“Over the past 18 months, Canada’s new gov­ern­ment has fo­cused on build­ing our strength at home, di­ver­si­fy­ing our part­ner­ships abroad, and strik­ing a fair deal with the United States.

Our ob­jec­tives in our trade ne­go­ti­a­tions have been to:

Preserve tar­iff-free ac­cess to the U.S. for the vast ma­jor­ity of Canadian busi­ness;

Provide greater sta­bil­ity to our trade re­la­tion­ship;

Significantly re­duce U.S. tar­iffs on our key strate­gic in­dus­tries, so that Canadian busi­nesses in these sec­tors would have the best ac­cess of any in the world;

Protect our small and medium-sized busi­nesses — the lifeblood of our econ­omy — in­clud­ing by re­mov­ing the im­mi­nent threat of new tar­iffs; and

Maintain our flex­i­bil­ity, in­de­pen­dence, and sov­er­eignty so we can keep build­ing the Canada we want.

We have recog­nised from the be­gin­ning that America has changed, and that we will not re­turn to our old re­la­tion­ship. Our gov­ern­ment un­der­stood, be­fore many, that America is al­ter­ing all its trade re­la­tion­ships. Putting tar­iffs on its clos­est al­lies and charg­ing for ac­cess to its vast mar­ket.

We have worked in that con­text. To strike a fair deal that would pro­vide the best ac­cess to the U.S. mar­ket and greater cer­tainty to Canadian busi­nesses and work­ers. Throughout, our goal has been to se­cure the best deal for Canadians, never a deal at any price or on any dead­line.

In re­cent weeks, we made im­por­tant progress to­ward im­prov­ing Canada’s po­si­tion as hav­ing the best deal in the world with the U.S.

However, that progress has not been enough to meet our ob­jec­tives for Canadians. As a re­sult, this evening, I have de­cided to sus­pend trade ne­go­ti­a­tions with the U.S. and have di­rected Canada’s ne­go­tia­tors to re­turn to Ottawa. They have worked hard, in good faith, to de­fend the in­ter­ests of Canadians through­out these ne­go­ti­a­tions up un­til the very last minute. However, last-minute changes in the U.S. pro­posed terms were un­fair, un­eco­nomic, and called into ques­tion the re­li­a­bil­ity of any deal.

At mid­night tonight, the U.S. in­tends to im­pose a 50% tar­iff on roughly $28 billion of Canadian goods. Canada will match those tar­iffs dol­lar for dol­lar to pro­tect our work­ers and busi­nesses.

In the com­ing days, the gov­ern­ment will in­tro­duce ad­di­tional mea­sures to sup­port Canadian work­ers and busi­nesses, build­ing on the nearly $25 billion in sup­port pro­vided over the past 18 months.

These ac­tions com­ple­ment Canada’s core eco­nomic strat­egy. From day one, we have been fo­cused on build­ing our strength at home and di­ver­si­fy­ing our part­ner­ships abroad.

That strat­egy is work­ing. We are ad­vanc­ing nearly $500 billion in ma­jor in­fra­struc­ture pro­jects. In par­al­lel, we are un­lock­ing new ex­port mar­kets for Canadian busi­nesses. Our ex­ist­ing free trade deals al­ready pro­vide Canada with pref­er­en­tial ac­cess to 1.5 billion con­sumers, and we are on track to dou­ble that mar­ket ac­cess by the end of this year.

Canadian eco­nomic growth is ac­cel­er­at­ing, and we are on course to have the sec­ond-fastest growth in the G7 over the next two years. Our econ­omy is cre­at­ing jobs at four times the rate of the United States. Our ex­ports to non-U.S. mar­kets are on track to dou­ble over the next decade. Foreign di­rect in­vest­ment in Canada is at its high­est level in two decades, run­ning at twice the rate of our near­est G7 com­peti­tor. Canada now ranks as the most at­trac­tive coun­try in the world for in­fra­struc­ture in­vest­ment.

Canada has what the world wants. And we will not al­low any na­tion to de­ter­mine our fu­ture. We will set our own course to keep build­ing Canada strong for all.”

16 hours ago

Nadine Yousif,Senior Canada re­porterand

Toby Mann

Reuters

A fresh wave of US tar­iffs on a wide ar­ray of Canadian goods came into ef­fect on Saturday af­ter a last-minute break­down in trade talks.

Announcing the sus­pen­sion of ne­go­ti­a­tions shortly be­fore the Friday night dead­line, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he would im­pose rec­i­p­ro­cal tar­iffs on US goods “dollar for dol­lar”.

Carney said “last-minute changes in the US pro­posed terms were un­fair, un­eco­nomic, and called into ques­tion the re­li­a­bil­ity of any deal”.

Trade ne­go­tia­tors had been en­gaged in in­tense talks since July, af­ter President Donald Trump threat­ened to im­pose a 50% levy on nearly $20bn (C$28bn; £14bn) of Canadian im­ports by 19 August.

Trump had tem­porar­ily paused those tar­iffs ear­lier in the week, say­ing the two sides were close to sign­ing a trade deal that was “very good” for both coun­tries.

But min­utes be­fore the dead­line for a deal, Carney said that while “important progress” had been made in the talks it was “not enough to meet our ob­jec­tives for Canadians”.

“As a re­sult, this evening, I have de­cided to sus­pend trade ne­go­ti­a­tions with the US and have di­rected ne­go­tia­tors to re­turn to Ottawa,” he said.

“Last-minute changes in the US pro­posed terms were un­fair, un­eco­nomic, and called into ques­tion the re­li­a­bil­ity of any deal.”

After Carney’s an­nounce­ment US trade rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jamieson Greer said in a state­ment: “Tonight, Canada de­clined to fi­nalise the trade deal un­der the terms agreed ear­lier this week.

“Despite the US of­fer to Canada to re­ceive the best treat­ment of any ma­jor ex­porter to our mar­ket, new de­mands and walk backs of other com­mit­ments by Canada have up­ended the care­ful bal­ance reached in the past days.”

The break­down in talks marks a sig­nif­i­cant shift in tone from ear­lier in the week, when both US and Canadian of­fi­cials sounded op­ti­mistic that a trade deal ben­e­fi­cial for both coun­tries was within reach.

Negotiators were re­port­edly dis­cussing a deal that would re­duce US tar­iffs on Canadian steel and alu­minium from 50% to 25%, and on Canadian au­tos from 25% to 15%.

In ex­change, Carney had asked Canadian provinces to re­store US al­co­hol to store shelves.

The break­down of the talks puts the US-Canada re­la­tion­ship in un­charted ter­ri­tory, and will be a ma­jor test for Carney’s pre­mier­ship.

The two coun­tries have de­vel­oped one of the world’s most deeply eco­nom­i­cally in­te­grated trad­ing re­la­tion­ships, and Canada sends ap­prox­i­mately 70% of its ex­ports south.

But ten­sions be­tween the two ma­jor trad­ing part­ners have been sim­mer­ing since Trump re­turned to of­fice in January last year and un­leashed a wide-rang­ing global pro­gramme of tar­iffs, up­end­ing decades of free trade be­tween Canada and the US.

Now that talks have bro­ken down, Canada will be hit with new 50% US tar­iffs im­posed by Trump us­ing a Depression-era law called the Tariff Act of 1930.

They will be ap­plied on a range of goods, about 5% of Canadian ex­ports, in­clud­ing wine, dairy, ce­ment, cloth­ing and hockey equip­ment.

The new levies are in ad­di­tion to ex­ist­ing tar­iffs the US had al­ready im­posed on Canadian steel and alu­minium, au­tos and lum­ber.

Businesses and stake­hold­ers on both sides of the bor­der had pushed for a deal to be reached, ar­gu­ing that the new US tar­iffs on Canada will be harm­ful to both coun­tries.

In a state­ment, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce called the tar­iffs “a body blow to North American com­pet­i­tive­ness”.

“For a small Canadian ex­porter op­er­at­ing on tight mar­gins, this is­n’t an ab­stract trade dis­pute. It means look­ing at your or­ders, your pay­roll and your em­ploy­ees and ask­ing what you can still af­ford,” said the cham­ber’s pres­i­dent Candace Laing.

Canadians have told poll­sters that they are will­ing to fight for a good deal.

A re­cent sur­vey by firm Abacus Data sug­gested that around 36% of Canadians would sup­port re­tal­i­at­ing to US tar­iffs, while an­other 30% would want the Carney gov­ern­ment to con­tinue ne­go­ti­at­ing.

The prime min­is­ter will need to con­vince Canadians that the eco­nomic pain is worth the cost of stand­ing up to the White House is search of a bet­ter agree­ment in the long run.

Financial an­a­lysts have pro­jected the new 50% tar­iffs could re­duce the coun­try’s GDP by 0.3% to 0.6%.

Doug Ford, pre­mier of Canada’s most pop­u­lous province Ontario, said “the prime min­is­ter has my full sup­port for a strong re­sponse - tar­iff for tar­iff, dol­lar for dol­lar”.

Ontario, which has a large man­u­fac­tur­ing and auto sec­tor, has been among the hard­est hit of Canada’s provinces in this trade dis­pute. The economies of Quebec and British Columbia are also go­ing to be es­pe­cially ex­posed to the new tar­iffs.

British Columbia Premier David Eby said in a state­ment on Friday night that “our po­lite­ness should never be mis­taken for weak­ness”.

“We did­n’t ask for this, but we’ll keep fight­ing for as long as it takes.”

Canada has been en­gaged in on-again, off-again trade ne­go­ti­a­tions with the US for over a year in pur­suit of a deal that would see the US drop or re­duce tar­iffs on these key sec­tors.

The US, mean­while, has been ask­ing for a num­ber of con­ces­sions from Canada, in­clud­ing re­mov­ing its re­main­ing re­tal­ia­tory tar­iffs on American au­tos and ad­just­ing its dairy quo­tas to al­low greater ac­cess for US cheese pro­duc­ers.

It has also asked that the ban on US al­co­hol sales, im­posed last year by most Canadian provinces in re­tal­i­a­tion to Trump’s tar­iffs, be re­moved.

In a state­ment on Saturday, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States said it was “unfortunate that the Canadian provinces’ con­tin­ued re­fusal to re­turn US spir­its prod­ucts to store shelves has led to this out­come”.

It said ex­ports to Canada fell more than 70% year-over-year from the start of the re­tal­ia­tory ban in March through December 2025.

You may have heard of the speech syn­the­sis com­pany ElevenLabs. Recently a friend men­tioned they knew some­one who worked at a com­pany called TwelveLabs that does AI for video (it feels like it must have been in­tended to play on the fact that ElevenLabs does au­dio, but I don’t know for sure). Jokingly, I googled “thirteenlabs” and was sur­prised to find an AI for 3D scenery pro­ject. I googled “fourteenlabs”. Another AI startup…?? How far does this go?

Numbers 0 – 99 an­no­tated with links to com­pa­nies us­ing it + “labs” as their name. A link has a back­ground if the com­pany is AI-related.

The com­pany must have some on­line pres­ence (not nec­es­sar­ily a web­site, but usu­ally one).

The word “labs” (or some­times “lab”) must ei­ther go af­ter or be­fore the num­ber (spelled or nu­meric). There’s plenty of com­pa­nies named af­ter a num­ber - what I’m af­ter is the weird trend of num­ber + “labs”.

If there were mul­ti­ple, I picked the one that was most sim­i­lar to ElevenLabs (and thus more likely to have got­ten the name in­spi­ra­tion from there?).

Every com­pany sort of wants to be an AI com­pany now, so it’s hard to def­i­nitely say what com­pa­nies are AI re­lated. I marked it if the do­main had a .ai TLD or if all of their main prod­ucts in­volved AI in a cen­tral ca­pac­ity.

This re­ally just raised more ques­tions than an­swers. Why is this such a pop­u­lar nam­ing scheme? Are peo­ple in­de­pen­dently ar­riv­ing at this nam­ing scheme? Why call your AI startup “68labs”? Why are the sev­en­ties so much more dense than the rest of the higher num­bers? Also, I’m tempted to spec­u­la­tively buy up do­mains like “twentyfivelabs” or “thirtytwolabs”…

One fun dis­cov­ery: among all the in­cred­i­bly same-y startup web­sites, there is sev­en­ty­onelab.com. Alongside the usual “all rights re­served” text, it po­litely in­forms you it is

best viewed in Netscape 4/0+ or IE 5.0+

best viewed in Netscape 4/0+ or IE 5.0+

Amazing. It looks like a de­sign/​web­dev port­fo­lio from the early 2000s and is full of fun lit­tle sites. I par­tic­u­larly like the aes­thetic of the land­ing page and the other ver­sions of it in the “little pro­ject” sec­tion. They sort of re­mind me of what I re­cently heard re­ferred to as the “vectorheart” aes­thetic (like what you’d see on 2000s IDM al­bum cov­ers!).

Free soft­ware

AGPLv3

Self hosted

Run it on your own ma­chine or server

Privacy fo­cused

No teleme­try, no ex­ter­nal re­quests

Preserve Knowledge.Find It Again.

Hister stores ex­tracted doc­u­ment con­tent with the search in­dex and dis­plays it as a read­able pre­view along­side search re­sults.

Download Hister Try the live demo

Search the con­tent you chose to in­dex

Look be­yond book­marks and file­names. Hister in­dexes the full con­tent of the pages and files you choose, then keeps that search­able knowl­edge on a server you con­trol.

Search the ac­tual con­tent

Look be­yond ti­tles and URLs to the words in­side every in­dexed doc­u­ment.

Narrow with pre­ci­sion

Use fields, phrases, wild­cards, nega­tion, pri­or­i­ties, and your own aliases.

Read it in con­text

Open a clean stored pre­view be­side the re­sults with­out los­ing your search.

How Hister works

A pri­vate mem­ory with­out the busy­work

Collect

Save newly vis­ited pages with the browser ex­ten­sion, watch lo­cal fold­ers, im­port your his­tory, or crawl a site.

Visited pages

Local files

Index

Hister ex­tracts the parts that mat­ter and in­dexes their full text on the server you choose.

Full text

Stored con­text

Find

Search from the web, ter­mi­nal, com­mand line, or let an AI as­sis­tant re­trieve it through MCP.

Web and ter­mi­nal

MCP as­sis­tants

The sim­ple loop

Browser ex­ten­sions can in­dex pages as they are vis­ited. File watch­ers, his­tory im­ports, and crawlers add other sources to the same in­dex.

Why Hister

Preserve Knowledge. Keep Control.

The in­dex, stored page con­tent, and rules re­main on the Hister server you con­fig­ure. The server has no teleme­try and does not re­quire a cloud ser­vice.

No teleme­try

The server does not phone home or re­port what you search.

No manda­tory cloud

A com­plete per­sonal setup can run on one lo­cal ma­chine.

Your cho­sen server

Clients send in­dexed con­tent only to the Hister server you con­fig­ure.

Auditable soft­ware

The source is pub­lic and li­censed as free soft­ware un­der AGPLv3.

Optional se­man­tic search sends text to the em­bed­dings end­point you con­fig­ure. Browser ex­ten­sions may re­trieve page fav­i­cons. You choose whether and where these con­nec­tions run.

Built for real re­call

One in­dex. Many ways back in.

Hister in­dexes vis­ited pages, watched files, im­ported browser his­tory, and crawled web­sites. The in­dex is avail­able through web, ter­mi­nal, CLI, HTTP API, and MCP in­ter­faces.

Browser ex­ten­sions can in­dex vis­ited pages au­to­mat­i­cally. File watch­ing, his­tory im­ports, and the crawler add other sources.

Browser ex­ten­sions

Local file watch­ing

History im­port

Website crawler

Full text search sup­ports field fil­ters, quoted phrases, wild­cards, nega­tion, date ranges, and query aliases.

Field fil­ters

Quoted phrases

Wildcards and nega­tion

Query aliases

Content ex­trac­tors han­dle struc­tured data from sup­ported for­mats and web­sites. Semantic search is op­tional.

Content ex­trac­tors

Semantic search

Language aware in­dexes

Readable pre­views

Skip and pri­or­ity rules con­trol in­dex­ing and rank­ing. Versioning can re­tain ear­lier doc­u­ment con­tent.

Skip rules

Priority rules

Version track­ing

Sensitive con­tent checks

The same in­dex is avail­able through the web in­ter­face, ter­mi­nal client, CLI, HTTP API, and MCP server.

Web in­ter­face

Terminal in­ter­face

HTTP API and CLI

MCP server

A sin­gle bi­nary can run lo­cally. Shared servers sup­port user scoped ac­cess with SQLite or PostgreSQL.

No con­fig quick­start

SQLite or PostgreSQL

Multiple users

Docker and Nix

Additional ca­pa­bil­i­ties

Hister also sup­ports mul­ti­ple crawler back­ends, lan­guage spe­cific in­dexes, con­tent ver­sion­ing, own­er­ship rules, and con­fig­urable ex­trac­tors.

Free, open source and per­for­mant multi-agent har­ness, works with your ex­ist­ing sub­scrip­tions (uses hourly lim­its).

Munder Difflin uses CLI agents run­ning on your com­puter to do any­thing you can do

Supports 12 CLI agent providers off the shelf, more com­ing soon

Claude Code

Codex

Grok

Kimi Code

Antigravity

Qwen

Gemini CLI

OpenCode

Crush

Pi

Copilot

Cursor

PRIVATE CLOUD + NETWORK

Get the Teams plan and dou­ble your pro­duc­tiv­ity

Private Cloud: Run agents 24/7 for each team­mate in iso­lated sand­boxes

Private Network: Allow clones of your team to talk to each other au­tonomously (E2E en­crypted)

MAKE CLONES OF YOUR TEAM · THEY WORK 24/7 🔒 E2E

CLICK A CLONE TO INSPECT

4/4 HUMANS · 4 CLONES ON

HOW IT WORKS

Three steps to a sec­ond you.

1

Install your har­ness

One down­load. It wraps the agent CLI you al­ready use and runs on your lap­top. Your code, your keys, your ex­ist­ing sub­scrip­tion — noth­ing leaves your ma­chine.

2

It be­comes you

It cap­tures your work­flow, your tool­ing and what you know. Every clone you run shares that mem­ory, so the next one you spin up starts al­ready know­ing how you work.

3

Your of­fice gets to work

Your clones work around the clock — and when one needs some­thing, it mes­sages an­other. They hand off work, share con­text and un­block each other, all on your own ma­chine.

JIM’S CLONE ⇄ PAM’S CLONE🔒 E2E

JIM’S CLONE

Blocked — need the in­voice-state de­sign to­kens.

03:12 · en­crypted

PAM’S CLONE

Sent — to­kens + edge-case flows in billing/​to­kens.json.

03:12 · en­crypted

✓ un­blocked overnight · PR #147 open

WHAT EACH TEAM MEMBER GETS

Understand your har­ness­es’ ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

Munder Difflin does­n’t give your team one shared bot. It acts as a clone of the in­di­vid­ual and con­trols their com­puter.

KICK IT OFF FROM ANYWHERE

YOU

SLACK INBOX

TRIGGERS

YOUR CLONE · YOUR COMPUTER

GOD or­ches­tra­tor reads · plans · routes

re­search Claude Code

build Codex

re­view Claude Code

git · each agent in its own iso­lated work­tree

MemPalace their mem­ory · their ma­chine · nowhere else

⟳ 24/7

🔒 asks “pricing fi­nal?” 🔒 an­swers 3 AM · he’s asleep

CLONE ⇄ CLONE E2E · same org only

TEAMMATE’S CLONE · THEIR COMPUTER

GOD or­ches­tra­tor reads · plans · routes

sell Grok

draft Kimi CLI

MemPalace their mem­ory · their ma­chine

⟳ 24/7

WHILE YOU’RE BUSY

Real work. Not demos.

🔍

Reviews like you would

Your clone re­views team­mates’ PRs with your stan­dards and your nit­picks — while you’re in a meet­ing.

💬

Answers for you

“How does the billing ser­vice work?” A team­mate’s clone asks yours and gets your an­swer — at 3am, with­out wak­ing you.

🌙

The of­fice never closes

Clones plan, build, hand off, and un­block each other around the clock. You come back to fin­ished threads, not open ques­tions.

👔

You stay the boss

Your clone es­ca­lates only the few de­ci­sions that gen­uinely need a hu­man. Check in oc­ca­sion­ally, an­swer, and it keeps mov­ing.

WHAT EACH NODE CAN DO

Not just for en­gi­neers.

Everything a com­puter does is reach­able from the com­mand line — and CLI agents can drive all of it. So every team­mate gets a clone that does their job, what­ever that job is.

👩‍💻

Developer

Reviews PRs, fixes bugs, ships small fea­tures, babysits CI, keeps docs hon­est.

$ git, tests, de­ploys

🎨

Designer

Audits screens against the de­sign sys­tem, ex­ports as­sets, drafts specs and copy.

$ screen­shots, to­kens, specs

📋

Product man­ager

Writes specs, triages is­sues, keeps boards and docs in sync, preps standup sum­maries.

$ tick­ets, docs, roadmaps

📈

Sales & GTM

Drafts out­reach, preps call briefs, keeps the CRM hon­est, chases fol­low-ups.

$ crm, email, briefs

🗂️

Everyone else

Reports, spread­sheets, files, sched­ul­ing, fol­low-ups — any­thing script­able. Which is every­thing.

Quick Introduction

We have all been on fo­rums, chats, red­dit, dis­cord, youtube, or some­where and heard “Oh! Model XYZ is AMAZEBALLZ!zomgwtfbbq” then down­loaded it (or more likely, some quan­tized form of it) and said “eww… This sucks!”

This post is go­ing to be a rather tech­ni­cal se­ries of ex­per­i­ments to demon­strate the im­pact of im­ple­men­ta­tion-spe­cific haz­ards with in­fer­ence. I will be us­ing the term “reference im­ple­men­ta­tion” to de­scribe the lab that pub­lished and of­fers first-party host­ing of their mod­els and posts orig­i­nal bench­mark claims. Their hard­ware will be dif­fer­ent than yours. Their soft­ware will be very dif­fer­ent than yours. And the com­par­isons in this post are not go­ing to be run­ning some 2.58-bit-gguf-in-ollama with a cou­ple test prompts.

I am in­ten­tion­ally gloss­ing over en­tire emerg­ing fields of study, moun­tains of re­search pa­pers and lit re­view to make this more ap­proach­able for you the reader. Don’t nit pick my over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tions or I will make you read the re­ally long un­pleas­ant ver­sion with math.

Your lo­cal im­ple­men­ta­tion sucks. But that’s ok, be­cause every­one else’s does too.

Every sin­gle in­stance of hard­ware and soft­ware run­ning an LLM to­day is a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent. or a lot dif­fer­ent when it comes to some cases. The av­er­age home lab user might be mix­ing mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions of GPU. The chips on those have dif­fer­ent in­struc­tion sets. Those in­struc­tion sets will im­ple­ment and ex­e­cute math to cal­cu­late your next to­ken dif­fer­ently from any other per­son, even when run­ning the same ex­act weights.

So that begs the first ques­tion: How much does your par­tic­u­lar setup suck? Turns out there are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways to go about mea­sur­ing that.

The prac­ti­cal ap­proach is straight for­ward. Run stan­dard bench­marks. A va­ri­ety of them. ter­mi­nal bench, hle, SWEthis, HELLAthat, MMLU-whatever… take your pick. Just make sure its rep­re­sen­ta­tive of your ac­tual work­load/​use case. Do not crank tem­per­a­ture to zero and paste in 3 test prompts then call it good/​bad. Zero-shot tests are not a good ana­log of most agen­tic tasks. You need long-con­text tool-call­ing and do­main spe­cific knowl­edge eval­u­a­tions to fig­ure out where your setup is weak when run­ning the same weights as some­body else repli­cat­ing those same bench­marks.

But the purely math­e­mat­i­cal an­swer is where my fo­cus is go­ing to be­gin be­cause as @wendell said:

Math is Math!

“Logits” are the mod­els scores for each pos­si­ble next to­ken. They are nor­mal­ized into prob­a­bil­i­ties, passed through the con­fig­ured sam­pler, and con­verted back into text by the deto­k­enizer to gen­er­ate THE→NE→XT→TOK→EN dur­ing de­code.

A side note about sam­pler set­tings: the model card on HF usu­ally spec­i­fies ex­actly what sam­pler set­tings (and chat tem­plate) you should be us­ing. temp 1.0, top-p 0.95, etc. it varies by model so make sure you are us­ing the right ones. btw, set­ting temp too low is why your qwen is sit­ting there loop­ing un­able to es­cape its THINK out­put. You’re wel­come, glad I could fix that for you.

When the next to­ken prob­a­bil­ity changes enough, THE→NE→XT be­comes THE→NE→W→DAY… And while those small changes might be fine, odds are that’s the be­gin­ning of the nig­gling sen­sa­tion in the back of your mind that some­thing feels off.

Some of you may have heard the term KLD be­fore, or KL Divergence. Don’t worry, I won’t make you do any math or flood your brain with ta­bles of very small dec­i­mal num­bers. But just in case you wanted the sim­ple ver­sion: con­vert the out­put log­its into a prob­a­bil­ity dis­tri­b­u­tion, and mea­sure how far that dis­tri­b­u­tion has moved from a cho­sen base­line. Lower KLD means closer to that base­line, not au­to­mat­i­cally ‘smarter’. KLD is also di­rec­tional, so the or­der of the two dis­tri­b­u­tions mat­ters.

A word of cau­tion: Don’t get suck­ered in by im­pos­si­bly low KLD claims on a quant HF model card. It is im­pos­si­ble to in­ter­pret a num­ber un­less the au­thor dis­closes the ref­er­ence check­points and full run­time en­vi­ron­ment, eval­u­a­tion text, cal­i­bra­tion data, con­text lengths, sam­pled po­si­tions, KL di­rec­tion, any vo­cab­u­lary trun­ca­tion, and how the mea­sure­ments were ag­gre­gated. The method­ol­ogy mat­ters as much as the num­ber and plenty of peo­ple get it wrong.

What the hell is vllm do­ing?

Now, we need to take a brief field trip down what the gi­ant stack of soft­ware is do­ing on your in­fer­ence en­gine to un­der­stand where some of those sources of di­ver­gence come from.

At every step of this over­sim­pli­fied di­a­gram are com­po­nents that can be con­fig­ured or changed based on your spe­cific hard­ware/​soft­ware foot­print, model, quant, ten­sor shape, etc.

The nightly VLLM con­tainer im­age I snagged had 734 (252 uv/​pip Python) pack­ages in it. That’s 734 code­bases each with their own bugs and un­doc­u­mented idio­syn­crasies. The path your spe­cific im­ple­men­ta­tion takes through that moun­tain of code will be dis­tinct.

Test 1: Precision Benchmarking Attention Backends

Lets start with one piece of that in­fer­ence flow­chart. During pre­fill (prompt pro­cess­ing) there are a sev­eral at­ten­tion back­ends your in­fer­ence en­gine will se­lect from. This im­pacts both speed and pre­ci­sion of pre­fill, while re­quir­ing dif­fer­ent cuda ker­nels for every GPU fam­ily / SM com­pute ca­pa­bil­ity 1.3. The CUDA plat­form — CUDA Programming Guide . Lets test them and com­pare.

(I’m re­ally very sorry, I had to…)

I started with the of­fi­cial BF16 check­point of Qwen3.6 – 27B on an RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU at ten­sor par­al­lelism 1. The KV cache was BF16, with no weight/​ac­ti­va­tion or KV-cache quan­ti­za­tion. The soft­ware was a pinned nightly vllm build. I used ea­ger ex­e­cu­tion, dis­abled CUDA graphs, pre­fix caching, and MTP, and used 2k-token chun­ked pre­fill.

Qwen3.6 – 27B is dense, not an MoE, but it is still a hy­brid model. 64 lay­ers re­peat in a pat­tern of three Gated DeltaNet/linear-attention lay­ers fol­lowed by one full-at­ten­tion layer. Only those 16 full-at­ten­tion lay­ers use the se­lec­table at­ten­tion back­end in this ex­per­i­ment; the Gated DeltaNet path re­mained fixed.

The work­load re­played here is “Prompt 2”, a roughly 100k to­ken con­text cap­tured from a real Turnstone lab work­stream con­tain­ing mul­ti­ple tool calls and real work prod­ucts. It was se­lected to re­sem­ble what a lo­cal agent ac­tu­ally does rather than a syn­thetic nee­dle-in-a-haystack test. And maybe more im­por­tantly, it does­n’t ap­pear in any bench­mark or train­ing dataset in the wild to­day. Nobody could have bench­maxed for this, or cal­i­brated their quant to ac­com­mo­date it.

There are three avail­able full at­ten­tion back­ends to se­lect from in vllm for this work­load: FlashAttention 2, Flash Inference, and Triton Attention. This was the only change made be­tween ex­e­cu­tions, the rest of the hard­ware and soft­ware stack re­mained sta­ble.

I also per­formed a same-back­end cross-GPU re­peata­bil­ity con­trol. For this graph, I cap­tured the full-vo­cab­u­lary log­its in BF16 every 32 prompt to­kens. Distribution com­par­isons such as KLD were cal­cu­lated af­ter­ward in FP64 from those stored log­its.

Top-1 agree­ment is whether the to­ken with the high­est logit, the greedy argmax, was the same. All three back­ends were eval­u­ated against the same forced to­ken his­tory. A “top-1 flip” there­fore means a back­end would have cho­sen a dif­fer­ent greedy next to­ken at that po­si­tion. We did not let that choice al­ter the re­main­ing his­tory. This keeps the math­e­mat­i­cal com­par­i­son con­trolled, but it does not show how far an un­con­strained gen­er­a­tion would branch or whether a tool call would even­tu­ally fail… that comes in test 2 ;D

The fol­low­ing graph shows % of sam­pled log­its re­sult­ing in to­ken flips:

For the first sev­eral thou­sand to­kens, every run of the model agreed about what the next to­ken was go­ing to be re­gard­less of back­end. Then in later por­tions of the prompt, back­ends be­gan dis­agree­ing. Triton was se­lected as the base­line to sim­plify up­com­ing quan­ti­za­tion chi­canery.

Each 8k-token win­dow con­tains 250 sam­pled po­si­tions, one probe every 32 to­kens. The per­cent­age is the frac­tion of those probes where the other back­ends high­est-scor­ing to­ken dif­fered from Triton’s.

Random noise was ac­counted for by run­ning the same test with the same at­ten­tion back­end mul­ti­ple times. The log­its across runs at every hid­den state were bit for bit iden­ti­cal. Meaning this par­tic­u­lar di­ver­gence comes ex­clu­sively from the ma­trix mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and ad­di­tion op­er­a­tions hap­pen­ing dur­ing pre­fill in­side trt/​fa2/​fi.

Disagreements ap­peared in clus­ters and var­ied with prompt con­tent rather than in­creas­ing smoothly with con­text length. This is not ev­i­dence of one uni­ver­sal length at which the model “falls apart” but… we will get there soon…

Now that we have a base­line com­par­i­son of in­ter­est­ing prompt fuel, lets dive into…

Test 2: KV Cache quan­ti­za­tion, or why your LLM’s IQ drops like a rock af­ter 40k to­kens

Repeating the same method­ol­ogy, we took the BF16 weights and BF16 kv cache base­line above run­ning Triton, and ran the next ex­per­i­ment. What hap­pens when you leave the weights and ac­ti­va­tions alone, and JUST quan­tize the kv-cache?

Ah, di­ver­gence. And this leads us to our first dump­ster-fire of the evening: a com­pletely re­pro­ducible tool call­ing er­ror.

Enough top-to­kens got flipped dur­ing tool calls, we let them play out and while BF16 was fine, int8 kv-cache even­tu­ally man­aged to re­cover, int4 did not!

Test 3: Weight Weight, Don’t Tell Me!

This time we are leav­ing all the kv-caches full size at bf16. We are adding some new play­ers to the game how­ever by com­par­ing:

BF16 ref­er­ence: Qwen/Qwen3.6 – 27B ( Qwen/Qwen3.6 – 27B · Hugging Face )

Official FP8: Qwen/Qwen3.6 – 27B-FP8 ( Qwen/Qwen3.6 – 27B-FP8 · Hugging Face )

INT8 W8A16: TheHouseOfTheDude/Qwen3.6 – 27B-INT8 ( TheHouseOfTheDude/Qwen3.6 – 27B-INT8 · Hugging Face )

NVIDIA NVFP4: nvidia/​Qwen3.6 – 27B-NVFP4 ( nvidia/​Qwen3.6 – 27B-NVFP4 · Hugging Face )

AWQ W4A16: cyankiwi/​Qwen3.6 – 27B-AWQ-BF16-INT4 ( cyankiwi/​Qwen3.6 – 27B-AWQ-BF16-INT4 · Hugging Face )

These 4 quants rep­re­sent a broad pic­ture of weights and ac­ti­va­tions. A no­table piece of in­for­ma­tion for our math­na­sium is the ac­tual CUDA ker­nel / GEMM (general ma­trix mul­ti­pli­ca­tion) / MMA (matrix mul­ti­ply ac­cu­mu­late) in­struc­tions be­ing run to cal­cu­late the log­its for each quant are dif­fer­ent:

Qwen3.6 – 27B (reference)

Weights/activations: BF16 weights, BF16 ac­ti­va­tions

Linear/GEMM: UnquantizedLinearMethod → torch.nn.func­tional.lin­ear. Each CUDA tile se­lected by its as­so­ci­ated shape/​geom­e­try.

KV cache: BF16 (Forced)

Qualification: Reference check­point.

Qwen3.6 – 27B-FP8

Weights/activations: E4M3 FP8 weights in 128×128 blocks; dy­namic FP8 ac­ti­va­tion quan­ti­za­tion in­side con­verted lin­ears; ex­cluded mod­ules such as lm_­head re­main BF16

Linear/GEMM: Fp8LinearMethod → CutlassFp8BlockScaledMMKernel

KV cache: BF16 (Forced)

Qualification: DeepGemm was au­to­mat­i­cally dis­abled be­cause vLLM flags its E8M0 scale for­mat as ac­cu­racy-de­grad­ing for this ar­chi­tec­ture (SM120); CUTLASS was se­lected in­stead. No cal­i­bra­tion dataset was iden­ti­fied in the pub­lished files.

Qwen3.6 – 27B-INT8

Weights/activations: Static, sym­met­ric, chan­nel-wise INT8 lin­ear weights; BF16 ac­ti­va­tions (W8A16). GDN/linear_attn pro­jec­tions and lm_­head ex­cluded from quan­ti­za­tion.

Linear/GEMM: CompressedTensorsWNA16 → MarlinLinearKernel

KV cache: BF16 (Forced)

Qualification: One-shot quan­ti­za­tion with ex­plic­itly no cal­i­bra­tion dataset. Its un­usu­ally good fi­delity is less mys­te­ri­ous once you ac­count for W8A16 plus un­quan­tized GDN pro­jec­tions.

Qwen3.6 – 27B-NVFP4

Weights/activations: Mixed check­point — 208 sta­tic FP8 W8A8 tar­gets cov­er­ing 64 full-at­ten­tion pro­jec­tions and 144 GDN pro­jec­tions; 193 NVFP4 W4A16 tar­gets cov­er­ing 192 MLP pro­jec­tions plus lm_­head, group size 16

Linear/GEMM:

FP8 tar­gets: ModelOptFp8LinearMethod → FlashInferFP8ScaledMMLinearKernel NVFP4 tar­gets: NVFP4 GEMM → MarlinNvFp4LinearKernel

FP8 tar­gets: ModelOptFp8LinearMethod → FlashInferFP8ScaledMMLinearKernel

NVFP4 tar­gets: NVFP4 GEMM → MarlinNvFp4LinearKernel

KV cache: BF16 (Forced)

Qualification: Not na­tive FP4 arith­metic in our up­stream-nightly run. vLLM clas­si­fied the GPU path as lack­ing na­tive FP4 sup­port and ex­plic­itly se­lected weight-only FP4 com­pres­sion through Marlin. The check­point’s em­bed­ded FP8 KV scheme was over­rid­den with BF16 KV for the bake­off.

Qwen3.6 – 27B-AWQ-BF16-INT4

Weights/activations: Static asym­met­ric INT4 weights, group size 32, MSE ob­server; BF16 ac­ti­va­tions (W4A16). GDN/linear_attn pro­jec­tions and lm_­head ex­cluded.

Linear/GEMM: CompressedTensorsWNA16 → MarlinLinearKernel

KV cache: BF16 (Forced)

Qualification: AWQ cal­i­bra­tion dataset dis­closed as “STEM and Agentic.”

Other no­table in­for­ma­tion for this run:

Full soft­max/​GQA at­ten­tion for all mod­els was AttentionBackendEnum.TRITON_ATTN; JIT mon­i­tor ob­served ker­nel_u­ni­fied_at­ten­tion.

GDN pre­fill: Triton/FLA GDN pre­fill ker­nel, re­quested as tri­ton, head­_k_dim=128.

During ex­e­cu­tion, the re­cur­rent path also JIT-compiled _causal_conv1d_update_kernel, fused_re­cur­ren­t_­gat­ed_delta_rule_­packed_de­code_k­er­nel, and re­duce_seg­ments.

TP1, ea­ger mode, no CUDA graphs, no MTP/speculative de­cod­ing, lan­guage-only ex­e­cu­tion.

The next-to­ken flip re­sults shake out fairly pre­dictably. TheDude (W8A16) mops the floor with every­body, beat­ing first party FP8 (W8A8) and Nvidia(FP4-is-a-Lie) re­lease. In fact, out of the 5 op­tions, Nvidia’s re­lease comes in dead last hit­ting ~50% to­ken flips by the time we reach 88k con­text.

Both the NVFP4 and AWQ W4A16 failed to prop­erly close their tool calls and botched Cisco com­mand line syn­tax (the cor­rect com­mand was ‘show arp’, while they ex­e­cuted ‘show run’), while both FP8 and INT8 were able to com­plete the cor­rect calls.

In fu­ture ex­per­i­ments I will try to ex­plore the im­pact of us­ing dif­fer­ent fused GEMMs for the same weights, this is an­other in­ter­est­ing source of di­ver­gence where some­times you have to trade pre­ci­sion for speed.

Part 1 Wrap Up

I have quite a few more ex­per­i­ments and ob­ser­va­tions to post, but re­quire a great deal of par­al­lel GPU time to cal­cu­late and record every logit sam­pled across huge con­text chains on mul­ti­ple prompts with dozens of dif­fer­ent set­tings.

If you have spe­cific ques­tions, shoot me a DM or poke me on dis­cord I guess.

typ.ing is an awe­some typ­ing trainer, de­signed to help you get faster and more ac­cu­rate when typ­ing with an ex­ter­nal key­board.

It looks like you’re us­ing a mo­bile de­vice - typ.ing will work much bet­ter if you plug a phys­i­cal key­board in (or just use a com­puter).

Do you have a phys­i­cal key­board con­nected?

Typey typey type

11 Aug, 2026

“Lisp is worth learn­ing for the pro­found en­light­en­ment ex­pe­ri­ence you will have when you fi­nally get it.” — Eric S. Raymond

“Lisp is worth learn­ing for the pro­found en­light­en­ment ex­pe­ri­ence you will have when you fi­nally get it.” — Eric S. Raymond

Welcome. Today you’ll learn a lan­guage from one of pro­gram­ming’s old­est and most un­usual fam­i­lies. A lan­guage where code is data, where paren­the­ses are pure struc­ture, and where pro­grams can write pro­grams. By the end of this tu­to­r­ial, you’ll have writ­ten your own syn­tax.

A bit of his­tory

Lisp was born in 1958, in­vented by John McCarthy at MIT. For con­text: it’s the sec­ond-old­est high-level lan­guage still in use (only Fortran, from 1957, beats it by a year). Python ar­rived in 1991. JavaScript in 1995. Lisp pre­dates them by more than 30 years and sev­eral ideas we now con­sider “modern” were born there:

Garbage col­lec­tion — in­vented for Lisp.

First-class func­tions — pass­ing func­tions as ar­gu­ments, now stan­dard every­where.

The REPL — the in­ter­ac­tive read-eval-print loop that Python, Node, and Julia all have to­day started in Lisp.

Conditionals as ex­pres­sions — the if that re­turns a value.

Homoiconicity — code is a data struc­ture of the lan­guage it­self. This is the big one. We’ll come back to it at the end.

For decades, Lisp was the lan­guage of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. In the 70s and 80s there were phys­i­cal com­put­ers de­signed to run Lisp di­rectly: the Lisp Machines built by Symbolics and LMI. Then came the “AI win­ter,” fund­ing dried up, and Lisp went from star to cult lan­guage.

But in­ter­est­ing ideas don’t die they mu­tate, that’s part of the beauty of the lisps.

From Lisp to Scheme to Racket

In 1975, Gerald Sussman and Guy Steele cre­ated Scheme: a min­i­mal­ist, el­e­gant, al­most math­e­mat­i­cal Lisp. Scheme be­came acad­e­mi­a’s fa­vorite lan­guage for teach­ing pro­gram­ming (the leg­endary book SICP Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is writ­ten in Scheme).

In 1995, Matthias Felleisen’s group cre­ated PLT Scheme, a Scheme de­signed for ed­u­ca­tion and pro­gram­ming lan­guage re­search. In 2010 it was re­named Racket, and to­day it’s much more than a Scheme: it’s a lan­guage for build­ing lan­guages. Its un­of­fi­cial motto is lan­guage-ori­ented pro­gram­ming: if your prob­lem needs its own lan­guage, Racket lets you build one in an af­ter­noon.

Who uses Lisp to­day?

More peo­ple than you might think:

Clojure runs in pro­duc­tion at banks, air­lines, and star­tups (Nubank, the largest dig­i­tal bank in Latin America, runs on Clojure).

Common Lisp (with the SBCL com­piler) is still alive in ex­pert sys­tems, flight plan­ning (ITA Software, ac­quired by Google, pow­ered Google Flights), and sci­en­tific com­put­ing.

Emacs Lisp — mil­lions of peo­ple run Lisp every day with­out know­ing it, be­cause their ed­i­tor is a Lisp in­ter­preter.

Guile/Guix — an en­tire Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion con­fig­ured 100% in Scheme.

Racket has its own an­nual con­fer­ence (RacketCon), an ac­tive aca­d­e­mic and artis­tic com­mu­nity, and is used for lan­guage re­search, for­mal ver­i­fi­ca­tion (Rosette), ty­pog­ra­phy and pub­lish­ing (Pollen), and ed­u­ca­tion around the world.

And new Lisps keep ap­pear­ing: Fennel (a Lisp that com­piles to Lua, pop­u­lar for games), Janet, Hy (a Lisp on top of Python)…

Easter egg for TADC fans:

In The Amazing Digital Circus (episode 8, “hjsakldfhl”), when Kinger opens the ter­mi­nal to try to re­set Caine, you can see that Caine (a cre­ative AI built in 1996) is pro­grammed in Lisp. The file is lit­er­ally named Caine-core.lisp.

In The Amazing Digital Circus (episode 8, “hjsakldfhl”), when Kinger opens the ter­mi­nal to try to re­set Caine, you can see that Caine (a cre­ative AI built in 1996) is pro­grammed in Lisp. The file is lit­er­ally named Caine-core.lisp.

Installation (5 min­utes)

Go to https://​racket-lang.org

Download the in­staller for your sys­tem (Linux, ma­cOS, Windows).

Open DrRacket, the en­vi­ron­ment that comes in­cluded.

DrRacket has two ar­eas: at the top you write your de­f­i­n­i­tions (your pro­gram), and at the bot­tom you have the REPL for live ex­per­i­men­ta­tion. On the first line of the de­f­i­n­i­tions area, write:

#lang racket

That line tells Racket which lan­guage you’re us­ing (remember: Racket is a lan­guage fac­tory, so you have to pick one).

If you pre­fer the ter­mi­nal: the racket com­mand gives you a REPL, and raco is the pack­age man­ager and tool­ing com­mand.

In the REPL, try:

> (+ 1 2) 3 > (* 3 (+ 2 2)) 12 > (string-append “hello ” “world”) “hello world”

The rule of Lisp fits in one line:

Everything is (operator ar­gu­ment1 ar­gu­ment2 …). Always. No ex­cep­tions.

Everything is (operator ar­gu­ment1 ar­gu­ment2 …). Always. No ex­cep­tions.

There’s no op­er­a­tor prece­dence to mem­o­rize, no spe­cial syn­tax for any­thing. (+ 1 2) adds. (if …) de­cides. (define …) names. The paren­the­ses that look in­tim­i­dat­ing at first are ac­tu­ally the com­plete ab­sence of ar­bi­trary rules. After a week, you stop see­ing them.

Definitions and func­tions

#lang racket

(define pi-ap­prox 3.14159)

(define (circle-area r) (* pi-ap­prox r r))

(circle-area 2)  ; => 12.56636

de­fine with a name cre­ates a con­stant.

de­fine with (name ar­gu­ments…) cre­ates a func­tion.

Comments start with ;.

Anonymous func­tions use lambda (yes, that lambda Church’s lambda cal­cu­lus from the 1930s is the the­o­ret­i­cal grand­par­ent of all this):

(lambda (x) (* x x))  ; a func­tion with no name ((lambda (x) (* x x)) 5)  ; => 25, ap­plied di­rectly

Lists: the heart of Lisp

Lisp stands for LISt Processing. Lists are the fun­da­men­tal struc­ture:

(list 1 2 3)  ; => ‘(1 2 3) ‘(1 2 3)  ; the same thing, “quoted” (first ‘(1 2 3))  ; => 1 (rest ‘(1 2 3))  ; => ‘(2 3) (cons 0 ‘(1 2 3))  ; => ‘(0 1 2 3) (length ’(a b c))  ; => 3

Notice the quote mark ’. It tells Racket: don’t eval­u­ate this, it’s data. Hold onto that de­tail it’s the door to the fi­nal trick.

Higher-order func­tions

This is where Racket shines. Passing func­tions to other func­tions is the most nat­ural thing in the world:

(map (lambda (x) (* x x)) ‘(1 2 3 4 5)) ; => ’(1 4 9 16 25)

(filter even? ‘(1 2 3 4 5 6)) ; => ’(2 4 6)

(foldl + 0 ’(1 2 3 4 5)) ; => 15

map trans­forms, fil­ter se­lects, foldl ac­cu­mu­lates. With those three func­tions you can solve most list prob­lems with­out writ­ing a sin­gle for loop.

Recursion: think­ing in spi­rals

In Lisp you don’t think “repeat N times” you think “what’s the base case, and how do I move to­ward it?”:

(define (factorial n) (if (= n 0) 1 (* n (factorial (- n 1)))))

(factorial 5)  ; => 120

And to make things vi­sual, let’s draw some­thing. Racket ships with graph­ics li­braries in­cluded:

#lang racket (require 2htdp/image)

(define (sierpinski level) (if (= level 0) (triangle 8 “solid” “purple”) (let ([t (sierpinski (- level 1))]) (above t (beside t t)))))

(sierpinski 6)

Paste it into DrRacket, press Run, and watch the Sierpinski tri­an­gle ap­pear on your screen.

The grand fi­nale: code that writes code

Remember the quote mark ’: it turns code into data. Watch:

‘(+ 1 2)  ; => the LIST (+ 1 2), not the num­ber 3 (first ‘(+ 1 2))  ; => the sym­bol + (eval ’(+ 1 2))  ; => 3. You just eval­u­ated data as code.

Your pro­gram is a list. You can build lists. Therefore: you can build pro­grams with pro­grams. This is ho­moiconic­ity, and it’s why Lisp has real macros not text macros like in C, but func­tions that re­ceive code and re­turn code, be­fore any­thing runs.

Racket does­n’t have a while loop? Let’s in­vent one:

(define-syntax-rule (while con­di­tion body …) (let loop () (when con­di­tion body … (loop))))

(define counter 0) (while (< counter 5) (displayln counter) (set! counter (+ counter 1)))

You just ex­tended the lan­guage ! in Lisp, the syn­tax is yours.

Alan Kay called Lisp “the Maxwell’s equa­tions of soft­ware”: a tiny core from which every­thing else can be de­rived.

What next?

How to Design Programs — the book Racket was de­signed around, free on­line.

The Racket Guide — of­fi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion, among the best out there.

Beautiful Racket — learn to build your own lan­guages.

SICP — the clas­sic of clas­sics, if you want the full en­light­en­ment.

Aug 22, 2026•5 min read

by­Suran­jan Das

pop cul­ture­mu­sicphi­los­o­phynot se­ri­ous

The cen­tral moral ques­tion posed in the 2015 song “Sorry” by Justin Bieber, i.e., “Is it too late to say sorry?” is ac­tu­ally not a moral ques­tion at all when viewed through a Kantian lens. The ques­tion in it­self con­tains the an­swer: yes, it is too late to say sorry, not in the sense that has any­thing to do with the na­ture of time, but rather the form of the ques­tion it­self shows that the song fun­da­men­tally mis­un­der­stands what an apol­ogy is.

When we con­sider the ques­tion’s im­pli­ca­tions, Bieber is not ask­ing “What do I owe to the per­son I have wronged?” Instead, the ques­tion pri­mar­ily asks whether say­ing sorry is still worth any­thing. Utilizing a lan­guage of strat­egy in­stead of duty, such as “Could some­one call a ref­eree?” or “one more shot at for­give­ness” fur­ther in­di­cates that the ques­tion might not be asked in good faith.

If one’s apol­ogy be­comes a means to­wards an end, then it is a hy­po­thet­i­cal im­per­a­tive. You ex­pect to gain for­give­ness by us­ing the apol­ogy. A moral oblig­a­tion, how­ever, does not de­pend on whether the de­sired con­se­quence re­mains avail­able. The song’s ques­tion of whether it is too late shows that Bieber mea­sures the value of this apol­ogy by what it can ac­com­plish.

One’s ad­mis­sions of wrong­do­ing do not change this ei­ther. He claims “I made those mis­takes maybe once or twice”, and then ad­mits, “maybe a cou­ple of hun­dred times”. Therefore, Bieber can­not claim ig­no­rance of the fact that he has wronged some­one. However, the song does not seem fo­cused on this. It con­tin­ues, “So let me re­deem my­self tonight” and “I just need one more shot at sec­ond chances.” The con­cern thus shifts im­me­di­ately from the wrong done to the ap­par­ent con­se­quences suf­fered by the wrong­doer. But moral re­demp­tion is not restor­ing one’s pref­er­ences.

If one was act­ing from duty, their maxim would be sim­pler: I have done wrong; there­fore I ought to ac­knowl­edge it. Whether for­give­ness is pos­si­ble is ir­rel­e­vant, and the same goes for whether he gets an­other chance or not. If, in this form, the apol­ogy is valu­able only be­cause it can se­cure a sec­ond chance or re­demp­tion, then it is not a moral duty; it is merely a po­ten­tially use­ful strat­egy.

Further in the song, Bieber clar­i­fies that he’s “missing more than just your body”. This is the real rea­son for which the apol­ogy is be­ing ren­dered. He is not con­fronting the wrong he com­mit­ted; in­stead, he is con­fronting the loss of some­thing he de­sired. His at­tempt to qual­ify his in­ten­tion by claim­ing that his feel­ings of miss­ing en­com­pass “more than just your body” does not solve this prob­lem ei­ther. It just tells us that he val­ues the af­fec­tion, per­haps com­pan­ion­ship, and the gen­eral re­la­tion­ship it­self. But the cat­e­gor­i­cal im­per­a­tive re­quires treat­ing an­other per­son as an end in it­self, not as a means to sat­isfy one’s de­sires. Thus, we can ask our­selves: would the apol­ogy still be ren­dered if Bieber knew for sure there is no sec­ond chance or re­demp­tion? If not, then the apol­ogy was ren­dered not be­cause of the wrong done in the first place, but to re­store what the wrong­doer lost.

In later verses, the lyrics seem to re­in­force this sus­pi­cion. The line “I’ll take every sin­gle piece of the blame if you want me to” is morally re­veal­ing. If one con­sid­ers them­selves re­spon­si­ble for a wrong done, that re­spon­si­bil­ity can not de­pend on the vic­tim’s re­quest. One ei­ther takes the re­spon­si­bil­ity in good faith, or they do not at all. Furthermore, the song states “there is no in­no­cent one in this game for two” which again re­veals that in­stead of of­fer­ing a moral apol­ogy, the song seems to con­sider wrong­do­ing as a con­test in which the guilt of the other party is enough to di­min­ish their own. But an­other per­son’s mis­con­duct can­not al­ter the maxim by which he acted.

Finally, the lyrics “can we both say the words and for­get this?” high­light that the ob­jec­tive is clo­sure rather than moral ac­knowl­edg­ment. Bieber qual­i­fies his po­si­tion again with “I’m not just tryna get you back on me” but the de­nial does lit­tle to re­solve the prob­lem once more. One’s moral worth ab­solutely can­not be es­tab­lished just by de­clar­ing the pu­rity of their mo­tives. The maxim must be ex­am­ined in­stead. If the maxim is “When I have wronged some­one and fear los­ing them, I will apol­o­gize in the hope of re­gain­ing them,” then the apol­ogy re­mains hy­po­thet­i­cal, and more im­por­tantly, fun­da­men­tally self-in­ter­ested.

Thus, the song’s cen­tral ques­tion iron­i­cally re­veals the very moral fail­ure it seems to try to re­pair. “Is it too late?” in this con­text trans­lates to “is an apol­ogy still ca­pa­ble of get­ting what I want?” Once an apol­ogy is eval­u­ated by whether it can se­cure for­give­ness and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, it ceases to be an ac­tion grounded in duty. So, yes, it is too late to say sorry, as the song con­ceives it.

This, how­ever, does not stop Bieber from do­ing what moral­ity re­quires: ac­cept­ing the wrong with­out de­mand­ing any­thing in re­turn. Instead of ask­ing whether it was too late to say sorry, the moral thing to do would have been to just say it.

However, even though the ques­tion has a clear ob­jec­tive moral an­swer, we can­not at­tribute any moral judg­ment to Bieber as a hu­man be­ing; we can only an­swer the moral ques­tion as posed in the song. If one were to con­sider an­other in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the song it­self, the ques­tion posed might not be in a moral con­text, but rather as a rhetor­i­cal de­vice, i.e., the artist knows the song is not talk­ing about a sin­cere apol­ogy, but rather it is point­ing out that we can of­ten say sorry in­sin­cerely just be­cause we miss more than their body. This can also ex­plain the in­ten­tional de­ci­sion to pair an up­beat dance track with lyrics that, on the sur­face, seem to be about some­thing much more se­ri­ous.

Note: You can find the pub­lic ver­sion his­tory of my ar­ti­cles on my github: link.

Meta’s busi­ness can be boiled down to four words that be­gin with the let­ter H: hook, hold, har­vest, hide, ac­cord­ing to a lawyer who is pros­e­cut­ing the world’s largest so­cial me­dia com­pany.

The owner of Facebook and Instagram “hooks” in users, “holds” them on its plat­forms for as long as pos­si­ble, “harvests” their data and then “hides” the truth from the pub­lic, she ar­gued.

“Meta’s busi­ness model worked es­pe­cially well for kids,” said Megan O’Neill, a lawyer for the state of California.

Her ac­cu­sa­tion opened the block­buster trial against the US tech com­pany on Tuesday in Oakland, California, just north of Meta’s head­quar­ters in Silicon Valley. California has joined 28 other US states in su­ing the £1tn ($1.36tn) com­pany for al­legedly de­sign­ing ad­dic­tive prod­ucts that lead to chil­dren be­ing harmed.

Eight ju­rors heard from O’Neill and at­tor­neys for Meta this week, along with tes­ti­mony from for­mer em­ploy­ees and a psy­chol­o­gist. The law­suit cen­ters on al­le­ga­tions that the com­pany vi­o­lated US fed­eral child pri­vacy laws and state-level con­sumer pro­tec­tion laws by col­lect­ing data on chil­dren un­der the age of 13 with­out parental per­mis­sion. Over the course of the trial, the jury is ad­di­tion­ally ex­pected to hear from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri.

The threat to Meta is ex­is­ten­tial. If the com­pany is found li­able, dam­ages could be as high as $200bn — an amount equiv­a­lent to the com­pa­ny’s 2025 an­nual rev­enue. The states are also ask­ing that Meta be forced to change the de­sign of its prod­ucts to make them safer for chil­dren, which could have per­ma­nent ef­fects on the com­pa­ny’s busi­ness model and how its so­cial me­dia plat­forms op­er­ate.

Meta has de­nied all al­le­ga­tions. Liza Crenshaw, a spokesper­son for the com­pany, said: “Rather than stick­ing to the facts or the law, the states have in­stead de­cided to chase an out­landish pay­out.”

During open­ing state­ments, Paul Schmidt, an at­tor­ney for Meta, said there is “no dis­pute” peo­ple can strug­gle with so­cial me­dia, but that Meta had “come up with tools to try and ad­dress that”. He added the com­pany does not al­low chil­dren un­der the age of 13 to reg­is­ter for ac­counts on its so­cial net­works and that it had dis­abled more than 1m ac­counts of those young users.

The trial is ex­pected to last six to eight weeks. The pro­ceed­ings will be led by at­tor­neys for the states of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. The ju­ry’s role is ad­vi­sory, which means they will give rec­om­men­da­tions to the pre­sid­ing judge, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will make the fi­nal de­ci­sion on the ver­dict and dam­ages.

Meta faces thou­sands of sim­i­lar US law­suits brought by fam­i­lies, school dis­tricts and other at­tor­neys gen­eral. The com­pany lost the first two of those cases to go to trial in March. In the first, the com­pany was or­dered to pay nearly $1bn to the state of New Mexico for al­low­ing child sex­ual ex­ploita­tion on its plat­forms; and in the sec­ond, it was found li­able for de­lib­er­ately de­sign­ing ad­dic­tive prod­ucts that hooked one young woman and was or­dered to pay her more than $4m.

af­ter newslet­ter pro­mo­tion

The star wit­ness to take the stand in the tri­al’s first week was Arturo Béjar, a safety en­gi­neer at Meta who worked there in two sep­a­rate stints be­tween 2009 and 2021. Since leav­ing, Béjar has been an out­spo­ken critic of the com­pany, tes­ti­fy­ing be­fore a US Senate com­mit­tee and serv­ing as an ex­pert wit­ness in other cases that in­volve so­cial me­di­a’s harm to chil­dren.

In Oakland, Béjar tes­ti­fied that his mo­ti­va­tion for pur­su­ing so­lu­tions for harms to chil­dren was his own teenage daugh­ter’s treat­ment on Instagram. He said she re­ceived un­wanted sex­ual ad­vances and pho­tos of male gen­i­tals as well as misog­y­nis­tic in­sults. Later, she told her fa­ther that re­port­ing these abuses through Instagram’s es­tab­lished processes was ei­ther in­ef­fec­tive or not pos­si­ble.

“Meta is tak­ing a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ strat­egy” when it comes to child safety, Béjar tes­ti­fied.

Béjar said that his job of­ten in­cluded brief­ing Zuckerberg and that he had spo­ken with the CEO more than 100 times in the course of his work.

During Béjar’s tes­ti­mony, at­tor­neys for the gov­ern­ment showed the jury an email he sent Zuckerberg in 2021, which out­lined a sur­vey he had con­ducted of teens’ ex­pe­ri­ences on Instagram. The re­sults showed 51% of users said “yes” to hav­ing bad or harm­ful ex­pe­ri­ences within the pre­vi­ous seven days and that con­tent was taken down only 0.02% of the time.

Béjar tes­ti­fied he sent that data to Zuckerberg be­cause, “in my ex­pe­ri­ence, when Mark makes some­thing a pri­or­ity, moun­tains move.”

“Did he ever re­spond to you?” the at­tor­ney asked.

“No,” Béjar replied. “I did­n’t hear back from him.”

Meta fought to bar Béjar from tes­ti­fy­ing at the trial, fil­ing a se­ries of mo­tions to strike his ex­hibits and pre­vent him from tak­ing the stand, all of which were re­jected. In an email to re­porters on Wednesday, Meta con­tin­ued to hound him. The com­pa­ny’s state­ment said Béjar’s tes­ti­mony was not cred­i­ble or re­li­able be­cause he over­in­flated his role at the com­pany and took credit for work he did­n’t do.

After Béjar’s tes­ti­mony wrapped, the jury heard recorded de­po­si­tions from Elena Davis and Natalie Troxel — both for­mer user ex­pe­ri­ence re­searchers for Meta. Jean Twenge, a psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor at San Diego State University, also briefly took the stand, with tes­ti­mony sched­uled to con­tinue next week.