- you don't get any/sufficient recognition for your contributions. The closest they have to upvotes and reputation is the incredibly obscure "thank" feature which is only visible to the receiver itself: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Notifications/Thanks
- deletionism is a tremendous problem on Wikipedia, for two main causes:The stuff you wrote can be deleted anytime by some random admin/opposing editor, examples at: Section "Deletionism on Wikipedia".
- tutorial-like subjectivity
- notability
This also possibly leads to Edit wars in the case of sub-page content (full page deletion is more clearly arbitrated). - Scope too limited, and politics defined. Everything has to sound encyclopedic and be notable enough. This basically excludes completely good tutorials.
- Insane impossible to use markup language-base talk pages instead of issue trackers?! Ridiculous!!! That change alone could make Wikipedia so much more amazing. Wikipedia could become a Stack Exchange killer by doing that alone + some basic reputation system. Some work on that is being done at: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DiscussionTools, already in Beta as of 2022.
- Edit wars
- HyperCard: we are kind of a "multiuser" version of HyperCard, trying to tie up cards made by different users. It is worth noting that HyperCard was one of the inspirations for WikiWikiWeb, which then inspired Wikipedia
- Semantic Web
- NLab
- physicstravelguide.com/ Nice manifesto: physicstravelguide.com/about by Jakob Schwichtenberg.
- OpenStax
- www.ft.com/content/5515ec3e-0040-4d90-85a9-df19d6e3ebd2 (archive) Twilio’s Jeff Lawson: an evangelist for software developersYou can never be first. But you can have the correct business model. That company's website must have gone into IP Purgatory, and could never be released as an open source website.As a student at the University of Michigan, he started a company that made lecture notes available free online, drawing a large audience of Midwestern college students and, soon enough, advertisers. At the height of the dotcom bubble, he dropped out of college, raised $10m from the venture firm Venrock and moved the company to Silicon Valley.His start-up drew interest from an acquirer that was planning to go public early in 2000. They closed the acquisition but missed their IPO window as the market plunged, and by August the company had filed for bankruptcy. Stock that Lawson and investors in his start-up received from the sale became worthless.The website was called stubhub.com/, as of 2021 the domain had been sold to an unrelated website.He might actually be interested in donating to OurBigBook.com if it move forward now that he's a billionaire.
- Knol: basically the exact same thing by Google but 14 years earlier and declared a failure. Quite ominous:
Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.
- leanpub: similar goals, markdown-based, but the usual "you own your book copyright and you are trying to sell your book" approach
- nature Scitable
OK, just going random now:
The Kibble balance is so precise and reproducible that it was responsible for the 2019 redefinition of the Kilogram.
It relies rely on not one, but three macroscopic quantum mechanical effects:How cool is that! As usual, the advantage of those effects is that they are discrete, and have very fixed values that don't depend either:One downside of using some quantum mechanical effects is that you have to cool everything down to 5K. But that's OK, we've got liquid helium!
- atomic spectra: basis for the caesium standard which produces precise time and frequency
- Josephson effect: basis for the Josephson voltage standard, which produces precise voltage
- quantum Hall effect: basis for the quantum Hall effect, which produces precise electrical resistance
- on the physical dimensions of any apparatus (otherwise fabrication precision would be an issue)
- small variations of temperature, magnetic field and so on
The operating principle is something along:Then, based on all this, you can determine how much the object weights.
- generate a precise frequency with a signal generator, ultimately calibrated by the Caesium standard
- use that precise frequency to generate a precise voltage with a Josephson voltage standard
- convert that precise voltage into a precise electric current by using the quantum Hall effect, which produces a very precise electrical resistance
- use that precise current to generate a precise force on the object your weighing, pushing it against gravity
- then you precisely measure both:
- local gravity with a gravimeter
- the displacement acceleration of the object with a laser setup
How We're Redefining the kg by Veritasium
. Source. The Kibble Balance, realizing the Kilogram from fundamental constants of nature by Richard Green
. Source. Presented in 2022 for a CENAM seminar, the Mexican metrology institute. The speaker is from the Canadian metrology institute- youtu.be/ZfNygYuuVAE?t=854: they don't actually use the Quantum Hall effect device during operation, they only use it to calibrate other non-quantum resistors
The Watt balance and redefining the kilogram by National Physical Laboratory
. Source. Nothing much, but fun to hear Kibble talking about his balance in beautiful English before he passed.wormwideweb.org/
Browse freely moving whole-brain calcium imaging datasets
A network interface controller that does more than just the base OSI model protocols, notably in a programmable way.
- www.nextplatform.com/2022/05/11/intel-unrolls-dpu-roadmap-with-a-two-year-cadence/
- www.trentonsystems.com/blog/what-is-a-smartnic
- blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/10/29/what-is-a-smartnic/ "Some are using FPGAs which promise flexibility"
- www.servethehome.com/intel-ipu-exotic-answer-to-industry-dpu/ "Intel IPU is an Exotic Answer to the Industry DPU"
- 2022 www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/amd-to-buy-smartnic-firm-pensando-for-19-billion/ "AMD to buy SmartNIC firm Pensando for $1.9 billion"
- www.theregister.com/2022/06/14/alibaba_dpu_cloud/ mentions that Alibaba Cloud created their own.
Hyperscalers Lead The Way To The Future With SmartNICs by The Next Platform (2019)
Source. - youtu.be/kwroXmFJJf0?t=599 financial industry is one of the users, notably high-frequency trading
Associated article: www.nextplatform.com/2019/10/31/hypercalers-lead-the-way-to-the-future-with-smartnics/ mentions that:
Google is widely believed to be working on its own design.
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