> Remember that uncanny valley between 1KB and 25MB? The problem isn't the sizes—it's that Second Age systems force you to choose between two bad options: inline the data (killing performance) or store pointers (breaking governance). Spiral eliminates this false choice. We store 10KB embeddings directly in Vortex for microsecond access, intelligently batch 10MB blocks of images for optimal S3 throughput, and externalize 4GB videos without copying a single byte. One system, no compromises.

No compromises but isn’t ‘externalising’ a large video the equivalent of storing a pointer in the first example? Can’t really see any other way to understand what that means (it goes to an external system and you store where it is)