That being said, food prices have gone down 30% when adjusted for median income, so I guess you win some, you lose some. But I definitely spend more on rent than food, so if I had the option, I'd switch them.

The median home in the US used to cost 6.7 years of median income. Now it costs 10.

@nytimes.com is a joke. The main job of an academic researcher is to openly publish their work. Anyone who receives federal research funding from the NIH has to make their final manuscript AND research data publicly available.

It's not completely unsurprising, but it's interesting that the correlation between the reasoning benchmark and simplebench, which tests spatio-temporal reasoning, is much weaker. It might be that the actual reasoning required to do the simplebench questions is somewhat, well, simple.

An interesting thing about the simplebench benchmark, (with questions designed to trick LLMs) is that most of the variance seems to be explained by the LLM's performance on language understanding benchmarks and scientific understanding benchmarks.

One of the interesting things about Simplebench and Livebench is that raw reasoning capabilities don't actually correlate well with the linguistic adversarial robustness needed to do well on Simplebench. Simplebench correlates best with language understanding.

Cats

Inflation compared between countries, where price levels on January 2020 are set at a value of 100 for each country. The black line is what 2% annual growth would look like.

I'd argue that the reduction in home ownership tracks pretty well to house prices outpacing incomes for that age bracket.

Wages and salaries have genuinely been stagnant for the bottom 20%.

While most groceries have gotten a LOT cheaper relative to income, ground beef has actually gotten more expensive over the years. A median household used to be able to buy 28,000 pounds of ground beef with their annual income. Now they can only buy 16,000.

Independents celebrate the holidays less than partisans.

Dashing portrait of Tofu