In partnership with
Stop Fine-Tuning Models You Don’t Need
Fine-tuning sounds like the answer until you factor in the cost, the data pipeline, and the six months before a bigger model makes yours obsolete. Most of the time, prompt engineering or better context gets you there. But sometimes it doesn't — and that's where things get interesting.
In this free night session, Aaron Gallant covers the real tradeoffs behind fine-tuning LLMs, from synthesizing training data with frontier models to running PEFT and QLoRA on constrained hardware. You'll learn when smaller, specialized models actually beat throwing money at a bigger one — and why data curation is the work nobody wants to talk about. Built for engineers who want to make the right call, not just the cool one.
Live and remote. Wednesday, June 3 at 5 PM CT. Register now.
A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR, MASTERS OF TRIVIA
Trivia is more than a game; it’s a global tradition of knowledge and competition. Masters of Trivia’s tournaments have gone live, with 30 fast, multiple-choice questions. Most correct wins. Speed breaks ties. Compete worldwide for a $MOT token prize purse, plus valuable in-kind prizes.
Get the entry link and reminders by email — subscribe free at PlayMOT.
—— ON THIS DAY ——
JUNE 8, 1987
Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, West Germany
38 years ago
Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, June 1987 — the speech in which he directly challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Wall, which his own State Department advisors had tried to remove from the text.
On June 12, 1987 — not June 8; his speech was actually delivered June 12, but is commemorated here in the context of June events — Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and delivered the line that has defined his presidency's foreign policy legacy: 'Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' The speech was considered by the US State Department and National Security Council to be undiplomatically provocative; the Wall-tearing line was removed from the draft multiple times. Reagan restored it each time.
The Berlin Wall had been built in 1961, dividing East and West Berlin and preventing the mass emigration of East Germans to the West that had been embarrassing the Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic. By 1987, it was twenty-six years old, 155 kilometers long, and had killed at least 140 people attempting to cross it. Mikhail Gorbachev, who had come to power in 1985 and was pursuing the reform programs of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), did not immediately respond to Reagan's challenge.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
West and East Germans at the Brandenburg Gate in November 1989 — the Wall that Reagan had demanded be torn down was breached twenty-nine months after his speech, and demolished entirely by 1990. See the linked Wikipedia article below for historical photographs.
The debate over how much Reagan's speech contributed to the fall of the Wall is genuine and unresolved. On one side: the speech gave rhetorical force and moral clarity to Western opposition to the Wall at a moment when Soviet authority was visibly weakening; it encouraged dissidents in Eastern Europe; it placed the Wall's continued existence in the context of a global moral argument. On the other: the Wall fell primarily because of internal pressures within East Germany and the Eastern Bloc — a mass protest movement in Leipzig and Dresden, Gorbachev's decision not to use force, and a miscommunicated East German announcement on November 9 that border restrictions had been lifted.
What is clear is that the Wall fell on November 9, 1989 — twenty-nine months after Reagan's speech — and that the crowd that flooded the checkpoints and began dismantling the Wall was responding to political developments that had been building throughout 1989. The Solidarity movement had won elections in Poland in June. Hungary had opened its border with Austria, allowing East Germans to flee westward. The Monday demonstrations in Leipzig had been growing for weeks. The Wall's fall was the culmination of pressures that Reagan's rhetoric reflected and possibly amplified but did not alone create.
The reunification of Germany followed with extraordinary speed. The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany — the 'Two Plus Four Agreement' — was signed on September 12, 1990. German reunification was formally accomplished on October 3, 1990 — less than a year after the Wall fell. The speed of reunification, which Western analysts had assumed would take decades, reflects how completely the Soviet Union's willingness to maintain the Eastern Bloc had collapsed. Reagan's speech remains one of the most quoted pieces of Cold War rhetoric, though its direct causal relationship to the Wall's fall continues to be debated by historians.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The fall of the Berlin Wall was the symbolic end of the Cold War, which had defined global politics for forty-four years. The Wall had been the most visible physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe. Its fall signaled the collapse of Soviet authority over Eastern Europe and the end of the ideological contest that had structured international relations since 1945.
German reunification had geopolitical consequences that are still unfolding. The reunified Germany became the dominant power of the European Union, the largest economy in Europe, and a key player in the NATO alliance. The economic and cultural integration of East and West Germany — still incomplete in some respects — has shaped European politics for three decades.
The question of what caused the Wall to fall matters for understanding how political change actually happens. The debate between those who credit Reagan's rhetoric and those who credit internal Soviet and Eastern European dynamics is not merely academic — it speaks to fundamental questions about the role of leadership, ideology, and structural conditions in producing political change.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On June 12, 1987, a US President stood at the Berlin Wall and demanded it be torn down. His own advisors had tried to remove the line from the speech. Two years and five months later, the Wall fell — for reasons that are still being analyzed and argued. Reagan restored the line.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
— President Ronald Reagan, Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, June 12, 1987
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Berlin Wall, Reagan's 1987 speech, the internal political dynamics that actually brought the Wall down on November 9, 1989, and the extraordinarily rapid German reunification that followed?
