Arthur Breitman's blog. Occasionally right.
my work, AI-generated overview Somewhere around 2015 I admitted to myself that my IMDB ratings were garbage: the numbers meant nothing. Asked to give a movie 7 or 8 stars, I produce noise: it depends on my mood, on the last thing I rated, on whether I’m anchoring against masterpieces or against the mediocre thing I watched on a plane. A 7 from 2013-me and a 7 from 2015-me are not the same 7. What…
my work, AI-generated overview In October 2023, Gurnee and Tegmark published Language Models Represent Space and Time : linear probes on Llama activations recover, among other things, the latitude and longitude of places the model has read about. The paper was received as ammunition in the “do LLMs have world models?” debate, and the skeptics’ rebuttal was predictable: recovering coordinates with…
In 2021, I purchased a property in Tuscany, sight unseen. This was in the midst of COVID restrictions, and UK residents were not allowed to travel outside of the country. The realtor did a tour of the place with a phone camera, and the deal was struck. The property had been renovated completely in the early 2000s, but was mostly left abandoned. With just a bit of work, it would be ready next year.…
Economic inequality lies less in wealth than in consumption, at least for billionaires, and at least in the sense that consumption is what actually commands real resources. A pile of stock in productive companies, or even a pile of cash that never becomes spending, doesn’t directly divert today’s output away from anyone else. And it isn’t inert. Being willing to sit on long-duration equity at a…
“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 backward. To understand inscriptions, we must first understand some technical limitations of the Bitcoin blockchain and the historical emergence of solutions around it. Data-availability and sovereign rollup Bitcoin generally…
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 scan. It’s not immediately obvious how the parallel scan algorithm can be applied to this recurrence, so I set out to understand the approach and see if it could be generalized. The parallel scan We have a sequence \(x_0,…
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 of safety and liveness of a consensus algorithm. Consensus algorithms do not require decentralization, but they do require an honest majority. Decentralization helps maintain an honest…
Important update It seems that one of the reason Vick’s First Defence lost popularity is that, in rare cases, the injected zinc can directly reach the olfactory nerve and cause anosmia . This is a good example of why I’m advocating for caution before shooting anything in your nose. At a minimum, removing the Zinc from the recipe could be wise. Part 1: LLM ideation This is the first part of a…
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 self-governance. Tezos has always been an ambitious idea. It has been a while since I worked on this project exclusively during my nights and weekends. Over the last four years, it has been rewarding to watch Tezos grow from an…
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. While EIP 1559 is an Ethereum-specific proposal, the fee market in Tezos, Bitcoin, and Ethereum are essentially similar, making the ideas in this proposal broadly applicable to all three. How a fee market works Let’s first review how…