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 […]
Category: Science & Tech
Everything from lampooning Popular Science to picking on Microsoft and Oracle belong here.
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 […]
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 […]
Rough intuition for tensors
As part of some original work I’m doing (which I will be elucidating here for you all soonish), I’ve been learning about tensors, a subject with which I am only vaguely familiar. The tensor abstraction is very mathematically weird, because it is stateful. It’s almost like object-oriented programming ported into mathematics. Despite it’s mathematical weirdness, […]
Experimental new series: Foundations of QAnal
I may or may not stick with this. I am having horrible writer’s block trying to write this all out in a LaTeX PDF, Erlang, my videos, or in my Revelations. So I’m trying the blog medium. The blog has the “fire and forget” property. So we’ll see. QAnal is my fork of mathematics. QAnal […]
Standarditis
This is a repost of a Substack post If you don’t know, I have a series of “podcast length” mathematical documents that I call Revelations, which you can find on my GitLab. I’m composing a new one (Revelations 27) right now about WF Algebra, which is a mindblowing take on formal logic. I wrote out […]
The chromopill
This was originally a Substack post. I would like to congratulate zxq9 on contracting me as his new star columnist. This is a major milestone for his publication, and you should all be proud of him. Every system that works rests upon a foundation of useful lies. There are three stages in understanding this Blue […]
Erlang: Protip — `throw` is an antipattern
throw is bad. EEP 0049 is a whole set of bad ideas. Deeply nested case is bad. Using if where it doesn’t belong is bad. try … catch is bad, but there are a handful of builtins and library functions that force you to use it instead of providing an ok | error return (use […]
Nonsensical Surveys
At the bottom of some mystery fear porn article on MSN about it being such a puzzle that Japan is doing fine despite no mandates, no lockdowns, no shutdowns, etc. this survey appeared asking readers how they felt about about Japan’s “handling” of the situation: This is ridiculous as there is no option for “This […]
Space-Based Solar Done Right
Anyone who gives a bit of honest thought to the so-called “renewable energy” market cannot escape the conclusion that the vast majority of it is fake — politicians creating a moral panic to grant themselves unquestionable authority over appropriations and then handing appropriated funds over to losing ventures run by their friends and family that […]