Basically when somebody makes a pricing error on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange there's a mob of automated arbitrage bots that try to trade against it. Who wins and actually gets to make the trade is mainly determined by how high of a transaction fee your bot is willing to pay.
You can win instantly by offering to trade with a transaction fee so high it almost wipes out all but a cent or two of the entire arbitrage profits, because nobody else will pay a higher fee.
Instead what happens is bots offer the lowest possible fee, then immediately increase their fee as soon as they see a competing bot try to take the trade with a higher fee. This results in the bot offering the highest fee changing every several milliseconds as the fee quickly grows.
The way Ethereum mining works, this results in the winning bot being randomly selected from among the set of bots "bidding" up the transaction fee: blocks are mined at random intervals of iirc about 20 seconds, and whoever had the highest bid at the time the next block is mined wins. <20 seconds of bidding is short enough that even with the bidding, the transaction fee doesn't get bid up particularly high, and the winner makes out with a highly profitable arbitrage trade.
By giving up a guaranteed win and instead rolling the dice against other bots, transaction fees stay low and everyone has a higher expected profit. It's coordination that happens without any communication between the participants and quite possibly the participants didn't realize they were in effect cooperating when they added the high speed bidding behavior to their bots.
> You can win instantly by offering to trade with a transaction fee so high it almost wipes out all but a cent or two of the entire arbitrage profits, because nobody else will pay a higher fee
This is like 1980s sawtooth algos in real finance.
A lot of crypto is former HF folks taking old strategies to a dumber field.
Most deliveries aren’t urgent, but I can see the appeal if it’s fast enough to replace a trip to Lowe’s to buy some part you need now for a project. Also, meal delivery is time sensitive. Amazon always wants to deliver things faster.
But I think the idea is that shipping by drone will eventually be cheaper than a delivery truck, not just faster.
For example, there are Chinese resellers that promise to provide access to Claude (which isn't officially available in China) and defraud users by substituting something else. They're obviously sketchy in all sorts of ways, but in theory, this would prevent one kind of fraud.
It might also provide an additional guarantee for users of Open Router and Fireworks.
It sounds like you know what you’re doing but the documentation seems rather shallow and I don’t quite get it. I think you’re going to need a real language specification. I like how Go does it.
There is some apparently AI-generated prose that needs rewriting for clarity. For example, in the tutorial:
> The caller proves where; the implementation proves ensures. A precondition failure stops compilation before any program runs.
Fron the readme:
> I think you get it now.
Nope, I skimmed, because the syntax is unfamiliar.
> Memory model is in a tree of "planes". The stack is a tree. Each function is a node. Each variable is another node. If it's a struct then it's also a node. Down to the most atomic types, which are just the integers.
Yeah the repo/documentation is pretty rough right now. TBH I am not quite ready to spend a ton of time on docs yet as some of these things are changing on the fly. But the core concept/syntax should remain the same. The code is not super interesting yet, though
> TBH I am not quite ready to spend a ton of time on docs yet as some of these things are changing on the fly.
I'd assume, what you do is based on some research, with articles and other projects like yours - these references are what's missing from your project, you don't have to write them yourself.
The most important missing explanation, that only you can provide, is this: Why a new language? There are projects that attach proof obligations to standard Rust in order to reuse its vast ecosystem and existing LLM skills. That would be a far easier and more productive approach to take.
For me part of the fun of such a side project is complete control. I’m willing to risk this over starting from something existing, which may be the wrong call!
If you want to have an LLM write your README (and other docs), I've found it useful to add a DOCS-GUIDE.md to your project and write your conventions and expectations there.
Google has a two-part technical writing crash course:
I've had good success with adding a directive to the guide that points to those two URLs and tells the agent to adhere to them in all of its documentation.
I considered waiting longer to share more but felt feedback early was better than waiting for more polish. Will focus on this with high priority though, good feedback
I think you might want to more deeply consider the impact it has on people when you ask them to read a bunch of LLM-generated code and documentation that you haven't even taken the time to "polish" yet. Some (myself included) might consider it a violation of an implicit social contract to expect such disproportionate effort from your audience than you are willing to spend yourself upfront.
Maybe, to put it another way: Why should people want to spend time developing feedback for you when you were not willing to spend commensurate time on the things you want to show them first? You're putting the cart before the horse.
I agree with you, if I were asking for a code review. I'm mostly interested in what people think of the language features. A code review in its current state is not interesting, but I believe the site has some ideas that can be food-for-thought
Ooo, this is exciting, I so rarely get to be the random dumbass crawling out of the woodwork to provide a statistically-unlikely counterexample to an otherwise sound point!
I've been really enjoying eating soybeans. Absurdly good source of protein (yes, even for a bean), dirt cheap, decent source of fiber and a bunch of minerals, and pretty easy to just drop in a pressure cooker and eat however you like once it comes out.
Can't say I eat a lot of field corn or hay though.
The way the singularity is often described reminds me of the arms buildup in preparation for a world war. When a war is coming, governments become convinced that the nation’s factories and natural resources need to be devoted to military production, instead of making things useful to civilians. During World War II, rationing was used to suppress civilian economies to devote more resources to the war effort.
The difference is that with a singularity, industrial capacity is supposed to get redirected via magic (nanotechnology), rather than because governments ordered it and spent money on it.
I do think AI companies are iterating faster by using AI to automate their own AI research. You could call that the beginning of recursive self-improvement. But does this result in magically growing an independent industrial base? I don’t really see it.
I think they’re going to build more data centers, and the electricity generation to power them, pretty much the same way as they do now, by convincing investors to spend money on them (selling stock and bonds), earning more revenue, and paying contractors to build them.
We are getting more and more resources devoted to building data centers, as well as more resources devoted to weapons buildups for wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf. These aren’t good trends! But they are happening via normal economic activity.
Presumably, those with the levers of power in their hands will willingly do as the super-intelligence says. Particularly when they start being outcompeted by other powerful people that do as the super-intelligence says, they either serve the super-intelligence or become irrelevant.
Obviously, some powerful people face little competition, and super-intelligence is still limited by available information, so some people will be able to resist.
I mean that, in theory, if you are a politician or CEO, and the AI has better ideas than you do, it would be stupid not to incorporate them, at least so far as they are compatible with your political brand. And similar down the chain to the staffers, lobbyists, etc.
One would expect that a super-intelligence would have great ideas given the available information, and would even be highly aligned with those leaders so long as the AI it told to keep the leader in power and expand their power.
Of course, some leaders won't want to consult the AI or won't follow the advice. If the AI is really super-intelligent, then we'd expect the politicians and leaders that do follow AI to eventually outcompete those that don't.
This all presumes that the super-intelligent AI is able to optimize for, e.g. political power and longevity, rather than "book smart" or "theoretically optimal".
This assumes that that there are excellent political suggestions that political advisors haven’t thought of already, and enough of them that an AI advisor would build up a history of usually being right in hindsight.
I’m not sure that’s possible. We often don’t know what the right move would have been, even in hindsight.
There are many examples in evolution of species that evolved to thrive in very specific environments who subsequently faced extinction when those conditions changed.
Current AI designs, which have evolved to thrive on cheap money funding a resource rich environment, will likely all die out in favor of something much more efficient as the cost of money continues to increase. Very likely that will happen in a catastrophic way once a certain tipping point has been reached.
> During World War II, rationing was used to suppress civilian economies
And price-rationing is suppressing consumer use of RAM right now. I'm very glad that the people who think that this isn't rationing, or who think that it's maximally enlightened rationing, aren't trying to allocate my food and aren't trying very hard (yet) to allocate my water and electricity.
Getting outbid isn't quite the same as rationing. AI firms need money to outbid you, which means they depend on investors buying what they're selling. Rationing is something a government can do by fiat, without spending money.
The problem with price-rationing is precisely those priorities determined by wealthy investors. If Nana is on a fixed income and electricity prices go up in the summer, then prices dictate that Nana must sweat so that Zucc can tokenmaxx. You are free to say that it isn't rationing, that markets completely sever the link of culpability between those who drive prices up and those who are priced out, but everyone else is free to be unimpressed by such word games and stretched arguments.
Making a quick prototype is probably the best way to find out if an idea is worth keeping. Vibe-coding it and then throwing it away seems like a good way to go?
Yeah, definitely. Also at times I've vibecoded successive iterations with better designs after seeing where the first ones collapsed -- the agents do a good job with a template and need much less prompting for the successive versions.
It depends on your assumptions. When Google is in "space crunch" mode, there are opportunity costs. Otherwise, there aren't, because you could do both.
You could also look at the opportunity cost of not letting Deepmind do quite as much research. How much is additional research worth on the margin? There will be diminishing returns.
reply