Author | Lightnews

joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 8h

It reminded me of this joke I saw on IG last week from Alistair Ogden, playing with (and critiquing) the idea that dietary restrictions and digestive issues are somehow woman-coded? We're exploring new frontiers in gender!

White male comedian saying: "Straight guys, we get perks. Like, we don't have dietary restrictions. A lot of women and queer folks have 'celiac', 'lactose intolerance', 'oil sensitivities'."

Comedian continuing: "Cis, straight guys, we just have years, decades, of unexplained diarrhea."

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 1d

Bernie isn't admitting he is wrong *now*.

Tweets from John Bresnahan, @bresreports:
An angry Bernie Sanders won’t drop his support for Graham Platner despite a Nazi tattoo on his chest

2/ Sanders said Platner “as a young man” went thru some really difficult experiences” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

3/ Sanders: “I personally think he is an excellent candidate and will support him, and I look forward to him becoming the next senator from Maine.”

4/ When pressed on Platner’s Nazi tattoo, Sanders lashed out at the “corrupt campaign finance system” adding “We don’t have enough candidates in this country that will take on the powers that be and fight for the working class.”

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 6d

That's right. I think it's probably easily explained by "younger people are more likely to be solely engaged at the presidential level and don't donate downballot."

joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 17d

The eigenslur was a great educational tool in making me think about the way "reality" is embedded in the structure of LLMs and how they store language.

joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 17d

The author *had* used a data series that was in real dollars. A common-enough mistake to make, but I still find it hard to dismiss this as just remixing existing text from the corpus. This was a screenshot of a chart it had never seen, with up-to-date data. There's something more going on here!

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 17d

Here's an example that isn't coding-related: someone I know posted this graph, and I wondered if chatGPT would be able to be able to tell what was off about it. At first it critiqued cosmetic stuff, but when I reprompted it, it basically nailed the question: both what's wrong, and the likely cause.

A graph charting "cumulative food price index" for OECD countries from 2015-2025, normalised to 100 for Q1 2025. For most countries, the 2025 price index ends up between 105 and 110.

Screenshot of ChatGPT conversation.

User prompt: "I mean yeah that's a nice catch but I meant with the lines themselves, the results."

ChatGPT answer: "Ah, got it — you mean the results in the chart, not the labeling. Looking closely at the lines:

The U.S. (blue) line looks too low compared to what we know. U.S. food price inflation since 2015 has been strong, especially post-2020. By 2024, the USDA’s CPI for food at home is up ~30% from 2015, but here the index only reaches ~107. That suggests the data may have been deflated or adjusted incorrectly.

Same with Canada (red) — the increase looks muted. By 2024, Canadian food prices are more like 25–30% above 2015 levels, not just ~10%.

Germany (green) rises a bit more, but still looks understated compared to Eurostat data.

Meanwhile, some gray OECD countries are shooting up by 20%+ (even 25%) — which is closer to reality.

So the likely issue with the lines themselves is:
👉 The author deflated or double-adjusted the price indices (probably using real terms), when these should be nominal indices. A food price index already controls for the base year (2015=100); adjusting further for overall inflation or real dollars flattens the lines artificially.

That’s why your friend’s U.S. and Canadian lines look oddly flat — they shouldn’t be trailing the OECD average like that."

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 19d

I think the MMT people partly bought themselves respectability on the left and center-left by attaching themselves to Bernie but it's a crank idea, and his senior economic advisor was a lead MMT person.

joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 20d

The article says that New York evaluates kids for the gifted program in kindergarten, then grade 3. It sounds like next year's class of kindergarteners aren't getting tracked for their first three years, and the article also says that Mamdani *refused to answer* if he'd end it in third grade.

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 20d

They're real, yeah, there are leaked files of the album floating around.

I don't hate the song, though Taylor might be a little bit too old for the Olivia Rodrigo thing she's going for.

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 21d

I don't think there's much of a reason to do that? You should graph pre-trends for the whole data set *with error bars*. Hopefully the control group's pre-trend will be roughly in the treatment group's error bars, and that + theoretical justification should be enough.

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 23d

They've only *done* two "real" Universes Beyond sets so far. LotR set was the 1st one, and until Final Fantasy came out it was the most successful MtG set ever. Avatar TLA in November will be the third.

(They've been doing a lot of smaller crossover products, but the shift to full UB sets is new.)

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 26d

Either like this or as a line chart would be actively good. Showing the sensitivity of your outcome to your design choices is good practice, and is pretty similar to a "here's how our RD estimates change with different bandwidth" chart in this Imbens/Kal paper

scholar.harvard.edu/files/imbens...

Fig. 3 in Optimal Bandwidth Choice for the Regression Discontinuity
Estimator by Imbens/Kalyanaraman.

x axis is different bandwidth widths for a regression discontinuity regression, from 0 to 0.5.
y axis is the coefficient for the outcome effect for each of those different bandwidths.

Outcomes are plotted as a solid line chart, with dotted lines showing the confidence interval.

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 26d

Image of a homophobic slug looking unimpressed, with a banner of white text on red background reading "LIVE SLUG REACTION"

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 27d

Large health insurers (or whatever Kaiser is) should have pretty good data on this, but it's definitely not the kind of thing they release publicly.

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 29d

Yeah sure. "Ally".

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · 29d

Red Army Choir rendition of Bella Ciao, eh?

Screenshot from church website showing bio for the dog, Bella.

Top left shows music player, Bella Ciao performed by the Red Army Choir.

Left shows image of Bella, a white husky.

Banner has "Bella" repeating in a wave, with the tile of the page being "Ciao!"

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · Sep 12

Unlikely to be him - someone named Tyler Robinson owned the house listed on the FEC form from 2019-2021, when our Tyler Robinson would have been 16-18.

FEC form showing Trump donation by Tyler Robinson at 83 N Lee Ln, St George, UT.

Homes.com screenshot showing 83 N Lee Ln was owned by Tyler and Makayla Robinson from Jul 2019-Jan 2021.

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · Sep 3

Gallup had him in the 60s and 70s for most of the year, brief dip into the 50s when the economy fell off a cliff and Congress passed TARP. news.gallup.com/poll/116500/...

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · Sep 3

It actually looks... shockingly benign. "Epstein was a pedophile, but likely not at the head of a sprawling elite network of organized pedophilia reaching into every corner of society."

www.compactmag.com/article/the-...

The Idiocy of the Epstein Mythology

The Epstein mythology can be roughly defined as the popular belief, nearly ubiquitous on social media and adjacent outlets, that the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein orchestrated a sprawling child s...

www.compactmag.com

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · Sep 1

Well sure, you're doing the typical academic radical two-step of "look at my idea, isn't it challenging? Aren't you... provoked?" but when it comes down to it you're not sticking to your guns, the only thing you're willing to defend is the Sesame Street-ass idea of "isn't mercy a virtue?"

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · Sep 1

Those are both quotes from you, bb.

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · Sep 1

You suggested "the Jordanian model where they've hybridized policing and tribal blood feuds" for discussion, and then a few posts later you said that you had presented "best practices from peers that get better value for money”.

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · Sep 1

You called it a "best practice", come on.

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · Aug 23

It's really a testament to the quality of the show that foreigners tune in knowing that a third of questions will be about BBC Four interstitial announcers.

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joffre.bsky.social @joffre.bsky.social · Aug 23

There's a question about snooker every four episodes and you just gotta take a mulligan on those.

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