Yesterday I was invited to do an interview with the man behind Erlang Punch, Mathieu Kerjouan. Mathieu is a truly great programmer, an absolutely excellent interviewer, and it was a lot of fun to get to do something task-focused with him like this. He asked some pretty broad questions about Erlang as a language, as […]
Podcast: The Roman Rapist Mindset, measuring your goals and why Euclid’s parallel copy procedure breaks (answer: I did it incorrectly)
This started as one of my Euclid videos, and ended up being an interesting conversation over an entire range of topics. The Euclid parallel copy question got answered, at 01:37:34. The first two hours or so are about the Euclid series as a whole, explaining the idea and what my plans are with the series. […]
Ethereum RLP Encoding w/code in Erlang and TypeScript
This is a standard for encoding arbitrary(ish)-depth lists of lists of … of lists of bytestrings, as a single bytestring. -type decoded_data() :: binary() | [decoded_data()]. -spec encode(Data) -> RLP when Data :: decoded_data(), RLP :: binary(). -spec decode(RLP) -> {Data, Rest} when RLP :: binary(), Data :: decoded_data(), Rest :: binary(). Ethereum’s docs are […]
Base64 v. Base58 with code in Erlang and TypeScript
Base64 and Base58 are two algorithms for encoding byte arrays to plain text. I initially assumed these were two instances of the same “Base N” algorithm. This is not the case. These are two fundamentally different algorithms. Base64 is simpler. It treats your byte array as a stream of bytes. It encodes 3 bytes at […]
Aegora.jp: An Explainer
Aegora.jp is a somewhat complicated system in that it directly uses on-chain contract call transactions as its payment method. This means that a sale’s status passes through phases that are governed by actions that occur on the chain which can only be initiated by transactions that are signed by the users and must be verified […]
Alternative Tracks
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises A cascade of financial crises are rushing across the Western world. Gradually Imagine a set of express trains that are all headed toward a single catastrophic, multi-track collision. Each train is heavily damaged already, but the […]
An obvious solution to the Fermi Paradox
The past three years have made obvious a simple solution to the Fermi Paradox. Any advanced civilization will eventually discover nuclear and (in our case) biological weapons. These present a systemic risk to the entire uniplanetary civilization. AI may also present a systemic risk, but that is less clear. The civilization now has two choices: […]
The USD is literally a diffuse, dupable NFT
Fiat currencies have reduced themselves to the level of NFTs. The USD is a perfect example of this. The story is fairly easy to understand. The story of NFTs Some intelligent people realized that smart contracts could be used to register ownership of a given contract by a given public key, and that contract could […]
Video: Why does Euclid’s parallel copy construction break in this weird way?
Update (2023-04-22): it was because I did it incorrectly. I have a very nonconventional approach to math. There’s a fake question that’s posed a lot in math, which is is mathematics invented or discovered? I previously thought it was a stupid question because it has no impact on how one does math, until I heard […]
The financialization cycle
The process of an economy shifting its optimizations from productive activity to the accumulation of money is called “financialization”. To add more confusion to the mix, people on the left-end (idiot-end) of the Midwit Curve can tell something is badly wrong and the game is being rigged, but can’t tell what forces are conspiring to […]