The first diodes. These were apparently incredibly unreliable, especially for portable radios, as you had to randomly search for the best contact point you could find in a random polycrystalline material!!
And also quality was highly dependant on where the material was sourced from as that affected the impurities present in the material. Later this was understood to be an issue of doping.
It was so unreliable that vacuum tube diodes overtook them in many applications, even though crystal detectors are actually semiconductor diodes, which eventually won over!
For a long time, before artificial semiconductors kicked in, people just didn't know the underlying physical working principle of these detectors. What I cannot create, I do not understand basically.
TODO WTF is this? How is it built? What is special about it?
Mentioned a lot in the context of superconducting quantum computers, e.g. youtu.be/t5nxusm_Umk?t=268 from Video "Quantum Computing with Superconducting Qubits by Alexandre Blais (2012)",
Session reports of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences at Berlin by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16Publications by the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
Links to their publications: de.wikisource.org/wiki/Sitzungsberichte_der_K%C3%B6niglich_Preu%C3%9Fischen_Akademie_der_Wissenschaften_zu_Berlin
Notable papers:
Founded by Satoshi Nakamoto, making it the earliest and one of the most important Bitcoin communities. TODO official in any way? Who founded it?
Some notable appearances:
- in 2010, it is where Laszlo's pizzas offer was announced
- it was used e.g. on the Mt. Gox investigation: youtu.be/tJ-TsrK6SuY?t=2018
- Jimmy Zhong's investigation: youtu.be/pxvd1YOMGxU?t=1004
Billy Mitchell comes strongly to mind!They even look similarly fraudulent.
These are commands that e.g. the Bitcoin CLI client can make to the server.
The commands can be listed with:and full help with:
bitcoin-core.cli helpbitcoin-core.cli help getrawtransactionFor example. to run the Bitcoin and then on another shell:
getrawtransaction command, first in one shell we start bitcoind:bitcoin-core.daemonbitcoin-core.cli getrawtransaction 75b431e0a8c4617ca8adefe593ba66aa30907742b6dc8772761bfe7edabd74b4 true
Pinned article: 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!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. 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/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - 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 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. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
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