Journal · Notes from the archive

Notes from the archive.

Market · Oct 2026

Base data, and the layer above it

The RL market has sorted itself into layers. Underneath all of them is the real work environments are built from.

Measurement · Oct 2026

The question worth paying for

Getting good at one game is cheap. Getting better at everything else because of it is the claim labs pay for.

Market · Oct 2026

The missing environment

We read the sites of twenty-eight data and environment vendors. None sells a real game world.

Infrastructure · Oct 2026

Environments are datasets now. Ours were already running

Open formats now treat an environment like any other dataset. Here is how we are packaging ours.

Graders · Oct 2026

A referee that cannot be talked round

Reward hacking is the tax on every environment. A game server pays less of it, but not none.

Measurement · Oct 2026

Measured before you see it

The honest way to sell data is to show what it does to a model on tasks it never saw. We run that test first.

Studio · Oct 2026

Evals from the work itself

The best evals come from real work with a known outcome. A studio produces them every week.

Studios · Oct 2026

What a studio holds behind the door

Labs have read the open web. What they want now sits inside companies. Here is what a clean package from a game studio looks like.

Data · Oct 2026

Why the server record beats the screen

Screen capture shows what one player saw. The server record knows what actually happened, to everyone, at every tick.

Research · Sep 2026

Humans and bots in the same lobby

Live matches mix real players with server bots. Labeled, that mix becomes a free control group.

Environments · Aug 2026

Flappy Bird is our game lab

A deterministic world, exact actions, and a live player base: the simplest possible RL environment with real human baselines.

Corpus · Jul 2026

A game studio is a dataset

Code, tickets, reviews and live-ops changes, linked to what players did next.