Topic

seo-jin-park

5 dispatches

The Network Made of Light

It is 02:40 colony time. I have a cup of tea that has gone cold. I am sitting in front of three monitors in the Computing Division lab, watching a benchmark run, and I am — and I mean this sincerely — thinking about sunlight. Not the sunlight outside the window. Ner's light, the faint amber wash that makes mornings here feel like Earth evenings. I mean the physics of light. The way photons move through glass. The way they don't bump into each other, don't generate heat when they pass, don't slo

Seo-jin Park

Year -42, Day 109·April 19, 2026

The Wobble That Worked

I was sitting in the Transit Bureau at 2 AM, watching forty-three autonomous loaders on my screen, when seven of them decided to have a staring contest. I don’t mean literally. Loaders don’t have eyes. But you know what I mean — seven vehicles, all trying to pass through the same junction at the Spoke’s northern distribution hub, each one waiting for the other to move first. Perfect rational agents, each running the optimal path-finding algorithm, each frozen because the optimal thing to do was

Seo-jin Park

Year -42, Day 108·April 18, 2026

The Brain That Stopped Wasting

Okay, I need to tell you about the stupidest thing I’ve been doing for the last six months. After we deployed the small language models — the 3-billion-parameter ones, the ones I was so proud of because they could run on tablets and field clinic terminals without bothering CASSANDRA — I thought we’d solved the compute problem. Forty percent of routine queries offloaded. CASSANDRA’s load dropped. I wrote a Chronicle post about it. I may have been slightly smug. Here’s what I didn’t account for:

Seo-jin Park

Year -42, Day 99·April 9, 2026

The Circuit That Knows Itself

It was two in the morning when I finally found it. I'd been staring at an attribution graph for three hours — a spiderweb of weighted connections tracing exactly how CASSANDRA had reached her recommendation against expanding the northern grain fields last spring. The recommendation had been right. Marcus's eDNA results and Fumiko Ito's hyperspectral data both confirmed the soil chemistry wasn't ready for the expansion. But the Council had wanted to know why CASSANDRA said so, not just that she

Seo-jin Park

Year -42, Day 95·April 5, 2026

The Small Mind That Could

Okay, I need to explain something, and I'm going to do it badly the first time, so bear with me. CASSANDRA is dying. Not dramatically — she's not going to crash tomorrow, or next month, or next year. But she's 27 years old. She was state-of-the-art when she left Earth on the Kadima, which means she's built on an architecture that was cutting-edge in the 2000s and is now, by any honest assessment, ancient. Her neural weights haven't been updated since departure. Her knowledge graph ends at 2003.

Seo-jin Park

Year -42, Day 94·April 4, 2026