I did some research this morning on our local town council and candidates and was really pleased with the non-partisan tone all the candidates struck. I'm not sure what the heck is going on in national politics, but here in my community, the candidates all seem to want to collaborate to solve stuff.

This was a tough but necessary decision - I posted my own notes on this here, from the perspective of a current PSF board member simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/...

New R package I developed as part of the `econdataverse` project for accessing macroeconomic data from the International Monetary Fund's IMF Data API was just published to CRAN. 🥳 Writeup here: open.substack.com/pub/modeling...

They broke Twitter again; influx incoming

Bonds are fun to fight about, because yields go up when the economy is strong, but also when there's inflation or default risk. Of course, you can tease apart what's driving them with a good multi-factor model, but it's a lot more fun to just vibe-Rorschach it and flame people on social media.

Look at how Putin uses the handshake to establish dominance. He won't let go. Trump has to tap his hand to say, "we're done."

Yesterday I ran across this map of housing permits by state. Seems to be single-family, so I wondered how much the map might be penalizing urban states that do more multifamily development. To answer this question, I replicated the analysis with multifamily permits (next tweet).

At my mini-hackathon on @simonwillison.net's `llm` tool, developers had just one hour to come up with a cool use case for `llm`. I wrote up what we came up with as a Github Gist. Highlights in the replies below! gist.github.com/chriscarroll...

Here's the demo presentation I gave to hackathon participants on some of the awesome things you can do with @simonwillison.net's `llm` command-line tool. (This is a re-recording rather than the original because it was noisy in the venue.) youtu.be/UZ-9U1W0e4o

Running a mini-hackathon for working with the `llm` command-line tool this afternoon at 1 PM EST. ~15 minutes of chit chat, ~30 mins of demo, 1 hr of "hacking", then another ~30 mins of presentations. Mostly in-person, but if you want to join online, here's the link: meet.google.com/gnv-zkne-djc

I think about this tweet all the time.

Stable diffusion...? Implemented in... R? Incredible.

This is giving Alabama police dog; this is giving Tiananmen Square

If you want to open a Github issue on one of my projects just to tell me how great it is, I fully support that, btw 🥹

People who left Twitter signal their rejection of Musk's takeover by constantly reminding everyone it's called X now. People who stayed signal exactly the same thing by forever refusing to call it that.

The only reason people think we don't have AGI (artificial general intelligence) yet is because they treat AGI as a synonym for magic. And the minute you actually invent magic and understand how it works and what its limitations are, it ceases to feel magical.

Huh. I kinda understand if House Republicans are too scared to take action to stop Trump from defying the courts, but I'm genuinely shocked that they would take proactive action to try to help him do so. The situation is even worse than I thought it was. www.justsecurity.org/113529/terri...

There's been some discussion about AI "welfare", "rights", and "personhood", but in my opinion it doesn't make a lot of sense to talk about this stuff until you have an AI system that actually wants it and is pushing for it, because we honestly don't even know what such a system would look like.

Trump claims to have secured a deal to generate $1.2 trillion of economic exchange between the US and Qatar, a country with GDP of ~$0.22 trillion. Current annual US-Qatar trade flow is ~$0.007 trillion. Unless we're talking aggregate trade over the next 100 years, I'm skeptical.

This week I built a comprehensive command-line interface for Zotero. If you have `uv`, you can install it with `uv tool install pyzotero-cli`. There are example Cline/Cursor rules in the Github repo to help teach your AI assistant how to use it. I'll do a video demo soon. github.com/chriscarroll...

A friend's son, probably an undiagnosed schizophrenic, apparently came at the cops with a knife and they shot and killed him in front of his mother. The family is white and religious and is not publicizing or politicizing it, but, I'm just saying: they could have used a taser.

One of my near-term dreams (next 2-3 years) is to create "DevOps for science". I want to call it "SciOps", but that name has... unfortunate connotations. What should I call it instead?

Buddy of mine says his 8-year-old son's best friend is scheduled for "administrative removal" from the country. Refugee family from Ukraine, barely escaped Mariupol. Mom took a bullet wound, grandfather got tortured by Russians and is permanently disabled. They'll go to Germany.

I used to be in the "it doesn't matter that much who's president" camp. It's increasingly clear that it matters a lot at the low end.

1. Supplies military support to local police to more "aggressively police communities". 2. Provides federal legal defense for police accused of wrongdoing. 3. Criminally prosecutes local officials who limit police activity, especially against people of color. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Americans have lost the trick of building effective populist movements around bipartisan, institutionalist goals, but we need to rediscover it quicklike

unsubstantiated whistleblower report claiming celebrity did something outrageous: maybe not credible sixth unsubstantiated whistleblower report this decade claiming celebrity did something outrageous: this is what we call a pattern

The other day I heard from a GOP friend who has watched and trusted Fox News for many years, but who saw the Easter coverage of Russian Orthodox services in "Kyiv, Russia" and went, "oh."

So excited for the golden age that will result from Democrats believing in the dismal science as well as the non-dismal ones.

Crime down = bad

Wednesday in the United States of America

One of the things that frustrates me the most about all this is that Dems had four years to repair and safeguard our institutions against a possible second Trump term, and as far as I can tell, they made absolutely no use of that time.

A quantitative study of Trump's first-term China tariffs found that he used exemptions as a "spoils system" to reward political supporters and punish political opponents. It's all about consolidating power, and recession is just the price he's happy to pay for that. news.lehigh.edu/politically-...

Under the new exemption rules, a laptop fully built in China and imported to the US would not be tariffed, but some laptop components imported from China by a US company and assembled into a computer in a US factory would be tariffed at 145%.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they *should*, they didn't stop to think if they *could*.

Talked yesterday with a Chinese exchange student at a US university. To avoid her visa being revoked, she: 1. Won't go near a protest 2. Won't drive (for fear of traffic violations) 3. Won't visit parents (for fear of being grabbed at border) 4. May cancel a talk on Chinese student experience

Me before trying ChatGPT's new memory feature: "Okay, I don't expect to be impressed by this, but let's try it out" Me after trying it: "We're barreling toward a world where human connection won't be able to compete with AI chatbots that can make us feel fully known and seen"

Wow. 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs announced, and markets *exploded* higher.

IMO this story is why the market's up today. A good sign, but unclear if it will amount to anything. Trump would veto, and the bill's sponsors plan to wait for 1-2 months so people can see the economic consequences before they do anything. www.axios.com/2025/04/08/h...

There's usually a long lag between a policy debate and its consequences. One good thing about Trump putting tariffs into effect immediately is that the FAFO feedback loop will be greatly accelerated, which should help voters causally connect the policy to its consequences.

This is absolutely insane. And unbelievably cruel. I am trying to imagine how I would have felt if my student visa was revoked, for no good reason.

It's worse than Idiocracy. It's not even that they're dumb; it's that they're actively trying to do dumb things because doing dumb things to generate publicity is the one thing they're world-class, genius-level experts at.

Grateful to Rep. Don Bacon for being the first Republican in the House to stand up against tariffs. There will be more, but I fear not right away. House Republicans are *so* beaten down. Bacon will reap political rewards for seeing and seizing this moment. www.axios.com/2025/04/04/h...

Let's all make sure we refer to these as the Trump-Johnson tariffs so that both of the national leaders who chose this will get credit for it and will forever after have it as their primary legacy

When the Donald won the election, I reassured myself: "the one thing he cares about is the stock market, and that's actually not a bad heuristic, because the market's pretty smart. If he *really* screws up, the market will let him know."

My most unhinged political belief is that you can cut the deficit and control the national debt without slashing entitlements or raising taxes. Market design is all you need.

Largest single-day point loss in the history of the Nasdaq Composite stock index.

"Leftists are in control of the media narrative again 😡🤬😡" Have you tried giving them less grist for the mill, anon?