Matthew C. Klein sides with what he calls the "standard view": that living standards in Northwest Europe have been rising more slowly than in the U.S. since the mid-1990s. This is a response to the ongoing debate between those who accept the standard framing ("Side A") and a revisionist camp ("Side B") that claims the gap is largely an artifact of mismeasurement.
Microsoft AI's MAI-Thinking-1 is a 35 billion active / ~1 trillion total parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) reasoning model trained entirely from scratch on clean, curated data. It represents a deliberate break from distillation-dependent approaches — the model's capabilities were learned, not inherited.
The project embodies three core principles:
Source: Science Magazine
The Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics represents the most significant collective response from a major academic discipline to the encroachment of artificial intelligence. Endorsed by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and signed by Fields Medalist Peter Scholze, this declaration formalizes the mathematical community's concerns and recommendations.
Source: Nature Scientific Reports Date Published: May 27, 2026
A large-scale Swedish study (N = 2,767, aged 35–45) investigated whether the combination of many small individual-level sex differences can collectively produce substantial predictive power.
Brad Setser, a leading expert on global capital flows and trade imbalances at the Council on Foreign Relations, published a thread questioning how China's trade surplus, capital flows, and international investment position are reported and interpreted. His central provocation:
Arguing that China has a comparative advantage at industrial policy is like arguing the U.S. has a comparative advantage at exporting debt.
Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations argues that Taiwan's Central Bank (CBC) engages in more aggressive and more opaque currency manipulation than China's People's Bank of China (PBOC). His analysis, prompted by a Bloomberg article, reveals a sophisticated system of hidden foreign exchange interventions that far exceed official reserve figures.
Source: Brown PLT Blog Date Published: May 22, 2026
Traditional REPLs and debuggers fail to convey complex program structures. Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), abstract syntax trees, and other non-trivial data structures are notoriously difficult to inspect in standard terminal-based environments.
Alan Jacobs reflects on the profound transformation of the relationship between the individual and the state, prompted by reading A.J.P. Taylor's classic work English History 1914-1945. The essay traces how World War I — "The Great War" — fundamentally remade the bargain between citizen and government in ways that persist and have deepened into the present era of surveillance capitalism.
Source: Cremieux Date Published: November 13, 2025
The central thesis: trends are meaningless if you don't know what you're measuring. Two series can look identical on a chart while being driven by completely different underlying mechanisms — a phenomenon known as measurement non-invariance.
Source: Simon Willison's Blog
Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI budget in just 4 months. The company's new response: cap all employees at $1,500 per month per AI coding tool (Cursor, Claude Code).