I like the startup-equity analysis because it follows the “lottery ticket” past the headline valuation to dilution, exercise costs, taxes, and the trouble of selling private shares. The comparison is assumption-heavy, and the compensation figures are dated, so I’d read it for the mechanics of the tradeoff rather than as current salary advice.

Taking the log of the trajectory probability turns the product into a sum, and the environment-transition terms vanish when differentiated with respect to policy parameters. I like this clear account of how REINFORCE learns from sampled trajectories without differentiating through the environment; the connection to variance and trajectory length keeps the cost of that choice in view.