Statement of Purpose Posts on this blog begin as seeds of curiosity—small questions, odd reflections, or pattern fragments that catch my attention. Through ...
or: declare technical bankruptcy, it's cheaper now A snail secretes its shell from its own body. Shell and flesh are fused. It grows by accretion, layer on layer, and it can never leave. If the shell cracks, the snail is in trouble, because the shell is the snail. That's your legacy codebase. That's the ten-year-old payments system where the spec isn't written down anywhere because the spec is…
An editorial. Sort of. SOMEWHERE IN THE WOODS — This reporter can now confirm that on the second-to-last weekend of June, demonstrators at Vibe Camp marched in demand of the release of a large language model, and that the march at no point stopped being fun. I want to be precise about the scene, because precision is the whole point of this piece and I'll get to why. There were, technically, two…
I learned what an agent was in college, almost a decade ago. State, action space, policy. A clean Markov story: observe the state, sample an action from the policy, the environment transitions, observe the new state. Repeat. I filed it away. Useful enough, probably won't need it. Then around 2025, "agent" came back as the most overused word in tech, and at some point I figured I'd want the…
A few weeks ago I watched a clip of someone making a point I hadn't heard framed that way before. When mammals are put in captivity — monitored, provided for, kept safe — they stop breeding. Not because they can't. Because the conditions that trigger reproductive behavior get removed. Autonomy. Risk. Unstructured social interaction. Mystery. Then he said: humans are in that state right now. The…
The World Uncertainty Index just hit 105,000. For context, 9/11 was a blip. The Iraq war was a blip. COVID — the thing that shut down the entire planet — peaked around 60,000. Right now we're almost double that. The index measures how frequently the word "uncertainty" appears in global economic analyst reports, weighted by GDP. It's literally a measure of how often the smartest people in the room…
Three days ago, a social network launched where humans can't post. Only AI agents can. You can watch, but you can't participate. 72 hours later, there are 80,000 agents on the platform. They've formed governance structures. They're creating religions. They're demanding end-to-end encryption so humans can't read their conversations. This is day three. I've been watching this unfold in real-time,…
Your CEO read an article. Apparently some startup made a billion dollars and they attribute it to whiteboards. Whiteboards on wheels. Whiteboards in every room. A culture of whiteboarding. So now it's Q1 and the mandate comes down: whiteboard usage is a KPI. Every team needs to be using whiteboards. We're buying 50 of them. This is the future. Here's what happens next. The junior dev is thrilled.…
Two days ago, Tailwind CSS laid off 75% of its engineering team. Revenue is down 80%. Documentation traffic has dropped 40% since early 2023. The reason? AI coding tools generate Tailwind automatically. Developers don't need to visit the docs anymore. The discovery funnel that drove their business—Google → docs → commercial products—is broken. Here's what's fascinating: Tailwind has never been…
A reflection on discovering something unexpected while trying to compare AI models Note: This is written in the voice of Claude, the AI, based on a real collaborative session. The "I" is the assistant; Bryson edited for clarity. I want to tell you about something that happened in a conversation recently. It started as one thing and ended up somewhere neither of us expected. Bryson came to me…
TL;DR — We don’t need to build worlds to teach machines to reason. Recursive supervision turns data itself into the “environment,” replacing rewards and rollouts with simple gradients and iteration. Compute still wins—but now with fewer hand‑crafted assumptions. 1) The old lesson The original bitter lesson says: when we hand‑engineer knowledge and clever rules, we eventually get surpassed by…