# Sarah Friend - Blog

> Writing Archive

This is the personal blog of Sarah Friend, an artist and software developer whose work explores technology, decentralization, identity, infrastructure, and the politics of software. The blog is hosted at https://blog.isthisa.com and posts are also cross-posted to https://isthisanart.substack.com.

## Posts

- [What Kind of Clock is an LLM?](https://blog.isthisa.com/what-kind-of-clock-is-an-llm/): All computational systems contain an implicit model of time, and all of them are wrong. On real-time operating systems, Unix time and the 2038 problem, Bitcoin/proof-of-work as a thermodynamic clock, and what kind of clock an LLM is — dataset cutoffs, stale context windows, and how blockchain time models might help with AI authentication and alignment.
- [Death of a Software Developer](https://blog.isthisa.com/death-of-a-software-developer/): The software developer is a type of guy, and his decline will be cultural as well as economic. On AI coding tools, vibe coding, the bifurcation between software developers and vibe coders, and the downstream cultural consequences of the software developer's fall from mainstream relevance.
- [Games in the Expanded Field](https://blog.isthisa.com/games-in-the-expanded-field/): On the impossibility of defining what a game is — from Wittgenstein and Bernard Suits to The Game, Le Grand Jeu, and Life and Death Pong (also known as Type 1 Diabetes) — and why leaving the question unanswered may be more generative than any answer.
- [Protective Rituals for Posthumans](https://blog.isthisa.com/protective-rituals-for-posthumans/): From sycophancy to disempowerment to psychosis, on the need for cognitive protection rituals when interacting with AI — anti-affirmations, cultivating attention, neutral questions, and touching grass.
- [Cyborg Upgrade](https://blog.isthisa.com/cyborg-upgrade/): On living with an open-source artificial pancreas as a Type 1 diabetic, the politics of medical technology, agency, and what it means to be a cyborg.
- [Decentralization and Its Discontents](https://blog.isthisa.com/decentralization-and-its-discontents/): An essay examining what "decentralization" actually means across technology and politics, arguing for multidimensional analysis rather than treating it as a universal good.
- [Being the Hydra](https://blog.isthisa.com/being-the-hydra/): On identity in software design, from the prisoner's dilemma through alt accounts and group meme pages to 4chan, exploring how platforms encode assumptions about selfhood.
- [Five years ago I saw the future](https://blog.isthisa.com/blockchain-time-capsule/): A 2016 article published as a time capsule, covering early blockchain utopianism including Bitnation, blockchain art, and decentralized ridesharing.
- [Deuteranopia](https://blog.isthisa.com/deuteranopia/): A short story about a cryptocurrency developer flying to London to retrieve a lost phone containing 2fa keys to a crypto exchange account, navigating the surreal world of digital finance.
- [Perverse Affordances - Interview with Alejandro Ball](https://blog.isthisa.com/perverse-affordances-interview/): An interview about the art project Perverse Affordances, which used GANs trained on social media screenshots to explore how platform interfaces shape human behavior.
- [Why this is not on medium](https://blog.isthisa.com/initial-commit/): A short manifesto on self-hosting and platform independence.