Neel Somani's Blog

Killing the GIL: How To Use Python 3.14's Free-Threading Upgrade

The global interpreter lock (GIL) has been interfering with true parallelism in Python. That ends with Python 3.14.

Oct 14 • 

Neel Somani

What You Didn't Learn in Berkeley CS 188 — Part 4

Is GRPO broken?

Oct 11 • 

Neel Somani

What You Didn't Learn in Berkeley CS 188 — Part 3

Off-policy methods, for better sample efficiency and scalability.

Oct 9 • 

Neel Somani

What You Didn’t Learn in Berkeley CS 188 — Part 2

Implementing the policy gradient methods: REINFORCE, A2C, TRPO, PPO.

Oct 7 • 

Neel Somani

What You Didn’t Learn in Berkeley CS 188 — Part 1

Why isn’t there model-free policy iteration?

Oct 4 • 

Neel Somani

July 2025

A Free Market for Eyeballs

Many takes on the attention economy, with very few attention economists.

Jul 29 • 

Neel Somani

February 2025

The BLAST Playbook

I argue that the $500B-1T in annual software investments should reallocate to BLAST: assets that monetize boredom, loneliness, and scarcity.

Feb 24 • 

Neel Somani

January 2025

Privatize the FDA

I advocate for privatizing the FDA by replacing its drug approval monopoly with a competitive market to reduce delays, lower costs, and foster…

Jan 11 • 

Neel Somani

December 2024

Race Science for Non-Racists

Science often avoids acknowledging our genetic diversity. I propose a discipline to holistically look at history, biology, culture, and psychology to…

Dec 9, 2024 • 

Neel Somani

October 2024

The New Economy

We have massively overallocated our youth to roles like software engineering and medicine - which will be shortly replaced en masse by AI. I propose how…

Oct 25, 2024 • 

Neel Somani

October 2023

A Year Around The Sun With Eclipse

I reflect on the Eclipse team's journey in building the Eclipse Mainnet, Ethereum's fastest L2. A reflection on rollups and challenges for the…

Oct 3, 2023 • 

Neel Somani

August 2023

Rollups-as-a-Service Are Going To Zero

The app-specific rollup space is poorly defined, so I have taken it upon myself to define the market landscape and explain the economics for the…

Aug 9, 2023 • 

Neel Somani