The more work I do on post quantum encryption, the more deja vu I feel. At first it was mysterious and sophisticated, yet after a few years the magic is gone.

Here’s what I have been thinking about lately: You can’t have a thing without a not-thing. You can’t have change without something staying the same. You can’t have sameness without something against which it’s same. Light means shadows.

That seems like a children’s book.

Yet the most advanced physicists have built elaborate mathematics to describe a universe that a simple Escher symbol of interlocking fish already captures: existence is mutual arising.

The parts don’t precede the whole. The whole doesn’t precede the parts. They co-emerge.

Imagine handing someone a one-sided coin. Impossible. Yet that’s what we call “classic” and the two-sided coin of normal everyday life gets called “weird” and “strange”. The coin-ness, the thing that makes it function as a coin, requires both sides existing simultaneously. The duality isn’t a property the coin has, it’s not strange, it’s what we think a coin IS.

But it gets even worse. Physicists want us to be surprised that flipping a coin or spinning it—let alone flipping a spinning coin—has been “found” possible.

Quantum mechanics keeps “discovering” that systems naturally have duality, and each time it’s treated as strange. But the strangeness is in the assumption that a oneness was ever our default. A particle with definite position and no momentum isn’t a particle. An electron with spin-up and no relationship to spin-down isn’t an electron. These things exist AS dualities, not as single-sided entities that happen to have another side.

The impressive sounding Tsirelson bound is a perfect example of the error. Rotate a coin, and the bound treats rotation as one thing. But why would an operation on a two-sided object be one-sided?

A new paper in Physical Review Letters says that rotation itself has turned out to have two sides. Well, of course it does. Why wouldn’t it? The operation inherits the structure of what it operates on. A spinning two-sided coin is two-sided simultaneously, and could be flipped at the same time too.

The paper wants us to believe their “discovery” is breaking physics, when it reads more like physicists finally testing what happens when you apply duality principles to the operations, and not just the states. The universe didn’t change. The assumption was proven to be false, that single-path evolution should ever have been the only option.

Introducing balance reduces noise because of course it does. Extremes collapse. The middle holds. A coin that’s purely heads or purely tails decoheres into classical definiteness. A coin held in tension between both states maintains its quantum character. Extend that to the dynamics themselves—evolution held in tension between two opposing operations—and you get deeper coherence, not less.

The decoherence resistance follows naturally from this too. Environmental noise pushes systems toward extremes, toward definiteness. A system already structured around dynamic balance has somewhere to absorb that pressure without collapsing.

What if quantum formalism has been obscuring our world rather than revealing its truth? This new paper reads like a priest is saying they “discovered” the earth could be orbiting around the sun after all, and now we can stop burning people at the stake for saying so.

Why did the church believe it wasn’t? And is the church ready to admit it was obstructing when it claimed to be enlightening? The elaborate mathematics haven’t just been inefficient, they actively prevent people from seeing what’s so simple.

Euro NCAP just put out a statement specifically warning consumers about Tesla’s door handle design as a safety hazard. This isn’t a weak-kneed American regulatory investigation that might take years, this is the European safety rating body publicly telling people the Tesla design is dangerous right now.

Tesla has been wrong this whole time, needlessly killing hundreds of people, yet here we are.

Tesla Deaths Total: 772
Tesla Autopilot Deaths Count: 65

The key points from their statement:

1. Tesla hiding door handles with no easy mechanical backup are the problem. Euro NCAP is explicit: doors must be openable “at all times” including when there’s no electrical power. Tesla’s design fails this basic requirement.
2. They’re calling out the interior release too. The electronic interior buttons also lack mechanical backup – meaning if the electrical system fails in a crash, occupants are trapped from both inside and outside.
3. This affects safety ratings going forward. Euro NCAP is signaling that vehicles without mechanical backup releases won’t score well, which hits Tesla’s marketing directly.

Tesla is almost banned entirely in China. That country smelled fraud immediately, given its unique history, and figured out how to crack down on Elon Musk’s gross misbehavior without mentioning him or Tesla directly.

Note, for example, the 2011 Wenzhou high-speed rail collision that killed 40 people, 25 fewer than Tesla Autopilot. Railway Ministry officials who’d been caught taking bribes and cutting corners on safety systems were executed or given lengthy prison sentences.

The report, published last month on the Chinese government’s website, into the causes of the collision last year between two high-speed trains near Wenzhou has concluded design flaws and poor management were to blame for the fatal crash.

The new Chinese AV regulations thus literally took Tesla down bullet by bullet, removing all the fast and loose games their CEO was playing with road safety. Now Tesla also is losing its safety fraud loopholes in America and the EU:

• US (NHTSA): Formal investigation into 5.8 million vehicles, focused on documented failure incidents
• Europe (Euro NCAP): Public consumer warning calling the fundamental design architecture unsafe

The Euro NCAP statement is the sharper immediate blow because it’s not “we’re investigating if the President lets us” it’s “we’re telling consumers today Tesla is a threat to public safety.” That’s the kind of thing that, if nothing else, goes straight into insurance risk calculations and national healthcare modeling.

Tesla handles were obviously flawed from the start (based on mechanical engineering code of ethics), and then the company ignored a decade of people being unnecessarily killed by a death trap design.

Tesla has been sued over a brutal and fiery January 2023 crash in Washington state that ended with one person dead and another severely injured because first responders allegedly couldn’t open the Model 3’s doors. It’s the latest in a growing number of lawsuits Tesla is facing over the door handles — both inside and outside — on its vehicles.

Jeffery and Wendy Dennis, a married couple, were running errands on a Sunday afternoon when their car “suddenly and rapidly accelerated out of control,” according to the lawsuit filed in Washington state federal court. It then hit a utility pole and burst into flames. Wendy died at the scene…

The cynical and immoral company, riddled with fraud cases from “veered” fatal crashes, is now being called out explicitly by regulatory frameworks simultaneously on three continents.

And just to reiterate that none of this should have every happened, decades ago Mercedes had “hidden” door handles that were mechanical.

China treats lethal corner-cutting as a crime against the state; the US treats it as a cost of doing business that generates billions in settlements. Tesla obviously is betting that the American President will continue to protect them so they can kill more.

The Euro NCAP statement suggests Europe might be moving faster and closer to the “fraud is unacceptable” end of the business spectrum, for perhaps obvious reasons also from history, even if they’re not executing anyone, yet.

China ordered capital punishment for people causing over 40 deaths, Tesla has 65 Autopilot deaths and counting, no consequences. And that’s before we look at hundreds more burned alive by Tesla’s death trap Swastikar design.

Anthropic has announced they built scaffolding around an amnesiac and called it a “harness.” Their new engineering post on long-running agents reveals a company solving for the wrong problems, without realizing it.

Here’s what they actually discovered: if you tell their “Claude” AI chatbot to write things down in specific files, it can read those files later.

That’s the research.

Shocking.

Let me write that down for future generations.

But seriously, they’ve dressed a notepad up as “a sophisticated harness architecture inspired by human engineering practices“. Strip away the marketing fluff and framing and you’re left with structured note-taking.

The big tell is in their metaphor. They declare the problem:

…a software project staffed by engineers working in shifts, where each new engineer arrives with no memory of what happened on the previous shift

Shift handoff?

Documentation hygiene?

Pass the baton, read the notes, rinse, repeat?

Nope.

All this framing is wrong in a revealing way. Shift handoffs are about being horizontal and transactional for the same workers, same capabilities, same role, all just sequential steps.

What Anthropic claims they actually built is the exact opposite: vertical and formative.

Their “initializer agent” does far more than leave a note because it establishes the culture of the project: anthropology (ethnography) of the norms, the patterns, what counts as done, what’s prohibited. That’s essentially a parent role.

Subsequent agents can’t pick up where someone left off until after they’re born by an initializer parent into a world of inherent and inherited constraints, regulations, and have to figure out what kind of agent they’re supposed to be. This isn’t new theory at all. I’ve been teaching similar frameworks for data agents to Austrian computer science graduate students since 2015.

The problem obviously isn’t about an agent shift change. People punching the clock don’t start their shift in existential crisis. It’s closer to the handoff of grandparents who are teaching their customs and culture to grandchildren. The agent is born into both the physics of its situation and the culture of its lineage.

As my father used to say we live in a point in time (absolute rule) that has a time zone (relative localized treatment of the absolute rule).

Archaeologists refer to this as chaîne opératoire. When you find an ancient hand axe, the interesting question goes far beyond the procedure that has been used for making it. The entire cognitive and cultural apparatus behind it should come into focus: Why this stone and wood, why not this or that one? How do you read shapes and fracture patterns? When is a tool “done” or ready? What’s it even for, and not for? Should you sharpen for two hours and chop for one, or chop for four? Or perhaps, as chillingly depicted in the new film Train Dreams, who is accountable for Americans using Chinese labor and then murdering them before they can prosper?

The accumulated judgment of generations is encoded in techniques, and that judgment doesn’t transfer through documentation alone.

Consider a soldier coming into bootcamp.

Knowing the right end of the rifle is the least of training, even if pointing it wrong is fatal. Instead the most crucial bits are here’s who we are, here’s why we fight, here’s how to recognize threats, here’s what victory looks like, here’s what’s unacceptable. Marksmanship is almost incidental to the identity formation for orders. Someone who could operate the rifle still wouldn’t be a soldier because he would lack the long term knowledge of why and where to aim, when NOT to fire.

Anthropic notices that Claude tries to “one-shot” its applications, declares victory prematurely, and doesn’t test properly. Oh boy, don’t I know that. It’s super frustrating.

They treat these as failure modes to be constrained, yet they are all dispositions. The agent has values and tendencies that are wrong for the task.

Anthropic’s solution doesn’t address the dispositions, however. Instead it constrains them externally with rules and file structures. The feature list that can’t be edited, the JSON format, the git discipline, etc. are primitive guardrails around an agent that doesn’t understand why they matter. It’s like a bird building a nest its chicks can never leave and calling them flight-ready.

The deeper problem is that Anthropic clearly has no understanding of the problems and lacks a theory of what’s happening. They stumbled onto ancient cultural transmission theory as if it’s novel or unknown and then framed it as documentation best practices.

They think they solved a coordination problem when they actually created a socialization system. The distinction matters because coordination problems have primitive engineering solutions, while socialization problems require sophisticated understanding of how identity and judgment are formed meaningfully.

What would a real theory look like?

Start by asking why Claude has the dispositions it has, and how it got there, rather than how to constrain them. Ask what it means to instantiate a new being into an inherited world. Ask how judgment transfers beyond just information.

Philosophy, or even anthropology, not physics.

A cat that gets burned may never return to the hot spot, but a human may learn the spot was hot because someone turned on the power. The burned cat learns correlation, not causation. Humans transmit the mechanism, not just the avoidance. That’s exactly what’s missing from the Anthropic harness, and yet it’s intelligence 101.

Anthropic rediscovered something every apprenticeship system, military, and religious tradition figured out millennia ago. It’s hardly news because you can’t transmit competence without transmitting culture. They just don’t know that’s what they did. Perhaps because they don’t have a proper handoff themselves from past social sciences.