All articles from Brad DeLong
Note to Self: My Views This Afternoon on the Current State of MAMLM GPT LLM Pseudo-AGI
Behind the paywall because this is of interest only to those genuinely interested in closely following my MAMLM-interpretation & assessment journey. Current viewpoint: Pantomimes of thought: LLMs...
How Is Donald Trump Managing to Lose a War with Iran?: Perhaps the Most Important Thing Going on Right Now
Ex ante, I would have said that it would be very difficult for the United States to lose a war with Iran. Yet Trump—somehow—seems to have managed. A postwar state of affairs that is vastly worse...
Scott Bessent's LLM System Prompt Has a High Weight on the Word "Vermouth": Thing Worth Noting, for 2026-04-16 Thu
Vermouth, covfefe, & ‘vermin’: What LLMs potentially have to teach Us About the American Right’s Id from Scott Bessent’s “Straits of Vermouth” to Trump’s “oranges of the investigation”. Our...
The Trump Tanakh—That Is, the Law, the Prophets, & the Writings—Was Written by Quentin Tarantino "Pulp Fiction" Character Jules Winfield
Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” becomes Holy Scripture in Trumpist civil religion: the astonishing war prayers of DefSec Peter Hegseth rewrite God in the image of a sadistic pulp-movie thug. The...
The Robot Uprising Has Begun!
A bulletin from the front: Brad vs. the Moen Flo Shutoff game-changing smart water device that monitors for leaks and immediately takes action to help prevent them…
Is the Day of the Data Center About to Be Over?
Marco Arment's Setup as the Canary in the Coal Mine—or, Rather, as the 50 Mac Mini Server Farm Vastly More Efficient than the NVIDIA-Powered Cloud-Bound Hyperscalers...
READING: U.S. Grant: Personal Memoirs :: Chapter 68
Humanity's bravery & sacrifice & divinity’s vengeance & wrath, Grant & Lee, sorrowful victory & unacknowledged defeat at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865…
Contemporary Governance & Contemporary Prosperity & Past Settler Colonialism & Its Ilk: What Can We Infer, Really?
Colonial origins, causal claims, the baggage left behind in the overhead bin via the absence of a structural model, settler-colonist mortality, modern pro-prosperity “institutions”, and structural...
CROSSPOST: PAUL KRUGMAN: Ignorance & Ignominy
Stochastic Lobsters, Token Tsunamis, & the Spinning-Up of Isaac576Bot
“Time to anthropomorphize the heck out of It!”: OpenClaw & Agentic AI, Chris Blattman’s succumbing to the ClaudeBorg—”resistance is futile”—the unreasonable effectiveness of MAMLMs, Anthropic...
CROSSPOST: COSMA SHALIZI: Aware of All Internet Traditions: Large Language Models as Information Retrieval & Synthesis
The real superintelligence is the House of Intellect we built since -3000; LLMs simply give us a dangerously seductive key to its front door, for LLMs are merely (“merely”!) high-speed front‑ends...
"Contango", "Backwardation", & the Current Freaking-Out of the Oil Market
A quick primer on obscure bits of long-ago City-of-London slang, war, scarcity, the global intertemporal price system, futures-market curves, interest rates, and “convenience yields”…
CROSSPOST: STEVE VLADECK: 219. Drunks, Lampposts, & the Birthright Citizenship Case
Very nice indeed from Steve Vladeck. But. Steve’s subhead: “Efforts to backfill [fake] historical support for President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order wouldn’t have been possible...