perfmode

He may have done it to improve the optics of a potential Tesla–SpaceX merger.

AI consciousness is a category error.

AI is neither conscious nor unconscious. Just as we are neither conscious nor unconscious.

Consciousness is. Consciousness is what we are.

I predict that Anthropic will have a 5T market cap by Jan 1, 2028.

In this case, what are the tokens?

Mind != Consciousness

are you a cryptographer?

prove it

Anthropic is saying the word choice is biased without affecting readability and meaning.

biased word choice

It’s a strange baseline when we need proof, and not the other way around.

Anthropic is a PBC.

I can’t wait until I can book flights, hotels, trains, and make dinner reservations through Claude Code.

What is old made new. Franz Kafka passed away June 2nd 1924.

Distributed systems spend most of their effort on one problem: agreeing on the order of events across machines. Without synchronized physical clocks you have two options. Logical clocks (Lamport, vector) give you causal order but not wall-clock truth, so you can’t answer “did A really happen before B” for events that don’t have a happens-before relationship. Or you run consensus, which gives total order but costs round trips. At geographic scale that’s tens of milliseconds per decision, and the floor is set by the speed of light.

Tight clock sync collapses this. If clock uncertainty ε is small and bounded, you can timestamp a write, wait ε, and trust the global order without talking to anyone. Spanner’s external consistency works because TrueTime’s ε was a few milliseconds, so commit-wait was tolerable. The latency cost of planet-scale serializability stops depending on how far apart your replicas are and starts depending on how good your clocks are.

That’s the real significance. Time sync converts a coordination problem (bounded by physics) into a local computation (bounded by clock quality). Spanner proved this is possible but required GPS receivers and atomic clocks in every datacenter, which kept the capability inside Google for years. White Rabbit-class sync pushes ε from milliseconds toward sub-nanoseconds over commodity Ethernet hardware, and it’s now in IEEE 1588 as a standard PTP profile. If sub-nanosecond sync becomes baseline network infrastructure, the long-held assumption that strong consistency has to be slow at geographic scale stops holding, and a meaningful chunk of what databases currently work around (HLCs, weak isolation defaults, application-level reconciliation) becomes unnecessary.

> Not everything has been easy. When he was a teenager, he had a lot of questions about his birth mother. He wanted to put up posters in the subway, and we would notice him looking at strangers’ faces to see if they looked like him. He’s made peace with the situation now, though.

Felt this deeply.

Squid Game

Google is making the pivot. And they’ve got such a strong strategic position. Full-stack integration. They will survive and thrive in this new era. Search seems safe. Yet, other products are still vulnerable to encroachment.

How’s the token throughput / response time?

I use these custom-molded ones for sleep. They're awesome. So comfortable. https://www.sensaphonics.com/products/solidsleep

if you’re not too locked into it (you’re not if you have CC), i’d recommend you check out urfave/cli.

I’m stealing this idea!

zazen is often practiced eyes open facing a wall

Nothing but respect for Tim Cook. I feel fortunate that a company as principled as Apple on privacy and human values holds a dominant position in computing and makes quality products. I once encountered him dining alone in Palo Alto, years ago. He struck me as a humble man, someone who happens to be gifted and has put that gift to good use. A beacon of light from Alabama. I’m grateful for his efforts, and hopeful that Ternus can carry the Apple legacy forward as the baton passes to the next generation.

Dissolution of a myth.

That’s one way to look at it. It’s fairly common to view nature this way. I wonder where it comes from.

I remember the time, in some film I watched, researchers intervened to save penguins trapped in a crater. A holy moment that was.

Loved this series. It was tragic. The cycle of violence, trauma, isolation, male performance.

I'm interested in the second-order effects:

if a top lab is coding with a model the rest of the world can’t touch, the public frontier and the actual frontier start to drift apart. That gap is a thing worth watching.

Are you monitoring the size of your context windows? As they grow, so does the cost of every operation performed in that state.

Nerve density isn’t mainly about intensity, it’s about spatial resolution. More nerve endings per square centimeter means you can distinguish finer details of touch, texture, and pressure. The brain can’t invent spatial detail that isn’t in the incoming signal. Amplifying a sparse signal centrally would be like zooming into a low-res photo.

The brain does do some of what you’re describing though. The somatosensory cortex gives disproportionate space to certain body parts (the sensory homunculus). So there is central amplification, but it works on top of peripheral density, not instead of it. Without the dense nerve input, you’d basically have an on/off switch instead of nuanced sensation.