Thinking about time and compute. I liked this: https://petafloptimism.com/2026/03/14/gas-town-and-bullet-hell/, especially the bullet hell stuff - that feeling of soft focus absorption... I can imagine a world where that is managing agents, though it is pretty far away so far.

More echoes of time: reading Permutation City where copies uploaded to virtual reality have their ticks run depending on the global marketplace for compute. So you get time shear between them and the outside world. Reminded of the deliberate time shear of the Maths in Anathem.

Time diverging - but of course it already long has - every time an improvement in efficiency is made. Sometimes I think of course intellectual labor will follow the same path of automation as physical, why did we ever think it wouldn't?