Recent

• Tilting at Windmills VI

  A pre-registered Gohr-style distinguisher pointed at the carry wall: the network beats the hand-built score where signal exists, and finds nothing one round deeper.

  cryptography·11 June 2026

• Tilting at Windmills V

  Carry depth as the structural measure of mining hardness: SHA-256d puts 386 adder layers between the header and the output, and the strongest local advantage we can measure falls off a cliff within a single round.

  cryptography, paper·8 June 2026

• Tilting at Windmills IV

  Six pre-registered feature families and 810 stem buckets, all null: the remaining attack surfaces on SHA-256d mining, enumerated and closed, leaving brute force unbeatable short of a SHA-256 break.

  cryptography·30 May 2026

• Tilting at Windmills III

  A hand-computed carry score selects nonces 67% better than random at any depth inside one SHA-256 block, a closed form predicts it to half a percentage point, and the second hash pays nothing for any of it.

  cryptography·24 May 2026

• Unfold your Agents

  Most agents should be views. The orchestration problem was solved before most of us were born.

  machine-learning·28 Feb 2026

• Preachers at the beach

  A beach allegory for AI summer, and the preachers who showed up.

  fiction·24 June 2025

• Tilting at Windmills II

  A Decision Transformer, three loss functions, a SAT solver, a game tree, an arbitrary-precision probe, and a brute-force oracle, pointed at nonce prediction in turn. The hash holds; the question improves.

  cryptography·31 Jan 2025

• Keycarver

  I had a junk drawer of old USB drives and a suspicion that some lost Bitcoin keys were still on them. The keys were there. The wallets were empty.

  cryptography·8 Jan 2025

• Earnest

  A baby name ranker for people who find 400,000 options exhausting.

  machine-learning·8 Nov 2024

• The Literal Listener

  A pragmatic speaker, in Chris Potts' sense, reasons about a literal listener. Train one, and it will learn what the listener likes. That's not the same thing as learning what the listener knows.

  machine-learning, paper·8 Apr 2022

• Tilting at Windmills I

  REINFORCE applied to nonce prediction, and why SHA-256's avalanche effect makes the expected gradient exactly zero.

  cryptography·1 Jan 2022

• Ultimately the Survivors Do Not Prevail

  Training multi-agent reinforcement learning in a zombie game taught us something that wasn't really about zombies: the environment is a more powerful programming language than the reward function.

  machine-learning, paper·20 Dec 2020