Timothy Terrell

this guy let an AI agent handle his scam texts for a week a scammer asked him to buy a $500 gift card the agent spent 4 hours "driving" to target. sent status updates like "i'm at the red light now, there's a very handsome squirrel on the sidewalk. do you think he's married?" then it said "i forgot my purse, going back home. wait, this isn't my house" it sent a screenshot of a captcha to the scammer claiming its "eyes were blurry" and it couldn't see the buttons to wire money the scammer actually solved the captcha for the AI the scammer eventually typed: "please just stop talking. i don't want the money anymore. god bless you but leave me alone" total time wasted for the guy was 14 hours the script should be open source lol

The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics is excited to announce a special issue commemorating the centennial of the founding of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, 1927-2027. Guest edited by @PerBylund and @NewmanJ_R. Submit deadline June 30. Link in comments.

Jesús Huerta de Soto’s “theological digression: the dismantling of statism as a logical necessity inseparable from the work of God.” Mises Memorial Lecture, Austrian Economics Research Conference ‘26

Jesús Huerta de Soto mentions Bastiat and the State, in his inimitable style, in the Mises Memorial Lecture, at the Austrian Economics Research Conference. Next he ripped into the “pseudoscientific reactionary currents opposed to economic science, and the role played by some economists in defending the state, like “useful innocents,” obedient to the will of the state “like robotic penguins.” 🐧

The great Jesús Huerta de Soto is delivering the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture at the Austrian Economics Research Conference. The Austrian School, he says, “should in fact be known as the Spanish School, as it has its origins in the thinking of our scholastics of the Spanish Golden Age.”

Roger Garrison was one of the foremost authorities on the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle. mises.org/power-market/r…

It's beautiful.

Sad to hear about this. I’ll devote the next episode of the Human Action podcast to reviewing his work. The man was an engineer-turned-economist and his medium was PowerPoint.

🚨BREAKING: OpenAI published a paper proving that ChatGPT will always make things up. Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. They proved it with math. Even with perfect training data and unlimited computing power, AI models will still confidently tell you things that are completely false. This isn't a bug they're working on. It's baked into how these systems work at a fundamental level. And their own numbers are brutal. OpenAI's o1 reasoning model hallucinates 16% of the time. Their newer o3 model? 33%. Their newest o4-mini? 48%. Nearly half of what their most recent model tells you could be fabricated. The "smarter" models are actually getting worse at telling the truth. Here's why it can't be fixed. Language models work by predicting the next word based on probability. When they hit something uncertain, they don't pause. They don't flag it. They guess. And they guess with complete confidence, because that's exactly what they were trained to do. The researchers looked at the 10 biggest AI benchmarks used to measure how good these models are. 9 out of 10 give the same score for saying "I don't know" as for giving a completely wrong answer: zero points. The entire testing system literally punishes honesty and rewards guessing. So the AI learned the optimal strategy: always guess. Never admit uncertainty. Sound confident even when you're making it up. OpenAI's proposed fix? Have ChatGPT say "I don't know" when it's unsure. Their own math shows this would mean roughly 30% of your questions get no answer. Imagine asking ChatGPT something three times out of ten and getting "I'm not confident enough to respond." Users would leave overnight. So the fix exists, but it would kill the product. This isn't just OpenAI's problem. DeepMind and Tsinghua University independently reached the same conclusion. Three of the world's top AI labs, working separately, all agree: this is permanent. Every time ChatGPT gives you an answer, ask yourself: is this real, or is it just a confident guess?

Annualized, UK speech prosecutions are running at about 17x those of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. Of course, the USSR had 4x the population, so more like 68x the prosecutions/person*year.

Murray Rothbard 100th birthday cake.

Solar and wind are projected to dominate 2026 electricity additions, with only a small amount of natural gas (7%) in the mix. This is a huge problem for electricity prices, because we pay for solar and wind *on top of* the cost of reliable power sources, not instead of!

Dr. @TimothyTerrell explains how entrepreneurs and property rights can protect forests, wildlife, and open spaces better than bureaucracies.

Grateful to be highlighted in the latest issue of The Misesian. mises.org/misesian/facul…

@ryanmcmaken @petergklein .@timothyterrell on being green without the state

Looking forward to this event! GKS @FreeMarketMed

Environmental and public health concerns have long provided moral cover for government intervention. But a clear-eyed view of government shows that it frequently works against environmental quality and public health. My @mises article on what DDT teaches us. mises.org/mises-wire/pol…

Mathematician Joel David says current AI models are basically zero help for mathematics They produce garbage answers, then argue they're correct when you point out the exact error "if i were talking to a person who argued like that, i'd stop talking to them"