Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
You're too smart for this, you know better. Obviously a differentiable curve fitted via SGD can only interpolate. That's true by construction. But if you use this curve as a sampling guide in a search process, then you're doing search, you're no longer interpolating at all. Theorem proving is search. Reasoning chain generation is search. Etc.
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
Bai & Jia (2025) show that in Qing China's imperial exams, merit and ties to powerful examiners were complements: top performers gained most from patrons, so careers looked merit-based even as networks mattered.
doi.org/10.1177/000271622614…
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
I've also been trying out Rex and have noticed the same, it feels like the new big flex will be software that is written with AI, but in such a thoughtful way that it has been refactored to human size and taste again
Rex by @superlogical is phenomenal software. tremendous fit and finish, feels like it was built and designed pre-AI (compliment)
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
Differences in GDP per capita across sub-Saharan Africa are large.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s poorest region. Its GDP per person is around $5,000 a year — less than a quarter of the global average of around $22,000.
But looking at the region as a whole can make it easy to forget just how different the economies within it are. That’s what this chart shows, by ranking GDP per capita across sub-Saharan African countries.
These differences are large. At the top of the chart, Gabon has a GDP per capita of about $19,000, roughly 18 times that of Burundi at the bottom. The gap between the richest and poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa is even larger than the gap between the region and the world as a whole.
(written by @EOrtizOspina)
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
The creator of Sci-hub has finally added semantic search. Side effect: guest queries are public, so you can see what the world is curious about
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
Yes! So the System of Health Accounts, which the OECD uses, actually makes this precise distinction between voluntary and compulsory. After the ACA, due to the employer mandate, ESI goes into the compulsory bucket.
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
New paper!
Lead exposure appears to cause riots in Africa.
Blog: cgdev.org/blog/riots-surged-…
Paper: cgdev.org/publication/lead-e…
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
Did Indian poverty really fall by 90%?
As Eeshani Kandpal notes, everyone knows recent survey rounds are not comparable. The real mystery is why the @WorldBankGroup abandoned its previous efforts to adjust for that, and ran with the raw numbers?
cgdev.org/blog/india-has-red…
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
Holy shit this isn't a RCA, it's a novel
I wasn't sure what I'll do the hour it takes to get from Heathrow to central London but now I do: reading this extremely detailed postmortem
These attacks are happening everywhere and FINALLY someone gives proper details
A detailed report of the October 21st security attack
blog.railway.com/p/incident-…
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
Been a fun challenge to get all harnesses running on Cloudflare. Had to pull out the wasm for OpenAI Codex
durable objects 4ever 😂
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
𝗣𝘆𝗙𝗶𝘅𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝟬.𝟳𝟬.𝟬 is on 𝗣𝘆𝗣𝗶!
When we started working on PyFixest around 4 years ago, we jokingly set the target to complete the project before the "agents would take over" and write all of the code.
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
When I reanalyzed their data using the standard per capita measure, the finding disappeared (see graph showing a minimal correlation). Countries with more police officers per capita have no more and no fewer police killings than countries with fewer officers.
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
U.S. teens saw notable declines in self-reported sadness and suicidal ideation from 2021 to 2025.
Relative to 2021, they were also more likely in 2025 to:
1) play sports (49% to 58%)
2) do strength training (45% to 51%)
2) eat fruit >=twice/day (19% to 28%)
3) eat at least one vegetable/day (55% to 63%)
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
this guy makes me so infinitely mad. what's the point of copy pasting lemmas from 15 years ago but ctrl+fing some keywords and replacing them with gen z slop
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
Parental connections help young workers access high-paying jobs, reinforcing intergen earnings persistence. Just Accepted new paper by Matthew Staiger @MatthewStaiger zurl.co/SqCyB
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
libghostty 1.0 is here! I started Ghostty ~5yrs ago to work towards this. Today, libghostty is in hundreds of projects used by tens of millions of people. 1.0 marks ABI stability, quality, and an invite for distros to begin packaging. mitchellh.com/writing/libgho…
Since starting the Ghostty project in 2022, the most common question I've been asked is "why?". Today, I'll answer this by showing the broad industry impact libghostty has already had.
On top of JetBrains and Neovim already mentioned (that alone being over 10 million users):
-KDE developers are experimenting with a Konsole replacement built on it.
- Vercel's Turborepo uses it to render task output in its TUI.
- devenv uses it to drive shells.
- Antithesis used it to fuzz TUI programs and found real bugs in btop and others.
-Ghostel brings it to Emacs.
- ghostty-web is the WASM build with an Xterm.js-compatible API.
- Commercial products like OrbStack embed it.
- And a whole wave of new terminals and "agentic" coding tools, such as herdr and cmux, have been built on it rather than writing yet another emulator.
There are community bindings for Rust, Go, JavaScript, Swift, Python, .NET, Elixir, Dart, Java, and more, and the awesome-libghostty list tracks well over a hundred projects.
More people today use a terminal powered by libghostty than use Ghostty the application, by a very large multiple. And libghostty is having a much larger impact than being "just" a terminal emulator.
I'm excited to see where people take it from here.
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
Your unwillingness to accept that you were mistaken about a relatively minor thing (the distribution of publication times) likely makes folks update on your other, and harder to directly quantify, claims -- along with your general approach here
Nathaniel Bechhofer retweeted
In “Childlessness by Age, Race & Ethnicity and Education in the US,” @Bensam_Schluter, Leslie Root & @monjalexander find substantial changes in childbearing trajectories in recent cohorts, benchmarking these shifts at the key ages of 30 & 45. @MPIDRnews read.dukeupress.edu/demograp…
