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 late one night I sent Don a paper. Three words in the title: reward is enough. The claim is that all of intelligence, the whole thing, comes down to a system maximizing a reward. Don thought that was far too reductive. I wanted to pull it apart and see if it held up.

We backed up through the history to find out how far "reward is enough" really goes: B.F. Skinner training pigeons, a backgammon program that taught itself, the Go move no human would have played.

It's a story about machine learning, and what that leaves for the rest of us who still do it by hand.

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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 the data isn't growing. The frontier labs call this the pre-training wall.

A leaked Google memo from 2023 argued they had no moat. R1 is on GitHub. Llama is on Hugging Face. OpenAI's secondary-market valuation has climbed past $850 billion.

Don was confused. So he came over and we made an episode about it.

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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 surveyed hundreds of software engineers about getting older. What scares you? What's changed? What have you lost? The things people feared most — memory, stamina, keeping up — weren't the real threats. The stuff that was actually breaking down was mostly fixable. A bad knee wasn't aging, it was a torn cartilage. Wrist pain disappeared when she changed how she slept.

But buried in the research was something harder to fix. The single factor that predicted whether you'd age well or badly had nothing to do with your body at all.

The opponent isn't aging. The opponent is the story about aging.

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