I built an interactive guide on how GPS works!

perthirtysix.com/how-does-gps...

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

Change in Data Sources Led to Lower Inflation Reading

An obscure methodological tweak -- a change in the source of data on the price of legal services -- resulted in meaningfully lower monthly PCE inflation in January. That's prompting questions about why the change was made and why it wasn't disclosed publicly.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/b... #EconSky

Download advice on feeding newborns to teens

Reminds me of Swift’s Modest Proposal.

Do they though

Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT OpenAI plans to test advertising in the U.S. for ChatGPT’s free and Go tiers to expand affordable access to AI worldwide, while protecting privacy, trust, and answer quality.

How regulation catches up with a space which had been seen as private will be interesting. “Not selling conversations” still gives a lot of leeway to profile users based on analysis of conversations in order to sell the most contextually relevant ad.

openai.com/index/our-ap...

OpenAI will put ads in ChatGPT. This opens a new door for dangerous influence History shows voluntary safeguards fade as profits rise, risking a more persuasive new era of online advertising.

After working early career as a software dev for a mobile analytics startup, I’m imagining what adding ads to ChatGPT or Gemini as platforms looks like with regards to commercialising what they know about us as targeting attributes. And that’s pretty unsettling.

theconversation.com/openai-will-...

Woah, this is actually pretty cool. I had not idea this existed: ase-lib.org

"I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace"

Projections make dumb people don dumb things

The super talented @pokateo.bsky.social made this for map nerds to demonstrate how projections can change how we see the map. Little known at the time it was also the reason for the dumbest president ever to destroy NATO.

(I show this map/diagram to my stats class every year. Tufte called it "the best statistical graph ever written.")

Is flashing red good?

I watched this over the weekend, and it is hard to dispute anything said as untrue- even prefaced as a recurring punchline with the legal magic words “menurut keyakinan saya” - in my opinion…

Former coordinating political, legal and security affairs minister Mahfud MD said Pandji’s material could not be prosecuted as it was performed and released before the new Criminal Code (KUHP) took effect on Jan. 2. “If [the show] is considered insulting, in Pandji’s case, it still cannot be punished,” Mahfud said on his YouTube channel on Friday. “If Pandji remains calm, he will not be punished. Don’t worry, I will defend you.”

Not super reassuring to say, don’t worry, you are safe from the repressive law preventing insults to the president due to a technicality.

Mens Rea, Pandji’s Netflix standup special, is still 1 in Indonesia

Support mounts for comedian after Netflix special reported to the police www.thejakartapost.com/indonesia/20...

Although it seems the police complaint was mostly related to implying religious orgs gained mining concessions for supporting the Prabowo-Gibran ticket.

Why AI is pushing developers toward typed languages AI is settling the “typed vs. untyped” debate by turning type systems into the safety net for code you didn’t write yourself.

I wrote up this post after going through the Octoverse report for this past year!

It's super interesting and kind of obvious that because humans aren't writing as much code across codebases, they're leaning into stricter tooling that offers better reliability.

github.blog/ai-and-ml/ll...

i bought the domain ohhh.lol a while back just because and the other night i noticed it gets like 100-150 unique hits a day from people typing it in their posts and group chats where it tries to load the url preview. so i hope this annoys some people while they're trying to get their mack on

gijn.org Editor’s Pick: Best of Data Journalism from 2025

Editor’s Pick: Best of Data Journalism from 2025

From global conflict and climate disasters to AI, trade wars, and disinformation – data journalism helps explain a rapidly changing world.

🔗 Here's some top selections:

New cherry blossoms chart just dropped

Maybe humans think in different channels too - stuff we say out loud, stuff which is internally working through a problem (inner monologue), examining available evidence (tool calls)?

It would be much more labour intensive in training, but inspecting the intermediary reasoning tokens may help get closer to laying out multiple possibilities. The OpenAI Harmony response format has the concept of multiple channels - analysis, commentary and final: cookbook.openai.com/articles/ope...

Why language models hallucinate OpenAI’s new research explains why language models hallucinate. The findings show how improved evaluations can enhance AI reliability, honesty, and safety.

Yes and this is structural. Reward functions are part of why there is hallucination. If by chance (a guess without drawing on the right context) an LLM produces a correct answer we reward it instead of rewarding saying “I don’t know”. OpenAI talks about this: openai.com/index/why-la...

Yeah, not as straightforward as it may first appear. When I’ve come back to do talks at my old PH startup Eskwelabs I’ve also used this nicely done vis: bbycroft.net/llm as part of intuition building. Then talk about training bias with the WEIRD paper: arxiv.org/abs/2410.16315

Tracing the thoughts of a large language model Anthropic's latest interpretability research: a new microscope to understand Claude's internal mechanisms

Although while LLMs do next token prediction, it is effectively following the pathways of a plan (which can be thought of as an executing a compressed program in embedding space). This old Anthropic paper from March does a good job of talking through it: www.anthropic.com/research/tra...

“When I woke up and read the news about the executive order, I was horrified and really mad. And when I get mad, I do math,” says Nichols, an infectious disease mathematical modeler and health economist.

A photograph of four emaciated dead bodies, propped up and being dressed with colorful tunics and sarongs by a person with black mask. Another man is sitting next to them, watching the process.

A photograph of a man combing the hair of a male dead body dressed in brown suit and tie. A female dead body wearing white dress was placed next to the male body.

The dried bodies of a man and a woman, propped up. One wore brown suit, tie, and black cap, and the other wore white bridal dress and the hands were holding a yellow bouquet.

A close up of the face of a man's cadaver with mustache and short beard. He was wearing a black hat that says "Toraja". A pair of hands took care of his facial hair and slipped a cigarette between his lips.

Ma'nene is a ritual in North Toraja, South Sulawesi, where people exhume the bodies of their loved ones from burial chambers, clean them, change their clothes, even serve their favorite food. It roots in ancient belief Aluk Todolo, "the Way of the Ancestors". 1/4 🧵

#WyrdWednesday

NZ not yet recognising Palestinian state, Foreign Minister Winston Peters announces The government has decided against recognising Palestinian statehood at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Disappointing and embarrassing.

NZ not yet recognising Palestine: www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Industry pushes swift action on radioactive shrimp scare - Economy - The Jakarta Post The government noted that only a few accredited laboratories are currently capable of advanced food testing.

Great. Now I have to worry about radioactive shrimp: www.thejakartapost.com/business/202...

Aaaand they’ve just covered it up.

Which is just another layer of irony…

…given that this is state action against protest about state action against protest.

Jakarta Post front page article with a timeline of Sri Mulyani’s history as a finance minister serving three Presidents

Flurry of news about the Indonesian cabinet reshuffle - Sri Mulyani’s departure the biggest scalp and front page of the Jakarta Post. Not sure how many finance ministers can cause the stock market to fall on their resignation.