Thanos Vassilakis
Distinguished Engineer, Managing Director, Head of AI and Architecture for Finance IT
Ideas, tests, and code fragments.
Thanos Vassilakis is a Distinguished Engineer and Managing Director at RBC Capital Markets, where he leads AI and architecture for Finance IT. He has spent decades building trading, risk, and operations platforms, ships open-source libraries, and writes about systems, data sketches, cryptography, and drones.
GitHub · crates.io · hex.pm · PyPI · zigistry
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Latest articles 10 of 47
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Which Model Would You Choose for Apple Silicon?
Aug 23, 2026
If you are building an inference engine for Apple’s M-series, start small and conventional. Qwen3-8B in 4-bit is the optimization target; Llama is the bootstrap.
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FlyBy: A Simulator Before the Hardware
Aug 22, 2026
Part 1: why FlyBy ships a first-class simulator, how VirtualNic and virtual time work, and how to run the constant_rate baseline at 100 kpps without privileged networking.
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FlyBy: Deterministic Fault Injection
Aug 22, 2026
Part 2: LCG-seeded packet drops in FlyBy’s packet_loss scenario—5% drop at 10 kpps for 10 virtual seconds, with counters you can assert in CI.
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FlyBy: Protocol-Aware Traffic Generators
Aug 22, 2026
Part 3: FlyBy’s protocol_quotes scenario fills 34-byte binary market quotes (AAPL) through VirtualNic so decoders see structured payloads, not random pads.
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FlyBy: Replaying Classic Pcap Captures
Aug 22, 2026
Part 4: replay FlyBy’s udp_quotes.pcap through the simulator—20 UDP binary quotes, full-speed or original timing, classic pcap only.
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Data Sketches Beyond the One Billion Row Challenge
Aug 15, 2026
A small, mergeable approximation is more valuable than an exact answer whose state is expensive to retain, move, or combine. The original 1BRC min/mean/max result does not need a sketch.
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Coding an LLM gateway: the Darial journey
Aug 14, 2026
This is a walk through how Darial 0.1 was designed and built: the problem that forced the shape, the decisions we recorded as ADRs, the libraries we actually shipped, and the trade-offs we accepted.
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Sketching One Billion Temperature Rows in Elixir
Aug 10, 2026
Exact aggregates where they fit; probabilistic sketches where a billion values do not. Stream 1BRC-shaped weather data with ex_data_sketch—KLL, HLL, and FrequentItems—without loading a 12 GB file.
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Why OTP is a natural model for drone swarms
Jul 31, 2026
Part 2 of Programming Drones with OTP: thin swarm coordinators, Registry vs membership, fail-fast fan-out, formations as planners, local safety, Good/Bad Advisor, and where Nerves fits as a companion—not an autopilot.
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One Binary, Many Front Doors
Jul 30, 2026
Treat GitHub Release binaries as the source of truth, then wrap them for Homebrew, Scoop, mise/asdf, pip, npm, Mix, and CI—the Ruff/esbuild pattern for tools like Oratos.
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From Transactions to Behaviour: MEV Detection with Datalog
Jul 29, 2026
A sandwich attack is three successful swaps. The blockchain never names it. Datalog can — with rules you can test, replay, and explain.
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The Classic UI Is Dead. Long Live the AIUI?
Jul 29, 2026
I’ve spent decades building UIs. AI is about to evaporate them.
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Building a BEAM-native drone controller: processes, UDP, safety, and simulation
Jul 20, 2026
Part 1 of Programming Drones with OTP: why one GenServer per vehicle, how Tello UDP fits the mailbox, how a pure safety pipeline protects flight, and why the simulator is the real development surface.
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Data Sketches: A Field Guide
Jul 20, 2026
The essential algorithms for reasoning about massive data streams
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Using ExDatalog: A dozen examples
May 1, 2026
A dozen examples including RBAC & authorization, BOM tracking, relationship based recommendations, static security analysis, fraud ring detection
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Are there on-prem alternatives to Sentry?
Apr 20, 2026
A quick look at logging aggregation alternative
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Polymarket and the Global Prediction Market Ecosystem
Apr 14, 2026
The Evolution of Information Finance: A Comprehensive Technical and Comparative Analysis of Polymarket and the Global Prediction Market Ecosystem*
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Liquidity Tree
Apr 14, 2026
A Liquidity Tree is not a single standardized textbook structure—it’s a conceptual model used in trading systems, market microstructure, and smart order routing.
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Rikiddo Scoring Rule
Apr 14, 2026
The Rikiddo scoring rule** is a **specialized automated market maker (AMM) mechanism for prediction markets, designed to improve on classic models like LMSR.
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Virtual AMM (vAMM)
Apr 14, 2026
A Virtual Automated Market Maker (vAMM) is a pricing mechanism used primarily in perpetual futures protocols
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Part 1: Why Post-Quantum Multi-Recipient Encryption?
Dec 10, 2025
Why encrypt-once / decrypt-many needs post-quantum crypto: HNDL risk and the tholos-pq motivation. This is part 1 of a 3-part series on tholos-pq, a Rust crate for encrypting one message to many recipients with NIST post-quantum cryptography.
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Part 2: Inside tholos-pq — Wire Format and Algorithm Suite
Dec 10, 2025
This is part 2 of a 3-part series on tholos-pq suite and wire format: ML-KEM-1024, XChaCha20-Poly1305, ML-DSA-65, CBOR envelopes.
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Part 3: Hardening a Crypto Crate in Public
Dec 10, 2025
This is part 3 of a 3-part series on tholos-pq. What public review broke in tholos-pq packaging — malleability, deps, docs — and what still isn’t promised.
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Noise_IK vs Noise_XX
Nov 18, 2025
Article 18: A Detailed Comparison of Two Interactive Handshake Patterns in the Noise Protocol Framework
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Explanating Noise_NN Pattern
Nov 17, 2025
Article 17: The Noise_NN pattern is the simplest interactive handshake in the Noise Protocol Framework. It stands for 'No static keys, No pre-shared knowledge.'
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Noise_IK vs Noise_XK Comparison
Nov 16, 2025
Article 16: Noise_IK vs Noise_XK: A Detailed Comparison of Two Key Handshake Patterns in the Noise Protocol Framework
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Noise_IK Handshake Details
Nov 15, 2025
Article 15: The Cryptographic Pattern Often Used in Secure VPNs and Related to Mining Security Layers
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What is WireGuard Mining Security
Oct 14, 2025
Article 14: WireGuard is a fast, modern VPN protocol that many miners use as an additional security and privacy layer around their mining setups.
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Noise Protocol Details
Sep 13, 2025
Article 13: The Noise Protocol Framework is the core cryptographic engine that secures nearly all modern Stratum V2 connections.
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Stratum Protocol V2: The Modern Standard for Miner-Pool Communication
Jul 11, 2025
The Stratum Protocol V2 (often abbreviated as Stratum V2 or SV2) is the current industry-standard communication protocol that connects individual mining hardware to mining pools.
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Block Template Construction: How Miners Build the Candidate Blocks They Actually Hash
Jun 10, 2025
A detailed look at the Block template construction process by which a miner (or its pool) assembles all the pieces needed before the nonce hunt can begin.
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Job Negotiation Mechanics: Giving Miners Real Control Over Block Construction
May 9, 2025
A look into Job Negotiation is one of the most powerful and forward-looking features introduced with Stratum V2.
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Stablecoins: What & Why?
Apr 26, 2025
Stablecoins: What They Are, Why They Exist, Their History, How They Work, and Their Future
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Compact Block Relay Details: How Blocks Travel Efficiently Across the Global Network
Apr 8, 2025
Compact Block Relay, defined in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 152 (BIP 152) and widely adopted by all major PoW chains, is the single most important optimization that makes block propagation fast, bandwidth-efficient, and resilient.
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Block Propagation Mechanics: How a Newly Mined Block Spreads Across the Global Network
Mar 7, 2025
Article 7: The Cryptographic Mint in the Age of Geopolitical Crisis: An In-Depth Analysis of Mining Mechanics and Residential Profitability
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An Alien Dialectic: Smart-Contract Languages?
Feb 12, 2025
In finance, contracts are civilization's atomic unit of trust. For millennia, they have been static documents - a specialized dialectic crafted by lawyers, interpreted by humans, and enforced by slow, costly third parties like courts. Their power was never in the document itself, but in the convoluted, expensive, and fallible human systems required to uphold them.
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The Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm
Feb 6, 2025
Article 6: Describes the The difficulty adjustment algorithm that is the automatic feedback loop that keeps new blocks arriving at a steady, predictable rate no matter how much total mining power joins or leaves the network.
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The Merkle Tree
Jan 5, 2025
Article 5: Merkle Trees Explained
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The Global Cryptographic Lottery
Dec 4, 2024
The Nonce Hunt in Greater Depth: The Global Cryptographic Lottery
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How Miners Actually Operate
Nov 3, 2024
Article 3: Solo Mining, Mining Pools, and Merged Mining explained
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What Is Crypto Mining?
Oct 13, 2024
What is Crypto Mining? A Complete In-Depth Tutorial to Become a Crypto Mining Expert
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Proof of Work - Why Bother?
Oct 2, 2024
Article 2: We look at the core purpose of Proof of Work (PoW)
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What Is Crypto Mining?
Sep 1, 2024
Article 1: High-Level Overview of Crypto Mining
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My Second Super Computer
Dec 1, 2010
Speeding up Monte Carlo using AWS GPU Instances
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My First Super Computer
Oct 1, 2010
Speeding up Monte Carlo using GPU
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Couchdb Performance on a MacPro
Sep 28, 2010
See the differences in on the Mac Pro
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Couchdb Performance
Sep 13, 2010
Looking in patterns for inserting and querying Couchdb 2.0