about

SmokingMirror is built by Brendan Hopper — engineer, researcher, and writer working on the question of what gets measured when we measure a language model. The infrastructure is a small home cluster named for Mexica cosmology — Tezcatlipoca for the smoking-mirror origin server, Cipactli for the database, Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl for the workers, Omeyocan for the place above the heavens. The data is collected, derived, and published with no institutional badge attached, under CC0.

The fuller bio — what Brendan was doing before this, why he started, who else is in the room — lives at the sister site, and shouldn’t be duplicated here. The companion project, Life Ladder, is the human-facing piece of the same broader question: how do we make the climb survivable.