Eric McKay

@AlextheYounga @DOGE Very cool project. 100 years ago, giving the public full natural language access to federal law would have been like spreading Gutenberg Bibles across Europe. I suspect we are all too brainrotted to care now.

This started as a project for @DOGE about one year ago, and has come a long way since then. You will soon be able to search the entirety of federal law with AI, using any model of your choosing, even local models. Sign up for the waitlist and get notified when I launch LawSnipe.

Regime change in Iran is the biggest +EV move the DoW could make. Utilmaxxing EAs, take note!

Has there ever been a Streisand effect as strong as demoting Pluto? My kids who were born 15 years after it was re-classified couldn't tell you a thing about Neptune but are obsessed with Pluto.

@zachcaceres <promise>FOUND PMF</promise>

Shout out to all the OG founding engineers out there. We all know you were the original Ralph Wiggum loop!

After a few weekends of testing, i have discovered my Clawdad constant: # of claudes running + # of children supervised at the same time = 6

@_dmca Hope you have a flat supply curve ;)

possibly the most important pair of charts in business history openai.com/index/a-busine…

@yrechtman homepricefutures.com <-- this guy will sell you cash-settled case-shiller futures to cover your short.

This is not as stupid as it looks. We're all basically short housing every day in our local markets. Every month we have to cover that short. I'd love to get long in a diversified low-leverage way. But ideally I'd do it as a city-specific REIT.

@EconTalker did you know that you and your last two podcast guests are being served targeted ads from Scientology on Amazon?

This makes my kids more scared of the dentist. A man who intends to put sharp objects in their mouth is talking like an idiot. I wouldn't trust him either

Related: why do all kid dentists baby talk to my kids? “We’re going to give you some sleepy juice to buzz buzz the sugar bugs away” 🤮

@bnielson01 Have you listened to last week’s episode of Levin on Lex Fridman’s podcast? He has very… interesting views on platonism

One thing I really enjoyed about this discussion is how clearly it showed the extent to which I’ll vehemently defend @DavidDeutschOxf ideas against both a Bayesian and a skeptic. Hehehe. In this episode, I talk with Sadia and Ivan. We began with a discussion of “Third Way” evolution (and Michael Levin’s work), but quickly branched into platonism, mathematical realism, and emergence. I brought out the best examples I could to show that mathematical realism—my term for Deutsch’s view that mathematics is a real part of the fabric of reality—is not the same as 'platonism' at all (at least not if by 'platonism' you mean 'Plato's platonism'), and that it’s actually the more defensible (and correct!) position. The argument I used was pretty simple. Let's say an alien race became an advanced race. Would they (like in Doctor Who) come up with some alternative to math? Or would their math have to be isomorphic to ours? And if they invented computer (regardless of the technology used!) would there still be a version of Ivan in the catalogue of possible programs? Or is that specific to a certain substrate? open.spotify.com/episode/0V99hO…

This Popperian understanding of "smart" also explains: 1. Everyday usage. e.g. my classmates in math class were smarter than me. i.e. even though we were equally interested in the topic, they were able to solve the problems on the test by conjecturing more efficiently and refuting incorrect conjectures faster. 2. The spectrum of "smarts" of LLM agentic systems. Neither Gemini 3 nor Claude 3.5 is a universal explainer, but Gemini 3 is smarter than Claude 3.5 because Gemini 3 is able to conjecture more varied explanations and criticize more efficiently on a benchmark like ARC AGI.

You can operationalize “smarter” in popperian terms by defining it to mean “better at conjecturing, criticizing, or both” So when people say Einstein was “smarter” they are saying “given the same background knowledge, Einstein was faster to generate high quality conjectures such as special relativity, photoelectric effect, etc”

Any idea can be understood by anyone, given enough time and interest. In fact, I don’t get how the world would look if there were such a thing as ‘smart’. Assume what I said is false, so there is an idea that, for some people, is incomprehensible despite being interesting. (1/4)

@Sam_kuyp Interest definitely plays a role here too. Not sure about his biography, but it's plausible he was more interested in applying his conjectural skill to physics than parenting.

@ericmckay People have specialised knowledge. Saying that Einstein was a god-tier conjecturer would imply he was better across the board. It neglects that there were areas of his life where he was just a regular guy. IIRC, he was a crummy dad, for instance.

In an alternate universe where DOGE had been the one to uncover massive terrorist-funding fraud by immigrants in Tim Walz’s state, how much faster would humans get to mars?

@SurfCityCom @DavidD_Chapman Where would the money to pay back the principal come from?

@DavidD_Chapman I agree, but it won't be $600. The 15 year and 30 year mortgages have different rates. The 50 year will have a higher rate than the 30 year and the difference will be less than 200. Instead they should offer a 30 year interest only option without the balloon payment.

No one cares about the total loan cost. People don't live in one place for 50 years. The 30 yr & the 50 yr have a monthly payment difference of $600. If you don't understand how important saving that $600/month is to many people than you dont understand the group this benefits

Any idea why those schools span the full range from 0-100 proficiency instead of following the linear model like the other schools in Mississippi and other states? MS data warrants extra scrutiny due to all the “miracle” talk. Thanks for putting this resource together btw. It’s both very interesting and very useful!

@ericmckay @The74 You mean the right side of their graph? That happened in a few states where they identified a large share of schools as having 100% of their students qualify for free and reduced price lunch.

{new} Which schools do a good job teaching kids to read? In a new project @The74, we set out to find schools where third-grade reading scores are much higher than might be expected, based on the schools’ poverty rates.

@MitchForest I’d love to try this!

Introducing Scribble — an iPad app designed to help students master beautiful cursive handwriting through guided practice. Parents/teachers/students, if you'd like to Beta Test and get free access, comment below 👇 and I'll DM you.