Joshua A. Miller

Don’t trust your gut, it’s full of shit.

Currently 892 hours into automating a 30-second task I do 4 times a year It's gonna be so worth it once I get everything working

Advent of LLMs hasn't raised the number of NBER working papers above trend. (Or submissions to top journals: next tweet). Why? Probably because LLMs substitute for good RAs, but not for good ideas. And RA labor supply hasn't been the binding constraint in economic scholarship.

Well how about that

NEWS: I'm told by @CMBrookePinto's office that D.C.'s expanded juvenile curfew law – which lets police enforce an earlier 8 p.m. curfew in designated areas – *does not* have the votes on the D.C. Council to be extended past its April 15 sunset or to pass on a permanent basis.

"The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Sam Altman" theonion.com/the-onions-exc…

@TimmyTimTom5 @mattyglesias "And one time 9/11 happened" is a weird debaters move. 25% of DC kids are chronically absent. That's like 12k kids. You want to lock them all up?!? Good luck, man.

@anotherpanacea @mattyglesias No, but the inefficacy of non-carceral interventions was.

Why does "accountability" always means locking kids or their parents up for truancy, and never demanding that government take responsibility for removing obstructions?

@TimmyTimTom5 @mattyglesias Was truancy really the problem in this case?

@anotherpanacea @mattyglesias I’d call his continued liberty a massive obstacle to every other students’ education. What do you think?

@TimmyTimTom5 @mattyglesias Better than locking them in cages, I'd say, but it's a weird failure of the imagination to think those are the only two options.

@anotherpanacea @mattyglesias Well I guess you can just let them run free?

@TimmyTimTom5 @mattyglesias Agreed. But using the city’s family and kid policing systems on the truancy problem would expand the number of kids in the deep end of the system.

@anotherpanacea @mattyglesias DYRS has an abominable record but the total amount of children involved with that system is a teeny tiny proportion of the truant student population, much less the underachieving students.

@mattyglesias I was a nerd and literally never skipped school. But our clients and kids I talk to at DYRS regularly report feeling unwelcome/unsafe in school, and DYRS pretty regularly fails to hold school at YSC/NB or register kids it's releasing for school.

@anotherpanacea Removing obstructions is good, but high school kids skip school because it’s fun and they think they can get away with it. We were both teenagers once.

Is 90% really the most we can hope for? That feels... low.

50% of all relationship advice on Reddit is “leave.” 15 years of data, 52 million comments, and the trend line only goes one direction. A researcher filtered r/relationship_advice down to 1,166,592 quality comments and tracked what people actually recommend. In 2010, “End Relationship” sat around 30%. By 2025, it’s approaching 50%. “Communicate” dropped from 22% to 14%. “Compromise” collapsed from 7% to 3%. “Give Space” fell from 25% to 13%. Every category that requires patience lost ground every single year. The one category growing faster than “leave” is “Seek Therapy,” which went from 1% to 6%. The subreddit is slowly learning to say “this is above my pay grade.” Train a model on this dataset and it would absolutely tell people to break up. The training data is 50% “leave” and climbing. The model wouldn’t be broken. It would be accurately reflecting what 52 million commenters actually believe about your relationship. A 50% prior that you should leave, a 14% prior that you should talk about it, and a 6% prior that you need a professional. That’s not LLM psychosis. That’s the median human opinion on your relationship, backed by the largest advice dataset ever assembled.

An objectively wild career move and one I couldn’t be happier with or prouder of. The world needs more local reporters more than it needs more national ones and even if I go back to national reporting one day, I’ll be a much better reporter for this experience.

New: DC is implementing a waitlist for its childcare subsidy program to cut costs, a step Bowser warned could be coming last month. New policy starts May 12. Childcare providers fear it’ll function as a freeze, as it’s unclear if new students can join as others drop out.

An absolutely incredible statistic; Trump's $100,000 H-1B fee has actually lost the U.S. government $19.5 million in application fees.

The fact that most captchas are based on robots not being able to identify bikes or traffic lights doesn't fill me with confidence for self-driving cars.

➡️ Juvenile courts detained & committed nearly 2,000 more youth in “residential placement” facilities. This was the second year in a row that we’ve seen an increase in youth confinement after 2 decades of steady declines.

🚨NEW: Last year, the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. increased again. The driving factor? President Trump’s deportation agenda. Our annual report, The Whole Pie, gives the big picture of mass incarceration. Here are some key takeaways 🧵

"You can just do things" is basically the same heuristic as "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face" except for people who haven't been punched in the face yet.