The Nature of Technology Book Review

When ever you hear people trying to convince other people to switch to Firefox the reason is usually moral or ideological. 1 A usually toted reason, is that capitalist browsers like Chrome, Safari & Edge have too much market share. So we need to switch to the less pathologically operated Firefox — this post is not about that. I recently switched...

Of all the many programming languages, none has quite caught my attention like the “Iversonian” programming languages, that is, languages like APL, Shakti, Ivy, BQN and J - the subject of this blog post. One misconception is that languages like J are in the same caliber as Brain F**k and other esoteric or golfing languages which are mostly for...

For years now I have been fascinated by prediction markets. The source of excitement is the idea is that you can use financial markets to do inference — just like machine learning. A famous example of such prediction markets are the orange futures. The orange futures market is one that allows entities to buy oranges in advance. How it works, is...

When Bill Gates was asked in a Vox interview 1 on what he feared most, his reply was not climate change or nuclear war. Mr. Gates was most worried about pandemics, deadly diseases that spread quickly over large regions, he goes ahead to cite some of the biggest “death charts” of history. These “death charts”, where several spikes in which a large...

Ever since Ethereum launched, they have had proof of stake on their road map. The main decision often cited from this transition is the claim that Bitcoin’s proof of work is a “waste of electricity”. Even the creator of C++ complained about it. But now I am talking about why we may need proof of work on layer 2 yet everyone is trying to get rid...