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alex williams

@atwilliams.bsky.social
9.9K followers 2.5K following 8K posts

macroeconomist and computer user at www.common-wealth.org, founder at www.continuousvariation.com, fellow at stanford, partisan of the republic of letters, "in this horrible age of abuse and decay / its good to know somebody's looking ok"

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Reposted by alex williams
Ruo Shui @ruoshuiresearch.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Counterfactual line without tariffs (blue dashed line)
A line chart titled "Tariffs Raised Consumer Goods Price Inflation" showing consumer price inflation percentage from January 2022 to early 2026.

Inflation peaked above 9% in mid-2022, steadily dropped below 0% by 2024, and began diverging in early 2025.   

Actual Line (Red Solid Line): Rises back above 0% in 2025, reaching around 2% by early 2026.   

Counterfactual Line without Tariffs (Blue Dashed Line): Drops below 0% in early 2025 and remains negative through early 2026.   

Shaded Area: Highlights the gap between actual inflation and counterfactual inflation without tariffs.   

Sources & Notes: Cites data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, USITC, and BEA. Notes clarify that the solid line represents the 12-month change in prices across 67 non-oil goods categories, and the dashed line subtracts estimated tariff contributions.
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Reposted by alex williams
Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 17h
We need to incept the idea of Trump renaming the GOP to the Trump Party, and by “incept” I mean have a reporter mention it once within his earshot and he’ll become obsessed with it and not let it go
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 3h
sometimes feels like the computer is like if they made a whole country out of consumer culture
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 6h
right, i completely buy supply chain crowding out stories, but thats not usually what "crowding out" is about in macro
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 18h
Real
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 19h
it's bigger than before
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
feel like this is probably too weird but we'll find out
alarming teapot
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
bigger
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
not to defend data centers, but, this is what crowd out looks like:
crowd out
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
arent the absolute values being spent on data center construction like, tiny by the scale of other construction investment? isnt this just a chart of interest rate sensitivity across sectors?
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Reposted by alex williams
Grace @gracekind.net · 07/10/2026
Expect to see a lot more things like this
Hacker news comment: 

jboggan 12 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [-] I went back to that Fable chat and showed it this new preprint. It coded up the new constructive algorithm and ran it against the existing test suite, that looks good at least.
It has been super helpful in delineating where the crucial concept came from. The proof is rather simple as graph theory proofs go, but it does seem to use some constructions that would only seem obvious if you had serious physics experience with partition function and calculating energy states that cancel out. *It's not a wholly alien bolt from the heavens, but I can also see how there hasn't been a human being with the broad theoretical physics knowledge combined with the deep graph theory experience in planar graphs to come up with this idea.* (emphasis mine) I don't know, I'm looking for precedents of this formulation and some old papers of Penrose counting the number of edge colorings of this same graph type are coming up, the line of argument at least rhymes.
But I agree with the thought that this sort of progress should not be siloed inside those companies. I propose a tax so that every slop cannon AI video pays for another hour of compute time for advancing mathematics.
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Reposted by alex williams
LRB Bookshop @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk · 07/10/2026
just remembered that in the underrated cypress hill song "cock the hammer", there's a bit where sen dog sings "hear me growl, grr, howl / I've got night vision like a wise old owl". can anyone think of other cypress hill lyrics which could also appear in julia donaldson books?
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JW Mason @jwmason.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Now asset owners typically have a target for the duration of their portfolio. If you hold a bunch of mortgages and rates rise, your duration goes up. How do get it back where you wanted it? By selling long bonds. Which causes rates to rise more. Thus the “vicious loop” of the Alphaville headline.
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
REAL
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
well, hitchhikers guide....
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
and here i always said i wanted to be the paul samuelson of cultural studies, replace thick description with a bunch of heuristic tricks that later students take as license to not read the original books,
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
theyre all set to gorilla mode (parallelizes everything then runs every computation in sequence in parallel one gorillion times)
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
"le chonk" is fun branding for a model, thank you, its not a guy
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
" izz'ere ever! "
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
i think the right bible-level joke about AI right now involves connecting "help peer" and "help meet"
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Matthew Haugen @mjhaugen.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Here in Birmingham, our electricity bills are 41% higher than Huntsville's because we have an awful investor-owned utility (that has the state government in their pocket) and Huntsville has public power www.al.com/news/birming...
al.com
Comeback Town: Birmingham residential electric bills are 41% higher than Huntsville’s
Birmingham cannot change its electric utility overnight. But Alabama can change the way that utility is regulated.
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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 05/10/2026
I don't know who needs to hear this, but the autonomous vehicle developers who most vocally argued that society must accept a certain number of deaths to enjoy the technology's safety benefits (Tesla & Uber ATG) were the only ones who killed people and never actually delivered on their promises
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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
…. the late Bruno Latour remarked that “Brazil is today what Spain was in 1936, during the civil war: it is where everything that will be important in the next decades is visible.” read our litlte magazine phenomenal world in English and Portuguese: phenomenalworld.org/interviews/b...
phenomenalworld.org
Brazil and the World System
An interview with Brazil's Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
on one level, Real, on another level, Fake, on a third level, Real, on a fourth, Fake, on a
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
reading your posts
ed miliband
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
your next AI agent may be a coworker
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Reposted by alex williams
Soph Warnes @thatsoph.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Something just clicked in my brain: modern life really requires consumers to be more astute and thoughtful about what they consume than ever before. And they are in no way prepared to do this both in terms of education and also in terms of putting in the effort to do so
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 03/10/2026
I have absolutely wondered about this. Amazing.
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Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
so as one would expect I really liked this @leifw.bsky.social essay on AI and "anthropomorphizing" but I also have a couple questions www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | These Things Are Computers. Stop Talking About Them Like They’re Human.
If we want to figure out the proper way to control A.I. models, we need to recognize what they really are.
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
i think the right metaphor for using AI in stuff is it's like a blank scrabble tile
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
the prose is great, its getting people to follow the model through the prose thats tough ime
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
yeah i think Mind is a Place and not a Kind
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
all fictional characters /act/ in the real world! how else could they get to your tv??
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
claude is a fictional character
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
AI is conscious like sherlock holmes is conscious: if he wasnt, he wouldnt be able to solve the mysteries, but when you put down the book there isn't a real guy there
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Catherine Winters @catherinewinters.com · 03/10/2026
The algorithm sure knows me.
Screenshot from Instagram of a video from the bridge of a ship on the high seas: fire emoji! 2004 Built Bulk Carrier Liberia Flag RINA Class For Sale
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Erika McEntarfer @erikamcentarfer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Good on Michael Lewis for giving the DOGE story the journalistic-thriller treatment it deserves. Two events that fundamentally shook my sense of this country's stability were January 6th, 2021, and the six months I spent dealing with DOGE.
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Sarah Burris @sarahburris.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Y'all I just caught the Kennedy Center claiming it isn't closing while telling vendors it's closing and now they're selling all of their Steinway pianos www.alternet.org/alternet-exc...
alternet.org
Kennedy Center moves to sell all of its Steinway pianos
Photos show piano movers rolling massive Steinway grand pianos through the red-carpeted halls of the Kennedy Center this week.
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
user was claude in this post
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
thats what id do, i'd freak them out and say "what if none of this stuff is actually in space, or what if all this stuff is in so many more dimensions than the ones you know how to see, that would be craaaazy right"
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
it would be fun to become an education crank about how they need to teach Kant in high school
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
like get a load of these
two cups and saucer
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
looking
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
pachinko machine called The Dollar
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
"trying to see something real quick"
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
"working on something"
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Minor Mobius @minormobius.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
She says she knows a place and brings you to play minesweeper on this
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
bsky.app/profile/atwi...
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Metropolitan Abundance Project @metroabundance.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
New research from @pewresearch.org: a 20% rent drop (what Austin and Minneapolis achieved through zoning reform) would reduce poverty by up to 26% and child poverty by up to 38%. Housing supply is an anti-poverty policy. www.pew.org/en/research-...
pew.org
The Housing Shortage Is a Major Driver of Poverty
Housing costs are usually the largest item in a household’s budget and can determine a family’s financial stability.
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