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economeager.bsky.social
Rafe Meager (they/them)
@economeager.bsky.social
17K followers 2.6K following 10K posts
Aspiring wastrel, applied econometrician. At http://rachaelmeager.com for bayes, dev econ and meta science. Also at http://rottenandgood.substack.com for writing, art, death and emotions. Gay academic nonbinary weirdo, cursed to be serious in life.
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economeager.bsky.social
i commend this essay to all of your attention
2. We all have a part to play in building the future we want. No single person can deal with this situation. I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants. It might not feel that way but that’s because psychopaths have a structural advantage: normal people aren’t obsessed with climbing hierarchies and dominating others. Look around you. The world runs on kindness and empathy. Hardly anything in our daily life would function at all if complete assholes were anything more than a tiny minority of the population. It actually takes a vast machinery to suppress this fact, and to reward evil behaviour.
November 10, 2025 at 12:57 PM
economeager.bsky.social
ok quite a lot going on here

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando...
I screenshotted the second paragraph of the wiki entry i linked to, and i highlighted the sentence: "The stage is the entire world, plus a trip to the Moon. "
November 10, 2025 at 2:03 AM
economeager.bsky.social
i made this one for @lastpositivist.bsky.social
zohran sign but instead of zohran for NYC it says blood for the blood god
November 9, 2025 at 12:28 AM
economeager.bsky.social
Check out my cool seaweed shirt and underwhelmed affect. (Enthusiasm plus this shirt would be too much and honestly I’m glad for the rest.)
I also have pink hair. The shirt is indescribably chaotic and some would say you’re better off not having seen it.
November 8, 2025 at 2:17 PM
economeager.bsky.social
it's friday at last
Mr spock is sobbing, the subtitles say [SOBBING MATHEMATICALLY]
November 7, 2025 at 9:15 AM
economeager.bsky.social
Christ II: The Ascension
opening paragraphs of the wiki page for Cynewulf, whose works include: The Fates of the Apostles, Juliana, Elene, and Christ II (also referred to as The Ascension).
November 4, 2025 at 12:26 AM
economeager.bsky.social
dominos meme starts with "humanities tenure track jobs don't pay well" and goes to "project 2025"
November 3, 2025 at 10:40 AM
economeager.bsky.social
This is one of the best books I have read in the last 5 years. I read it 2 years ago and it has not left my thoughts. Do yourself a favour and get it if you have any interest in art, or any kind of complex relationship to the demands of the world.

www.sternberg-press.com/product/tell...
Martin Herbert Tell Them I Said No This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms. A large part of the artist’s role in today’s professionalized art system is being present. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity. By illuminating these motives, Tell Them I Said No offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge. Essays on Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Trisha Donnelly, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Charlotte Posenenske, and Albert York. Martin Herbert is a writer and critic living in Berlin. He is associate editor of ArtReview and writes for international art journals. Previous books include The Uncertainty Principle (2014) and Mark Wallinger (2011).
October 26, 2025 at 12:23 AM
economeager.bsky.social
I then asked it to tell me such outside of the weak instruments literature. the results were now comical. some real howlers in here.
This list contains the LATE 1994 paper again as well as several very obvious hallucinations; Elie Tamer will be surprised to know he apparently wrote a paper called "Tanks for the Memories" in 2010 and Chernozhukov and Hong are going to be interested to have published a paper evidently partially in spanish
October 18, 2025 at 7:09 AM
economeager.bsky.social
Read the alt text for this list if you are not sure you can immediately see errors here
quite a few issues right off the bat here, most obviously the list includes the LATE paper from 1994 is somehow in here, also conflation of Partial Id with Weak Id; have not checked each reference is real but i am pretty sure the Andews et al 2019 paper is a pure hallucination and the list is missing Andrews and Mikusheva's work in general
October 18, 2025 at 7:05 AM
economeager.bsky.social
apnews.com/article/aust...
The first error that jumped out at him wrongly stated that Lisa Burton Crawford, a Sydney University professor of public and constitutional law, had written a nonexistent book with a title suggesting it was outside her field of expertise. “I instantaneously knew it was either hallucinated by AI or the world’s best kept secret because I’d never heard of the book and it sounded preposterous,” Rudge said. Work by his academic colleagues had been used as “tokens of legitimacy,” cited by the report’s authors but not read, Rudge said, addding that he considered misquoting a judge was a more serious error in a report that was effectively an audit of the department’s legal compliance. “They’ve totally misquoted a court case then made up a quotation from a judge and I thought, well hang on: that’s actually a bit bigger than academics’ egos. That’s about misstating the law to the Australian government in a report that they rely on. So I thought it was important to stand up for diligence,” Rudge said.
October 8, 2025 at 4:58 AM
economeager.bsky.social
the sky in sydney last night was un fucking believable
the pale grey clouds drag over the rooftops, obscuring the huge bright moon the grey-black clouds against the even blacker sky are flat but almost tremble, irradiated a dome of clouds surrounds the earth obscuring the bright full moon
October 8, 2025 at 3:49 AM
economeager.bsky.social
jumpscare on instagram @dandekadt.bsky.social
some instagram account has posted a screenshot of dan's post that says "My wife and I never talk baby talk to our kid. We enforce academic seminar norms and jargon. My child isnt even 2 yet and can interrupt presenters on the first slide. Adults at family gatherings are shocked when my child asks a questino that turns out to be more of a comment." it has THIRTY SIX THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIVE LIKES
October 7, 2025 at 9:12 AM
economeager.bsky.social
Today let us read Baydin et al (2018) Automatic Differentiation in Machine Learning: A Survey

arxiv.org/pdf/1502.05767
I have screenshotted the first three paragraphs of the introduction. It reads: Methods for the computation of derivatives in computer programs can be classified into four categories: (1) manually working out derivatives and coding them; (2) numerical differentiation using finite difference approximations; (3) symbolic differentiation using expression manipulation in computer algebra systems such as Mathematica, Maxima, and Maple; and (4) automatic differentiation, also called algorithmic differentiation, which is the subject matter of this paper. Conventionally, many methods in machine learning have required the evaluation of derivatives and most of the traditional learning algorithms have relied on the computation of gradients and Hessians of an objective function (Sra et al., 2011). When introducing new models, machine learning researchers have spent considerable effort on the manual derivation of analytical derivatives to subsequently plug these into standard optimization procedures such as L-BFGS (Zhu et al., 1997) or stochastic gradient descent (Bottou, 1998). Manual differentiation is time consuming and prone to error. Of the other alternatives, numerical differentiation is simple to implement but can be highly inaccurate due to round-off and truncation errors (Jerrell, 1997); more importantly, it scales poorly for gradients, rendering it inappropriate for machine learning where gradients with respect to millions of parameters are commonly needed. Symbolic differentiation addresses the weaknesses of both the manual and numerical methods, but often results in complex and cryptic expressions plagued with the problem of “expression swell” (Corliss, 1988). Furthermore, manual and symbolic methods require models to be defined as closed-form expressions, ruling out or severely limiting algorithmic control flow and expressivity. We are concerned with the powerful fourth technique, automatic differentiation (AD). AD performs a non-standard interpretation of a given c…
September 29, 2025 at 8:19 AM
economeager.bsky.social
but it was fun when i thought for a minute that this might be a canon event
SPICE WORLD: the spice girls movie
September 26, 2025 at 9:47 AM
economeager.bsky.social
Spring sky in Australia
Blue sky with very thin layer of pale white clouds brushed across it. Eucalyptus tree tops in the foreground.
September 18, 2025 at 3:53 AM
economeager.bsky.social
critique this perfect angel!!! no
September 10, 2025 at 1:04 PM
economeager.bsky.social
possibly the greatest line in cinema of all time
a still from park chan-wook's Lady Vengeance. two women are lying in adjacent hospital beds, pre or post surgery. one looks at the camera and says, per the subtitles, "Then this bitch suddenly says she'll give me one of her kidneys."
September 8, 2025 at 12:13 PM
economeager.bsky.social
so stupid to think you can out-do t-chal on this anyway
September 4, 2025 at 1:54 PM
economeager.bsky.social
Another very decent haul, I did not know Goethe wrote erotic poems
Pile of books, titles on spines: Tolerance is a wasteland, learning to talk, theorem (Pasolini), vertigo (sebald), our lady of the flowers, Geothe erotic poems, Faust part 1, reformation (macculloch), understanding a photograph, day off, look back, forms for a public address, a small book by bora chung is on top and you can’t see the title (it’s called Grocery List)
August 17, 2025 at 12:32 AM
economeager.bsky.social
as a trans person, i am no fan of gavin newsome. but as a poster? i have to salute him and his entire press office
Carl DeMaio tweeted "I am looking forward to Nov 4 when California voters hand Newsome a humiliating defeat..." and Newsome's press office QTed with "You won't be "handing" us anything Carl" with a screenshot of a headline: "Ex-Councilman accused of masturbating in City Hall", which is, indeed, about Carl.
August 15, 2025 at 8:16 AM
economeager.bsky.social
Exceptional high low haul today
Pile of books: The house of hunger, monkey king makes havoc in heaven, macunaima, stoner, madk 2 and 3, blue lard, goodnight punpun, and the passion of gengoroh tagame
August 9, 2025 at 6:45 AM
economeager.bsky.social
Never seen a sign that was more in need of « listen up idiots » pre-appended to it
The sign over the manga section at the bookstore says « some Manga may contain mature themes »
August 9, 2025 at 5:45 AM
economeager.bsky.social
I get it now. This was about increasing the bs in blueberry
A gpt dev I guess tweeted a graphic that showed gpt 4 as a small blue dot and 5 as a large blue dot
August 8, 2025 at 3:19 AM
economeager.bsky.social
I guess you always write the essay you most need to read it’s just temporally displaced sometiems
The past is a canon we are all entangled with. Whether we know it or not, our combined human history is the reference we all share, and it is emotionally complex beyond any corpus of texts imaginable. Of course structural powers and systemic forces matter, of course political systems and expediencies matter, but power is concentrated in individuals, and individuals have emotional histories. 
August 3, 2025 at 4:57 AM