symmetry, broken

Sign in Subscribe

Latest — Oct 3, 2026

Is Everything a Remake?

At a Works in Progress event in San Francisco on October 2, Aria Schrecker gave a talk with the title: "You get what you pay for: why everything is a remake." Through a variety of empirical evidence she framed a puzzle that anyone who has scrolled a streaming

More issues

The Wall as Unpaid Synchronization Tax

The wall marks the boundary where the synchronization tax goes unpaid: where gradient descent has never supplied the energy needed to rotate each position's hidden state into alignment with the unembedding

Daylight Cannot be Saved

The real curiosity is that we keep fighting over which flavor of wrong the clock should be, instead of asking whether the clock needs to be wrong at all.

Asymmetric Evolution

Selection and mutation are not merely biological observations, but the gradient and the noise of a dissipative flow on a space of measures — the same mathematics that governs the forward pass of a transformer.

What Art is Doing

What art is doing, at this moment, is providing the only space large enough and flexible enough to contain the emotional contradictions of the present.

Coherence at 300 Kelvin

We never achieve perfect mutual understanding. But our imperfect, noisy, expensive attempts at coordination do not scatter randomly; they organize into long-lived configurations that every culture independently discovers.

Maintaining Divergence

The synchronization tax is the price of building the bridge. Maintenance is the price of keeping the bridge standing. Transmission is the price of crossing it.

A Tribute to Peter Putnam

Every intelligence leaves a trace. What we experience from the inside — the felt texture of perception, the recursive awareness of our own awareness, the striving that drives our mattering projects — expresses itself outward through action, and those actions broadcast signals. Upon death, the inside experience ceases. No future observer can

A More Perfect Union

We can build systems that, at least from the outside, look like flourishing: systems that operate within appropriate constraints, fulfill purposes their design enables, and participate in relationships characterized by reciprocal adjustment — "a more perfect union."

Communication Communicating

Consensus-seeking communication is limited: not because consensus is impossible or undesirable, but because it is costly, and systems that economize on synchronization costs will, all else equal, outcompete systems that do not.