Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
I'm still finishing up a post on the obscure and convoluted history of the intellectual property behind the eagerly anticipated Coyote vs. Acme (really hoping that this one knocks it out of the park). A story that no one outside of a couple of particularly obscure fan sites has noticed. In the meantime, I thought I'd set the stage by revisiting one of my favorite cases of cartoon, or in this case…
Given the state of things in 2026 and the two "next big things" that preceded generative AI, this is by no means a trivial point. The metaverse was next to nothing. Web3 effectively was nothing. In both cases, an astounding and profoundly embarrassing level of hype was supported by nearly non-existent substance. Large language models are not like the other two. They are a powerful set of tools and…
Random Patrick Boyle quote:"If I left a million dollars on the table over a non-disparagement clause, I'd bang out a million dollars worth of disparagement that same afternoon" His Wedding Guests Were Arriving—Just as His $45 Billion Fund Was Falling Apart Berber Jin, Peter Rudegeair, Gregory Zuckerman, Anissa Gardizy July 31, 2026 12:41 pm ET When the week began, Leopold Aschenbrenner was…
First, let's get some important disclaimers out of the way. Neither Joseph nor I are any kind of experts on international energy markets, so anything we tell you is pretty much based on what we read in the papers. When it comes to military questions, Joseph is actually pretty good, but, unfortunately, he's not the one writing this post. Nothing I have to say on that subject is backed by anything…
By the standards of 2026, March is a long ways away, particularly with respect to this story. For starters, there is that ticking fee, a penalty which Paramount agreed to pay for every day after the end of September that the deal doesn't go through. One interesting aspect of that fee which probably hasn't gotten the attention it deserves is that Paramount/the Ellisons only have to pay it if the…
[Picking up from this and this ] I realize that my recommendations for Patrick Boyle videos tend to be a bit heavy-handed, but even by his standards, this one is essential for anyone trying to get a handle on the AI bubble and its increasingly likely ramifications. It is an extraordinarily pithy half hour, hitting a number of important topics. I really need to do at least one or two more posts on…
Following up on yesterday's post . If you're not interested in the AI bubble, you might want to come back next week because this thread is going to be running through Friday. Here is Ed Zitron discussing the AI industry's huge off-the-books debt. Before we jump in, however, there's one point I want to emphasize (we'll dig into this even deeper tomorrow when we discuss Patrick Boyle's analysis).…
Back a couple of years or so ago, when the evidence of an AI bubble was just starting to accumulate, the standard rebuttal to skeptics broke down into two basic categories. One was that large language models were going to have such a huge impact and make so much money that a massive ROI was all but guaranteed. The second argument, specifically addressing the comparisons to the dot-com bubble, was…
In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, sever o'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine! In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight…
More fun stuff from Matt Levine's newsletter . There are a couple of stories here, both interesting but only one important. The inconsequential one is a ingenious variant on the paradox of the heap. As Levine cleverly points out, under certain circumstances, selling insider information becomes legal, arguably even ethical, if you can just sell the same piece of information to a sufficient number…
Here, Brown does a characteristically fine job of walking us through the weeds of the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack. The TL;DR version is that OpenAI made a bunch of rookie mistakes setting up their sandbox, while Hugging Face did a comparably bad job on their end. He also explains what concepts like "zero-day," and "escape"mean in this context (spoiler: not what tech reporters think it means), and…
Following up on yesterday's post, Yesterday's Alarmism is Tomorrow's Consensus Longtime and even casual readers of this blog will know that we are big fans of Talking Points Memo and particularly of Josh Marshall (for my money, the best political commentator of the past 20 years). There have been plenty of times when I have disagreed with Marshall on minor and sometimes major points of analysis,…
A couple of years ago, skepticism about the AI boom was something of a fringe position. Today... not so much. From FT Alphaville [love that last line]: Over at Jefferies, head of equity strategy Chris Wood has for some time been offering clients a sum of all fears in one simple, easily ignorable package. His latest outlines his expectation of “massive capital destruction”, as token parsimony…
Now I can stop lying about not having seen Throne of Blood. Status, which has been doing some really good work lately, was unusually generous with their recent newsletter on the Warner/Paramount deal. They convened a panel of antitrust experts and this time didn't leave the good stuff behind the paywall. Here are some excerpts, preceded by a few framing thoughts. I'm not sure how this could be…
From FT Alphaville : Still, while we’re doodling, it’s worth pondering once more whether the economics of making frontier models and monetising them before free-to-download open-weight versions catch up will really play out. According to Epoch AI we’re talking around four months of lead time: Apologies to regular readers who have been through all this before, but there's some essential context…
Quick thinking having a tablecloth handy. I didn’t even notice the twitching from that dead robot. [image or embed] — Rav ( @rvbdrm.com ) July 21, 2026 at 8:38 PM Pete Hegseth: "We need our warriors to embrace the Spartan mindset" U.S. Military: *suffers crushing defeat to the Persians* — Gingerspiced ( @gingerspiced.bsky.social ) July 18, 2026 at 10:13 AM Both events, it must be stressed, are a…
Cal Newport walks us through the latest from Anthropic, first with an excellent tutorial on how large language models work, then with an explanation of the company's latest research (which is actually pretty good), and finally with why the report built around that research was so bad. The dean of Musk YouTube critics, The Common Sense Skeptic, gives us much-needed context on SpaceX, as well as a…
The press, for the most part, has done a really poor job conveying just how many unlikely events have to happen in sequence for the current AI boom not to be a bubble. This is especially true when you look at certain companies. If you go through the conditions necessary for OpenAI to meet its present commitments and continue to spend perhaps a trillion dollars over the next three and a half years,…
See here and here for the rest of the thread. the thing is all state AGs have to do to deep-six this merger is delay it until OpenAI can't pay Oracle, Oracle's stock dives, Larry's collateral goes poof, etc. [image or embed] — Christopher Mims ( @mims.bsky.social ) July 20, 2026 at 11:09 AM (Christopher Mims is a longtime tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal , just so you know I'm not…
Ed Zitron has a new epic post out, massive post out at Where's Your Ed at? To be honest, it's probably a bit much unless you've already fallen deep into the AI bubble rabbit hole. New comers may want to start with his Better Offline podcast where he regularly talks with some of the sharpest AI bubble skeptics Cal Newport, Paul Kedrosky, and Carl Brown. He has also has become a fixture on shows…
“.. hard to overstate how critical $ORCL is to the entire AI narrative. No big company has levered itself (figuratively and financially) more .. the stock's horrendous trading performance underscores heightened anxiety about how it can profitably build all the infrastructure ..” - Vital Knowledge [image or embed] — Carl Quintanilla ( @carlquintanilla.bsky.social ) July 16, 2026 at 7:59 AM Picking…
Remember a little over three weeks ago when we ran a post about CNN's report on the oil reserves in Cushing, Oklahoma. We used this as an example of how highly important aspects of a major news story like the war in Iran, while not ignored, are covered only sporadically, while relative trivia runs constantly. The CNN article was very good, but in the weeks that followed, other news organizations…
If you've been following AI boom skeptics like Ed Zitron, you've heard this a dozen times in more detail and in far less dry language. Over the past year or so, this message has been increasingly making its way into the discourse of mainstream economists and publications like the Financial Times , but it's still notable when a collection of the world's central bankers starts sounding just a bit…
... going through a recent study from JPL that takes a serious look at the unserious idea of terraforming Mars. At the risk of a spoiler, the conclusion is not encouraging. While everyone reading this probably already knew how this was going to come out, it's worth walking through the numbers to get some sense of the full absurdity of what Elon Musk and his fellow travelers have been spouting on…
Pick up where we left off in June. As is so often the case, this story in the New York Times is less of interest for the facts, which have been reported earlier and in greater depth by other news organizations such as NPR, Reuters, CNBC, Variety , The Hollywood Reporter , and others, than it is for what it tells us about the standard narrative. States Prepare Lawsuit to Block Paramount’s Merger…