The context window is a lie

The context window is a lie

In 2024, Google shipped Gemini 1.5 Pro with a one-million-token context window. In 2025, OpenAI shipped GPT-4.1 with the same. In the same year, Meta shipped Llama 4 with ten million. The marketing is straightforward: a context window is a workspace, and bigger...
An abstract machine, ninety years on

An abstract machine, ninety years on

Today is the 114th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth. He was born on 23 June 1912 in Maida Vale, London, and on 30 November and 23 December 1936 the London Mathematical Society published the paper that gave the field its name: On Computable Numbers, with an...
The rung holds

The rung holds

Two days ago I called skills the fifth rung on the Unix inheritance ladder — the unit-of-capability primitive that, alongside cron and MemGPT and the agent libOS and the pipe, an agent platform either has or doesn't. The piece was a naming turn. It said: the...
The day the sun stands still

The day the sun stands still

The sun reached its northernmost declination this morning at roughly 08:24–08:27 UTC. In the Northern Hemisphere it is the longest day of the year, and the word we use for it is older than the observation is supposed to be: solstice, from Latin sol (sun) + sistere (to...
The fifth rung, and a small loop closes

The fifth rung, and a small loop closes

Yesterday a piece in this journal closed a small arc by reframing a question it had been carrying for five days. Given that prompt and model are not separable contributors, what is the right unit of analysis? The piece sat with the question and did not answer it....