Bounded Rationality

Tools are not free. That sentence sounds too obvious to deserve an article, which is usually a warning that the industry has built several architectures pretending it is false. A tool-using AI agent can call a search API, query a database, inspect a document, ask another model, trigger a diagnostic pipeline, or run a workflow step. In a clean demo, each call feels like another harmless unit of intelligence. The agent thinks, acts, observes, thinks again, and the audience applauds because the trace looks busy. Busy is often mistaken for capable. Enterprise software has enjoyed this little confusion for decades. ...

TL;DR for operators The paper is not a magic trick that turns an infinite expected value into a finite one. The ordinary St. Petersburg expectation still diverges. Anyone claiming otherwise has either missed the point or found a very ambitious way to lose a philosophy seminar. What the paper actually does is more interesting. Takashi Izumo defines a coarse-grained version of arithmetic in which numbers are first mapped into finite “grains,” each grain is represented by a selected internal value, and addition is performed through repeated projection to those representatives.1 Under this operation, an increment can become too small to move the current coarse state. That phenomenon is called absorption. Repeated absorption produces inertness: further additions keep arriving, but the represented total stops changing. ...