The Bitter Lesson: The history of reinforcement learning
I've been trying to understand how machine learning actually works. Not use it, understand it, down to the ifs and loops. How does a program built out of plain conditionals get better on its own? So l...
13 Juni 1h
The Pre-Training Wall and the Treadmill After It
I've been confusing Don with frontier-lab links late at night for a bit. Ilya Sutskever told a NeurIPS audience that pre-training as we know it would unquestionably end. There's only one internet, and...
9 Maj 56min
Story: The Aging Programmer
Kate Gregory has been writing C++ for over forty years. Books, keynotes, a consulting firm she built from the ground up. At sixty-three, she's one of the most experienced programmers alive. She survey...
2 Apr 41min
From Hacker News to TikTok - How Algorithms Learned to Hook Us
Corey told me about his AI cat reel problem. He found these AI-genearted cat videos hilarious. Who makes these? He kept sending them to his wife. Then he tried to stop watching and he couldn't. So I w...
2 Mars 41min
Notes: The Universal Paperclip Clicker
Multiple VS Code windows. "Agent stopping" in a robot voice. A laptop stand on the treadmill so Claude can keep working while I run. The Big Rich sitting unread by the fireplace while I check if the m...
4 Feb 11min
Story: Inside Early Google - Race Conditions, Java Pain, and the Birth of AdWords
Ron Garret left JPL for a 100-person startup he'd just discovered on Usenet. Four a.m. alarms. Burbank to San Jose on Southwest. A rented room in Susan Wojcicki's house. He expected the search engine ...
2 Jan 37min
Story: The Bug He Couldn't Name - A 15-Year Fight Inside One Developer's Mind
Imagine facing a problem you can't name, something that feels bigger than any bug you've ever had to fix. How do you debug your own mind when you don't even know what's wrong? Burke Holland's story st...
2 Dec 202544min
Story: Godbolt's Rule - When Abstractions Fail
What do you do when your code breaks and the only fix is to dig into the runtime below? Matt Godbolt lives for that. Tile-based renderers, color-coded scanlines, zero-copy NICs—each story is a clue th...
4 Nov 202544min
