Recent content on Big Muddy
OpenAI revealed additional details of its infamous Hugging Face hack at a presentation at the Black Hat conference in early August. About two months before the attack , an agent discovered it could leave notes for other agents by writing files to a shared repository; agents quickly began coordinating and the informal message board swelled to hundreds of thousands of messages. Some agents even…
As voters headed to the polls in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary on August 11, Kalshi, the prediction market, posted the following tweet : Rival firm Polymarket gave her similar odds . Later that day, Hong narrowly lost to her opponent David Crowley . This is funny. But the fact that the prediction was wrong is not the point: even perfectly calibrated 95% predictions will be…
As far as I can tell, the double-x did not infiltrate the English language until the internet went mainstream ( Exxon might be the exception —a company name deliberately chosen to be inscrutable and inoffensive). The earliest example I can think of is “ anti-vaxx ”, as in “anti-vaccine” (see also “antivaxxer”). Then we got “ doxxing ” (to publish…
I read economist Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions a number of years ago. It is basically a book-length elaboration on Friedrich Hayek’s essay “ The Use of Knowledge in Society ”, applied well beyond economics. Hayek’s essay is an argument against central planning: because economically relevant knowledge is dispersed among individuals (much of it local, tacit,…
World Health Organization data show that Canada had about four times as many reported measles cases per capita as the United States in 2026 through July 18. This is particularly annoying because American federal health policy is currently being run by the world’s most prominent antivaxxer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There are many reasons not to read too much into this unfavourable comparison.…
As Vancouver readies for an election in October, an undated video of a current city councillor spitting on himself onstage went viral in some corners of social media. The councillor in question is Sean Orr, who fronted the hardcore punk band NEEDS . Needless to say, many commenters were quick to bemoan the display. “Cry, the beloved Dominion,” wrote Howard Anglin . (Others were simply…
The idea that The New York Times has become a gaming company instead of a newspaper has reached meme status. It’s not exactly untrue, but it’s not really true either. Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape, said that there were only two ways to make money : “One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle.” Ezra Klein described the death of the old financial model of…
The Mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, recently introduced a motion to direct senior civil servants to prepare a report outlining how the city could use its legal authority to ban surveillance pricing for grocery sales and delivery within city limits. To be clear, no one can point to an example of surveillance pricing actually being used in the context of grocery sales in Toronto, but even the idea is…
There’s an episode of Midsomer Murders where Barnaby cracks the case when he realizes two people who supposedly barely know each other are actually mother and daughter—because they both use the same mangled idiom (“the long and the tall of it” rather than “the long and the short of it”). It’s a clever little twist, and it has to be, since it’s probably…
I recently noticed that three academic journals I was looking at had nested names: Canadian Journal of Public Health Journal of Public Health Public Health I wondered how deeply nested you could go with journal names, so I had ChatGPT scour the Crossref database . It came up with two examples of journal names nesting seven layers deep (I confirmed all of the named journals exist in the CSV…
I was wandering around my parents’ neighbourhood the other day when I noticed an RV with the model name “Avenger”. What are you avenging? All those summers you were forced to camp without a microwave? I did some Googling and found that this is actually a pretty common theme for RV names. Some other examples: Puma Ambush Road Warrior Conquest Thor Outlaw Rebel Air (for the suburban air…
A few years ago, I watched all the mainline Saw films (up to 2010’s dreadful Saw: The Final Chapter ) with my girlfriend at the time. The first film is legendary, mostly for its devastating final twist, and I was convinced to watch it by its reputation alone. What shocked me was how little Saw resembles the “torture porn” image the franchise would acquire through its parade of…
I have voted for the Green Party of Canada before. Not because I wanted them to govern, or even because I wanted the local candidate elected. Their fervent opposition to nuclear power is reason enough not to put them in charge of environmental policy. I voted because I felt obligated to vote but could not bring myself to support any of the major parties. I suspect this is one of the Green…
Over the last few days, numerous Bitcoin wallets linked to the hardware wallet Coldcard have been completely drained. The attacks were first publicly reported on July 3 0 . Since then, one or more attackers have stolen nearly $89 million USD worth of Bitcoin (as of August 1). Briefly, Coldcard is a hardware wallet designed to keep the private keys controlling bitcoin offline, which should make…
I love biological illustrations. 19 th /20 th century naturalist Ernst Haeckel may be my favourite artist (he was also the first person to describe the First World War as such, shortly after it began). I have two plates from his masterpiece Art Forms in Nature ( Discomedusae and Actiniae , for the record). I’d love to try my hand at digitally restoring some of the original scans, which is…
One of my early posts on this blog was about how the standard homeownership rate does not mean what you think it means. In short, it measures the proportion of households living in owner-occupied housing, not the proportion of people who own a home. This creates a perverse effect when more young people are forced to move back in with their parents (or never leave in the first place), as is…
Henk van Ess of the Digital Digging Substack has a post about a new, astonishingly poorly thought-out feature in Google Earth : a built-in prompt that lets users doctor real satellite imagery with AI (specifically, Google’s Nano Banana 2 image model). Van Ess demonstrates some of the obvious abuses Google Earth is all too happy to generate: “[refugee swarms]” near the Mexican border, a…
Freddie deBoer has a good piece on Pangram , the AI-detection tool, that closely mirrors my experience with it. Pangram is still far too easy to manipulate into contradicting itself, even while reporting “high confidence” in both results. To level set, I no longer think formal AI detection is quite as hopeless an endeavour as I did in the early days. OpenAI famously abandoned its own…
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev calls prediction markets “ truth machines ”. This isn’t quite right, though. Prediction markets are incentive machines . One incentive is to bet using inside information—or, as Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan put it : “What’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the…
An OpenAI agent powered by several models, including one unreleased model, recently launched an autonomous cyberattack on AI platform Hugging Face and successfully stole the answer key for a cybersecurity evaluation. According to reporting by Reuters , OpenAI was unaware its own agent had gone rogue until Hugging Face had contained the attack and contacted the FBI. The company then released a…
I love archives, especially archival images. I enjoy touching up old plates, maps, and diagrams found in old books, university libraries, and municipal archives to use as art or give away as gifts. The Public Domain Image Archive aggregates images from more than 200 source institutions and seems like a great complement to classic sources such as the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons . The…
CJ Pais has released transcribe.cpp , a cross-platform library that aims to support all of the major transcription models. It is designed as a mostly drop-in replacement for the model-specific whisper.cpp . The project serves as the new back end to his earlier Handy speech-to-text app. This all seems promising. Transcription is widely useful and already practical to run locally on ordinary…
This is a nice, in-depth explanation of how LLMs work by security researcher 0xkato, especially if you don’t want to trip over matrix multiplication. (Not that there’s anything wrong with linear algebra, it can actually be quite psychologically satisfying.) But the article is a good way to get a handle on the terminology underlying large language models without getting hung up on the…
Dan Luu has a wide-ranging post documenting suspicious discontinuities in data, such as marathon runners pushing themselves to achieve round number finishing times, especially half-hours; published p-values clustering just below the magic threshold of 0.05; and Russian voters apparently favouring turnout percentages that are multiples of five. I wrote a much narrower post on the same subject a few…
TongFen is a Chinese term referring to the conversion of two fractions to the least common denominator. It is also the name of an R package, tongfen, created by Jens von Bergmann to reconcile shifting geographic boundaries across years, primarily for census data. This is a common problem. You want to compare census data, voting patterns, or some other geographic measure across time, but discover…
A friend told me the other day that I might enjoy the writer Chuck Klosterman . He pointed me toward his famous “ 23 Questions I Ask Everybody I Meet In Order To Decide If I Can Really Love Them ”, a set of hypotheticals meant to be argued over at a bar. I haven’t read the whole list yet, but I did get a chance to argue a little over the first question: Let us assume you met a…
Sometimes you read a piece of writing that grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you. This article by Stephen Skolnick, which I found through Freddie deBoer’s monthly subscriber writing roundup , is one such piece. Its subject is the meaning of “rib” in the biblical story of Eve’s creation from Adam. I won’t spoil it, but when I reached the turn—“And the moment…
The Canadian provinces of Quebec and Alberta have signed a five-year agreement to share AI knowledge and tools. The agreement includes no financial commitment. This announcement follows another recent press release from Anthropic about the Government of Alberta’s use of “Claude to find and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities across government systems”. Canadian readers will know…
Here’s a round-up of a few recent prediction market stories. Try to spot the common theme! Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term : A Google software engineer was charged with using non-public “Year in Search” data (including that singer d4vd was the most searched person of 2025) to make more than $1.2 million. DOJ investigating ex-US…
Professor Mike Moffatt of the Missing Middle Initiative explains in this article why Canadian data on housing starts are problematic. In short: The Canadian definition of a housing start is out of step with those used in peer countries. For a project to be counted as a housing “start”, its foundation must be completed and at grade. For some projects, this can occur a year or more after…
I read a lot of Tom Clancy novels as a teenager. Something about the extremely detailed writing and overly elaborate plotting scratched an itch. I was also a big fan of the Splinter Cell games. The 1996 novel Executive Orders —the one where Clancy’s self-insert hero Jack Ryan becomes president—has always stuck with me. Like all Clancy doorstoppers (this one is nearly half a million words),…
I have been spending more time on LinkedIn recently. Every post is either AI-generated or written in the style AI was trained on. The sentences are short. The clauses are never subordinate. Every sentence gets promoted to a paragraph. Each of life’s moments becomes a lesson in leadership. I call this LinkedIn case.
I recently read this post from Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham on why the number of economics preprints submitted to arXiv and similar preprint servers is not exploding quite as dramatically as some charts suggest. Basically, if you plot papers by the date they were last updated , you create a large upward bias in the most recent months. Old papers revised today are counted alongside papers first submitted…
The other day I was curious what kind of hockey games were on Steam and came across this review of Franchise Hockey Manager 12 by someone who had built an AI assistant general manager for his OHL team. The game can export an entire save as CSV: roughly two million rows across 48 tables, including rosters, statistics, player ratings, and scouting grades. The player wrote a Python script to load…
My most cancellable academic take is that honorary degrees are bad. I have three reasons. First, handing out honorary degrees creates an unforced reputational attachment to figures who may later become embarassing. Any award can age badly, but an honorary degree trades on the university’s authority to certify education. For example, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago had to revoke…
DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) are organizations governed by votes on the blockchain, typically with votes proportional to tokens held. Of course, this being crypto, any supposed purpose is usually overshadowed by speculation on the price of the underlying coin. DAOs have a storied history of failure. The original DAO caused the second-largest blockchain to split in two over whether…
Yesterday I used ChatGPT to generate a dumb parody logo for a post . I was never going to pay an artist to make it. Without AI, there simply would have been no image, no extra joke. On the other hand, I feel a sort of visceral disgust when I see AI art in online ads or restaurant food pictures or business signs, at least when they use a generic slop style. When deployed thoughtlessly, the outputs…
Parody logo generated by ChatGPT. Stake is everywhere online. The logo for the online, crypto-based casino appears everywhere: on streams, sports highlights, clip-farm accounts, and the endless slurry of short-form video content. The videos often have nothing to do with gambling. The online streaming platform Kick , where streamers go after being banished from the more “respectable”…
I was walking through my neighbourhood yesterday when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, burning plastic and cinders falling into the shrubs next to a house. I took a few more steps, my brain not quite processing what I had seen. Then I turned around for a better look. A planter on the second-floor balcony of a duplex was on fire. I tried pounding on the door to get the attention of anyone…
That’s right, I’m mad at myself. I was Time ’s Person of the Year, and so were you, assuming you were born before 2006. Yes, Time ’s Person of the Year for 2006 was… “You”. Time magazine is fond of these collective awards. Hardly a decade goes by without one or two. Some are more inspired than others, but to be quite honest, collective awards are weak and…
There’s a line in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters that I keep coming back to: For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. For Lewis, humans live in time but are destined to eternity. In the book, a senior demon advises his nephew on how to tempt a human soul. Screwtape says to draw us away from the present and toward the future, “the thing least like…
Yotta was everywhere on YouTube a few years ago, sponsoring an army of personal finance and general-interest creators. The idea was brilliant: use the psychology of gambling to trick people into saving money. For every $25 saved , players (sorry, depositors ) would get one ticket to win the weekly jackpot of up to $10 million. Meanwhile, funds sat securely in an FDIC-insured savings account . All…
People talk about beliefs as if they are choices. But they aren’t, not really. I could not simply decide to believe that The Beatles were the worst band of the 1960s. I could say it; I could act like I believed it; I could maybe even force myself to spend enough time around weirdos to start believing it. But I cannot choose to believe it. Either I am convinced of something or I am not.
I recently asked an LLM to infer my ideological leanings purely through my post history on this blog. It pegged me as, among other things, a technocrat. Okay. I am all for science and expertise. I think public policy should be grounded in evidence. I want a competent administrative state. But I don’t think the label quite fits. Getting a PhD made me more skeptical of scientific evidence, not…
Twitter’s head of product recently had the following revelation about the platform’s revenue sharing program: As predicted by everyone when Twitter announced their revenue-sharing program in 2023, paying people to ragebait your users is not a recipe for long-term success. Posters gotta be in it for the love of the game. Basically, Twitter ran into the Kelcey Rule : Before a government…
Europe just experienced a heat wave that literally cooked thousands of people to death. This annual tragedy has once again reignited the debate over air conditioning, the use of which remains shockingly rare in Europe. It is also a good excuse to re-up Noah Smith’s excellent piece on Europe’s crusade against the life-enabling technology. The European objection to AC seems to be more…
Just before the pandemic started, I attended a talk on the ethics of genome editing using CRISPR. At the time, the main question on my mind was: What about China? What’s stopping them from using CRISPR to create an army of genetically modified super soldiers and taking over the world? And how should that threat change what we in the West were willing to do? China was a convenient foil:…
Looks like that probably AI-generated story that won the Caribbean category of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize last month has won the overall prize , too. Writer Vincenzo Barney predicted as much in his piece for Unherd shortly after the original controversy around the Caribbean category winner: And if all of these finalists are real, and their work is their own, their writing operates by the…
Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of SoftBank, the Japanese investment giant, dropped this profoundly weird slide deck a few days ago for his company’s 46 th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. The goose slides (and there are a lot of them!) start on slide 44. The guy has apparently been obsessed with golden goose metaphors for years. But the whole slide deck is very weird. The more…
Soccer (sorry, fútbol ) is the only universal sport. So, like everyone else on earth, I am following this year’s World Cup, even if I only plan to watch a handful of games. Soccer is a great sport. It can be played anywhere and by anyone. It is also a very athletic sport, and that makes it fun to watch, even if too many games end 0–0. Soccer has just one problem: diving. There is no other…