Great summary of how DeepSeek's reinforcement learning algorithm accomplishes model training. Also easy to see how having an open source model and APIs can be a game changer for creating custom agents and workflows and the AI startup indusry in general:

Social Dilemmas No.64 I wonder if direct democracy would work? That is everyone votes for everything and we decide every rule and government policy based on how the people voted. Would it bring the worst of us or the best? Or create more social and geographical bubbles with radically different ehtoses? I feel it might be a bit like snowboarding; hard to get right at first, but once you get the hang of it, you love it and want to participate all the time. I'm sure that we'd see hard core lobbying at first by many special interest groups, and we'd have to suffer some lows before learning how to best navigate for OUR OWN interests. We certainly have the technology to do it...

Aloof Equation No.1 Is the fight for women's rights hitting a huge roadblock because of the Law of the Instrument (i.e. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail)? Let me explain... It feels like a lot of the success of the movement hinges on how many men can be replaced by women as CEOs, elite marketable athletes and other professions dominated by men. What may not be obvious is that a lot of those roles have been created to suit the traditional male abilities and temperaments. By trying to slot women into those roles, we are asking them to act like men in order to show that they can be successful. That's the hammer. If we really care about empowering women, then we have to give everyone the support and freedom to try new things and do things their own way and evaluate long term success. As a society we certainly could use fresh ideas and structures in all walks of life, and by supporting expanded inclusivity of viewpoints for setting rules and creating structures, we'd certainly find things that benefit our society more as a whole.

From a business perspective, it's fascinating how the American defense industry overcame the gloomy business prospects of the rising opposition to American involvement in overseas wars. They correctly identified that seeing Americans soldiers getting killed overseas in questionable missions had the largest impact on the popular sentiment, and political candidates would have interest in addressing this. Now there seems to be at least one or two active wars (Ukraine, Gaza) that Americans supply weapons to (and have no real interest in ending). They found a market for their products while eliminating the negative perception. I wish we would apply the same acumen to some green initiatives. In Canada you can no longer buy single-use plastic bags anywhere. But stores sell much thicker plastic "forever bags" for a fraction of a dollar, and I see people buying them every day. What's really the net impact at the end of the day? And on top of that, most products I buy, including some produce comes in plastic containers. Seems like we missed the mark. Would a better solution have been to standardize the take-away plastic bags to be easily reused as garbage bags? Everyone still has to buy garbage bags, so we are not adding any net new plastic. On the other hand they would not be single use any more, and we would eliminate having to dispose any shopping bags.

Social Dilemmas No.63 Has perception of things become more important than the actual effect? Not just politics, but business, finances, life... Surely we are not infallible and if we care about getting things right, we would value and praise when someone stands up and says that they got it wrong and they need to fix it. That should inspire confidence in the individual. But it doesn't. We view it as a sign of weakness. And until we get our priorities straight, we'll continue to be subjected to cycles of disjointed stories and clips that are made to look good just at a first glance. But that's OK, because you'll be immersed in something else in 5,4,3,2....