David Rhodus @pipenetwork Latency remover. Electrician turned tokens-per-watt optimizer. Previously exited to AWS.
San Francisco, CA 🇺🇸
Joined February 2013
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In the end, AI will generate optimized machine code directly for a specific CPU architecture. No high-level language, no assembly just raw binary instructions, ready to execute.
Rust is a superb language and ecosystem, especially given it was invented pre agentic coding.
With agents, new languages will blossom, even purpose-built ones for specific usecases, and discretionary C or even LLVM IR, assembly…
AI is fluid. No more one-size-fits-all.
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Interesting. Pipe clients’ last-packet-out latency is 11–17 ms.
I can probably shave another 6–8 ms off on this old 32-core workstation.
Check --experimental-execution-arenas (stop page fault retard spam) … 30% better.
Well, Firedancer cooked too. Next month's release will replay a 200ms block in about 11ms. ⚡️ No long tails.
ALT Histogram showing replay of 10000 recent mainnet blocks. Firedancer v26.12 candidate vs Agave latest master, both development versions. Firedancer 2.5x faster.
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Yes. Early on we showed GPUs could do high-parallel integer multiplication at useful scale. The NVIDIA revenue side was skeptical it would ever matter commercially. Jensen backed the compute vision anyway the guy who thought it wouldn’t work didn’t stay.
One question is. Whether in business or politics, has Jensen done anything different than just a pure revenue-maxing CEO would?
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Idea for Solana: Prepaid Validator Admission Tickets (PVAT).
Let validators prepay VAT for future epochs at a discount. The SOL is burned upfront and never refunded. A longer commitment buys a lower rate, down to 0.1 SOL per epoch.
Illustrative schedule, not current policy, at about 1 epoch per day:
1 epoch: 0.80 SOL
7 epochs: 0.70 per epoch (4.9 SOL)
30 epochs: 0.50 per epoch (15 SOL)
90 epochs: 0.30 per epoch (27 SOL)
180 epochs: 0.20 per epoch (36 SOL)
365 epochs: 0.10 per epoch (36.5 SOL)
A full year drops from 292 SOL to 36.5 SOL.
Why do it? A flat 0.8 SOL treats a validator who's been running for years the same as one who joins for a day. Prepaying gives committed operators lower and predictable costs, and they can't miss a daily VAT payment. Small independent validators would need less delegated stake just to cover fixed protocol fees.
How it works: coverage is tied to the vote account and covers a fixed range of epochs. It can't be transferred and expires on schedule whether or not you're online. Stake ranking, BLS registration and the 2,000-validator cap all still apply. It's opt-in, so anyone can keep paying 0.8 SOL per epoch.
The honest tradeoff: prepaying proves financial commitment, not security. A year-long fake identity gets cheaper (36.5 SOL instead of 292), and annual VAT burn shrinks. Possible mitigations are a minimum self-stake, deeper discounts only for validators with a participation track record, and a one-year cap on prepayment.
Precedent: SIMD-0326 describes VAT as preserving historical voting costs and leaves room for adaptive pricing. Alpenglow moved voting off-chain, which removed the fees that justified 0.8 SOL in the first place.
This needs a consensus-level SIMD. It's not something a single validator client can ship.
A bigger question: should base VAT simply be repriced around what off-chain consensus actually costs, with a small extra discount for annual prepayment on top?
Feedback welcome. Happy to write up the SIMD.
Solana is a natural fit for the state machine renaissance + formal verification push.
On-chain programs already work as state machines: state lives in accounts, instructions are transitions. Proving invariants (solvency, access control, no double-mints) is high-value here.
The ecosystem is already moving: Certora’s Solana Prover, Lean 4 models of the SVM (qedsvm), Kani, and emerging AI-assisted tools for generating specs and proofs. Exactly the “law-driven development” direction where agents implement freely while math keeps the rules intact.
The state machine renaissance
There's a renaissance happening for state machines in software development.
A prompt circulating on X this week tells coding agents to find all the implicit state machines lurking in a codebase. It's like a magic spell that brings submerged structures to the surface.
Suddenly, scattered booleans, conditional branches, and ad hoc state transitions are revealed as parts of state machines.
Once you've identified them, you can model them explicitly, constrain their transitions and eliminate entire classes of bugs.
For JavaScript and web development, XState is an excellent tool for wrangling your state into a disciplined and diagrammable structure.
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A GPU is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)
I think the key things to watch going forward are
1. The arrival of the ASIC era
2. The arrival of the inference era
3. Who holds the competitive edge in memory, and more broadly, across the supply chain
I’ll put together an article on the bigger picture and share it soon, although I already have quite a backlog of articles to write…
Btw @BSPK_ Thanks for painting a clearer picture!!! 😍
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Gavin Newsom signs a new California law requiring ID to purchase creatine and protein powder, effective January 1, 2027.
Lord help those of us trapped in California. 🤦♂️
Creatine shrinks tumors, improves anti-cancer immunity in new study.
More evidence that creatine enhances the immune system's response and clearance of tumor cells.
Adding a normal ~3-5g human equivalent dose of creatine promoted energy production in dendritic cells (key immune cells).
This meant more optimal priming of the immune system to clear cancer cells.
Note: creatine's impact on cancer is dependent on the type, more on that below.
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Big step forward for U.S. capital markets: Formation Securities just notified the SEC of plans for the first tokenized securities venue on Solana
Success with willing issuers proves the model and opens the door for more companies to list, unlocking global access, lower costs, and modern infrastructure while keeping the shareholder relationship intact. The path starts with those who see the value
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Running TLA+ formal verification on the implemented SOL Is Money market feature to validate correctness, verify safety properties, and identify potential edge cases
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