ex.rs
Arthur Breitman's blog. Occasionally right.
Category movies
Category economics
Note that the following idea isn’t particularly new, economists have known this for a while. I only happen to think it ought to be better known. When it comes to...
I can think of a couple of things that branding achieves:
L'algorithme de Bellman-Ford, qui calcule le plus court chemin dans un graphe, met en évidence les arbitrages sur le marché des devises : des opérations d'achat et de vente garantissant...
There is a lot of value in private arbitrage, especially when dealing with emerging markets or countries where the judicial system isn’t well developed. However, a private arbitrage firm ideally...
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court said Wednesday that evidence obtained after illegal searches or arrests based on simple police mistakes may be used to prosecute criminal defendants.
The subprime crisis should have been avoided rather than solved, but there was a simple way to solve it.
When I argue with Americans about socialized healthcare, I argue we shouldn’t move towards it, when I argue with French people, I argue we should get out of it. On...
I’ve been arguing with many people about politics, and over time, my persuasive power has steadily decreased. This may seem paradoxical, so here is what happened.
With the subprime crisis raging, there are many stories of people walking out of their mortgage. It also seems that it is not uncommon among young people to walk out...
This is a thought experiment, but I think it gives interesting results. Assume that you gain political power in a country, and - before you become absolutely corrupted - try...
Along with roads and defense, education often comes as a necessary output of the State. Even Hayek claims that, since we need to be educated to value education, it has...
Category math
This post is inspired by the recent paper on Mamba. Mamba introduces a simplified, linear RNN and shows that it can be computed in \(\mathcal{O}(\log n)\) time using a parallel...
Note that the following idea isn’t particularly new, economists have known this for a while. I only happen to think it ought to be better known. When it comes to...
Double-blind studies are the gold standard in medicine. I contend they should be triple-blind. The statistician analyzing the data should be given anonymized, whitened, normalized data from the experiment and...
L'algorithme de Bellman-Ford, qui calcule le plus court chemin dans un graphe, met en évidence les arbitrages sur le marché des devises : des opérations d'achat et de vente garantissant...
I’m in a club, and my girlfriend asks the DJ to play music from another DJ. He refuses; he knows the other guy and thinks he’s an asshole. There is...
Video compression codecs are getting better and better at compressing video. However, they only use a very limited set of properties characteristic of videos… namely, they describe a video as...
A contrarian take on decision theory: the real difference between Newcomb's problem and Solomon's problem isn't precommitment. The devil is in the details of how each problem is specified.
Category philosophy
A contrarian take on decision theory: the real difference between Newcomb's problem and Solomon's problem isn't precommitment. The devil is in the details of how each problem is specified.
Category ai
Skeptics call linear probes that recover geography from an LLM 'mere statistics.' But compression is the discovery of structure — even a plain bag-of-words model of text builds a world...
This post is inspired by the recent paper on Mamba. Mamba introduces a simplified, linear RNN and shows that it can be computed in \(\mathcal{O}(\log n)\) time using a parallel...
Un programme informatique viendrait de réussir le test de Turing. Les médias en ont fait une nouvelle sensationnelle — mais qu'en est-il vraiment ? Retour sur Turing et la valeur...
Category bitcoin
This blog post expands on a popular Reddit comment on the benefits and drawbacks of supply caps. This topic is particularly interesting as it touches upon many areas of crypto-economic...
It’s impossible to walk around the distributed ledger landscape without encountering the idea of so-called “colored coins”. The purpose of this post is to clarify their nature, the motivation behind...
In the interest of bringing some much-needed sanity to the discussion surrounding “blockchain technology” I have attempted to establish a functional nomenclature of cryptographic ledgers.
"Decentralized" doesn't mean what most people think. Popularly it suggests diluted power; in systems theory it means participants act on local information, with no participant given an explicit role.
An improved, SHA-256-only scheme to discourage mining pools from forming — Fawke signatures, refining the earlier Lamport approach — for when that goal is worth pursuing at all.
Miners join pools mainly to reduce the variance of their returns. But if the expectation is unchanged, why does variance matter so much? A look at the risk math of...
A minimal change to the Bitcoin protocol that could discourage mining-pool concentration — having miners generate Lamport signatures instead of block hashes — without penalizing existing ASIC investments.
Dispelling misconceptions common even among people who know Bitcoin well — starting with what hashing power actually buys you: security through expensive, irreversible spending, not transaction throughput.
Category blockchain
“Inscriptions” became a popular way to create NFTs on Bitcoin earlier in 2023 and have picked up significantly in the past month. However, they are, in many ways, a step...
It’s impossible to walk around the distributed ledger landscape without encountering the idea of so-called “colored coins”. The purpose of this post is to clarify their nature, the motivation behind...
In the interest of bringing some much-needed sanity to the discussion surrounding “blockchain technology” I have attempted to establish a functional nomenclature of cryptographic ledgers.
What do blockchains accomplish?
Category finance
Note that the following idea isn’t particularly new, economists have known this for a while. I only happen to think it ought to be better known. When it comes to...
Category probability
Category tezos
“Inscriptions” became a popular way to create NFTs on Bitcoin earlier in 2023 and have picked up significantly in the past month. However, they are, in many ways, a step...
Decentralization is a means to an end. In the case of blockchains, decentralization typically achieves two ends: double spending prevention and censorship resistance — these map, respectively, to the properties...
Seven years ago, I embarked on a mission to bring about a new form of money: bound by algorithmic rules, and yet capable of evolution; decentralized, and yet capable of...
The following is a collection of thoughts around fee markets in general and mechanism to fold in transaction fees in a protocol, such as the one outlined in EIP 1559....
This blog post expands on a popular Reddit comment on the benefits and drawbacks of supply caps. This topic is particularly interesting as it touches upon many areas of crypto-economic...
I have been compiling some thought from various community members regarding the design of an on-chain treasury for Tezos chains, and what that might look like. Of course, there is...
In which I outline, for different categories, what seems to me as reasonable, immediate, directions for improving Tezos. The emphasis is on relatively low hanging fruits, nothing earth shattering, just...
Futarchy, in a nutshell, is the governance technique of evaluating policies ex post while relying on a prediction market to determine the best policy ex ante.
What is baking? Bitcoin has mining, Tezos has baking. In Bitcoin, miners compete to publish blocks containing a proof-of-work stamp by repeatedly hashing block headers. In Tezos, block creation is...
I’ve spoken several times of hash-consing as a way to store contract data efficiently for the Tezos blockchain. Here’s why it’s useful, how it works, and what its limitations are....
Tezos is a proof-of-stake blockchain with a delegation mechanism. How delegation is handled at the launch of the network could have enduring consequences for the network.
This post describes a light compilation step to help stack manipulation in Michelson. It’s not critical for the launch, so we aren’t focusing on it in the near term, but...
Here is a short video update on Tezos development in the past week. Beware, this was largely improvised and the sound quality is not good. Please bear with us, we...
A letter from Arthur & Kathleen Breitman to the Tezos community.
This post is an attempt to give a tour of the Tezos code base and its state of development. All of the functionality described in the whitepaper has been implemented...
But there will be hard-forks nonetheless
In which we do not pursue sharding as a scaling technique
tl;dr:
* We made a some tweaks to the three year old white paper.
Scroll to the bottom of this post for a list
This is meant to be a concise guide to the principles and values we hope to see embodied by the Tezos network. A longer, more detailed version of this list...
Like an idol with feet of clay, the oft-touted mathematical immutability of blockchains stands on a weak foundation so long as hard forks remain a possibility. Indeed, the rules of...
The meltdown of “The DAO” and, more recently DDOS attacks on Ethereum have spurred a debate on the wisdom of “Turing completeness” in smart contract languages. Tezos, a cryptographic ledger...
An exciting glimpse into the future that ultimately falls a bit short
Category michelson
This post describes a light compilation step to help stack manipulation in Michelson. It’s not critical for the launch, so we aren’t focusing on it in the near term, but...
Category baking
What is baking? Bitcoin has mining, Tezos has baking. In Bitcoin, miners compete to publish blocks containing a proof-of-work stamp by repeatedly hashing block headers. In Tezos, block creation is...
Tezos is a proof-of-stake blockchain with a delegation mechanism. How delegation is handled at the launch of the network could have enduring consequences for the network.
Category ethereum
The following is a collection of thoughts around fee markets in general and mechanism to fold in transaction fees in a protocol, such as the one outlined in EIP 1559....
Category bio
Category software
Category machine-learning
Absolute movie ratings are noise that drifts with your mood; pairwise comparisons are stable. So stop rating — compare, and let the machine infer calibrated numbers from the comparisons.
Skeptics call linear probes that recover geography from an LLM 'mere statistics.' But compression is the discovery of structure — even a plain bag-of-words model of text builds a world...
Category statistics
Absolute movie ratings are noise that drifts with your mood; pairwise comparisons are stable. So stop rating — compare, and let the machine infer calibrated numbers from the comparisons.
