I, too, started parsing this as RL=real life and that’s why I found the headline interesting

Thank god. Was driving me mad.

It's a deliberate click/ragebait, not a mistake. It makes People click and talk about it, just like it happens here.

This is the first time I read that someone uses an acronym for ragebait purposes. The acronym "RL" is very well known. Dwarkesh's podcast is mostly AI related, so it's not a surprise that he will freely use acronyms. I think your take is very cynical.

That is a bizarre take. Dwarkesh Patel is publishing in a very specific domain, where RL is a very common and unambigous acronym. I'd bet it was immediately clear to 99% of his normal audience, and to him it's such a high frequency term that people finding it ambiguous would not even have crossed his mind.

(Like, would you expect people to expand LLM or AGI in a title?)

RLVR is the more particular term of art in this domain.

VR stands for verified rewards and is the single bit per rollout that is the heart of the post. Maybe we can convince dang to update the title.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Ok so now it's stupid or malicious to use RL as reinforcement learning on a blog about AI where everyone in the field has been referring to it as RL forever? Even wikipedia puts (RL) after reinforcement learning.

That's the normal way to introduce an acronym in an article.

Anyway, I was just saying that however irritating, it's likely just an omission out of forgetfulness, not deliberate clickbait. A minor application of Hanlon's razor.

Seeing the downvotes and even a flag, it appears I'll have to lower my expectation of people's cultural baggage here.

Additionally, replying to "in the field" in GP: this is about the article title. You first have to know which field the article is in, which simply is not clear if you are an HN reader that happens to not be in that field.

There needs to be a new law, applicable to posts on the Internet of any kind.

Because that law doesn't hold, when malice has a massive profit motive, and almost zero downside.

Spammers, popups, spam, clickbait, all of it and more, not stupid, but planned.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That doesn't, or shouldn't apply to the content itself. Because we all know how prevalent clickbait is.

Even though I knew which RL was being referred to here, the (ab)use of initials in this ways annoys me to no end. I wish people did not do that.

Counterpoint: much of academia is creating and learning these shorthands. They are genuinely useful - humans have limited context space in their heads, so this compression allows them to work in larger problem spaces. Classic example: Einstein and tensors.

Upshot - don’t hate - pick up the vocab, it’s part of the learning process.