arXiv subjects

Amadeus Brandes

Publications and source records attributed to Amadeus Brandes.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Substitution Escrow Threshold: When "Compatible With" Becomes Safe Enough to Buy

Enterprise infrastructure buyers routinely evaluate compatibility claims--"S3-compatible," "PostgreSQL-compatible," "OpenAI compatible"--as proxies for future substitution options. Yet most compatibility claims do not escrow the substitution path they imply. This paper introduces the Substitution Escrow Threshold, a five-condition framework that determines when a compatibility claim genuinely reduces institutional risk versus merely reducing first-integration cost. The five conditions--boundary closure, executable conformance, custody independence, state and operations reversibility, and extension quarantine--are applied to five infrastructure cases (OCI, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, S3, PostgreSQL) that populate five distinct outcome cells. The framework produces actionable diagnostics for enterprise architects, platform engineers, procurement teams, and investors evaluating compatibility-dependent infrastructure decisions, and identifies AI infrastructure as the framework's most urgent next application.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

The Custody Envelope Threshold: Authority-Scaled Admission of External Artifacts in Institutional Infrastructure

Modern infrastructure depends on externally maintained artifacts such as package-registry dependencies, CI/CD actions, container images, Terraform providers and modules, developer extensions, model artifacts, and AI tool servers. These artifacts are easy to fetch but difficult for institutions to admit, govern, and revoke. This paper proposes the Custody Envelope Threshold, an authority-scaled model of artifact admission. It argues that direct institutional admission is defensible only when object identity, ingress path, and revocation capacity are sufficiently closed relative to the execution authority delegated to the artifact. When this threshold is not met, institutions tend to proxy, policy-mediate, vendor-mediate, internalize, quarantine, or reject the artifact. The framework is operationalized as a four-condition ordinal instrument and connected to reference-monitor reasoning, least privilege, and transaction cost economics. It is applied to package dependencies, GitHub Actions, container images, Terraform providers and modules, developer extensions, and open model artifacts, with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers treated as held-out evidence. The paper also specifies a validation design, deterministic prediction function, and OSF replication package for testing whether high-scrutiny institutions converge toward stronger custody closure for high-authority artifacts.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

The Preservation Tradeoff: A Thermodynamic Bound in the Diminishing-Returns Regime

Thermodynamic systems that preserve information against thermal fluctuations face a tradeoff distinct from transmission (Shannon) or erasure (Landauer). We formalize the preservation problem by defining the preservation stiffness $S_\kappa$, a response function analogous to magnetic susceptibility, and derive the Stiffness-Odds Identity: at optimal allocation, the stiffness equals the ratio of payload to maintenance capacity. This identity is the paper's central contribution. It reduces optimal preservation to a single measurable response variable and provides a substrate-agnostic diagnostic for thermodynamic efficiency -- applicable wherever maintenance competes with payload, regardless of whether the underlying substrate is biochemical, electronic, or algorithmic. For all systems in the diminishing-returns regime, we prove the unconditional bound $\kappa^* < 0.50$. For the subclass exhibiting smooth saturation with rate parameter $a \in [2,3]$ -- an empirically characterized efficiency frontier, not a universal constant -- the optimum is further constrained to the 30-50% band. We motivate this functional form from two independent physical principles: Shannon error exponents and thermodynamic dissipation bounds. We then illustrate consistency with representative operating points from kinetic proofreading in E. coli and protocol overhead in TCP/IP networks, and specify conditions under which the framework is falsifiable.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗