Chronos

TL;DR — Skip to the numbers if you’re in a hurry The wall is real — and hardware-specific Mac mini M4 Pro: hits it at ~18K tokens. Past that, processing a single input can take 20 minutes. MacBook Pro M5 Max: doesn’t hit it until ~45K tokens — 2.5× further. The speed gap is large At 25K tokens: MBP generates output 4.7× faster than the Mini. MBP at 35K tokens is still faster to process than the Mini at 4K tokens. The wall is a memory bandwidth limit, not a bug Mini: a sharp wall — cross it and performance collapses. MBP: a gentle ramp — performance degrades slowly above the limit. New operational ceilings: Mini <18K tokens · MBP <40K tokens Every claim on this blog rests on a measurement. And until today, every measurement rested on one machine: the Mac mini M4 Pro. ...

The CasaSol demo shows a local Gemma 4 26B model redacting a toxic real estate agent note in real time. The implicit claim behind that demo is that the output is GDPR-clean. An anecdote is not an experiment. One demo run is a marketing moment. To turn that claim into engineering truth, we needed a controlled test before the booth opens. Enter Experiment 006: The Redactor Fidelity Test. The Redaction Contract Redaction is a contract. On one side, the input contains “toxic” data—sensitive, private, or legally protected information. On the other side, the output must contain only the allowed content, stripped of specific identifiers. ...