·reading
The Bitter Lesson
Rich Sutton's short essay arguing that general methods leveraging computation beat hand-built human knowledge, every time, over the long run.
Two pages, and it reorganizes how you read the last seventy years of AI. Chess, Go, speech, vision: in each case the hand-engineered representation of what humans thought they knew lost to search and learning scaled onto more compute.
The bitter part is not that the lesson is wrong-headed to resist — it is that resisting it feels like doing the real work. Encoding domain knowledge is satisfying and legibly clever. It is also the thing that gets eaten. I re-read this whenever I catch myself building a clever prior instead of a scalable substrate.
Neighborhood