Rich and poor countries differ in the size distribution of business firms. This paper shows that the right tail of the firm size distribution systematically grows thicker with economic development, both within countries over time and across countries. The author develops a simple

The second time Vellam uncovers the conspiracy underlying all of society, he approaches a Keeper. Some of the difference is convenience. Since Vellam reported that he’d found out about the first conspiracy, he’s lived in the secret AI research laboratory at the Basement of the Wo

Baking has traditionally made extensive use of egg whites, especially the way they can be beaten into a foam and then set with heat. While I eat eggs, I have a lot of people in my life who avoid them for ethical reasons, and this often limits what I can bake for them. I was very

And you say to yourself, what? Scalzi, you are not ten years old today! You are just barely a month away from being 57! The only juvenile you are is juvenile elderly! Stop being a faker, you faker! To which I respond: Yes, I am fifty-six and eleven(ish) months old… on Earth. But

1. Nyege Nyege Tapes. 2. Does it help poets to be religious? 3. Martin Jay on Habermas. 4. U.S. prime age employment rate is near an all-time high. For a different perspective, here is NYT on AI and the job market. And new measures of AI task performance from MIT. 5. China’s AI e

Over at Veriphysics, we’re utilizing the Triveritas to tackle the hard problem of consciousness: The Hard Problem of Consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) asks why and how objective physical processes give rise to subjective experience. We show that the problem contains a structural equ

[BUG] org-element does not parse dynamic blocks correctly [9.6.15 (release_9.6.15 @ /usr/local/share/emacs/30.0.50/lisp/org/)]

Recently some friends and I were comparing growing the pie interventions to an increasing our friends' share of the pie intervention, and at first we mostly missed some general considerations against the latter type. 1. Decision-theoretic considerations The world is full of peopl

Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: It's inoperable thanks to the yellow sun of Earth! Today's News:

tl;dr Paper of the month: A benchmark of 56 model organisms with hidden behaviors finds that auditing-tool rankings depend heavily on how the organism was trained — and the investigator agent, not the tools, is the bottleneck. Research highlights: Linear “emotion vectors” in Clau

Epistemic status: romantic speculation. The core claim: I accidentally thought that compute growth can be rather neatly analogized to natural resource abundance. Before compute curse, there was resource curse Countries that discover oil often end up worse off than countries that

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. ― H. L. Mencken I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think. ― Jac

Sometimes the absence of evidence is the inevitable result of the authorities being very determined to avoid looking at it. Jeffrey Epstein had only been arrested four months earlier in Manhattan on sex trafficking charges when New Mexico local talk show host Eddy Aragon received

More Fatal Conceits Robin Hanson Apr 04, 2026 7 Share In The Fatal Conceit (1988), F.A. Hayek argued that cultural evolution has bequeathed to us a capitalist “extended order” of money, property rights, and competitive markets, all with matching morals, and that socialism is bad

Scott Lemieux juxtaposes the hard-hitting journalism being done by the Harvard Crimson on the Jeffrey Epstein case (although so far they seem to be focused on former university president Larry Summers and not Epstein’s other Ivy League buddies) with a … Continue reading →

Whatever happened to the sacred principle of the free movement of peoples supposedly enshrined in the the European Union’s so-called “rights of Man”? And how can it be said that a “German” man who has lived somewhere else for three months is not every bit as American, or Australi

A book that unexpectedly explodes upon opening it would be good grounds for a product liability claim; a book whose content inspires someone to act recklessly should not. – Elizabeth N. Brown Choke Point (#1388) The government is now demanding banks not do what it has repeatedly

This is the first post in a planned series about mean field theory by Dmitry and Lauren (this post was generated by Dmitry with lots of input from Lauren, and was split into two parts, the second of which is written jointly). These posts are a combination of an explainer and some

From Isiah Andrews, via Emily Oster and the excellent Samir Varma. A good piece, though I think it needs to more explicitly consider the most likely case, namely that the models are better at all intellectual tasks, including “taste,” or whatever else might be knockin’ around in

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun -- Mao Zedong Halfway thru recorded history, Athens became the first state we're sure was a democracy, and inspiration to many later ones. Probably some existed earlier, and certainly some entities smaller than states were democrat

I am a software engineer. I work for a company that makes software for road construction. Monday last week we were under a bad crunch and we were told to start using agentic workflows. We had like 50 tickets to close by the following Tuesday. I’ve been experimenting with ai devel

Written quickly as part of the Inkhaven Residency . At a high level, research feedback I give to more junior research collaborators tends to fall into one of three categories: Doing quick sanity checks Saying precisely what you want to say Asking why one more time In each case, I

I’ve asked a few people that question lately, and get either no answer or very exaggerated answers. Rep. Burchett recently raised the possibility of being terrified and not sleeping at night if UAPs are aliens. But even if that is your immediate response, you need a more construc

In my previous post I found evidence consistent with the scratchpad paper's compute/store alternation hypothesis — even steps showing higher intermediate answer detection and odd steps showing higher entropy along with results matching “Can we interpret latent reasoning using cur

I've spent a fair amount of time trying to convince people that this AI thing could be quite large and quite dangerous. I think I normally have at least some success, but there is a range of responses, such as: Deer in the headlights - People don't know what to do with themselves

(with apologies to Sasha Shulgin) Gabapentinoids are weird. For a start, they don’t do what they say on the tin. It was named after the thing the inventors thought it would do, i.e. bind to and modulate GABA receptors, the ones which cause sedation and anxiolysis. But they have n

I've played a lot of dance weekends over the years [1] and if I could change one thing it would be no more challenging sessions. I see it happen every time: it's a great crowd of people, with a wide range of experience levels, and Saturday afternoon is going well. Then it's time

[GitHub] platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.) GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now

This year's Spring ACX Meetup everywhere in Shenzhen. Location: We'll meet up right outside the Shenzhen Bay Kapok Hotel. There is a large open space with a huge set of stairs ~20 meters to the right of the Hotel (assuming that you're facing the hotel entrance). The Hotel itself

The White House seeks to slash the NSF budget by nearly 55%, to $4 billion. The proposal also cuts all funding for the NSF division that funds research on the social sciences and economics. At an internal all-hands meeting on Friday, NSF leaders announced that they would dissolve

A few years ago I listened to a fascinating podcast interview featuring former Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson. They agreed that politics is a mess and politicians are constantly doing bad things that harm the people they are supposed to ser

The records that were hits at the same time as the British Invasion. Tune in Saturday April 4th to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West. If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz

TL;DR: The efficient market hypothesis is a lie, there are no adults, you don't have to be as cool as the Very Cool People to contribute something, your comparative advantage tends to feel like just doing the obvious thing, and low hanging fruit is everywhere if you pay attention

1 To tell you the truth, I finished this book almost a week ago, and I forgot most of what I wanted to say about it. Primarily the business insights. Not that I don’t remember the facts. Not that I haven’t internalized the messages. In any event, this book is not for casual fans,

Vulnerability Research Is Cooked Thomas Ptacek's take on the sudden and enormous impact the latest frontier models are having on the field of vulnerability research. Within the next few months, coding agents will drastically alter both the practice and the economics of exploit de

A fun thing about recording a podcast with a professional like Lenny Rachitsky is that his team know how to slice the resulting video up into TikTok-sized short form vertical videos. Here's one he shared on Twitter today which ended up attracting over 1.1m views! That was 48 seco

My blog is back! It doesn’t have an official name beyond davidgumpert.com; the title for this post is “The March of Life,” which may or may not stick for a name. Anyway, an update: I’ve been off doing “genealogy” research the last year-and-a-half. Genealogy is the study of family

I’m back from ATmosphereConf in Vancouver, and I’m processing what I saw and heard. The atproto developer community could not have been nicer and more welcoming. Here are some takeaways. The Atmosphere is bigger than social media I’ve been to a lot of developer conferences over t

The Fighting Temeraire . 1839, by Joseph Mallord William Turner. (Source: Wikimedia ) Editor’s note: Post 2/30 for Inkhaven Why did the philosophers fail to anticipate the industrial revolution? I often find myself wondering. On the one hand, you could argue that they weren’t in

Anthropic dropped a paper this morning showing that Claude Sonnet 4.5 has steerable emotion representations. Actual directions in activation space that, when injected, shift the model's behavior in predictable ways. They found a non-monotonic anger flip: push the steering vector

Why cryonics, and the two main methods, with practical discussion and philosophical musings on both. Epistemic status: Cryonics is a scientific field that is long established, yet long underfunded, and uncertain. I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a few years and remain

Morning and night, I pronounce "Hey Exo" [1] , and my phone beeps once. I begin describing events and what's going on in my mind – where my attention is, my present feelings, how I slept, what I did that day, and who sleighted me – you know, that kind of stuff ;) Eventually, I be

There's a lot even our best neuroscientists don't know about the human brain. How can we have any reasonable hope for preservation given those unknowns? What if there are crucial memory mechanisms that are so poorly understood, we don't even know to check whether our methods pres

On the kernel security list we've seen a huge bump of reports. We were between 2 and 3 per week maybe two years ago, then reached probably 10 a week over the last year with the only difference being only AI slop, and now since the beginning of the year we're around 5-10 per day d

The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. Many of them really good. I'm spending hours per day on this now. It's intense. — Daniel Stenberg , lead develop

Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality. It was kind of funny. It didn't really worry us. Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports. All open source project

A familiarity with the pre-rigor/post-rigor ontology might be helpful for reading this post. University math is often sold to students as imbuing in them the spirit of rigor and respect for iron-clad truth. The value in a real analysis course comes not from the specific results t

(Crossposted from my Substack ) There is a preference that I think most people have, but which is extremely underdescribed. It is underdescribed because it is not very legible. But I believe that once I point it out, you will be able to easily recognize it. In a sense, I am doing

This week we’re going to look a specific piece of early Roman military equipment, the humble bronze pectoral, which it turns out is surprisingly tricky for us to confidently reconstruct, in part because the period of its use that most interests us (the run from c. 264 to c. 146 w

Don't exaggerate how bad something is – but don't feel compelled to make it all right either. Seeing the silver lining – reinterpreting unwelcome news as not exclusively bad – is a core tenet of positive pop psychology. I practised it for years to the point that it became automat