Research

tl;dr If you’re invested in URA because of Uranium, consider diversifying that position into other ETFs or fully moving it over to NUKZ to broaden your nuclear exposure. This is not financial advice. Special thanks to ChatGPT, Google, Reddit and Claude for helping me research, prepare, write and edit this post. Last May I wrote about why I’m allocating a large portion of my portfolio to Uranium with a bullish perspective on the nuclear sector at large. ...

tl;dr Next time you read, see, hear, give, get, ideate or invent a mantra, just remember that “every mantra has a counter-mantra, including this one.” Tweet Sized Advice The Startup Seesaw Tools vs Solutions For every Mantra, there is an equal and opposite Counter-Mantra Concluding Thoughts Appendix Tweet Sized Advice For the better part of a decade now, I feel like at least once a week I’m either on the giving or receiving end of “tweet-sized *advice” *that’s intended to solve large, complex problems. ...

tl;dr Stream-of-Thought Note Taking is an opinionated approach to brain-dumping thoughts on paper to aid the process of clarifying your own ideas. Table of Contents The Power of Deletion Tools for Modeling Thoughts Can you get to the point? Stream-of-Thought Note Taking Extending to Chain-of-Thought & LLMs The Power of Deletion One of my favourite Yuval Noah Harari quotes from his interview with Lex Fridman is on the power of the delete button: ...

I’m going to share a small secret: a perfect solution to software documentation does not exist. It’s hard to generalize what “good documentation” entails. It depends on the team, the product, the timing, and a million other things. Have you found PMF or are you iterating? Are you a small tight-knit team or are you scaling? Is your team remote, in-office or hybrid? Is open source and external collaboration a key component of your value proposition? I’ll stop here before it gets boring… ...

tl;dr People come for the long-term vision but stay for the short-term gains. Success is measured only by how good your NGU algorithm is: Number Go Up. A vaporware product with good marketing can go the distance until it memes into existence. There is a lot of cynicism and politics behind open doors. Intelligent and authentic leaders are critical in upkeeping community optimism. It’s still early. Table of Contents The Vent The Ugly The Fuel The Bad The Analogy The Liquidity The Good The Reasons I’m Still Around ...

Inspired by Simon Willison’s How I make annotated Presentations, I figured I’d annotate a presentation I did at ethcc.io in July 2024. He says it best: Even with that quality of presentation, I don’t think a video on its own is enough. My most recent talk was 40 minutes long—I’d love people to watch it, but I myself watch very few 40m long YouTube videos each year I might also create a Twitter thread similar to what @_tessr did for her talk on optimism if anyone requests it. ...

This is part of a series called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r). I summarize 5 key concepts that would have helped me learn, relearn, or refresh my knowledge of a topic or paper. Today, I’m reviewing a paper I contributed to myself so I added a personal forward :) The real value prop of a permissionless inference network 1 Reference 5 Points Point 1: POKT Network ...

tl;dr Artificial Intelligence (AI) computing requires substantial energy, increasing the urgency for sustainable, scalable, and modular energy solutions. Major tech companies are actively adopting and investing in new ways to tap into nuclear power sources. The spot price for Uranium doubled over the past year due to a supply-demand imbalance, as current uranium supplies struggle to meet the demand from nuclear reactors. I argue that the current market presents a good entry point for diversifying into the uranium sector. Macroeconomic tailwinds could suggest a strong outperformance over the next decade at the cost of short-term volatility. I outline my thought process for choosing as a vehicle to do so. ...

This is a post in a series of articles I’m writing called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r), where I summarize a list of 5 concepts that would have helped me start learning or re-learning a certain topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. Edit: Thank you to Kautuk (founder of Stackr ) for reviewing this post. Micro-rollups (MRUs) are the answer to “a blockchain is too slow and expensive” for my use case, but “I still want some eventual Web3 security guarantees” in progressively porting a Web2 app to Web3. ...

Special thanks to Gabi, Mike, Art, Adz & ChatGPT for the discussion and feedback. tl;dr Self-hosting is not a long-term solution since users just want to pay for whatever is cheaper, faster and easier to use. Infrastructure companies in both AI and Web3 are in a race to the bottom in a commodity market. Excelling as both a hardware operator and gateway company is increasingly untenable in open-core ecosystems. Table of Contents Introduction Web3 vs AI Gateway ...

Whenever I get really excited about something, I tend to tell all my friends about it. This could range from a book or movie to an activity or something I bought. I can find a good handful of people who can attest that sometimes it gets excessive. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been slowly turning olshansky.info into the one place to find and search through my resources, but there is still a lot of work ahead, and I expect it to be a lifelong endeavour. ...

This is a cross-post of the original article posted here and announced here a couple of weeks ago. Some of the tables and diagrams that are presented as screenshots can be viewed in more detail in the markdown GitHub gist here. tl;dr The Pocket Network core protocol team has decided to implement the first version of the next iteration of the protocol (Shannon Upgrade) as a “micro-rollup” using Rollkit with Celestia as a Data Availability (DA) layer. ...

I recently had the fortune of stumbling upon a transcript from a 1986 seminar by Richard Hamming at the Bell Communications Research Colloquium titled “You and Your Research.” If you’re ever looking for inspiration, this is it. A key point Hamming emphasizes is that when reading, it’s not the quantity but the quality that matters: “you read, it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts.” To showcase active reading, you can find my Proof of Active Reading here or at ipfs://bafybeifoz5tkbdd2v5bzxfuyvokuchnpoqthl63gwcuoadmmz3c7t5kfve. ...

GPT4 Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in recent years, thanks in part to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, the success of these models depends not only on the quantity of human labels but also on their quality. This blog post discusses the importance of high-quality labels in LLMs and proposes a blockchain-based solution to incentivize better labelling. tl;dr Data Quality » Data Quantity for fine-tuning a foundation model. ...

*This is a fun open idea for Ethereum’s KZG Ceremony: using your Apple Watch’s ECG as a source of entropy to participate in Ethereum’s KZG ceremony. I got a response when I first proposed it to the Ethereum foundation in December. Still, it does have some open-ended problems and requires a non-trivial amount of implementation effort. If you find it interesting and have the time to implement it, I’d love to see it come to fruition! * ...

This post was rejected by Seeking Alpha Editors so am sharing it here instead. Summary Disney’s strong brand can be trusted in uncertain macro-economic times COVID and Iger’s leave of absence was a transient hurdle Disney has hopped over Disney Plus keeps growing, and Disney Parks are returning Bob Iger is coming back to a strong & supportive team Disney shares are at a long-term low with relatively solid financials ...

Special thanks to Arthur Sabintsev for the feedback and review of this post. Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. - Bill Gates You have to live it to understand it, and this statement can only come from experience. The one thing Bill forgot to mention is how much will change in the span of 12 months within each of those 10 years. ...

This is a post in a series of articles I’m writing called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r), where I summarize a list of 5 concepts that would have helped me start learning or re-learning a certain topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. Edit: Thank you to Aaron (one of the JMT authors) for reviewing this post. An Addressable Merkle Tree (AMT) is a cryptographically authenticated deterministic data structure backed by a key-value store database used for account-based (non-UTXO-based) systems to map keys (i.e. addresses) to arbitrary binary data in each leaf node. ...

This is a post in a series of articles I’m writing called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r), where I summarize a list of 5 concepts that would have helped me start learning or re-learning a certain topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. Celestia decouples transaction consensus and execution by splitting the responsibilities between Celestia (i.e. the core network) and other blockchains (i.e. clients/applications) built on top of it like so: • Celestia: transaction ordering & availability • Client: transaction validation & execution ...

Tl;dr I’m incredibly excited to announce that I’m now leading Pocket’s V1 Protocol R&D team! This post gives a glimpse into the exhilarating 🎢 during my first six months at Pocket and the community behind this 🚀 shaping the future of Web3. A bit of background A little over six months ago, I published about my life-changing trip to Mexico on the Day of the Dead, which is basically half a decade in crypto years. Since then, the only constant in my life has been change, and I’m fortunate enough that almost all of it, though not always easy, still gets me excited and motivated to get out of bed every morning. ...

Tl;dr I am incredibly excited to announce that I’m joining pokt.network today as a full-time Protocol Specialist! This post documents my realization of how I want to devote my time to shape and build out the future of Web3. A bit of background Without diving into my life-long story, I spent most of my adolescence growing up in Toronto. I love the city and where it’s headed, but I’ll save that discussion for another post. ...

I remember thinking I had the foundation to tackle any problem that came my way around the time that I was graduating from College. Having studied a lot of theory in school, I believed that anything could be done by applying the concepts I had learned. With every year that goes by in the workforce, the number of things I find to learn and get better at far outpaces those I actually get to. This makes me both excited and scared of how I’ll feel in another 10 years. ...