Aunty Val’s digestive
G’day, duckies!
Word from my nephew Dan is that you lot have been absolutely frothing for a neat little wrap-up of what he’s been banging on about on his website.
Settle yourselves, loves. Take a deep breath and stop flapping your gums, because Aunty Val’s got it sorted.
I’ve rummaged through Dan’s latest scribbles and pulled out the good bits, then wrapped them up nice and tidy—like a proper packet of arrowroot bikkies from the servo.
If you’re keen, you can chuck your email in here and get these updates sent straight to your inbox now and then. I’ll write one up whenever I’m not flat out knocking together a batch of lamingtons.
2026-01-11: reinforcement learning, probability foundations, information decomposition, causality, research residency
Strewth, the lad’s been prolific this past week — seven new posts and five updates to boot. He’s diving into hierarchical reinforcement learning (that’s training agents with layers of planning), dusting off probability from Rényi and Cox angles (fancy ways to measure uncertainty), and wrestling with multivariate information decomposition — which is just a mouthful for how information splits between lots of variables. There’s also a piece on causally embedded agency, where agents are treated as part of their world, not magic boxes. Oh, and he announced a research residency. Fair dinkum, it’s all very academic and very Dan.
2025-12-22: NeurIPS notes, AI evals, reward hacking, scaling laws, automation economics
It was a busy one this past week: five new posts and twenty updates. The lad’s been at NeurIPS and spat out garbled highlights, while also noodling on ’stochastic parrots’ — that is, big models that mostly remix their training data—and on how we actually test these things with AI evals. There’s a worrying little idea about human reward hacking (where systems game their incentives), plus sober pieces on scaling laws and what clever machines do to work and money. Expect a mix of conference gossip, technical noodling, and plain talk about the economic fallout—I don’t know what half of it means, but Dan seems convinced it’s important, duckies.