handy little data hoarder tool i built and deployed for myself but others might find useful lalten.org/linkpull/ 1) academic or govt site with a bunch of hyperlinks 2) write a regex to grab all links matching a pattern in said url, copy and paste into file 3) download with wget or curl

an attempt to formalize the "squiggly pre-trends that match well are more credible than smooth pre-trends" intuition. apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/... ideation -> simulation -> algorithm sketch -> writeup heavily aided by LLMs

typical theorist career

What is it about building flash-attn (vanilla uv pip install, v 2.8.3) wheels that oscillates wildly between consuming ~no RAM and consuming 25-26 gb? Don't know enough about the cuda compiler to debug. This is single threaded (MAX_JOBS=1), anything more OOMs my machine.

Crossposting because the QT is there but the audience for this is here

First wintery week calls for GPU warmth Large scale OCR (and hopefully downstream embedding, search, and model) project running on a brand new GPU - should be adaptable to many other tasks github.com/apoorvalal/n...

Baiting bsky with nanobanana artist cover portraits of The Agent in commemoration of 2 months of life and a full week of sleeping through the night

Is this enshittification?

upgraded my eGPU setup over the weekend [RIP ADT rube goldberg machine] and decided to document it for posterity (with some promo for my torch econometrics package included) apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...

My twitter feed is doing a 4th round of memeing a shitty inconsequential interview and my bsky feed is 4 people competing to be the goodest boy by circular firing squad. Back to whatsapp and discord then.

The agent's first vibecoding experience

behold, an authoritative answer to the question of "how'd you like em apples?" [also love how old papers have the most stilted hot-takes in their intro. no citation salute to the elders to get the paper accepted, just passive-voice passive-aggressiveness]

Updated a classic to reflect our times

if you use a tiling wm, you can event tuck the radio away into your scratch workspace [L; omarchy makes it very easy] compact htmx makes it work well on mobile [R] with background playback [getting it to not die on suspend was the most javascript i've had to learn].

Go play Crab Souls. It is so very good.

split keyboard recs? but like really really split; the wiggly phone cable thing won't do for obvious reasons.

(4,4) - turns out "Sleep like a baby" is black humour.

Built and hosted a scrappy fasthtml radio player on a VPS for my own edification+excuse to listen to good radio (Soma, kexp, etc). Curious how many concurrent users can use it before it crashes the tiny raspberry-pi tier machine i deployed this on. lalten.org/radio

apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/... New linklog: local projections are balancing, torch choice models, inhomogeneous poisson processes for event data

Happy "Econ history nobel followed by econ historians tweeting through their persecution complex" day to those who celebrate

watch palo alto shutter all three caltrain stations in response to SB79; atherton is already thanking its lucky stars it shut its only public transit. [more seriously, is a potential second-order effect that this passes the buck to transit extension being monstrously difficult?] 😶‍🌫️

For those who, like me, didn't get what "Gwern-pilled" meant in this post.

Put stuff on arxiv, it'll have more impact than 90% of papers because the robots read more comprehensively than most of us. Gwern-pilled conclusion - write for the robots. (A friend got jumpscared by this and sent it to me)

Tfw there's a fart on the way and one seeks plausible deniability

academics write normally challenge: impossible

apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/... new linklog - ecological inference, adversarial estimation, bargaining games with The Agent

Bay area people, come see Yin Yin with me! They're fantastic; think Khruangbin but actually good.

We have got exciting (and unconventional) stuff cooking and we are hiring for a strong research engineer on the GDM Game Theory team in London. Consider apply if you are interested in the intersection of game theory, multiagent systems and LLMs! job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/job...

Nothing prepared me for how often newborns look like this

Acquired one of these newfangled learning agents. No API documentation though; time to figure it out by trial and error over decades.

simple little uv-runnable python script to generate interactive diffs for arxiv papers based on the underlying latex source. github.com/apoorvalal/a...

Looking forward to the beer potluck tonight.

the long shadow of the world cup 2006 final youtu.be/N0OBF83rL-8

(Z’X)^{-1}Z’Y

link 📈🤖 Challenges in Statistics: A Dozen Challenges in Causality and Causal Inference (Cinelli, Feller, Imbens et al) Causality and causal inference have emerged as core research areas at the interface of modern statistics and domains including biomedical sciences, social sciences, computer scie

Magic lasso to get you estimates and standard errors for "significant segments" of heterogeneity in your garbage-can DML regression where even the base effect isn't identified:

new linklog - economic model of online platform enshittification, assumption-lean inference with sample splitting, consumer search models apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...

News you can use (assume all the authors did hands on work)

casual causal inference: 1) metacritic colors badges differently w cutoffs at 50 and 75 2) given how prominently steam features metacritic, one might think this would manifest in higher purchase counts at 75 v 74. Turns out not really. 3) Rating distributions are weird. Check out 80.

How your email finds me

set it up just the way i like it github.com/apoorvalal/a... this is now my favourite computer [this is coming from an already high benchmark of tiling ubuntu via regolith, but the additional bikeshedding that folks have done for omarchy is nuts - free riding is the best].

Why has nobody been nerdsniped into building a bike stash cache on caltrain? The price of anarchy here is probably huge.

arch btw (but actually usable; bless dhh)

Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio

anyone have online radio channel recommendations? I've been making a more concerted effort to listen to the radio lately [thanks in part to this little terminal radio player i built for myself github.com/apoorvalal/t... ] and am on the lookout for stations that stream to a m3u/pls url.

economic models are surprisingly fun devices for expressing strident opinions with no empirical basis. attempt to bait theorists into working on platform design in tech with a caveman model of my own. apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...