The United States frontier was partitioned according to the Public Land Survey System.

It was an idea designed by Jefferson.

Normally, parcels would be split up based on an understanding of the terrain: where the rivers are, where the valleys are.

But the United States frontier was too vast; it was much easier to simply project a cartesian grid across the US, sight unseen.

This created some oddities: parcels that required multiple bridges to connect, for example.

But it made the problem of partitioning the whole interior of the US tractable.

It was too hard to be precise, so they just sliced across the grain of the land.

This is what we did with the app's same-origin model.

The origin boundaries are tidy, easy to reason about for the OS, and simple… but they cut across the grain of our lives.

Before, it was not feasible to be more precise.

But now, with LLMs, we can be!