Analysis of the tech industry,exploring the intersection of technology, culture, and innovation.

The Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton

In his influential essay, "The Bitter Lesson", Rich Sutton, a prominent figure in reinforcement learning, argues that the most significant insight from 70 years of AI research is the ultimate triumph of general-purpose methods that leverage computation over those that rely on incorporating human knowledge. Sutton posits that while building in domain-specific human knowledge can provide short-term gains, these approaches tend to plateau and even impede long-term progress. In contrast, methods that scale with increasing computational power, such as search and learning, have consistently led to breakthroughs.

Sutton supports his argument with several key examples from the history of AI:

• Computer Chess: Early attempts to create chess-playing programs focused on encoding human strategies and knowledge. However, the system that ultimately defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, Deep Blue, was based on massive, deep search capabilities.

• Computer Go: Similarly, in the game of Go, initial efforts to leverage human understanding of the game were surpassed by systems like AlphaGo, which relied on search and learning from self-play.

• Speech Recognition: The field of speech recognition saw a shift from knowledge-based systems to statistical methods like Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), which performed significantly better in a 1970s DARPA competition. The more recent success of deep learning in this area further underscores the power of computation and learning from large datasets.

Sutton's "bitter lesson" is a four-part observation: 1) researchers build knowledge into their agents, 2) this provides a short-term boost, 3) it ultimately plateaus and hinders further progress, and 4) breakthroughs consistently come from scaling computation with search and learning. He concludes by advocating for the development of meta-methods that can discover and capture the complexity of the world on their own, rather than being explicitly programmed with human discoveries.

The Bitter Lesson's Bitter Lesson by Andrew Trask

"The Bitter Lesson's Bitter Lesson" presents a critique and extension of Sutton's argument. Trask contends that Sutton's focus on "pure learning" from scratch, akin to how babies and animals learn, is computationally impractical and overlooks the immense value of "inherited learning" from human-generated data.

Trask introduces several key quantified points to support his argument:

• The Scale of Evolution: Trask estimates that the evolutionary process that produced human intelligence involved over 10^50 operations. In contrast, current state-of-the-art AI models are trained with around 10^26 operations. This vast difference suggests that recreating the learning process from scratch is computationally infeasible.

• The Efficiency of Inherited Learning: Trask argues that human-generated text is a highly compressed and efficient source of knowledge, representing the output of 4.5 billion years of evolutionary optimization. By learning from this data, AI models can inherit a massive amount of information without having to rediscover it.

• Untapped Human Data: While some may believe that large language models (LLMs) have consumed the entire internet, Trask points out that the training datasets of leading AI models are in the range of 100-200 terabytes. However, the total amount of digitized human data is estimated to be around 180 zettabytes. This means that current AI models are using less than a millionth of the available human-generated data.

Trask's central thesis is that the future of AI lies in developing architectures that can effectively and privately access this vast, untapped repository of human knowledge. He argues for a hybrid approach that combines the benefits of inherited knowledge with the ability for novel discovery, moving beyond the limitations of "pure learning."

1. Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

2. Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about -- a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union -- and take its side.

3. Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multiple-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.

4. Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

5. Remember professional ethics. When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

6. Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

7. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.

8. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

9. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

10. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

11. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.

12. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

13. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

14. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.

15. Contribute to good causes. Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life. Pick a charity or two and set up autopay. Then you will have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others to do good.

16. Learn from peers in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends in other countries. The present difficulties in the United States are an element of a larger trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.

17. Listen for dangerous words. Be alert to use of the words "extremism" and "terrorism." Be alive to the fatal notions of "emergency" and "exception." Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

19. Be a patriot. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

20. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

In his blog post "Digital hygiene," Andrej Karpathy outlines a comprehensive guide to enhancing personal privacy and security in the digital age. He argues that such measures are essential in response to a vast "fraud apparatus," where tech companies, data brokers, and cybercriminals exploit personal information gathered through profiling, data breaches, and insecure practices. The guide provides a series of actionable steps, ranging from basic to advanced, to protect one's digital life.

The foundation of Karpathy’s security strategy is robust authentication. He first emphasizes the use of a password manager, like 1Password, to generate and store unique, strong passwords for every online service. This practice mitigates the risks of password guessing and credential stuffing attacks that occur when a single password leak compromises multiple accounts. To secure this central password vault and other critical services (e.g., Google), he strongly advocates for a hardware security key, such as a YubiKey, as a second authentication factor ("something you have"). He dismisses SMS-based two-factor authentication as dangerously insecure due to the prevalence of SIM swap attacks. A hardware key, which stores a private key on the device itself, requires an attacker to have physical possession of the key, drastically reducing the risk of a breach. He also advises treating antiquated security questions as passwords, generating random answers and storing them in a password manager.

Karpathy then addresses data and device security. He insists on enabling disk encryption (like FileVault on Macs) to protect data if a computer is lost or stolen. He expresses strong disdain for the Internet of Things (IoT), labeling it the "@internetofshit" and advising readers to avoid "smart" devices whenever possible. He views them as insecure, data-gathering computers with microphones that create a significant attack surface within a home.

For communication and browsing, Karpathy recommends privacy-first tools. He advocates for Signal for messaging due to its end-to-end encryption and minimal metadata storage, and suggests enabling disappearing messages to reduce long-term information vulnerability. For web browsing and search, he recommends the Brave browser and search engine, which are built on a privacy-first model with their own search index, unlike alternatives that may rely on Bing. He notes his preference for paying for premium versions of such services to be treated as a "customer, not the product."

A significant portion of the guide focuses on anonymizing personal and financial information. To prevent merchants from linking purchases and to mitigate credit card fraud, he uses privacy.com to mint unique, virtual credit cards for each transaction, which allows for spending limits and the use of random billing information. Similarly, to avoid giving out his physical address, he uses a virtual mail service (like Virtual Post Mail) that receives, scans, and digitizes physical mail. Regarding email, he follows strict rules: never clicking on links and disabling automatic image loading to prevent tracking pixels.

Finally, Karpathy details network-level protections and behavioral best practices. He uses Mullvad VPN selectively to hide his IP address from less-trusted services, NextDNS to block ads and trackers at the DNS level, and a network monitor like The Little Snitch to observe which applications are communicating online. He also stresses the importance of work-life separation, advising against accessing personal accounts on company-owned computers, which are often heavily monitored. Karpathy concludes by acknowledging that digital hygiene is a journey with trade-offs, admitting he still uses Gmail and 𝕏 (Twitter) for convenience but is exploring further steps like burner phone numbers and unique email aliases.

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ActivityPub is a technology through which social networks can be made interoperable, connecting everything to a single social graph and content-sharing system. It’s an old standard based on even older ideas about a fundamentally different structure for social networking, one that’s much more like email or old-school web chat than any of the platforms we use now. It’s governed by open protocols, not closed platforms. It aims to give control back to users and to make sure that the social web is bigger than any single company.

This summary details Mark Johnson's article, "Why Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life," which explores the profound impact of Douglas Hofstadter's 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Johnson finds Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB) difficult to simply reduce to a single idea, such as "how complex systems arise from simpler ones." Instead, he explains its significance through three core mental models it imparted to him: epistemic limits, self-reference, and isomorphism.

Core Concepts and Key Figures

The article identifies the mathematician Kurt Gödel as the book's central figure. Gödel is most renowned for his revolutionary Incompleteness Theorems of 1931. Before Gödel, mathematicians widely believed that any well-formed mathematical statement could eventually be proven true or false. Gödel shattered this belief by proving that in any formal system complex enough to contain arithmetic, there will always be statements that are true but cannot be proven within that system. This established fundamental epistemic limits on knowledge, revealing that unanswerable questions are an inherent feature of complex systems, not a temporary flaw. Johnson compares this to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in physics, emphasizing that some things are fundamentally unknowable, a frustrating but essential truth.

The second major theme is self-reference, a property of powerful systems that allows them to talk about themselves. This capability leads to paradoxes, famously illustrated by the statement, "This sentence is false." If the statement is true, it must be false, and if it is false, it must be true. Self-reference is a key mechanism through which systems achieve complexity and encounter their own intrinsic limitations.

The third concept is isomorphism, which Hofstadter uses more loosely than its formal mathematical definition of "equivalence." In GEB, isomorphism refers to a structural similarity between two seemingly different systems. Johnson finds this concept useful for identifying and comparing underlying patterns. An example provided is the isomorphism between planets orbiting a star and electrons orbiting a nucleus.

The other two titular figures, artist M.C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, serve as artistic reflections of these abstract themes. Escher's work is replete with visual self-reference and paradox, such as his drawing Drawing Hands, which depicts two hands drawing each other into existence. Bach’s complex musical fugues, where a single melody is layered on top of itself, are auditory examples of self-reference and intricate, rule-based systems. Johnson notes that these artistic examples provide tangible, intuitive illustrations of the book’s more abstruse mathematical ideas.

The Book's Unique Structure and Style

Johnson praises GEB's exceptional writing and structure. Each chapter is preceded by a clever, Lewis Carroll-inspired dialogue between characters like Achilles and the Tortoise. These dialogues are not merely decorative; each one is isomorphic to the concepts discussed in the chapter that follows, often serving as a more accessible explanation of the theme. The book itself is highly self-referential, with themes and ideas weaving together and resolving hundreds of pages apart, rewarding a careful and attentive reading.

Personal and Professional Influence

Johnson concludes by detailing how GEB's mental models have influenced his own thinking and career.

• Bottom-Up Systems: Hofstadter's exploration of how complexity emerges from simple components—such as consciousness from neurons or the intelligence of an ant colony ("Aunt Hilary") from individual ants—has reinforced Johnson's belief in bottom-up solutions. He sees isomorphisms in how DNA expresses proteins, how society functions from individual actions, and how brains operate. This model suggests that complex, intelligent behavior often arises organically from simple, local rules rather than from top-down design.

• The Limits of Knowledge in Human Systems: Gödel's concept of epistemic limits has humbled Johnson regarding the potential for perfecting complex human systems. He argues that utopian ideals, which often seek to remove "bugs" from systems like capitalism or socialism, fail to recognize that these flaws may be inherent and inseparable "features." He suggests it is more productive to work within the system's limitations rather than attempting to achieve an impossible perfection.

• Software Development: The book's themes resonate with Johnson's work in designing software products. He connects the ideas of iteration and feedback loops (cybernetics) to the understanding that perfection is impossible "out of the gate." Quality software emerges from a process of continuous feedback and refinement, acknowledging the inherent complexity and limitations of the creative process.

In essence, Johnson's article presents Gödel, Escher, Bach as a transformative work that equips readers with a powerful intellectual toolkit for contemplating philosophy, consciousness, and the fundamental nature of complex systems.

This collection of blog posts by Ian Hickson (Hixie) covers several key topics in web development and open-source projects. The first post announces a UI framework guide published as a Google Doc and PDF, sharing insights from 25-30 years of experience. The second post discusses how to handle feedback when building products, emphasizing that complaints about non-goals are actually signs of success - if you're receiving complaints about aspects you didn't prioritize, it means you're successfully achieving your actual design goals. The third post provides an in-depth analysis of power dynamics in web standards, explaining how users ultimately hold power by choosing browsers, which in turn influences what browser vendors implement, which then determines what standards become reality. This led to the creation of WHATWG with its principle that specifications should match reality rather than theoretical ideals. The fourth post examines the size and composition of the Flutter team, revealing that approximately 94,000 people have contributed in some way, with about 3,800 being active contributors who've worked for more than 180 days. Of those with commit access, roughly 85% are Google employees or funded by Google, while 15% are independent. The final post discusses Hickson's continued involvement with Flutter after leaving Google, noting Flutter's success as the leading mobile app framework and its strong position for desktop and embedded development, with potential to become the first major WebAssembly framework.