Bitcoin’s fixed monetary supply – 21,000,000 bitcoins – is a fairly well-known fact these days, but there was a time when this wasn’t the case. In fact, until 2014 there was a major bug in Bitcoin that would have caused its supply to inflate forever. If you read the hilarious and short BIP-42 you can get a little bit of insight into what the infinite inflation bug was: As is well known, Satoshi was a master programmer whose knowledge of C++ was…
Sometimes, while working on a project, a simple templating system is necessary either for code or documentation generation. While you can get quite far with sed and awk, their nifty one-liners will eventually become monstrous, especially as your templates get more complex. How do you deal with this growing complexity? For a lot of use-cases the simple m4 macro processor is exactly what you want. This command is probably installed on your machine without you even realizing it. It comes standard…
Skepticism emerges as a reaction wherever a certain, commonly held notion of truth begins to unravel. Operating with this notion of truth, we can try to slip out of the grasp of skepticism, but inevitably we trace the same maddening circle right back into its clutches. Can we model this worldview as a machine? Factual Discourse Machines The Classical Factual Discourse Machine We take as our starting point the most naive view of factual discourse possible. All factual discourse involves acts of demonstration. I present…
Eric is starting something new today. He’s starting a more professional blog. Wow…alright sick of the third person…let me switch to something more natural. So I’ve been toying with the idea of taking my blogging a bit more seriously. I’ve tarried at the edge of the deep, dark unknown without really diving in for long enough. So it’s time that I publicly declare my intent in the hopes that’ll actually force me to do this thing. This blog is going…
