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Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

• Ratings largely determine spreads. Yet, their construction remains largely a black box. Our paper assesses the relative importance of debt, deficits and country specific effects in the determination of these ratings. The evidence is at odds with a simple model of default: more importance of debt, less importance of forecast deficits, limited role of r-g, surprisingly large role of country effects. We are agnostic. The model may be too simple in some fundamental ways. Or the rating agencies may be using incorrect weights. Or a mix of the two... We hope the paper triggers a useful discussion.
  Quoting@int_mon_econSuper interesting! "Ratings, Debt, and Deficits: An Exploration" by Olivier J Blanchard, Daniel Leigh, and Prachi Mishra. "We look at the effects of debt and primary fiscal balances on sovereign credit ratings through the lens of a simple model. We find that the ratings differ from the implications…

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Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

• yihui.org — Personal website and discussion board of Yihui Xie | 谢益辉

  CommitsDocument shell engine startup files and the engine.env option (yihui/knitr#1762) · Document webshot2 and the screenshot chunk options (yihui/knitr#2315) · document the fig.topcaption chunk option (now works for LaTeX to…

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Web standards author and speaker; wrote the CSS: The Definitive Guide series and co-founded the An Event Apart conference.

• I made this floating-scrollbar #CSS demo as the result of a discussion we had in today’s Front-End Study Hall: https://codepen.io/editor/meyerweb/pen/01a0b0bd-0100-750d-8c24-745f6318896d I don’t know if it’s actually a good idea to do something like this (probably not), and it has a few styling limitations (no drop shadows or glows), but it was interesting to try to hit a design brief with clipping paths and the relatively new `shape()` value.

  CSSRelated

Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.

• lot of the responses to me the last few days (as usual when i get surfaced in some parts of X) is that i'm anti-white. i'm really not, but if you think i am, you are either retarded or nazi-grade racist. which is fine. but then we know it's beyond discussion what needs to happen
  Quoting@SarahTheHaiderI spent the better part of a decade pushing back against anti-white racism, and suffered immensely for it, both professionally and personally. People tried to get me fired for standing up for the Covington Catholic kids! It was the right thing to do, and I would do it again. But I did expect that v…

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Author of Shape Up; formerly head of strategy at Basecamp, where he worked on product design for seventeen years; now runs Felt Presence.

• Watched a bit of @poteto + team on the Grok Bot stream today. Surprised by how normal the work is, but faster. So many micro judgements and steps that weren't automated. You could pause at many moments and be like "wait why that?" and it would lead to an interesting discussion.

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Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?

• When a discussion becomes tribalized, the collective mind drops by 50 IQ points
  Quoting@micsolanamain thing preventing us from having a productive AI safety conversation is identity. too many AI people want to be seen as intelligent by AI safety giants. too many skeptics want to be seen as critical of EA. you have to actually think. that is the only way we'll get there.

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Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Two missing pieces in the AI safety discussion

  We need to make skeptics properly scared. And we need to make CHINA properly scared.

  AI alignmentChinaRelated

Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.

• A Modest Proposal

  The announcement yesterday by OpenAI of a solution to the Millennium Prize Navier-Stokes problem has been causing a great deal of discussion among mathematicians. There’s a lot to be said about this story and its implic…

  OpenAIRelated

Mac developer and writer at brettterpstra.com; makes the apps Marked and nvALT and writes extensively about Markdown and automation.

• Lately on the blog: Just for fun: GoLlyGee, Game of Life visualization

  brettterpstra.com

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Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

• Separate and interesting discussion. True, the ECB (BDF) is slowly reducing its holdings of sovereign bonds, including French bonds (this is called QT, quantitative tightening). By selling those bonds, it decreases their price (not very much, but a bit) and thus increases the interest rate paid by the governments of the euro zone. This indeed makes things a bit harder for the government, who now pay more on their debt. Is the ECB doing this to spite governments, or to induce them to adjust? Emphatically not. It is doing this because it wants to reduce reserves (which is what happens when it s…
  Quoting@StefPalomba@ojblanchard1 1/ la BdF fait partie de l’Etat donc 2/ l’histoire ne tient pas sauf à imaginer que Pierre soit le gouv, 3/ si Paul, dont ce n’est pas le rôle, veut contrer la politique de Pierre, il remet les titres sur le marché, le taux d’intérêt grimpe, 4/ congeler a donc du sens pour Pierre

  interest ratesgovernmentRelated

Prime Minister of Canada since March 2025; formerly governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

• Les travailleurs à Thunder Bay ont fabriqué les Hawker Hurricane. Aujourd’hui, ils fabriquent la prochaine génération des voitures de VIA Rail. Une discussion sur le prochain chapitre de l’histoire du Canada autour d'un café au Persian Man avec @bryanadams.

  English, from FrenchThe workers in Thunder Bay built the Hawker Hurricanes. Today, they are building the next generation of VIA Rail cars. A discussion about the next chapter of Canada's history over coffee at the Persian Man with @bryanadams.

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Statistician at Columbia; writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and wrote Bayesian Data Analysis.

• Does anyone have a lower Jordan3 number than Evans Boney? (And what about the Ariely-Armstrong-Enron number?)

  From last year’s post, What’s your Jordan3 number?: In the discussion of our post, Who has the lowest Erdos-Bacon-Epstein number? (the winner appears to be the mathematician Daniel Kleitman, my freshman-year academic ad…

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Statistician at Columbia; writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and wrote Bayesian Data Analysis.

• Update on U.S. government’s Soviet-style push for “gold standard science”

  We had a discussion last year: I got this email the other day from a journalist at a major news organization: I’m a science reporter from **, wondering if you’d have some time to talk/reflect on the Trump administration…

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Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.

• This is the fastest way to keep your relationships from falling apart during a difficult discussion. Stop trying to fix the problem and focus on matching their mood instead. Researchers call this the Matching Principle. Here’s how it works: 🧵

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Canadian cartoonist and writer: Dinosaur Comics, Marvel's The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and the choose-your-own-path books To Be or Not To Be and Romeo and/or Juliet.

• my kind thighs deserve - and crave - thigh fives

  archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about ← previousSeptember 3rd, 2026next September 3rd, 2026: This comic was inspired by the kind eyes discussion in Swan Boy! You should be reading Swan Boy!…

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Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.

• I use this Vinod Khosla tweet with apologies to Vinod, since tweets are often out-of-context or emotive, to launch a discussion on the trade-off between scaling up and building business models (profitability) that every business faces.

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Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

• This is a perfect example of how the right visualization can describe something better than 1,000 words.

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AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).

• A couple of days ago, I did a quick explainer on Claude’s new watermarking process and implementation. Since it’s such a popular topic and sparked such a lively discussion, I thought it might be interesting to go into a bit more detail when explaining how it works. So, instead of the usual text article, I recorded a little lecture on the topic (to change it up a bit from my usual articles). It ended up a bit longer than intended, but I hope it clarifies a lot of things: - Sampling the next token in an LLM and pseudorandom number generators - How watermarking relates to the regular LLM samplin…

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Sociologist at Duke University writing on markets, exchange and moral order, and on plain-text and data-visualisation tools for social science.

• Releasesocviz v2.0.0 — Support files for a data visualization course and book

  Release notesNew version of package to accompany the second edition of Data Visualization: a practical introduction Added ACS and election datasets. Removed some defunct datasets and functions. Fixed issues with documentation.

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Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.

• With a new round of brouhaha over ADHD in the UK, seems like a good time to repost this discussion: What if obesity were invisible in the same way as ADHD is? ADHD is a construct that seems to encompass motivational and task initiation difficulties, executive function difficulties, and impulse control difficulties. And stimulants are attractive to people for a lot of reasons.

  psychiatrymargins.com

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Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

• BlueskyVery insightful podcast discussion featuring Tristan Harris on how the unregulated race to develop AI risks harming us all, and on the need for greater international collaboration, safety standards, and public engagement around AI.

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• x.comVery insightful podcast discussion featuring @TristanHarris on how the unregulated race to develop AI risks harming us all, and on the need for greater international collaboration, safety standards, and public engagement around AI.

  youtube.com

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China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.

• Real talk about the exchange rate

  (This post reproduces a thread I wrote on Twitter/X on July 29.) A lot of the discussion about the depreciation of/undervaluation of China’s real effective exchange rate takes for granted that this is about the currency…

  ChinaRelated

Writes Where's Your Ed At and hosts Better Offline; runs a tech PR firm, and argues at length that the AI business does not add up.

• Premium: AI Is Getting Way Too Expensive

  A great deal of the discussion of the so-called benefits or problems with AI comes down to the theoretical jobs that are (or are not) lost as a result of things LLMs can (or cannot do), or the equally theoretical produc…

  LLMsRelated

China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.

• A lot of the discussion about the depreciation of/undervaluation of China's real effective exchange rate takes for granted that this is about the currency. After all, it's called the "exchange rate"! But it's actually not. Mostly, it's about prices. A rant 1/

  ChinaRelated

Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.

• AI in Linux

  The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “put his foot down” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development. I can identify two major ways in which AI is…

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Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.

• Will be a great discussion of Nathaniel’s new data-center thriller novel tonight!
  Quoting@NathanielRichTonight, on the UES, just blocks from my favorite Manhattan mini-storage facility—excited to be in conversation with @chaykak:

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Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

• gglite — (Experimental!!) An R package for data visualization via g2 (based on the Grammar of Graphics)

  Commitsbump xfun version

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Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.

• agent-recovery-viz — An interactive visualization of Cloudflare Agents' chat recovery system.

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Coffee consultant and author of books on espresso, roasting and brewing, including The Professional Barista's Handbook and The Coffee Roaster's Companion; writes about brewing gear and roast control at scottrao.com.

• Crema is rubbish, 2026 edition

      In 2009, James Hoffmann famously stated “crema is rubbish.” His comments generated heaps of discussion for many years, but somehow, they didn’t have much lasting impact on how people serve or enjoy espress…

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Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.

• The Regulatory Frontier

  Part 3 of our four-part discussion with three frontier founders: Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Blake Scholl (Boom Supersonic), and Max Hodak (Science Corp). Also see Part 1: Waste Tokens, Save Time, Part 2: Vibe Coding Hard…

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Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

• links to css colour palettes jvns.ca/blog/2026/05... (from a discussion over on mastodon)

  CSSRelated

Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.

• Addressing the harassment

  Kiwi Farms is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life haras…

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Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.

• my two cents on the introspection discourse

  henrikkarlsson.xyz

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Web infrastructure engineer and standards editor; chaired the IETF HTTP working group and co-authored core HTTP and Atom specifications.

• More belated introspection from the adtech industry.

  adexchanger.com

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Maths educator; writes Mathworlds on how mathematics is taught and why so much of the technology sold to schools does not help.

• How We Built Discussion Moments

  And how we decided NOT to build it.

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Maths educator; writes Mathworlds on how mathematics is taught and why so much of the technology sold to schools does not help.

• “Discussion Moments” Is Our AI Battery for the Social Classroom

  This is one of the best things I have ever worked on.

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Indian software engineer and co-founder of Skcript; builds web apps and writes at varunraj.in.

• docker-compose-visualizer — A powerful, interactive web application for visualizing and analyzing Docker Compose files. Transform your docker-compose.yml into an intuitive graph visualization with co…

  Commitschore: remove unused files and clean up vite configuration · style: enhance header layout and add author credit in App component · refactor: remove file download button from App and implement in ExportMenu

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Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

• A new paper with Bogdan Georgiev, Javier Gomez-Serrano, and Adam Zsolt Wagner: "Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale" arxiv.org/abs/2511.02864. Further discussion is at

  terrytao.wordpress.com

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Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

• I have just launched a "Lean companion" to my textbook "Analysis I": github.com/teorth/estim... . This gives a Lean translation (or paraphrasing) of the various definitions, theorems, and exercises in the textbook into Lean. Further discussion at

  terrytao.wordpress.com

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Co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face; writes about open models and where he thinks the field is wrong.

• I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a "compressed 21st century" Here: thomwolf.io/blog/scienti... It's an extension of this interview discussion from the AI summit:

  youtu.be

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Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.

• Debanking (and Debunking?)

  Crypto advocates kicked off a recent, somewhat politicized, discussion of debanking. Strap in for scintillating banking compliance trivia.

  cryptoRelated

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

• Four charts to understand causes of death across the lifespan: A dataviz walkthrough

  The key question I ask myself while making data visualization: What question am I trying to answer?

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Engineering leader and writer on web operations and resilience engineering; formerly SVP of Technical Operations at Etsy and co-author of Web Operations.

• "...the process is inherently a social one, people learn how the organization responds to events, what tensions exist (between individuals, teams, management, etc.), which topics are acceptable for discussion and which ones are forbidden, how power dynamics play out..." 👇
  Quoting@AdaptiveCLabs"It is not uncommon for high-consequence events to be handled mostly in-camera and for the open, formal incident review to take on the flavor of 'incident theater'." https://t.co/PUWHitzBIJ #learningfromincidents #incidentanalysis

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Family therapist and founder of Relational Life Therapy. Author of I Don't Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through to You? and Us; argues that Western individualism is what makes couples' work hard.

• [Video] Patriarchy Now: Watch the webinar replay

  Thank you to everyone who has stepped forward to engage in this dynamic topic with me through your emails, questions, and listening in for the live call. We had an excellent discussion today, and I’d like to share the r…

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Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• job-search-viz — A tool for visualization of complex job searches.

  Commitsforce viz of new version · update viz for readibility

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Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

• Decentralised content moderation

  Who is doing interesting work on decentralised content moderation? With Donald Trump suspended from Twitter and Facebook, and Parler kicked off AWS, there is renewed discussion about what sort of speech is acceptable on…

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Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

• hualos — Keras Total Visualization project

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Danish Mac developer; author of the TextMate text editor and founder of MacroMates.

• visual-fortune-algorithm — Visualization of plane-sweep algorithm for Voronoi diagrams (java applet)

  CommitsAdd ignore pattern for class files. · Update links in HTML. · Rename README to comply with (new?) github logic.

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