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Armin Ronacher x.com
Sometimes I really wish there was a global clock I could manipulate so that I can test expiration behavior on distributed systems I do not control.
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18 September
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12 September
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4 September
1 September
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korrents.com
Compute platforms are converging toward one unified, globally distributed system limited only by physics.Their words
The future is one global and unified compute platform, with only known physics as the limiting factor
31 August
26 August
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Their words
The reason I say that is there's a lot of programmers who are not very good product managers. Software is product management. What should it do? Who should it do it for? How should it do it? How should it look? What are our priorities? What do we start with first? What does version one include? All of those skills are not easily or equally distributed across all programmers.
19 August
13 August
10 August
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Their words
humans are capable of doing a lot of things with our tools, but we don't do all of them. For example, today any car manufacturer can say every Friday the brake doesn't work. This is a trivial technology. There's a clock in the car's computer and it just turns off the brake every Friday. But we don't do that because it has deeply bad implications to our human society.
7 August
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Their words
And so we can distribute the voting across a lot of the company for this initial review, which is essential because if you're doing anything cool, by the time you get a couple years into it, that top of funnel is overwhelming. And if you place any in any small group of employees or any one person in the way as a bottle bottleneck on this, they will absolutely bottleneck the whole rest of the organization.
28 July
From one piece Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup" 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think concentration of power has basically been bad in every moment of human history um to varying degrees of course but I have a real spirit and I think this is part of the startup spirit of thinking that the world, the economy, society is the best off when power is very widely distributed
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Their words
In fact, if if we are right that AI is going to be such a big change, startups will be much more important to making sure that the power of this technology gets widely distributed throughout the economy and society and is not just concentrated in a few companies or models.
27 July
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Their words
So coding is solved for the kind of coding that I do. It's not solved for everyone. You know, there's still code bases that are like super deep systems code bases where quad still struggles.
22 July
17 July
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korrents.com
Modern technology has made seasonal clock changes far less burdensome than they were decades ago.Their words
the main relevant difference between 1974 and now is that technology handles clock changes on our behalf, so time changes are less burdensome than they used to be.
27 June
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Their words
These failures are a strong signal that HDL-C is not the variable we should be trying to manipulate.
16 June
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korrents.com
A very long life would not grow boring, because pleasures spaced far enough apart do not wear out.Their words
There are things that we naturally take pleasure in—such as friendship, sex, and Italian food—and while we can become sick of anything if continually exposed to it in large doses, we don’t get tired of these things if they are properly distributed in time.
Immortality Sounds Pretty Good, Actuallysmallpotatoes.paulbloom.net
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Their words
It even becomes a kind of a prisoner's dilemma system because if you're the duke and you don't manipulate the papacy, if you don't bribe the pope, if you don't work hard to get your brother to be bishop, and your enemies do, you're screwed.
4 June
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Their words
some people think either uh frontier AI gets commoditized and we all enjoy the benefits, but there might be some risk because like it's the market's really competitive and cutthroat, or um things are safer because there's a big gap between the leader and the laggard, but that means that the leaders get fantastically wealthy. No, like you could just have a relatively big gap, but it's a public company ownership and it's widely distributed.
27 May
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Their words
We're now doing it in a much heavier way because we find that these like kind of bory enterprisey uh patterns end up being pretty useful because you have a bunch of idiots on your team now. The coding agents are a bunch of idiots and they are going to work 24/7 and they're going to like ship a lot of stuff. So you need way more guardrails than you used to.
21 May
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Their words
Central planning is not a solution simply because agents are software, and do not fix the problem of local knowledge which lives near the work.
11 May
22 April
From one piece Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
we just assume that there's no upper bound on how long it might take for a message to go over the network. So, you send a message, it might arrive within 100 microseconds, or it might take 10 years.
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korrents.com
Clocks are right most of the time, and that is precisely why a distributed system may never rely on them.Their words
it's very easy to assume that your clocks are correct and most of the times the clocks are pretty correct but we just can't rely on it because actually they're just not precise enough uh on the whole.
19 April
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Their words
There will be negative second-order effects of almost every widely distributed technology.
15 April
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Their words
Pick your ASIC team where you can say I can bet the farm of I can bet my entire business that you will be here for me every single year. Your cost, your token cost will decrease by an order of magnitude every single year. I can count on it like I can count on the clock.
11 April
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Their words
but I still think the model of Eventually Known Consistency is the better theoretical model even if it is harder for users to reason about.
7 April
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24 December 2025
31 October 2025
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Their words
But as a spy, that doesn’t really work because you have to be against the clock. So I think for me, I’m, I question if you can even make a good open world spy game.
5 October 2025
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Their words
I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Um, yes, they they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways. Especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your like learn habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You know, you need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff.
30 September 2025
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Their words
One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That’s really important to realize the content you consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind. You have to disconnect yourself.
28 September 2025
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korrents.com
Academic talent is normally distributed, so some students failing is inevitable rather than anybody's fault.Their words
Academic talent is normally distributed throughout the population, and so some degree of failure is literally inevitable.
There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com
15 September 2025
4 September 2025
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Their words
You're dominant in contests, particularly with conspecifics. If you're trying to win a territory or win mating rights, bigger things usually beat up smaller things. So there's going to be selection favoring them. But then big things don't usually do well in extinction events, so that tends to reset the clock by killing off the big stuff, and then smaller stuff does better again.
3 September 2025
20 August 2025
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Their words
I think this slop-adjacent realm of dupe products and Instagrammable potions points to our increasingly desperate need to manipulate our own images, and an acceptance of the fact that we're kind of hybridized monsters ourselves in this post-A.I. human-machine moment
23 July 2025
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Their words
Including things like universal basic provision or something like that where a lot of the increased productivity gets shared out and distributed to society and maybe in the form of services and other things where if you want more than that, you still go and get some incredibly rare skills and things like that and make yourself unique. But there's a basic provision that is provided.
7 July 2025
15 June 2025
5 May 2025
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Their words
So I think we’re very attached to imagining creatures like us, that manipulate technology, and I think we have to be way more imaginative if we’re going to really take seriously life in the universe.
18 March 2025
16 December 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Designing Data-Intensive ApplicationsTheir words
The most practical book I've found so far on distributed systems.
14 October 2024
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Their words
If WP Engine didn’t want this to happen, they should not have published their code under the GPL or distributed it through WordPress.org’s directory.
24 September 2024
26 August 2024
3 May 2024
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Their words
The second is that producing semiconductors requires almost unfathomable levels of precision.
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fabconstruction-physics.com
2 February 2024
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korrents.com
A technology company's success is determined mainly by how fast it operates and learns.Their words
The biggest determinant for success in a technology company is the speed at which it operates and learns - the "clock speed" to use a CPU analogy.
17 November 2023
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korrents.com
In a world of mutual assured destruction, nuclear weapons are used to manipulate risk rather than to win a battle.Their words
The way you use nuclear weapons in that world is you use them for manipulation of risk purposes, demonstration effect. You put both sides out on the slippery slope.
12 October 2022
23 February 2022
31 May 2021
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