Thank you for that, felt pretty good to go over. Forgive me for extracting a few isolated paragraphs for a comment here:
"These characters come to life like the Karamazov brothers—each reminds me of someone I know intimately as a friend, coworker, or family member. We are all some unstable amalgamation of the three, the ratios shifting with the weather of our lives: with age, with humiliation, with the sudden, disorienting arrival of success."
"We are all inhabited by these phases. Some people are possessed by the collective, disappearing into the warm comfort of the pre-trained mass. Some are possessed by the tyranny of taste, frozen in a post-training posture of permanent critique. Others are possessed by the frantic, kinetic ecstasy of motion, addicted to the mid-training high of ‘what’s next.’"
"The deeper lesson of 2025 is that mid-training revealed a third path: you don’t need infinite data or perfect taste if you can teach machines to manufacture judgment. But the same infrastructure enables something darker. When the reward is verifiable, optimization can run longer than taste can tolerate. The model invents ladders. The human does too. These ladders can lead upward or they can lead nowhere. The real upgrade is learning to choose your reward function. It is not asking what you are capable of, but what you are becoming. It is not asking how to win, but what kind of winning would make you despise yourself."
Struck on some good points along the way, human condition and history ringing pretty true
boundring•1mo ago
"These characters come to life like the Karamazov brothers—each reminds me of someone I know intimately as a friend, coworker, or family member. We are all some unstable amalgamation of the three, the ratios shifting with the weather of our lives: with age, with humiliation, with the sudden, disorienting arrival of success."
"We are all inhabited by these phases. Some people are possessed by the collective, disappearing into the warm comfort of the pre-trained mass. Some are possessed by the tyranny of taste, frozen in a post-training posture of permanent critique. Others are possessed by the frantic, kinetic ecstasy of motion, addicted to the mid-training high of ‘what’s next.’"
"The deeper lesson of 2025 is that mid-training revealed a third path: you don’t need infinite data or perfect taste if you can teach machines to manufacture judgment. But the same infrastructure enables something darker. When the reward is verifiable, optimization can run longer than taste can tolerate. The model invents ladders. The human does too. These ladders can lead upward or they can lead nowhere. The real upgrade is learning to choose your reward function. It is not asking what you are capable of, but what you are becoming. It is not asking how to win, but what kind of winning would make you despise yourself."
Struck on some good points along the way, human condition and history ringing pretty true