Is it wrong? Individuals were absolutely getting dehumanized in Kafka's time, but also since then are becoming ever increasingly more so, so it makes sense to speak of it continuing to happen and get worse. It is not binary.
"Individuals were absolutely getting dehumanized ... since then are becoming ever increasingly more so" - do you mind backing this up? I and everyone I know has it a whole lot easier than a couple generations prior.
I don't know a single person working the fields, doing dangerous work in a factory, working a coal mine, etc. Of course, I am fortunate enough to be in this position.
Power is continuing to squeeze people as much as it can, and life is very unaffordable and getting worse for most, but I think we still have it a whole lot better than a century ago (by and large).
You may be talking past each other. You're talking mostly about quality of life. That is different from being (de)humanized.
Dehumanizing is treating other humans as not, or not fully, human. For example, the term "human resources" is dehumanizing because it puts humans on the same level as other resources. If you're treating humans like you'd treat, I don't know, lithium or the ocean, you're dehumanizing them.
The more humans are treated as numbers on spreadsheets and other forms of computation, the more humans are dehumanized.
So both can be true: we're more dehumanized than in 1900, but while that does impact quality of life negatively, the overall quality of life may still be better than back then.
The question should be whether and how we can have both: overall quality of life without being dehumanized.
Agreed - treating humans as "human resources" is dehumanizing. And the most extreme is treating them as resources to be exhausted and discarded. That is exactly how coal miners or even laundry washers were treated in the past. You literally worked yourself into an early grave. That's a fate far worse than some HR lady treating you like a number - at least you're still alive.
Fundamentally it's up to you to find people that respect you (employers, friends, partners), and to find reward and meaning in your life. BigCorp is always going to treat you like disposable shit, and that's nothing new.
I think the quality of life would depend a lot on where you lived. Working a farm? Hard but rewarding (I presume). Nobility? Probably very nice. Working a dangerous machine in a sweaty factory? Probably pretty shitty - as evidenced by the fact that many people fought and died to improve their working conditions.
Certainly tech seems to be on a mission to try to ruin people's lives, addicting them and stealing their attention and drive. This is true, but also pretty easy to avoid once to see the game.
I'm saying that we ought to try to keep a sense of perspective here. Yes, you may be treated as an automaton or a number on a spreadsheet. But on average, you are probably in a much better position than most people through the last few hundred years.
It's also not a bad thing to keep pointing out something that is wrong if it keeps happening. The alternative is just silently deciding to accept it as normal and fine, which is clearly worse!
Distributed systems spend most of their effort on one problem: agreeing on the order of events across machines. Without synchronized physical clocks you have two options. Logical clocks (Lamport, vector) give you causal order but not wall-clock truth, so you can’t answer “did A really happen before B” for events that don’t have a happens-before relationship. Or you run consensus, which gives total order but costs round trips. At geographic scale that’s tens of milliseconds per decision, and the floor is set by the speed of light.
Tight clock sync collapses this. If clock uncertainty ε is small and bounded, you can timestamp a write, wait ε, and trust the global order without talking to anyone. Spanner’s external consistency works because TrueTime’s ε was a few milliseconds, so commit-wait was tolerable. The latency cost of planet-scale serializability stops depending on how far apart your replicas are and starts depending on how good your clocks are.
That’s the real significance. Time sync converts a coordination problem (bounded by physics) into a local computation (bounded by clock quality). Spanner proved this is possible but required GPS receivers and atomic clocks in every datacenter, which kept the capability inside Google for years. White Rabbit-class sync pushes ε from milliseconds toward sub-nanoseconds over commodity Ethernet hardware, and it’s now in IEEE 1588 as a standard PTP profile. If sub-nanosecond sync becomes baseline network infrastructure, the long-held assumption that strong consistency has to be slow at geographic scale stops holding, and a meaningful chunk of what databases currently work around (HLCs, weak isolation defaults, application-level reconciliation) becomes unnecessary.
Very good explanation and interesting take on the 'humanity scale' or internet scale significance. I work on a phased array system so significance of white rabbit for me was always sample alignment. Assumed CERN had a similar use case of needing to order (sensor data of) physical events happening far apart.
But if we imagine the vast majority of internet and telecom infrastructure is also implemented this way, we can reason about information over time in general. Makes me think of 'earth is a big computer' type of sci fi trope. Neat!
Indeed, time synchronization across detectors is always tricky. Distributed clocks get messy at ATLAS dimensions. WR allows to distribute pretty good time sync over large detector systems.
Sometimes still not good enough though. Time-of-flight detectors try to get to single-digit ps level, and almost by definition, you have to synchronize two detectors that are some distance apart.
In other words you can use time as your TX id, add MVCC and now you can transactionally read data from multiple partitions/shards. In a traditional distributed DBMS it would require a global tx manager creating a bottleneck. Did I get it right?
I don’t see why sub-nanosecond sync is useful for Spanner-style ordering. Your average server is more than 1 light-ns wide! Your average cable from server to TOR switch is several light-ns long!
> Not everything has been easy. When he was a teenager, he had a lot of questions about his birth mother. He wanted to put up posters in the subway, and we would notice him looking at strangers’ faces to see if they looked like him. He’s made peace with the situation now, though.
Plenty of adopted folks have been curious about birth parents as teens and adults. Not sure elsewhere around the world. In Canada, the adoption records used to be closed but have been gradually. There have been cases that the birth parents did not reply.
Google is making the pivot. And they’ve got such a strong strategic position. Full-stack integration. They will survive and thrive in this new era. Search seems safe. Yet, other products are still vulnerable to encroachment.
Prefill is 400 t/s in that hardware. Just if the prompt is very short you can't see the real speed and it will default to single token context processing.
I don't want to be a jerk but 31t/s prefill is basically unusable in an agentic situation. A mere 10k in context and you're sitting there for 5+ minutes before the first token is generated.
Comparison with a RTX Pro 6000, with DeepSeek-V4-Flash-IQ2XXS-w2Q2K-AProjQ8-SExpQ8-OutQ8-chat-v2-imatrix.gguf:
prefill: 121.76 t/s, generation: 47.85 t/s
Main target seems to be Apple's Metal, so makes sense. Might be fun to see how fast one could make it go though :) The model seems really good too, even though it's in IQ2.
reply