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Latest — 08 May 2025

Internet Search is Not a Naive Information Retrieval Problem

"During RL training, we employ a curriculum-based rollout strategy that incrementally degrades the quality of generated documents, progressively eliciting the model’s reasoning ability by exposing it to increasingly challenging retrieval scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ZEROSEARCH effectively incentivizes the search capabilities of LLMs using a 3B LLM as

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In Conversation with Glenn Frankel: Principles, Ethics, and the Practice of Journalism

On February 5th, 2007, Lisa Nowak, a NASA astronaut, was arrested on the charge of attempted kidnapping. Nowak had driven 900 miles, from Houston to Orlando, to confront and kidnap her ex-boyfriend’s new love interest. Three days later, when I met Mr. Frankel for the interview, the story was

Cell Mates: Extracting Useful Information From Tables for LLMs

We seem to have cracked the art of distilling information in words and images using large machine learning models. But our ability to exploit useful information in tabular data using large models is mostly missing. The upshot is that LLMs don't largely encode the knowledge from these tabular

Advertising is Undersupplied

"[I]f you think about what percent of GDP is advertising today, I would expect that that percent will grow." https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-about-ai-and-the-evolution-of-social-media/ Why is advertising undersupplied? Producers bear the cost of figuring out who to show an ad to and what to show them. The

A Textbook Paradox: The Puzzle of Price Dispersion in E-Books

The same e-book sells at very different prices on different platforms. For instance, the e-book version of The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited sells at $25.57 on Amazon and $39.99 on Google. (You can also buy a DRM-Free version for $39.99 on CUP). We can&

Scan to Save: Arbitrage Between Paper and Digital

Remember when e‑books were supposed to undercut paper editions—no printing, warehousing, shipping, or returns to pay for? Fast‑forward ten years, and you’ll often pay more for a DRM‑locked Kindle file than for a used paperback plus scanning. Case in point: * The Supreme Court and the

Breaking the Monotony: Calibrating Without Preserving Monotonicity

Calibration refers to how well the predicted probabilities of an event match the actual frequencies of that event occurring. For instance, when a calibrated model predicts that an event has a 20% probability of occurring, that event occurs 20% of the time. The intuition extends to continuous values. When a

Uncorrelated Tariffs

We know the means look a little off (not to say anything about the ends): The EU, like the United States, has generally low tariffs; the average tariff it charges on US goods is less than 3 percent. So where does this 39 percent number come from? I have no

(Don't) Feed the Robots

"My site [with] modest traffic (~1,000 visitors per day) went from serving ~1GB/hr (to tons of AI crawlers!) to ~50MB/hr in traffic" Can you tell what was the point where I 1. Manually blocked a few AI crawlers 2. Moved my nameserver to Cloudflare plus

The GitHub Sampler

GitHub is the world's largest developer platform, making it a compelling place to build developer tools and study software development. However, with over half a billion repositories and an API that limits responses to a thousand results, it feels nigh impossible to answer even simple questions like, "