Thoughts
Agent systems in production — architecture, LLM infrastructure, latency and cost, and the lessons that only arrive after something ships.
The Cost of Autonomy: Token Economics and Latency Bottlenecks in Production Agentspinned
Agent loops re-send their whole context on every step, so the bill grows with the square of the step count. The arithmetic, what prompt caching does to it, and why semantic caching is a trap inside the loop.
Local-First Agents: Running Ollama, Llama 3, and AST Parsingpinned
A background refactoring daemon on a laptop: a local Ollama tool loop, a JSON schema the model must answer in, and Python's ast doing every edit. The model decides what to change; the tree does the typing.
Tool Use vs. Hallucination: Why Function Calling is the Weakest Link in Modern AI Agentspinned
Broken JSON and made-up function names are mostly a solved problem now. What's left is worse: valid calls that are wrong. Grammars guarantee shape, not meaning, so the real work is semantic validation and fallbacks.
Beyond the Wrapper: Building Fault-Tolerant Multi-Agent Swarmspinned
A chain of prompts can't loop; a graph can. Most multi-agent failures are distributed-systems bugs, and the fix is bounded cycles, error edges, checkpoints and idempotent side effects. Often the right number of agents is one.
From Prompt Engineering to Control Flow: Designing Deterministic State Machines for LLM Appspinned
The bug isn't treating the model like a chat buddy; it's letting the transcript be the program. Let the model turn messages into events, let a state machine decide what happens, and test the table rather than the prompt.
The Fermi Paradox is Wrong: Why We Don't Hear Aliens Because They're Post-Biological
Minds that outgrow biology have little reason to broadcast, which explains the radio silence. They still have to dump heat, though, and the infrared sky is quiet too.
The Paper Route: How Bureaucracy, Ledgers, and Double-Entry Bookkeeping Invented Capitalism
Pacioli didn't invent double entry, and ledgers didn't invent capitalism. What they did was make trust portable: a checksum on commerce that catches carelessness but not bad judgement.
Megaprojects of Antiquity: The Logistics of Moving Millions of Tons Without Steel
No lost secrets: the Pyramids, the Nîmes aqueduct and Angkor were built with boats, bread, careful surveying and decades of patient logistics, and the hard part then was the same as now.
Titan and Enceladus: Why the Outer Solar System Is Our Best Bet for Alien Microbes
Enceladus sprays its ocean into space, Titan is a chemistry lab, and Mars has the best clue with no ride home. Why a second genesis in Saturn's moons would teach us more than a Martian fossil.
The Geopolitics of Guano: How Bird Poop Sparked Wars and Built Modern Agriculture
Peru ran a state on bird droppings, Spain seized them as a hostage, and Chile fought for what replaced them. The dependency ended in a chemistry lab, not on a battlefield.
Rogue Planets: The Billions of Wandering Worlds Floating Through Interstellar Space
Microlensing hints at trillions of planets with no star, give or take a factor of five. How they get thrown out, how you weigh something that never shines, and whether one could keep an ocean warm.
Seeing Music
Music has always wanted a body — a dancer, a lamp, a spinning record. On why I built Dhun, and why I will keep building it for an audience of one.
Antimatter Factories: How We Make, Trap, and Lose the Universe's Most Dangerous Substance
A microgram of antimatter would make a 43-kilogram-of-TNT bang, not an apocalypse, and CERN has made nanograms in half a century. The real feat is keeping a hundred antiprotons alive for a year.
Mapping the Invisible: What Multi-Wavelength Astronomy Reveals About the Cosmos
Visible light is one octave out of about forty. The best of multi-wavelength astronomy isn't the pretty composites, it's what turns up when two bands disagree, and the ageing telescopes that make that possible.
The Ultimate Fate of the Cosmos: Heat Death, the Big Rip, and Vacuum Decay
Heat death, the Big Rip and vacuum decay all hinge on a couple of measured numbers. New DESI data hint that dark energy is weakening, which makes the most violent ending less likely.
Colophon
How this site is built, and why it is built the way it is: posts as React components, a design system that is one colour ramp, and dark mode without a single dark: variant.
The Quantum Measurement Paradox: Why Reality Doesn't Exist Until We Look at It
Nothing in quantum mechanics waits for you to look, and the delayed-choice eraser doesn't rewrite the past. What survives, Bell's theorem, is stranger than the myth.
Quantum Tunneling in Biology: How Enzymes and Photosynthesis Cheat Classical Physics
Enzymes really do tunnel hydrogen through barriers. Birds probably use spin chemistry, smell-by-vibration is still a long shot, and the famous photosynthesis coherence didn't hold up.
Information Monopoly: How the Printing Press, Telegraph, and Internet Shattered Power
The press, the telegraph and the internet each broke an information monopoly, then built a new one at the bottleneck. Keeping power spread out has always been a political job, not a technical one.
Gravity is Not a Force: Rethinking General Relativity Without the Rubber Sheet Metaphor
What you feel as weight is the floor pushing you off a geodesic. For slow objects gravity is almost entirely the curvature of time, and the part you can't make vanish by falling is a millionth of g.
Supply Chain Collapses That Ended Civilizations: Lessons from the Late Bronze Age
The Bronze Age world didn't fall because the tin stopped. Drought, hunger and raiders hit a tightly coupled system with no slack left, and trade spread every failure to every kingdom.
The Maxwell's Demon Problem: Information Theory Meets Thermodynamics at the Nanoscale
Forgetting one bit costs at least kT ln 2, about 2.9 × 10⁻²¹ J at room temperature. It's been measured on a bead, an electron and a nanomagnet, and your laptop pays 10⁴ to 10⁹ times that for reasons unrelated to it.