There was a sad moment last week during the collapse of Frontier Math. Epoch AI had created this new benchmark to assess claims that the latest crop of AI models reason just like mathematicians with Ph.D.s who work on the research frontier.

Over the weekend, I had a chance to get to know Apollo Robbins. If you don’t recognize the name, Apollo came to public attention when he pickpocketed members of Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service detail.

To protect a hard-earned reputation for objectivity, Nobel laureates in economics usually refrain from making public policy recommendations on the basis of personal values or political beliefs. We comment in public only when logic and evidence show that some proposal is unambiguously worse than a feasible alternative. Donald Trump embraces so many harmful policies that there wasn’t space to list them all in the letter that a group of us released today.

In a previous post, I wrote that Anaconda got in my way when I was trying to learn Python. After I wrote that, I tried to recall the specifics. What was it that I started doing with the official Python tools that I didn’t do with Anaconda? Mostly, I broke the rules and made a mess.

If you teach a course that requires Python, you’ve encountered students on macOS who are trapped by Anaconda. Typically, they were told to install Anaconda in a first course on Python or data analytics. After that course is over, they discover that they can’t get an official version of Python to run.

Many of these students have not used the command line. Many do not understand the difference between a text editor and a word processor. If they ask ChatGPT for help, it responds with instructions that they do not understand and that wouldn’t work anyway. In my experience, most give up.

This post gives them a simple way to recover the ability to run an official version of Python. It requires neither commands from the terminal nor edits to files. All that’s required is to drag and drop a file.