Things I've been experimenting and reading recently
From footballers and Facebook to bananas and burden
One of the nice things about AI coding assistants is that a lot of the quick ‘I wonder what this would look like?’ experiments I always seem to have in my head, endlessly floating around well defined but not yet executed, are now 20 minute tasks instead of one hour ones. Here are a few recent ones I’ve done, followed by some wider Substack articles I’ve been reading that you might like reading too.
How sycophantic is AI when it comes to creative writing?
Are World Cup betting odds over- or under-confident? Or just right in terms calibration?
How stable are judgements of sentiment when using different AI models?
And some things I’ve been reading recently
Did the iPhone Cause the Baby Bust? by Jenn Dowd, PhD
Besides the iPhone, what else was happening from 2008-2011? The Great Recession, officially running from December 2007 to June 2009, was the longest and most severe period of economic contraction in the United States since World War II. Such a large economic shock impacts everyone, but the effects still vary a lot, especially by geography. The housing crisis hit urban areas particularly hard, precisely those counties “treated” with high AT&T coverage. The county-level fixed effects and other statistical controls the authors employ can’t account for the main potential problem here—that the impact of the Great Recession was different in richer, more urban counties—the same ones with high AT&T coverage.
There Is No Such Thing as a Representative Sample by Saeideh Bakhshi
This is the problem with treating “representative sample” as a generic research virtue. A sample can look representative on the variables that are easy to see and still be unrepresentative on the variables that actually move the outcome. The issue is not whether the sample resembles the customer base in general. The issue is whether it can support the specific claim the study wants to make.
The Apple-Banana paradox by Ed Conway
Essentially, the price of bananas has been more or less flat for the last quarter century. It is a remarkable thing, in a world accustomed to inflation, to see that flat line. And it’s all the more remarkable when you think about what it takes to get a banana in a store in Europe.
Reinventing the Mid-Career Academic by prof serious
Mid-career academia can become dominated by optimisation: the next grant, the next paper, the next promotion, the next metric. Yet the greatest advantage of this stage of a career is that you have already demonstrated your capability. You have earned the right to take risks, to explore, to contribute in new ways and to help others succeed.
How to get ahead in journalism by Ian Dunt
You are watching an expert give evidence at a select committee. But in fact you are scanning their words for headlines. That point that they say something, often buried in a long answer, which can be turned into a headline. Perhaps they’re talking about hospitals - lots of stats and analysis - and then they say something about how one patient came in for an operation and was kept in a side room for nearly 24 hours. That’s it. That’s your headline.
Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive by Simon Willison
When I came back a few minutes later I saw my machine open a browser window in my regular Firefox and then navigate to the dialog in question. I had not told Claude Code to use any browser automation, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t possible for it to trigger mouse movements or keyboard shortcuts within a window, so how was it doing that?
your anger is a gift by Naomi Alderman
“But of course,” continued the head master, “a girl can’t come top. So the boy who came second will be listed as top, and Lily will be listed as second.”
Are you feeling it? Is there a feeling going round in your stomach? It hits me somewhere just around my diaphragm. It stops me breathing. My breath comes in short snorting gasps. Every time I tell the story, or think about this story it feels like a stage of a spacecraft igniting. Exactly like this, except inside my body.
industrialising ourselves crazy by Dan Davies
Most of the time, the media reflects people’s prejudices back toward them, developing a kind of feedback loop that’s somewhat bad in itself. From time to time, this feedback loop can be exploited by someone who wants to manipulate preferences by injecting their own material into the process – then the feedback takes over as people actually seem to like more and more of what they’ve already been shown.
Pregnancy is worse than we think by Alex Hill
But nausea and vomiting of pregnancy (NVP) is not recorded in the GBD, despite being maybe the most prevalent cause of ill health in pregnancy. Estimates put the prevalence of NVP at around 70%, although it varies a lot in severity, from mild nausea that comes and goes, through to relentless vomiting that leaves sufferers bed-bound, vulnerable to dehydration and weight loss. The most extreme form has its own diagnosis - hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) - but this has been ambiguously defined for a long time, so prevalence estimates are somewhat unreliable.
Don’t follow leaders by Oliver Johnson
After their futile attempts to buy their way to success by throwing money at galacticos like him, Messi and Neymar, the elusive Champions League wins only came when they adopted the collective, picked attackers with talent who would also sometimes defend, who would subjugate their own talent for the good of the team.
I Shipped a Facebook Feature So Fast Sheryl Sandberg Called an Emergency Meeting to Stop Me by Michael Novati
As soon as the meeting ended, I walked back to my desk, opened up internal chat, and wrote a direct message to Mark Zuckerberg. I told him: “Look, I’m going to build this by Monday.” I think Mark actually believed me—or at least, he’d seen me ship fast enough to know it was possible—but he was still skeptical.
But here’s the thing: when you have two people of great influence and power at the company, who think you’re joking, that is the most motivation I could get to prove them all wrong.
The University As We Know It Is Finished by Nils Gilman
Kerr was a droll man. He once observed that the three great problems facing any university president were “parking for the faculty, athletics for the alumni, and sex for the students.” He described the university faculty (and I can confirm from personal experience that this remains accurate) as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”
Why were Covid vaccine trials so fast? by Saloni Dattani
Interest in volunteering for trials was very high. Dr Jim Kublin, who helped run a clinical trial network for Covid, recalled: “My colleagues were enrolling a phase one study for the Moderna vaccine, and they had like 10,000 people sign up on their website. They needed 40 people to enroll.”
Drunk Post: Things I’ve Learned as a Senior Engineer by luminousmen
The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation.