Stories by realitydrift

Why Do So Many Everyday Systems Feel Harder to Use Now?

The Optimized Tomato

How Metrics Drift: Goodhart's Law, Metric Gaming, and Reality Drift [pdf]

AI as a Mirror of Cognition: Compression, Prediction, and Semantic Drift [pdf]

Nothing Is Broken. So Why Does Everything Feel Off?

Why do systems stay coherent even as they lose connection to reality?

When Intelligence Scales, Reality Drifts

When Representation Replaces Reality in Modern Systems

Why AI systems improve while drifting away from reality [pdf]

Why do so many systems feel like they're getting worse at the same time?

Why Systems Optimized for Metrics Eventually Drift from Reality [pdf]

A Reality Alignment Index: Measuring When AI and Systems Lose Meaning [pdf]

Why optimization slowly breaks the systems it improves

Why Modern Systems Keep Functioning After They Stop Making Sense [pdf]

Large Systems Lose the Ability to Correct Themselves

Why Modern Life Feels Unreal: An Information-Theoretic Model of Cognitive Drift

The AI Productivity Paradox Is a Feedback Problem

The Loss of Stop Conditions in Modern Life

Early Signs of Constraint Loss in Product and System Design

Continuous Context Switching Erodes Attention