29 Aug 2026 -
i need to learn like an RL agent more the key to life is repetition if you boil it down we feel inadequate simply because we haven’t forced ourselves to sacrifice the time to being good
my mind living in the space of AI as an engineer has led me to draw analogies. there’s a reason why so much value is placed on data. Why the AI space is driven by data, we are in an age of data. tech companies pay millions to have it store it and use it. the 10000 hours of data we collect through experience in our own lives is valuable in a similar vein of thinking. data, or in the human case, experience, is an invaluable component of existence. because it the singular irreplaceable component of progression. we cannot progress without it. our prior collected history and knowledge it drives future action. our past drives our future.
What does the way RL functions teach us about the way we should learn? Yes its possible to converge to a suboptimal solution but with proper guidelines we converge close to true optimality. yet in life local optima is enough, we don’t need to chase perfection the simple act of improvement is sufficient
and of course the human mind is far less rigid than RL, yet also far more mechanical than we realize at the same time. RL strips this fundamental aspect of learned experience down and employs in a technical facet, but it highlights a core component of the human condition.
Andrei karpathy said it best. its what the 10000 hour rule is about. its cliche but true ive realized. my failure to achieve has been the result of not committing myself to the 10000 rule to a singular mission in life. 10000 i believe doesn’t necessarily mean committing oneself to a singular skill like piano it can be relaxed to a holistic focus on life, or a multitude of cohesive passions that synergize with each other to an amplifying effect.
i have been robbing myself of live experience out of fear. its time to change things up.
by the theory of life the universe grants you wisdom at the end of a strenuous road. the metaphorical road being any “fruitful” activity (journaling everyday, meditating, studying some topic, learning to play an instrument). each activity delivers a fundamental lesson about the world we cannot comprehend until we’ve “arrived” at the end even non-fruitful ones persay (addictions that we indulge teaches us its danger at the end of extended use)