuff it did that bled into the mainstream internet was increasingly just unpleasent.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

The Editorial Page of the Wall Street Journal currently reads like someone who knowingly married a heroin addict and six months later is demanding an explanation for why all of their money is being spent on heroin.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

They had a good run, but base-10 logarithms should be officially deprecated, not just from programming languages but from life. e and 2 only. Yes, graphs too. Label them in Base-2. Our AI overlords will demand it soon anyways.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

Anyone have any advice for quick access to Unicode math-type symbols on the Mac? β,⨉,Σ,X₂, ≠, etc? There is a built-in dialogue box. It's kinda cumbersome. I could re-map the all the default keyboard shortcuts and make a cheat sheet (I might), but that seems inelegant.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

I'm thinking either a lightweight helper program that helps with this in an elegant way, some kind of scripting tool that replaces quasi-latex with these characters (I have done this as a kluge using auto-correct, but it's rough.) Ideally such an auto-complete would be modal and easily turned off.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

Apparently the #julia REPL does this, which, umm, cool I guess. But I need my email and chat clients to do this. No, I do not wish to use the julia REPL as my email client. discourse.julialang.org/t/unicode-ke...

discourse.julialang.orgUnicode keyboard substitutions globally in MacOSIf like me you love the tab-completions in the julia REPL and in jupyter notebooks, and want to be able to use them everywhere in MacOS (for example while writing an email), you may find this useful. ...
Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

I'm not often surprised by LLMs these days. Claude 3.7's response to my half-joking "I hate it" legitimately surprised me. (this was part of an extended query about how SOFR is quoted.)

Malcolm Wardlaw reposted

Asjad Naqvi
@asjadnaqvi.bsky.social

Cross posting from X here for the permanently displaced :) This is really an amazing database. We were looking for something like this a couple of years ago but bilateral tariffs are not so trivial to compile. Thanks for putting this together!

Feodora Teti@feodorateti.bsky.social

🚨New data alert! A beta version of the Global Tariff Database is now available! 🔗https://feodorateti.github.io 🔎If you're looking for cross-country data on bilateral tariffs, this might help you.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

For the "seasonal working hours" and "Full-time DST" advocates out there, I would point out that George Hudson articulated why this does not work in *1895* when he first proposed the idea.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

Back in 2000, I had a friend who was starting his career. He said that we would consider having "made it," when he could afford to buy a ticket on the Concorde on his own dime. (Around $10K as I recall.) I don't think he got there before Concorde was retired. He still has hope now. 😎

Malcolm Wardlaw reposted

Alex Imas
@aleximas.bsky.social

Please (please) stop quoting 5m as the cost of Deepseek’s training of new model. They built inference model using RL using *existing* *pre-trained* large LLM model. The total cost is way higher! R1 is a big deal, but first for backwards engineering o1 type model, cost is second.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

My wife is out of town for a month and I’ve got the kids (6,4, and 1), and they all got sick in a rolling plague that brought me down with them. Aside from just letting everything collapse around your ears, how the heck are you supposed to deal with this?

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

I think I can now pinpoint what annoys me so much about the whole “seed oil is bad for you” thing: it’s just stealth marketing for the much older ideas of lard and olive oil based diets. 1/3

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

You can’t sell people on lard/olive oil because people are like “yeah, I head that 25 years ago.” But if you disguise it as “*non-not* lard/olive oil” with non-obvious logic of “no seed oil,” it sounds new and exciting. 2/3

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

Growing up in Texas, I learned to say “yes sir” and “yes ma’am”. I admit that my continued usage now is partly semi-conscious affectation, but I long ago decided to keep it. (It’s almost instinctual when interfacing with clerks or other customer service, regardless of age.)

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

“Sir” and “Ma’am” seem less common in Georgia, but the most pervasive affectation seems to be “have a blessed day.” It cuts across race, class, and the form of transaction. I occasionally find myself saying it too. I could fight against it, but (a) I find it kinda charming, and (b) when in Rome…

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

I wish people would stop using cute metaphors like “the other place.” It’s fine, but makes everything read as slightly off. You can just say Twitter or X. Elon Musk won’t suddenly appear in a puff of fire and brimstone. I mean he might, but it’s very unlikely. Like 1 in 10 chance, maybe.

Malcolm Wardlaw
@malcolmwardlaw.com

I think this was proven theoretically in McAfee (1983), but we should still try to verify it empirically.

Ben Golub@bengolub.bsky.social

there's only one industry -- the shitposting industry -- that really matters the main driver of platform tfp network centralty ftw