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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · 8h

Super stoked about Krasznahorkai's Nobel Prize. A beautiful interview with him from a couple years ago: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/a...

László Krasznahorkai interview: 'This society is the result of 10,000 years?'

The Hungarian writer behind the formally experimental Satantango talks punctuation, inspiration and money-motivation to Richard Lea

www.guardian.co.uk

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · 8d

This. Today my coauthors complained that Github does not properly render the math from my @obsidian.md notes. By the time we finished the meeting, Claude Sonnet 4 has built a nifty CLI tool “ghmd” that converts Obsidian markdown to github flavor. Complete with unit tests and pipx installable.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · 10d

When you start your commit message with bigfux: instead of bugfix: you can be sure it was a major bug.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · 17d

The way AI helps human-to-human communications is underrated.

I used to be picky about collaborating on technical projects. Like, "don't send me an email, send me a pull request."

Now I do some of my best work just talking to coauthors. AI transcribes, AI summarizes using the project context.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · 24d

My daughter taught me about www.doesthedogdie.com

DoesTheDogDie.com

Crowdsourced trigger warnings spoilers for movies, tv, books and more.

www.doesthedogdie.com

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · 24d

Great summary of research on AI coding agents.

www.cerbos.dev/blog/product...

The productivity paradox of AI coding assistants

AI coding assistants promise speed, but do they deliver? Explore data, developer insights, and security risks showing why AI feels faster but often slows production. Learn where tools like Cursor and ...

www.cerbos.dev

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · 25d

I have been working with coding AI agents several hours a day in the past couple of months. You get to know their style.

Grok is like Elon Musk. Moving fast and breaking things at 10x speed. Not apologizing either.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Jul 29

For the narrow subset of #econsky people clinging to their Stata and crunching big datasets with @duckdb.org, I have vibe coded a DuckDB extension that reads .dta files.

koren.dev/software/

Give it a spin and report issues! (Thanks, @anthropic.com Claude Code and the Python Pandas implementation.)

-- Load a Stata file as a table
SELECT * FROM read_stata_dta('path/to/your/file.dta');

-- Count observations
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM read_stata_dta('data/survey.dta');

-- Filter and aggregate
SELECT
region,
AVG(income) as avg_income,
COUNT(*) as obs_count
FROM read_stata_dta('data/households.dta')
WHERE age >= 18
GROUP BY region;

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Mar 25

Always excited to hear Elhanan Helpman. If you're in Vienna, come by.

events.ceu.edu/2025-05-07/p...

Public Lecture: Elhanan Helpman

events.ceu.edu

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Mar 25

Mac.

Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Mar 25

Why I love OneDrive, part 78.

My local folder is called

/Users/koren/OneDrive\ -\ Central\ European\ University\ \(CEU\ GmbH\ Hungarian\ Branch\ Office\)/

Luckily, I can symlink.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Mar 14

Good point, this never occurred to me.

1

Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Mar 14

Austrian Airlines is pitching Budapest for me.

I mean, I love the city. But as long as this is how well AI understands us, I feel safe.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 27

I see a lot of scripts where the file name encodes some structure. Like analysis_this.do, analysis_that.do and plot_this.do, plot_that.do

If you have such a clear structure, you are best served by folders. It just as easy to write "src/analysis/whatever.do" as "src/analysis_whatever.do".

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 20

Ceci n’est pas une espresso machine.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 18

Sorry, by internet I mean www. Was profoundly useless before proper search.

3

Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 18

Not knowing what to ask is one of the best use cases of LLMs.

The technology is much better at deciphering what I want than SEO-infested web pages.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 17

To me this seems similar to the early days of the internet. A promising technology with no product. Once the initial bubble bursts, we may yet see fantastic products leveraging the tech.

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · Feb 17

Newsletter: Generative AI is a marketing con perpetuated by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei through a mixture of lies and half-truths carried by a tech media that fails to ask the right questions. Outside of ChatGPT, generative AI companies barely get any traffic at all.

www.wheresyoured.at/longcon/

The Generative AI Con

It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st ...

www.wheresyoured.at

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 17

New level unlocked: typing an email, three letters into a word in the second sentence, get distracted, then go back and try to figure out what words begin with those three letters.

#adhdlife

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 13

Searching for Sugarman was such an awesome movie.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 13

Why did we develop Kezdi.jl and what can you do with it?

Watch my presentation at JuliaCon in Eindhoven. #juliacon #juliasky #econsky

youtu.be/JklbLwgePis?...

docs.koren.dev/Kezdi.jl/dev/

Kezdi.jl: A data analysis package for economists | Koren | JuliaCon 2024

YouTube video by The Julia Programming Language

youtu.be

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 13

Image to text. English to German. Vague text to clean Python code. Legalese to human arguments.

Automating this translation seems both useful and profoundly risky for many white-collar jobs.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 13

Compelling arguments. I have seen the value of LLMs in “translation”, not “creation”.

It is striking how much of a professional’s job, whether lawyer, teacher, software developer, is about translating things from one format to another.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 13

Too what?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBIs...

The Banshees of Inisherin 2022 Barry Keoghan Great Acting

YouTube video by ClassicMovieScenes

www.youtube.com

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 12

The fact that i’ve been listening to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Donovan and John Lennon these past days doesn’t mean I won’t defend capitalism in a degrowth debate. koren.dev/events/2025-...

I like to keep my music out of my science.

Album cover of Donovan’s Gift from a flower to a garden

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 10

Why not just set up a national firewall? Blocking terms like, you know, Tiananmen Square.

Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · Feb 10

1. EXCLUSIVE

Today, the NSA is planning a "Big Delete" of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including "privilege," "bias," and "inclusion," a NSA source tells Popular Information.

The massive purge is creating chaos, taking down "mission-related" work

The NSA's "Big Delete"

Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a "Big Delete" of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including "privilege," "bias," and "inclusion." The "...

popular.info

3

Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · Feb 10

1. EXCLUSIVE

Today, the NSA is planning a "Big Delete" of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including "privilege," "bias," and "inclusion," a NSA source tells Popular Information.

The massive purge is creating chaos, taking down "mission-related" work

The NSA's "Big Delete"

Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a "Big Delete" of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including "privilege," "bias," and "inclusion." The "...

popular.info

1K 6.4K 13K

Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 10

I love how the movie and Chalamet, in particular, get across the “fuck it” attitude of Dylan. Fans don’t like my new music? Fuck them, I don’t owe them anything.

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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · Feb 10

Dylan goes full electric here and his voice is scruffier than usual, but what a great live album!

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