Smart Brevity

Jamiepluscoffee
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My way of learning

  1. 4d ago

    AI Systems, Week 2: How much does the interface shape the model?

    Week 2 of AI Systems: Models, Harnesses and Agents. Why two tools that can make the same edit can set a model very different problems: tool contracts, trajectories, the failure points in tool use, capability versus elicitation, and why the error a tool returns is half the interface.

  2. 4d ago

    MailDump 11: Thirteen Out of One Hundred

    Why coding agents ace the benchmark and flunk the job, what happens to content when the reader is an agent, three ways to handle a tax-loss problem, dosing versus rewriting aging, how early hires get picked, and an archive thread on engaging versus excluding in conservation.

  3. 6d ago

    Smart Brevity 5: Guarantees come from structure, not from asking nicely

    Guarantees come from structure, not from asking nicely; Waypoint-gated distillation: transfer only the RL shifts that early and late training agree on; Decision-native models: null-aware, order-proof, scalable, and cacheable by construction; Thinking inertia: no-think switches leak reasoning, so measure answer-only compliance; Demo versus delivery evals: held-out acceptance, business-uplift scoring, priced clarifying questions; User-modifiable harnesses: users edit the agent loop, subagents, and routing; Cache-aware economics: stable prefixes first, judge models by cost per completed task

  4. Oct 13

    AI Systems, Week 1: Where does an agent's behaviour come from?

    Week 1 of AI Systems: Models, Harnesses and Agents. Where an agent's behaviour comes from: weights, context, inference compute, and the runtime that executes its actions; how to attribute a behaviour with controlled interventions instead of guessing.

  5. Oct 11

    MailDump 10: Practice Rooms for Robots, and a Cliff Already Born

    A chip maker pays eight billion dollars for a model that invents camera angles, two AI labs disagree about who holds the agent's leash, colleges face arithmetic that has nothing to do with AI, and an archive thread on thinking with the body.

  6. Oct 10

    Smart Brevity 4: The signal is narrower than it looks: recency posing as memory, failures that teach, less supervision that wins

    The signal is narrower than it looks: recency posing as memory, failures that teach, less supervision that wins; Memory-need stratification: pooled memory scores mostly measure recency; Memory framing: calling context "memories" changes how often it gets used; Hindsight-to-foresight distillation: failed runs teach when group rewards are flat; Reliability over coverage: distill only where tokenizers align cleanly; Experience retention: raw logs versus summarized playbooks for learning agents; Cheap discriminative judges for closed-answer evals at volume; Brain and hands split: editable harnesses, cloud reasoning, device actions; Action gating: approval policy plus readable

  7. Oct 4

    MailDump 9: Colleges Close, Solar Goes Red, and Who Checks the Work

    American colleges are closing on arithmetic, not AI. Solar booms in the reddest states for business reasons. Private ownership explains more of the top one percent than its reputation suggests. Plus the offices and software seats that headcount no longer fills, cheap thinking versus costly experiments, and who checks AI's work. From the archive: speed in founder writing.

  8. Oct 3

    Smart Brevity 3: Your training signal has a shape, and it can lie: who teaches, how loudly, and who checks

    Your training signal has a shape, and it can lie: who teaches, how loudly, and who checks; On-policy distillation scaling: small RL teachers can lift bigger students past themselves; Multi-teacher distillation: normalize each teacher's feedback spread or the loudest domain wins; RIDE: extrapolate the RL direction in hidden states, not in word probabilities; Co-cheating: self-play loops reward shared errors; cross-fitted graders break the echo; Decision models: calibrated classifiers as cheap routers and eval judges; UCB tree search over experiment notebooks, and the reward hacking it invites; Environment interaction shape decides what skills transfer; Cost per completed t

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My way of learning

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  • Creator
    Jamiepluscoffee
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Jamiepluscoffee