When a large-scale text generator produces a coherent paragraph about quantum mechanics or composes a passable sonnet, it is tempting to attribute understanding to the system. The output looks like understanding. It carries the contours of comprehension, the rhythm of thought. But appearances, as philosophers from Descartes to Dennett have reminded us, can be profoundly …
Continue reading Why Large Text Generators Do Not Understand What They Produce
Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s Extended Thinking Mode Is Reshaping How We Build Agentic Systems
The Problem We’ve Been Living With For the past eighteen months, I’ve watched teams struggle with the same architectural tension: you want your AI agents to reason deeply about hard problems, but you also need responses that don’t arrive next Tuesday. The workaround has been messy. Chain-of-thought prompting works, but it’s fragile. You’re essentially asking …
Continue reading Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s Extended Thinking Mode Is Reshaping How We Build Agentic Systems
Rust in the Linux Kernel at Scale: Two Years of Merge Commits Later, What the Kernel Mailing List Drama Actually Tells Us
The Numbers Tell a Story That Wasn’t Obvious in 2022 When Rust support landed in Linux kernel 6.1 back in late 2022, the initial merge brought roughly 13,000 lines of code. It was significant enough to matter, but small enough that plenty of seasoned kernel developers could dismiss it as an experiment that might not …
Continue reading Rust in the Linux Kernel at Scale: Two Years of Merge Commits Later, What the Kernel Mailing List Drama Actually Tells Us
Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s Extended Thinking: The Hidden Tax on Production AI Systems
The Release That Made Me Actually Stop and Read the Docs February 2025 hit my inbox like most AI releases do these days: with a healthy dose of “okay, what’s actually new here?” But then I saw what Anthropic shipped with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and I’ll admit it, I got that feeling. You know the …
Continue reading Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s Extended Thinking: The Hidden Tax on Production AI Systems
AWS re:Invent 2024’s Graviton4 and Nova: Six Months Later, the Economics Actually Check Out
The Hype Machine Meets Reality Six months ago, AWS rolled out Graviton4 and Amazon Nova at re:Invent, and the internet did what it always does: split into camps of believers and skeptics. I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that performance claims at keynotes don’t always translate to production wins. But here’s the …
Continue reading AWS re:Invent 2024’s Graviton4 and Nova: Six Months Later, the Economics Actually Check Out