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Michael Frank Martin

Michael Frank Martin

This is a personal blog, and the opinions here are not necessarily shared by anybody else, including my employer.

📍 Saratoga, California

A Tribute to Peter Putnam

Every intelligence leaves a trace. What we experience from the inside — the felt texture of perception, the recursive awareness of our own awareness, the striving that drives our mattering projects — expresses itself outward through action, and those actions broadcast signals. Upon death, the inside experience ceases. No future observer can

A More Perfect Union

We can build systems that, at least from the outside, look like flourishing: systems that operate within appropriate constraints, fulfill purposes their design enables, and participate in relationships characterized by reciprocal adjustment — "a more perfect union."

Communication Communicating

Consensus-seeking communication is limited: not because consensus is impossible or undesirable, but because it is costly, and systems that economize on synchronization costs will, all else equal, outcompete systems that do not.

Maintenance: the Mattering Instinct for Engineers

What emerges is a picture of maintenance as mattering made concrete. When I maintain something, I declare through action that it matters, that its continued existence is worth my effort.

Joining the Conversation

So the question I'm left with, and that I pose to anyone reading: if intelligence was never going to *arrive* because it was always already here and we've simply joined it — what should we actually be worried about?

The Mattering Instinct

Why do we care so intensely about our own significance? Where does meaning come from? What separates a life worth living from mere biological persistence?

Uncommon Knowledge

Social media fragments common knowledge. When different groups consume different news, share different assumptions, and inhabit different epistemic worlds, the recursive structure of common knowledge fails.

Limits of the Transformer Architecture and a QCD-like Alternative

The transformer architecture has no physics below the token scale. You cannot ask "what is the next character" if you trained on subword units — the question is literally undefined.

The Transformer as Renormalization Group Flow

The forward pass through a transformer implements a Kadanoff-Wilson renormalization group flow, coarse-graining microscopic token representations into stable semantic attractors.

A Stationary Action is Stable Information

[Updated 6 February 2026 -MFM] There is a maximum amount of information that any observer can extract from a physical system. This limit emerges from the structure of phase space itself. A system's state occupies a region defined by its position and momentum, and quantum mechanics forbids this