May 2, 2022

Why does Twitter matter?

Twitter is different from Instagram and YouTube because Twitter is where politics and journalism live.

Journalists construct the world. The media world the rest of us live in. If you influence Twitter, you influence the ink that fills the pages of culture more broadly.

TV producers and reporters are listening to what people are talking about on Twitter. Whatever resonates with the public and trends on Twitter influences what goes on TV.

Twitter lives upstream from media and culture.

Josh

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Aug 31, 2025

Every clever shortcut is tomorrow’s bottleneck

When AI model get faster and better, any implementation details are just a form of premature optimisation. They constrain AI to our understanding of a domain and limit its ability to operate independently. Tell the system what to look for and what doing that well means, and then get out of the way. When building AI products, the goal is to be able to swap out all of your…

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The Bitter Lesson

If you're building anything that involves AI, then you have to know about the bitter lesson. The bitter lesson is an article by Rich Sutton from March 13, 2019. This sounds like ancient AI lore but is only six years old. Rich Sutton, a pioneer of reinforcement learning and a Turing Award winner, wrote a short essay saying that 70 years of AI has taught him and the best quote…

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Most people test what AI can do. Ankur Goyal suggests testing what it should be able to do. Typically, as product developers, we build a feature then write some tests to protect it. When tests fail in the future, you know you've broken something important and need to fix it before pushing any changes. This is true of conventional code as it is for evals. Goyal, who heads…

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Spontaneous Preparation

Started playing Dungeons & Dragons again and Im easing back into being a dungeon master, something I enjoyed as a child. There are two big challenges: Preparation time and wielding narrative tension The reality of playing DnD as an adult is that time is scarce. And preping for a game as a Dungeon master takes up a lot of it. Robert Peake, over at https://www.spontaneousdm.com…

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Giving Good Thread

I recently started playing Dungeons & Dragons again after about 25 years. I used to play it as a kid, but now that I’ve picked it up again as adult, I’m with the idea that you can sit around and talk, yet this structured, elaborate immersive experience unfolds. Now we have a regular tuesday game online, and a one or two in-person games each month, and I’m starting to warm up…

A little more from Josh.

More from Josh

Every clever shortcut is tomorrow’s bottleneck

The Bitter Lesson

Using Evaluations Offensively

Spontaneous Preparation

Giving Good Thread

More from Josh

Every clever shortcut is tomorrow’s bottleneck

The Bitter Lesson

Using Evaluations Offensively

Spontaneous Preparation

Giving Good Thread