12 chunks · 12 episodes
First, get the loop to close, then get it to be tight. Getting the loop to close is going from default-divergent to default-convergent. The shift is an infinite difference that in the moment feels mundane. Once it's default-convergent, tightening is a simple matter of hill-climbing.
If it's a hill climbing exercise, first, make sure you're on the right hill. For example, performance work should come after required architectural changes. When you have us...
...rting bias never even thought to say something funny, to start that compounding hill climbing.
Hill climbing a moving hill doesn't work. LLMs are moving hills. The models are still improving rapidly. Don't over optimize for their current behavior.
...ce it's a loop it is self cohering as it turns. Hill finding is finding a loop. Hill climbing is turning a loop. Process praise sets the bar lower for what counts as viable for the learner, where they get some encouragement to keep going. This...
...appen to work. There is a selection pressure you can't see, possible because of hill climbing: a clear objective metric to experiment with. But they're hacks on top of hacks; almost certainly hitting a local maxima.
...em as an optimization problem (without dangerous externalities) you can now use hill climbing techniques on it. If you can fully "capture" the complexities of the argument as an optimization problem, it changes the character of the problem. La...
...a viable product (it has achieved PMF with some small audience) you can move to hill climbing. How much you have to plan and test before shipping is tied to how easy the "good enough" target is to hit for users, in a way that stands out from o...
... you frame it as a smooth problem (differentiable), it can be optimized and use hill climbing. One of the reasons that identifying a good "self steering metric" can be powerful. For example, for rolling out an ambitious technology: "Maximize a...
...oturf content in an ecosystem. The challenge of an ecosystem is not so much the hill climbing of quality, it's the creation of the ecosystem to a critical mass. And now you can astroturf it!
...r being artisanal and instead being more about program management. We're in the hill climbing phase of PMing. PMs don't decide anymore, the metrics do. The humans are subservient to metrics. The hill -finding artisanal PMs didn't go away. They...
Hill climbing is easier to organize and coordinate than hill finding. With hill climbing everyone can agree, easily and with their own eyes, the steepest upward sl...