We are grateful to Maximilian Worth for outstanding research assistance. For helpful comments we thank Paul Novosad, Anne Case, Andrew Cherlin, and seminar participants at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, the Wennberg International Collaborative, the American-European … Read more
Please clap for Techmeme Techmeme turns 20 freaking years old today. This is our self-congratulatory post marking the occasion. Please share, retweet, and offer your sincerest congratulations. And thanks to so many of you for reading us all these years. … Read more
The other day I discussed how high monitoring costs can explain the emergence of “aristocratic” systems of governance: Aristocracy and Hostage Capital Arjun Panickssery · Jan 8There’s a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the “old corruption” … Read more
Community blog post Published November 20, 2023 TL;DRor check out the interactive demonstration A Short background storyThe 4 channels of the SDXL latents The 8-bit pixel space has 3 channels The SDXL latent representation of an image has 4 channels Direct conversion of … Read more
To learn how optimizing compilers are made, I built one targeting the 6502 architecture. In a bizarre twist, my compiler generates faster code than GCC, LLVM, and every other compiler I compared it to. I reckon my compiler isn’t doing … Read more
The supply chain bottlenecks we’re experiencing across the globe start with components. Rather, they start with component shortages. Of all the component shortages, by far the most severe is for certain semiconductors, or chips. The current global chip shortage rivals … Read more
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum algorithms do work, which he could then link … Read more
Welcome! In this article we’ll do a deep dive into detailed description of Ethereum’s PoS consensus model how Ethereum PoS can recover from malicious attacks refuting common anti-PoS talking points discuss the practicalities of liquid staking or running your own … Read more
People tend to be visual: we use pictures to understand problems. Mainstream programming languages, on the other hand, operate in an almost completely different kind of abstract space, leaving a big gap between programs and pictures. This piece is about … Read more
Albert Einstein said: “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” I like to think this is true about explaining things to my parents. As is the case for many people my age, … Read more