reading, watching & listening to

When a restaurant gets a Michelin star: Customer expectations rise, employee wage demands rise, suppliers expect you to pay more, and the restaurant is more likely to go out of business in the ensuing years.

an honest reflection from Yancey Strickler on stepping out of the crypto rabbit hole. 

a really well done ELI5 explainer on AI training models. read this closely and you’ll learn a lot about how the incentives of the commercial web impact the quality of the training data.

wow, sofia isella is so verbal and lyrical.  

had to read this several times to grok it but applied to a real-life example.

It’s hard to design the perfect onboarding. but it’s easy to check: “Did the user reach ‘Aha!’ in 3 steps instead of 7?” or “Did 80% of users complete the flow?”

So the industry (and people) naturally get pulled into automated loops. this is why mid-training is powerful and dangerous. it can manufacture the appearance of discernment while dodging deeper unmeasurable criteria.

“They have learned to produce the appearance of discernment without ever developing the faculty itself.”