Fred Lutz

South Africa is the hardest place in the world to do business, says the IMF. Measured against 49 other countries, SA came in stone last. IMF noted that if SA could just achieve an ease of doing business equal to the average, economic growth could double. dailyinvestor.com/south-africa/8…

I often get folks looking to work with me... well now's your chance! Reach out before our schedule fills up again 🚀

@MTabarrok @timhwang @JohanFourieZA you'll enjoy this

@timhwang Historical Statistics OF THE UNITED STATES 1780-I945 www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp…

What is the greatest, rarest PDF that you have saved down?

Here's my conversation with Javier Milei (@JMilei), President of Argentina 🇦🇷. I'm posting it in both English (overdubbed) & Spanish (with subtitles) here on X and everywhere else. See comment thread for Spanish version and links. The Spanish version has me speaking Spanish 🔥 Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 3:27 - Economic freedom 8:52 - Anarcho-capitalism 18:45 - Presidency and reforms 38:05 - Poverty 44:37 - Corruption 53:14 - Freedom 1:07:26 - Elon Musk 1:12:54 - DOGE 1:14:56 - Donald Trump 1:20:56 - US and Argentina relations 1:28:05 - Messi vs Maradona 1:36:58 - God 1:39:05 - Elvis and Rolling Stones 1:42:45 - Free market 1:49:46 - Loyalty 1:52:23 - Advice for young people 1:53:49 - Hope for Argentina

I confronted SEC Chair Gary Gensler with a deceptively simple question: Is a Yankee ticket a security? Mr. Gensler claims that NFTs are securities. I see no legal difference between a Yankee ticket that offers access to a Yankee game and an NFT that offers access to an animated web series (as in the case of Stoner Cats). Mr. Gensler is misclassifying collectibles, art, and tickets as securities.

@gvrooyen I feel you posting your phone number on X publicly makes me subscribing you to a cat facts SMS subscription service fair use.

I know about NameDrop on iOS and QuickShare on Android, but honestly – those assume the same platform, and having the right permissions enabled, and it's finicky. QR codes are kinda ugly, but they just work. [2/2]

Was at an event again where I didn't think to bring business cards. I hardly ever carry them any more, and nobody I spoke to had one. With one person I took a photo of contact details on his phone screen 😝 I now just have one of my phone backgrounds set to a QR vcard. [1/2]

Four famous charts that almost everyone misinterprets:

@gvrooyen I wanted my DnD game to feel more like a LitRPG, where items and spells are aligned to your character and their background. I made this GPT to do this, it's really fun but not always balanced: chatgpt.com/g/g-qehxrEV34-…

Time to call a friend. This aint Shakespeare, Gygax or Vince Gilligan, baby – but wow, it's amazing how rich and detailed the LLM responses are now. We have a great outline with lots of details, and I can wing anything that's off, and even weave further along on the story. 3/3

So the 15yo casually drops that he has this great D&D character concept, and please can dad run a 1-shot solo campaign tonight? (Dad wants to lazily code a bit this afternoon and then take a nap before cooking dinner; has a nice seafood gumbo in mind). 1/2

A map of academics who write about 'degrowth'. (Further commentary seems unnecessary..)

Does astrology work? We tested the ability of 152 astrologers to see if they could demonstrate genuine astrological skill. Here is how the study was designed and what we found (including a result that really surprised me): 🧵

This website shows what the climate in a given city will feel like in 60 years. fitzlab.shinyapps.io/cityapp/

The IMO is the hardest high school Math test. A lesser known sibling, the IOL (International Olympiad for Linguistics), starts tomorrow! Students are asked to translate lesser-known languages purely using logic. 5 problems, 6hrs. The problems seem absolutely impossible.

JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK. This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible. After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars. WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people's right to know. As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom. Julian's freedom is our freedom. [More details to follow]

I'm very happy to share our new benchmark, IrokoBench--a human translated benchmark dataset for 16 African languages covering: - NLI (AfriXNLI) - Maths reasoning (AfriMGSM) - Multi-choice QA (AfriMMLU) arxiv.org/abs/2406.03368 Project funded by @LacunaFund with @MasakhaneNLP

Most people only pay attention to one of these three facts. Real progress depends on understanding all three.

@cosmo_bruce The new GPT2-Chatbot on chat.lmsys.org got the answer: Alice's children are ages 2, 2, and 5 (product 20, sum 9). Bob's children are ages 3, 3, and 1 (product 9, sum 9). More impressive was the reasoning:

"we both have twins, but they aren't our oldest children". "Ahh!" says Eve, now I know! How old are Alice and Bobs' 6 children? -- As far as I know the solution is not on the internet, so when AI conquers this challenge it will signal a really interesting step forward.

I test new AI capabilities on my "meta-brainteaser". As of today none of GPT-4, Claude 3 and Gemini Advanced and Gemini 1.5 Pro can solve it... Here it is: Eve, a mathematician, is visiting her friends Alice and Bob who she hasn't seen for many years. Both Alice and Bob...

@jdeanwallace This is such a cool concept, and well executed!

Car people have found my website 😮

Less than 50 authors sell more than 500,000 units per year globally. 90% sell fewer than 2k, 50% less than a dozen. Book publishers think like VCs investing in many books with a small chance of success. Fascinating article on the economics of the publishing industry.

I just read the 43-page International Monetary Fund paper on cross border flows in bitcoin. Thought I'd share three interesting takeaways to crystallize my thoughts. A quick thread. imf.org/en/Publication…

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it. 1/