rescrv

Hi HN,

I'm Robert, a Member of Technical Staff at Chroma. I've been working on transaction protocols for at least 14 years now, starting with my PhD in distributed systems. During my tenure at Dropbox, where I worked on the metadata layer for storing non-filesystem data, we added transactional support to Edgestore, the storage system for the same.

Agents fascinate me. With agents, we have real reason to question the fundamental tradeoffs we've made with software. Coding agents build differently, communicate differently, and thus need different solutions than engineers have built in the past.

We've built a new context layer for organizations called Foundation. With Foundation, we treat the agents as a distributed system and use techniques from the literature to guide the swarm effectively.

At the heart of Foundation sits some novel distributed systems work we call the Fission protocol, documented in this post. In short, breaking atomicity of transactions is encouraged and necessary.

I'll be here to answer any questions you have about the post.

Happy hacking, Robert

I think I've discovered something new and useful. Looking for others to share with.

I haven’t tried the extremes. Context rot says it’ll likely degrade there anyway.

What I’m investigating is if more compact languages work for querying data.

What makes you think it’s going to clutch at straws more? What makes you think it won’t do better with a more compact, localized representation?

Looking to discuss with people about whether LLMs would do better if the language had properties similar to postfix-notation.

I appreciate the feedback. I can definitely see people thinking I'm crazy by the first few chapters and not getting to the good part.

I was trying (and failed) to be clever about improving your life.

What you say about exaggeration vs hyperbole vs analogy vs literal resonates with me. Have you considered they may not, themselves, have an answer to this? For example, I often throw out (hyperbolicly) really wild numbers at work that are off by orders of magnitude to illustrate what happens when stuff grows to an extreme; yet, I'm also very cautious to get precise numbers when building. My co-workers may be bothered by this (so I'll be more mindful now that I've probed for this insight), but I would like to think that hyperbole is easily detected.

Honestly, I don't know if I can help with perspective without witnessing you with your care-person. Everyone's different and the nature of the beast is you only interact with really ill people when you yourself are out of commission. I wouldn't want to generalize me onto someone else. Perhaps you just show them the post I'm replying to and ask what they think?

From where I sit today, I can say that I see things others don't. I have a hard time saying they aren't real, though, as experience has been a zero-knowledge proof the the commentary.

The front half of the book, up until a clear pivot chapter, is me trying to put to words a coherent schizophrenic vision; both to establish credentials and to give people a sense of what it can be like.

A common theme I've seen both in myself and in others who have spoken to me about their experience is that it's common to have a delusion that you are at the center of a religion.

Personally, I've been blessed with insights at the core of every major religion that I know more than a slight deal about. It just so happens that the episode I detail in this book has me at the center of a prophecy; It rings in my head as truth, but I don't have any proof of that truth to produce.

In the latter half of the book, I introduce a conversation with Master Yoshu that I feel is critical to the message. It would have been awkward to say, "I heard this from a voice" without the setup to give that.

Regarding your last paragraph, I think what you'll find is that life is rarely ever centered around something that you can ever adequately put to words. Even if someone is always 100% literal, their concepts will not match your concepts; labels are the source of much of our suffering, and trying to label something as example or metaphor or "not literal" already betrays that you're unable to falsify it; thus, there's something to it.

I don't want to dismiss you though: If I went through that burden of categorizing my own text, how would your life be improved?

I appreciate you sharing.

My understanding is schizoaffective disorder is one of four categories of schizophrenia. I think people often use them interchangeably.

Medication can be tricky because when it works it seems increasingly unnecessary and often has side effects of its own.

I hope no one reads my book as a substitute or prescription to avoid medication on their path. To each their own, but it's not what I'm advocating for.

Thank you again!

I'm sorry to hear you were heartbroken.

I assure you I've seen people who are worse than me turn out much better than me and I hold hope that I'm on a good trajectory.