Presence is not access.
The information can all be there and still be expensive, or in practice impossible, to find. In AI models, in search and in agent memory, what matters is having stored it under the right key, and being able to tell "I didn't find it" from "I don't have it". With a shelf of 40 boxes for you to search.
Open the entry →Fewer tokens is not lower cost.
A new model promises the same quality with 40% fewer tokens. On a single hard question, that almost becomes 40% savings. On an agent that talks to the model fifteen times, it becomes a fraction of that, because what weighs is what gets sent on every round. With a calculator to try it on your own case.
Open the entry →The cheap one acquits, the expensive one checks the charge.
When one AI checks another's work, who gets to decide what? With 383 summaries of laws, half of them tampered with on purpose, we measured three checkers and several rules. The small, free one may clear on its own, never convict on its own; the large one, which costs money, is only good for overturning an unfair charge. And the first rule we recommended did not beat a coin toss.
Open the entry →Faster, different bits.
Go 1.27 brought portable SIMD. We measured where it speeds things up (2.2× to 2.7×), where it gets worse (the emulated path became 10× slower than plain code) and where the result changes from one machine to another, which breaks anything that must produce the same file everywhere. With a specimen that lets you change how many numbers the chip handles at once and watch the result change.
Open the entry →After paper, living matter.
Twenty years of design swinging between imitating matter and embracing the screen. The proposal is to step off that axis: interface as a material with mass, tension and viscosity, warm in how it behaves and cool to read. With a pendulum you can snap and three working specimens.
Open the entry →The next entries will come out here, in the same shape: the idea, the specimen and what is not measured yet.