DeLong🖖

No longer posting here. At Subscribe to Buy “Slouching Towards Utopia"

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

What say the remnant denizens of this dumpster fire? Is it time to leave Twitter for good?

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...$1.2 Trillion Magical Rainbow Unicorn Costume...
<https://t.co/qhp4mGYooS>
2026-07-23 2/END

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

A car company by revenue, a rounding error by profit, and a meme by market cap—and with $300,000B of global liquid financial assets, there is an insufficient short-selling kitty to make things consistent:

**Tesla Motors: CHART OF THE DAY**
A $50 Billion Company Wearing a... 1/

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...relative convergence was very real—and something completely unprecedented in the economic history of the world since the start of the industrial revolution...
<https://t.co/kamo5FHCM8>
2026-07-22 3/END

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

An expansion of the world-economic prosperous core countries from 900 million to 1.3 billion and of peripheral as share of core per capita income from 12% to 24% between 1990 and 2023 were absolutely wonderful things to see. But for the past decade, the relative income gap... 1/

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...between core and periphery has not shrunk at all. It is not as bad as the 1820 to 1975 Great Divergence. But we ought to be doing much, much better:

**The Short Summer of Cross-Nation Convergence in Real GDP Per Capita Levels: CHART OF THE DAY**
From 1995 to 2020... 2/

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...< https://t.co/wffzJ2drxT >
2026-07-22 4/END

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

Hormuz closure removed Gulf crude and LNG → emergency stocks were released, pipelines bypassed, and non-OPEC output plugged some of the gap → prices spiked, then partially retreated → but the adjustment happened vai drawdown and rationing, not new durable supply or...

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...Now Been Effectively Closed for 4 1/2 Months: CHART OF THE DAY**
Via Torsten Slok of Apollo, drawing on Bloomberg and MacroBond. If we can trust these numbers, then the situation is truly dire. If we can trust these numbers, and if a lot of oil has not snuck out... 3/

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...of Odysseus: Humanities Tuesday**
As Bret Devereaux says: a remix, not a cover: As Theo Nash says, fusing the Athenian idea of the Sack of Troy as unholy excess with the historical reality of the Late Bronze Dark Age...< https://t.co/BSpoX1EdWN >
2026-07-21 3/END

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

Here we are: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν—ándra moi énnepe, moûsa, polýtropon, hòs mála pollàplánchthē, epeì Troíēs hieròn ptolíethron épersen—about the man whose mind and body goes to many places... 1/

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...sing to me, muse, who was so very greatly forced to wander, after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.
Odysseus’s name does not appear until line 11. Contrast with the Iliad, in which the name Akhileus appears as word five:

**Christopher Nolan's Remix of the Story... 2/

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...model capabilities across frontier labs shrinking by half...
<https://t.co/Ir6kaCk5sr>
2026-07-21 3/END

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...understanding crowd is right, the scale may well be measuring the wrong thing:

**Convergence in LLM Quality & Slowdown in LLM Improvement: CHART OF THE DAY**
From two Epoch-Capability points a month back in 2023 to one every six months today, with the spread of assessed... 2/

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

But are these <https://t.co/4PyqWRrwTG> assessments real numbers that mean anything? And how could we tell? The apparent slowdown in LLM improvement is exactly what you would expect if the LLMs are at base just emulating internet s***posters. But if the compression = true... 1/

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...drive and where they really want to go:

**2026-07-16 SUBSTACK CROSSPOST- NOAH SMITH- Why I Didn't Sign the "We Must Act Now" Statement (Yet)**
Noah' subheadline: "I'd like to know exactly what the actions are"...
< https://t.co/AxG2LgY9dk >
2026-07-16 2/END

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

My view: A deliberately fuzzy AI manifesto looks less like prudence and more like some kind of marketing funnel for one faction’s agenda. But which faction? And for what agenda? I agree with Noah Smith that before we sign up to “steer” AI, we should find out who wants to... 1/

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...things in a very compressed but effective form...
<https://t.co/64WSnpepsL>
2026-07-16 3/END

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

“AI” truly is potentially poised to liberate us from dehumanizing work—unless the market makes that potential liberation into a dystopian catastrophe for human equity. What I thought back in 2018 the big issues were going to be, with the real danger being not that AI takes... 1/

[DeLong🖖 @delong]

...the jobs, but that it takes the wrong ones for the wrong reasons:

**Automation & Labor & Inclusive AI- HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES**
From 2018: "The Future of Work: Technology & Policy for a Diverse Human Future". I have always been proud of this, as saying the important... 2/