iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

The good news is that you don't need to do much of it, but it has to make an appreciable difference to what you produce as a team. I truly and really am sorry.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

LLMs can and will automate your job if all you do is routine everyone else is also doing. You need to find a way to make yourself useful in this new world, where showing up will no longer be enough.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

Your advantage is that you understand cause and effect. It doesn't. You can look at a set of rules and conditions, spend some time contemplating them and reach conclusions about where they "collide". It can only do so in places where it has seen enough to relate it back to its training.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

What they're good at is reusing the steps around our concepts, i.e.: our routines. However I feel about LLMs, it's important to give them a fair shake, if for nothing else: self-preservation. We know writing code without giving it sufficient thought is a recipe for disaster. LLMs can only do that

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

In other words: fast-thinking is our reward for having done the hard work of figuring things out in detail previously. We can train ourselves enough to turn some tools in our industry into routines, but LLMs can mostly catch up with us there if it has enough training material.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

I read the tests to remind my later self why I considered this particular scenario some special case and if they break, I have a way to slide back into these mental structures, but it doesn't become easy until it turns into routine, which it rarely does if I did my job well.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

Once I'm finished with those, I usually write the conclusions down -mostly in code- after which I put some unit-tests in place to make sure that I got the formalisms right. Unit-tests are my safeguards that turn hard-won results from my slow-thinking into fast-thinking, i.e.: intuitive.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

This is something deep in our biology, not something we can just "snap out of". "Slow thinking" is the thing LLMs can't and (as far as we can tell) won't ever be able to do. My job makes me do (sometimes weeks-) long "slow thinking marathons". I don't find them enjoyable in the slightest.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

I don't need much introspection to find that I do everything I can (both consciously and unconsciously) to avoid doing it. There was a famous experiment (reproduced a few times) where they showed that people preferred being electroshocked to having to do cognitively strenuous tasks.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

LLMs are me when I show up for work but are somewhere else mentally. This is your advantage. Recently, I've been thinking about Kahneman's "fast and slow thinking" and how this relates to current AI. I often find asking myself how often I need to strain my "thinking muscles".

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/02/2026

LLMs are us (me certainly) at our worst. I'm an LLM when I become annoyed with a problem, refuse to engage with it in earnest and just want to get it over with. I'm an LLM when I give the first answer to a non-obvious question that pops into my mind.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 07/02/2026

People say that AI-produced stuff is uninspired, generic and soulless, but this year's Grammys were a great illustration of how we don't need GenAI for this to happen, shallow consumerism is enough.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 12/01/2026

Is it possible to show that LLMs can't reason? It's easy to show that they can't reason the way we do, but hypothetically it might be possible to somehow couple its "semantics" coherently. Unless this is you however, you really should shut up about LLM intelligence though.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 29/12/2025

How to mitigate latency in a deterministic system. This is an almost entirely novel concept which has very little literature supporting it.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 29/12/2025

Gemini does a great job at summarising our paper

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 27/12/2025

LLMs automated design patterns, that is: stochastic pattern-matching on signals without any consideration for semantics. Neither of them ever really worked, but both look like they do at first glance and since people don't like to think about semantics, they both took root

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 22/12/2025

I'm reading @markburgessosl.bsky.social draft paper on attention in AI. Some 🤯: - LLMs are slow because of the incredibly wide context when evaluating, so that's also a boundary problem - Boundaries are the same as a rejection of a violation of an autonomy, so semantics are agentic

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 17/12/2025

The US can't do anything very radical with the threat of EU/Japan dumping its debt hanging over its head. The GENIUS Act can't be implemented because we can't fully automate clearing between two consistent datastores. The whole thing is just silly. andrasgerlits.medium.com/why-clearing...

andrasgerlits.medium.com

Why Clearing is a Distributed System Problem and Why That’s Bad News for Stablecoins

That all financial transactions rely on trust is nothing new. Just how far we need to trust the other party however, makes all the…

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 17/12/2025

If you want to issue stablecoins as defined by the GENIUS Act, you need to buy treasuries in equal amount. I wonder if its goal is to bring US debt back on-shore. It's amazing how the status quo is held up by the Two Generals' Problem and how that's mostly a misunderstanding.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 11/12/2025

Systems like these are called relative-time systems and are simply not subjects to CAP's limitations.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 11/12/2025

Isolated clocks shouldn't be allowed to append to the sequences of nodes from which they are isolated, but should recover seamlessly once they become available again. Ideally, event-order should be established with the speed of communication.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 11/12/2025

The alternative is to define the clock around communication. Nowhere does strong consistency say that you need to have an immediately evaluated global clock, in fact that's an oxymoron, what does time mean without its associated information anyway?

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 11/12/2025

It really doesn't matter whether the local clocks are atomic clocks, vector-clocks or stable wormholes in space-time, the point is that the total order can't be progressed in case a single such node becomes isolated. This is what absolute time coordinate-system is.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 11/12/2025

So, even in isolation, a node is allowed to process a new event and by choosing a time locally, implicitly appending that event to the global sequence of events at a point of its (well, its physical clock's) choosing. CAP only applies to systems which are defined this way.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 11/12/2025

Second: that there's only a single, globally shared clock. So, what does absolute time mean? It means that the total order of all the events required by the system (to fulfill strong consistency) can be appended by each node autonomously. Like you would with atomic clocks.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 11/12/2025

First, that we can lose "a node". One could argue that (regardless of Paxos, so never needing to have nodes with exclusive data) this is a reasonable thing to assume, as we'll always have a finite set of sync replicas for any of our computers, so let's go with this.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 11/12/2025

Define clocks as "the thing that orders change in a system". We have a multi-node system, where all write-events are stongly ordered. CAP says that if we lose a node in this setup, we can't know on any of the nodes what the "correct" state is. What are the assumptions?

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 11/12/2025

All clocks are wrong but some are useful. 🧵

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 10/12/2025

Can someone explain to me why CAP was adopted into the canon based on a paper, but Paxos required Chubby to even be noticed?

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 09/12/2025

The problem of state-management is that processes are allowed to make decisions. We project free will. It's a kind of anthropomorphisation. In fact, all their "free will" is just a byproduct of their incidental entanglement, ie: unforeseen causal relationships between them.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 08/12/2025

Whatever you might think about LLMs, it's matter of fact that they are tools of cargo-culting, meaning that they imitate the external signals without understanding the internals. How that is not considered a problem is beyond me.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 29/11/2025

There are two options here: we either end up showing that we're actually wrong and all our theories are for the birds or that cloud providers and their overpriced services are obsolete

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 29/11/2025

If you believe the conclusions of CAP apply to all distributed systems, you believe that there's no way to not have the occasional latency spike or even node isolation event happen to your service, unless you have an incredibly well tuned network. Our next project disproves this

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 27/11/2025

LLMs and Tesla's FSD are the same problem. Both can only succeed if they can consistently apply meaning and reason about it. A bush with feet is a human carrying a plant. Now do this with orders of magnitude more complexity and you see the problem. Probabilism won't save you

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 26/11/2025

We're planning a new kind of service, one everyone thought impossible because of CAP, that should fix most distributed systems problems in a very simple way. If you have control-plane problems or service-integration issues, send me a DM or reply here and I'll get in touch.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

I did find it amazing at the start, (but got used to by now) is how nobody refutes our innovation at its substance. People who take the time to understand it (without exception) also accept even our wildest claims. Few actually care about truth if it contradicts their beliefs

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

A thread about why pessimistic systems are bad at scaling.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

In the next thread, I'll explain how to build such a clock from many, smaller ones, how such a system can be built on any hardware, and how it can be much more resilient than its alternatives.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

So, what can we do? We can establish a different kind of clock, one which allows for different places to move at their own speeds. In physics, this is called "proper time". We also need a way to reach consensus about the outcomes of events, ordered by these clocks.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

When event A happens at a distance of 100ms from event B, they cannot be reconciled in under 400ms. Now, if event C depends on either A or B, it needs to wait 400ms before it can even start processing. You can see how this quickly gets out hand.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

When Spanner attempts to "flatten out" time by playing on our perception of time-order, what it's actually doing is trying to establish some absolute, shared time through cause and effect, using communication. These time-effects are transitive, so reverberate across the system.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

Since locks are also records, which have an impact (are in a causal relationship with) on other processes throughout the system, Spanner's clocks are made up of both its atomic clock and its communication-mechanism serving its locking, as those are "things that establish order"

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

People usually understand Spanner's "clocks" to mean its physical, atomic, "wall-clocks", but they only provide a subset of all the operations expected of a clock in a distributed system. A clock is supposed to order all changes in the system, but in Spanner, it doesn't.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

Spanner isn't fair. Local transactions can grab locks much more quickly than remote ones, so will have an opportunity to write records more often. So how does this cause our scaling problems? By making all changes "local" at all places, papering over the fact that they aren't.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

So what are the limits of Spanner vs the limits of distributed consistency? Even the simplest pessimistic transaction will take at least 2 round-trips to complete, so 400 ms instead of a 100. Even worse: we're comparing apples to oranges. The 100ms was for "fair writes".

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

Locks obfuscate this process, by simulating a world where clocks are frozen until some system-wide consensus is reached about the next version of a locked record, at the end of some collection of write-events. This abstraction in clocks is what causes our scaling problems.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

According to our model, Spanner (or any other pessimistic system) creates a different event each time it's requesting a lock over a remote resource. The local process emitting the event blocks until the remote node creates a counter-event to acknowledge the lock.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

Think about what a Compare-and-Swap operation is and you'll find the definition of optimistic conflict-resolution. Our intent to update the value of a given record is conditional on that record currently having the given value. Locks are polite signals to others. Conventions.

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Andras Gerlits @omniledger.io · 20/11/2025

Let's analyse Spanner using the model explained here. Spanner relies on pessimistic locks, so we first need to ask the question of what it is in a distributed system. Simple: a pessimistic lock is an optimistically written record, sometimes on a remote node.

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