Life update: I’m beyond excited to start my PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley this Fall! I am grateful to have had many wonderful people who contributed to my journey until here. Here’s a thread of thanks:

This is a truly amazing opportunity to work with and learn from one of the most brilliant economists of our time. If you’re interested in theory and captivated by the discussion in the job listing, there’s likely no better predoc position for you :)

Holy s*&t. This paper is insane. You can recover input text from an LLM through inversion. Huge implications for how we understand these models, as well as for things like privacy.

The unreal exoskeleton frame of the Morpheus Hotel in Macau Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (2018)

https://t.co/OjN5aSWVce

Então quer dizer que o Bessias do áudio do Tchau, querida vai ser ministro do Supremo? A democracia é uma delícia, mas tem seus custos…

Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.

I was walking to the office in New York this morning and noticed an arrestingly beautiful high-rise above me. Turns out it was the Woolworth building, which I'm a bit embarrassed to say I'd never noticed or heard of before. It was the tallest building in the world for 16 years

a verdadeira desgraça é o país formar um engenheiro aeroespacial e ele terminar trabalhando no têceú

One of the best antitrust papers now in the QJE: Nearly half of US federal judges attended a crash course in economics at the Manne Institute. This training had lasting effects: judges used more econ language, sided against regulators more often, and imposed harsher sentences.

Perhaps of interest to folks with social science PhD programs: at Rotman, we added an experimental 3 session "tech stack" training in addition to the math camp. My lecture was "how to do reproducible, open, quick research", aka version control, LaTeX, AI. 1/2

Interesting paper. Instead of constantly anthropomorphizing these models by using language like "alien intelligence" and "hallucinate", this would be a lot less mysterious if we treated them as the statistical systems that they are.

The optical illusion of the corkscrew stairs at the San Siro Stadium in Milan, Italy

US traffic engineering doesn’t just design the most deadly roads in the industrialized world, they deliberately eschew trees because they design the road for the most dangerous drivers who may careen off the road and hit them. So our roads are both dangerous and bleak as hell.

Great writeup here on an amazing fact: *median* rent in NYC is $1650. 3/4 pay $2400 or less! How? Because *majority* of NYC rental units are not rented at market (mostly rent controlled, not public housing). The fraction paying market rent subsidize everyone else.

Sim, secretário, o Brasil é um país extremamente fechado—em praticamente qualquer comparação. (Gráfico abaixo do livro “Política comercial no Brasil”, de Ornelas, Pessoa e Ferraz)

This is what’s wrong with our permitting system: A single NIMBY retiree can spend all her time suing to block wind & transmission projects from being built. Activists used these same rules to block nuclear projects in the 1970s. Now they’re being used against all clean energy.

And not one of them was built in the last decade Affordable housing is *older* and *smaller* product. You have to build NOW so apartments can be affordable later ... or else subsidize.

Se São Paulo despoluisse os rios Pinheiros e Tietê e acabasse com as marginais, poderia virar uma cidade muito mais habitável.

🔥🚗🚗 Here we go, short-run effects of congestion pricing in NY. I feel like Twitter already figured this one out, but looking forward to seeing what Vasserman et al have to show us