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Nicholas Emery-Xu

@nicholaskemery.bsky.social
459 followers 1K following 397 posts

Economics Ph.D candidate @UCLA | economics of computing and AI | industrial organization, innovation, political economy | PEPFAR fanatic nicholasemeryxu.com

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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 23h
In 2024 45.8% of EA survey respondents were vegan or vegetarian. If the community made it more of a priority to root out sexism, I'm sure it could be done! forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z4Wxd2...
forum.effectivealtruism.org
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Restoring USAID better than before and then putting the perpetrators in prison for life are my top 2 issues
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
It will be very interesting to see how the cyber offense-defense scales as models get better at finding exploits.
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Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) @lizthegrey.com · 20/08/2026
I have gone from "this is a sham and a bubble" to "I am terrified two companies control this"
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Very cool new paper from researchers at @csail.mit.edu : "As artificial intelligence’s capabilities improve, it is increasingly viewed as a general scientific method. But how true are these claims?"
arxiv.org
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
It is unironically a good thing when animal-derived products rise in price
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
When writing a paper on safety-performance tradeoffs in tech races in 2022-2023, my coauthors and I were careful to show that the economic forces existed in prior races (e.g. nuclear) and *might possibly* apply to future AI races to ensure that audiences didn't deem our work wild speculation.
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Thorne 🌸 @ens0.me · 10/09/2026
me, Sept 2025: AI is cool and useful, though we've probably gotten a lot of the low-hanging fruit wins already and are still a ways off from a takeoff. progress might slow down for awhile! me, Sept 2026: buckle up, buckaroos!!
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
-Is it ethical to use open weight LLMs (not paying rents to firms training on pirated data)? -Is it ethical to use TimeCapsuleLLM (all training data in public domain)?
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Seems like surprisingly long AGI timelines for someone at OAI!
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
I want to write a blog so bad but I know it’s not a good use of my time with the job market looming😞
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
There’s some empirical evidence of this “do more but poorly” in coding, at least according to this convenience sample: www.swe-chat.com
swe-chat.com
SWE-chat: Coding Agent Interactions From Real Users in the Wild
The first large-scale dataset of real coding agent sessions collected from human users in the wild. 6,000+ sessions, 63,000+ prompts, 355,000+ tool calls.
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
The fact that Tesla went out of their way to use vegan leather in all of their cars is strong evidence that Musk once cared about something good
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
ban animal agriculture in developed countries
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Alex Coad @coad.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
📢📢 Research Policy 12th online conference for Early Career Researchers! Fri 25th September 2026, 2-4pm (UK time) Submit a 3 page abstract by Sun 23rd August Link for submitting: forms.gle/Xu7oXsSV2zYX... Link to RP page: www.sciencedirect.com/journal/rese... #EconSky
Research Policy 12th online conference for Early Career Researchers!
Fri 25th September 2026, 2-4pm (UK time)
Submit a 3 page abstract by Sun 23rd August
Link for submitting: 
https://forms.gle/Xu7oXsSV2zYXib2EA
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ArXiv Paperboy (Econ.GN + Econ.TH) @arxivecongnbot.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
arXiv📈🤖 AI Adoption in S&P 500 Firms By Yu, Fleming, Hampton et al
The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by large enterprises is an important potential source of aggregate productivity improvement and labor market impact. We study AI adoption of S&P 500 firms over the period 2016 to 2025, estimating adoption at the enterprise level. While generative AI tools are useful for personal and professional applications, our focus is on the deep integration of AI in the business processes of large enterprises which are bellwethers for firm adoption more broadly. We develop a novel measure to assess deep AI adoption (and distinguish it from AI hype) that is based on SEC 10-K filings, where laws and regulations ``prohibit companies from making materially false or misleading statements." In 2025, 11% of S&P 500 enterprises had AI deeply integrated into their business processes, and a further 10% were using AI in the production of goods and delivery of services. AI adoption has more than quadrupled from 5% in 2022 with slowly accelerating adoption among non-technology firms but very aggressive adoption in the technology sector which accounts for two-thirds of deeply integrated enterprise adoption. Firm profitability shows a "J-curve" as firms move from no adoption to deep adoption, but we observe no differences in capex or productivity. Among technology firms, but not others, AI adoption is higher for firms with more employees and higher values of Tobin's q.
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
This is so very very cool, and an example of the ITN (importance, tractability, neglectedness) framework at its best!
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
It's quite coincidental that both Steven Pinker and Benedict Anderson consider a major feature of the international system (nationalism and the decline of war, resp.) a causal effect of the invention of the modern novel.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 27/06/2026
I know it's hard to keep a sense of proportion, but between his wars, decimating USAID, rolling back pollution restrictions, repealing climate policies, & suppressing vaccine programs, Trump is reaching genocide-level body counts. It's almost too much horror to take in.
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Atheendar Venkataramani @atheendar.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
This is perhaps the most impressive #medical study I have seen in years: www.nature.com/articles/s41... It will save a lot of lives.
nature.com
An ECG biomarker for sudden cardiac death discovered with deep learning - Nature
A deep-learning model trained on electrocardiogram (ECG) waveforms identifies an easily visible biomarker that predicts sudden cardiac death more accurately than the current clinical state of the art.
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
PEPFAR rates of undocumented expenses are between 0 and 2% of funding: pepfarreport.org/pepfar-repor...
pepfarreport.org
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Joshua Goodman @joshua-goodman.com · 22/06/2026
I'm really disappointed that folks are still on X.
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Surprisingly Angelenos seem better about this: the median is probably 4 stars, so the scale is effectively over the [4.0,4.1,…,5.0] interval
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Politicians who support health aid cuts deserve to lose elections
Nancy Mace tweet “not our problem” in response to article about rising AIDS rates after Trump cuts. She subsequently lost the gubernatorial primary
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Politicians who cut foreign aid deserve to lose power
bbc.com
Keir Starmer cuts aid to fund increase in defence spending
The PM will head to Washington a day after announcing military budgets would rise to 2.5% of national income by 2027.
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
Doubt Elon would have destroyed USAID without his own site and YouTube/Joe Rogan feeding him conspiracy theories
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Wild to see AI x-risk enter mainstream political economy research: "The results show that AGI risk depends not only on technical considerations, but also on market structure, resource constraints, and institutions that shape the equilibrium allocation between speed and safety."
nber.org
The AGI Race and Existential Risk
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...
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The Verge @theverge.com · 12/06/2026
While his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully. Read more: www.theverge.com/tech/949259/...
Verge headline: The world's first trillionaire is a killer
by TC Sottek

Image of Elon Musk doing a "fascist salute" in the form of an oil painting on a wall
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Jeff Kaufman @jefftk.com · 05/06/2026
I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. We're running the world's largest metagenomic biosurveillance network and we're looking for people who know how to build and scale processing systems and infra. No bio background needed!
jefftk.com
SecureBio Detection is Hiring Software Engineers
I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. As AI systems become increasingly capable substitutes for expert human biologist expertise, the risk that someone coul...
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
I had a great time presenting my work on cloud computing adoption at the Applied IO workshop at the #bsebarcelona Summer Forum! Glad to get and share feedback with a great group of scholars. #bseforum
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Some random cloud computing stylized facts: -From 2016-2019, 98% of firms used a datacenter in the same region (US vs EU) in which they had their headquarters (Demirer et al. 2025), and firms rarely switch within region, even when a new datacenter opens nearby
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Dr. Katharine Dickson @metaomicsnerd.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Monthly check-in: I am still on the hunt for the right climate policy and regulatory role. I’m a Ph.D. microbial ecologist specializing in biogenic methane, agricultural climate policy, and complex systems mapping.
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
One of the most terrifying facts is that these two, uh, stable, level-headed men control ~90% of the world’s nuclear weapons
Extremely stable geniuses Putin and Trump chatting
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
It's wild that my M3 pro mobile chip runs 4-5x faster serially than my university's HPC Intel Xeon Gold processors. Moore's Law continues to be incredible.
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
I just found 2 incredibly cool datasets this week but won't be able to seriously dig into either for like ~6 months at least🥲
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Golden Gate Claude seems like eons ago
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
This will be in the NielsenIQ data soon. DiD design for marketing researchers!
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
I’m even more excited for lab grown meat to annihilate the animal agriculture industry than I am renewables to destroy the fossil fuel industry
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Jack Fitzgerald @jackfitzgerald.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Fresh preprint! Using Dutch administrative data, I show that businesses who respond to business surveys are typically unrepresentative, and that this unrepresentativeness is driven by which businesses are contacted for those surveys. 1/ doi.org/10.31235/osf...
Paper title and abstract.
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Sherry w/ a whY @justiceforall.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
#EarthDay #EarthDay2026 🌍
Screenshot from twitter

Peter Kalmus
@ClimateHuman
If we ended industrial animal agriculture, there'd suddenly be more than enough food for everyone, we'd essentially end animal cruelty, no one would die, and we'd take a huge bite out of the climate and ecological emergency.
We could do this basically overnight.
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Playing tit-for-tat when political parties defect from democracy in a repeated PD is good
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Claude Mythos and this result have updated me further in the direction of LLMs being inventive. Genuinely surprised by both!
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
How will LLMs impact economics research output? I have 2 main predictions. 1) I predict structural economics papers will become more prevalent relative to reduced form empirical and theory papers as a result of LLMs.
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Anna Gifty @itsafronomics.blacksky.app · 14/04/2026
lol I have a hot take and that is way too many people have low data literacy. Reading and understanding words is just as important as reading and understanding numbers.
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Opinion writers should be required to bet on their beliefs
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
As the Protestant population has declined in the West, I'm surprised we haven't seen more denominational mergers.
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quasisocial 🏴 @quasisocial.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
The consequences of mainstream EA are pretty much the opposite of eugenics -- resources being given to improve the lives of poor populations in colonized countries -- but the movement does unfortunately have a racism problem due to its association w rationalism (which has a huge racism problem)
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
This is, by far, the primary reason to get off of Twitter
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Finished reading Meat by @brucefriedrich.bsky.social yesterday. A great read about the future of cultivated and plant based meats. Given the optimism of cultivated meat scientists, it's made me a lot more optimistic that they will reach price parity with animal meats sooner than I had expected.
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Nicholas Emery-Xu @nicholaskemery.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
This book got me to go vegan 6 years ago!
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