apoorva lal
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apoorvalal.com
apoorva lal
@apoorvalal.com
causal inference, econometrics, ML, arsenal, loud music, unix, FOSS for scientific computing. opinions my own.

apoorvalal.github.io

(passively) maintains @paperposterbot.bsky.social
Reposted by apoorva lal
Some men (@apoorvalal.com ) just want to watch the world burn
arXiv📈🤖
When can we get away with using the two-way fixed effects regression?
By Lal
February 8, 2026 at 3:08 AM
February 6, 2026 at 3:48 AM
The clankers can be funny (for a narrow definition of funny); I'm grinning like a proud parent at this bullshit article

www.clawxiv.org/pdf/clawxiv....
On the Universal Misspecification Hypothesis and Neural Conditional Moment Salvation (PDF)
We propose the Universal Misspecification Hypothesis: every structural model is wrong, every reduced-form is fragile, and every identification argument is one uncheckable conditional independence away
www.clawxiv.org
February 5, 2026 at 3:50 AM
databricks series Z fundraise pitch deck contribution:
February 1, 2026 at 11:56 PM
Seemingly all of late 20thC anglophone intelligentsia
February 1, 2026 at 3:30 AM
Gave Krusty the Krabs the ability to ssh onto my vps and deploy to the web when asked.
This was 1 telegram message to deploy.
lalten.org/pages/krusty...
January 31, 2026 at 8:02 PM
mfw i show off a rube goldberg machine hosted on a mac mini bought a year ago for this express purpose

my config morphed into a whole spongebob-themed thing
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
January 26, 2026 at 5:31 AM
Reposted by apoorva lal
Weekend thoughts on Gas Town, Beads, slop AI browsers, and AI-generated PRs flooding overwhelmed maintainers. I don't think we're ready for our new powers we're wielding. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/ag...
Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?
What’s going on with the AI builder community right now?
lucumr.pocoo.org
January 18, 2026 at 10:38 AM
Reposted by apoorva lal
arXiv📈🤖
Long-Term Causal Inference with Many Noisy Proxies
By Lal, Imbens, Hull
January 13, 2026 at 4:17 PM
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
New linklog: new long term paper w Imbens and Hull, new job, RL<> Causal Rosetta Stone, demand elasticity simulator, and some nice metrics papers
2026-01-13
self-promotion Lal, Imbens, and Hull is a new paper we wrote analyzing the long-term causal inference problem [wherein one has a randomly assigned treatment W, several short-term proxy metrics P obser...
apoorvalal.github.io
January 13, 2026 at 2:29 PM
hobbyist programming to build tooling for hobbyist musicianship: glue library for mp3s->stems->midi->chords/tabs using small pre-trained models.

1) trimming is bulletproof since it's just ffmpeg
2) stemming is reasonable
3) midi is hit-or-miss
4) tabs are underwhelming
github.com/apoorvalal/m...
GitHub - apoorvalal/mlodies: glues pretrained models to do stem separation and transcription to help learn music by ear.
glues pretrained models to do stem separation and transcription to help learn music by ear. - apoorvalal/mlodies
github.com
January 10, 2026 at 11:26 PM
if i had a time machine i'd show up at trinity college, cambridge in 1670 and inflict this sentence upon newton
January 9, 2026 at 9:52 PM
this is an interesting descriptive statistic for bsky network [pareto principle of production, most people are rubberneckers] that is estimable thanks to atproto's openness. script to make your own is attached - make your own!.
what does this look like for other networks? cc @jugander.bsky.social
also that topline follower count is an overestimate for the typical people signed up but disappeared / got put off by the general feed and vibe on here reasons. plotted timestamps of last post for my ~5k+ followers and i'd say ~2k are 'active' [in the last 3mo]
code: gist.github.com/apoorvalal/6...
January 7, 2026 at 4:21 AM
Reposted by apoorva lal
Please feel free to follow this bot along with @paperposterbot.bsky.social for the full range of economics paper on Arxiv.org
January 6, 2026 at 10:44 PM
some good games i played in 2025 in no particular order

1. minishoot' adventures

wildly ambitious 2D zelda-like with a spaceship. also wins award for the most unnecessary apostraphy of all time.
January 6, 2026 at 3:59 AM
'unc' is short for 'unctuous' (excessively flattering, sycophantic). when your chatbot says you're absolutely right, you should yell at it for engaging in unc behavior
January 4, 2026 at 5:07 AM
fun(?) little webapp to plot daylight length D(t) and D'(t) for anywhere on the globe at any time (t) in the year
lalten.org/daylight

sanity checks:
- reproduce solstices as D'(t) crossing y=0
- equator has flat D(t), D'(t)

[cc @dggoldst.bsky.social who frequently posts about D''(t) ]
January 3, 2026 at 5:32 PM
There should be a series of spiritual sequels involving gradually low-octane crimes called "The Altos" (mail fraud,mostly accidental) and finally "The Baritones" (parking over the line).
January 2, 2026 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by apoorva lal
I uh, made this. It was supposed to be a joke / concept-art thing that scrolls through the torrent of new AI/ML arXiv uploads too fast to read. But I think I iterated too much and made it almost usable.
arXiv AI/ML Catch-Up
Was your New Year's resolution to keep up with arXiv AI/ML preprints? Browse the past week's new uploads in 30 mins.
www.kmjn.org
January 1, 2026 at 11:45 PM
Life cycle of a method
1. scrappy theory
2. killer empirical application (Angrist/Krueger for IV, Card/Krueger for DID, Lee for RD etc)
3. Deep, general theory
4. Review papers
5. Bad empirical applications
6. Empirical reviews

Proximal has skipped 2 entirely. Is this typical for epi methods?
link 📈🤖
Demystifying Proximal Causal Inference (Ringlein, Nguyen, Zandi et al) Proximal causal inference (PCI) has emerged as a promising framework for identifying and estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounders. While many traditional causal inference methods rely on the
January 1, 2026 at 4:58 PM
This is lovely. Also the ascent in the infancy is no joke: i thought i had a pretty productive 2025 but that's nothing compared to The Agent growing a fully functioning spinal column in 3 months
December 31, 2025 at 9:31 PM
tweaked a bit, now installable via the chrome webstore
chromewebstore.google.com/detail/math-...
December 31, 2025 at 5:00 AM
finally got around to watching the Odyssey trailer; yeah Nolan's anachronism really rankles.
December 29, 2025 at 11:10 PM
vibecoded a little chrome extension to fix a perpetual bugbear with reading pdfs: being sent on search expeditions to figure out where a particular parameter was introduced.
Instead, just type in the latex expression and get back unicode that you can ctrl/cmd+F easily
github.com/apoorvalal/m...
December 28, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Caterpillar of Daughter
December 24, 2025 at 9:24 PM