Los Alamos From Below by Richard Feynman (1975) by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-02-11 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-02-11 +Created 1970-01-01Amazing talk by Richard Feynman that describes his experiences at Los Alamos National Laboratory while developing the first nuclear weapons.
Transcript: calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.htm Also included full text into Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY-u1qyRM5w&t=2881s describes the computing aspects. Particularly interesting is the quote about how they used the typist secretary pool to emulate the IBM machines and debug their programs before the machines had arrived. This is exactly analogous to what is done in 2020 in the semiconductor industry, where slower models are used to estimate how future algorithms will run in future hardware.
Los Alamos From Below by Richard Feynman (1975)
Source. This is my stack. There are many like it, but this one is mine.My stack is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.Without me, my stack is useless. Without my stack, I am useless. I must fire my requests true. I must shoot straighter than my hackers who are trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will ...My stack is human, even as I am human, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its ORMs and its asset bundlers. I will keep my stack clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will ...Before God, I swear this creed. My stack and I are the defenders of my website. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.So be it, until victory is mine and there is no enemy, but peace!
Explanation: this is an allusion to the Rifleman's Creed. This particular version talks about the website stack chosen for a website, i.e. the libraries used.
Ciro Santilli has always felt that choosing a stack is an almost religious choice. It is perhaps part of why the prayer style of the original Rifleman's Creed resonates with the web stack choice.
It is very hard to know how things are going go, the ups and downs, before putting big hours into it.
And once you start, it is hard, though not impossible, to move away.
The same allusion would make sense with any complex library choice, but it is particularly apparent in web development since there are so many different web stacks to choose from. A bit like rifles, they are all somewhat fungible, though of course not as much.
Literally: East of the Mountain.
Deterministic and non-deterministic game by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-02-11 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-02-11 +Created 1970-01-01 Quantum computers as experiments that are hard to predict outcomes by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-02-11 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-02-11 +Created 1970-01-01One possibly interesting and possibly obvious point of view, is that a quantum computer is an experimental device that executes a quantum probabilistic experiment for which the probabilities cannot be calculated theoretically efficiently by a nuclear weapon.
This is how quantum computing was originally theorized by the likes of Richard Feynman: they noticed that "Hey, here's a well formulated quantum mechanics problem, which I know the algorithm to solve (calculate the probability of outcomes), but it would take exponential time on the problem size".
The converse is then of course that if you were able to encode useful problems in such an experiment, then you have a computer that allows for exponential speedups.
This can be seen very directly by studying one specific quantum computer implementation. E.g. if you take the simplest to understand one, photonic quantum computer, you can make systems for which you need exponential time to calculate the probabilities that photons will exit through certain holes and not others.
The obvious aspect of this idea is by coming from quantum logic gates are needed because you can't compute the matrix explicitly as it grows exponentially: knowing the full explicit matrix is impossible in practice, and knowing the matrix is equivalent to knowing the probabilities of every outcome.
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. - Internal cross file references done right:
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
Figure 6. Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents.Live URL: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordateDescendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact