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The 1890 US Census and the history of punchcard computing by Stand-up Maths (2020)
Source. It was basically a counting machine! Shows a reconstruction at the Computer History Museum.DRAM is often shortened to just random-access memory.
You can't just shred individual sSD files because SSD writes only at large granularities, so hardware/drivers have to copy stuff around all the time to compact it. This means that leftover copies are left around everywhere.
What you can do however is to erase the entire thing with vendor support, which most hardware has support for. On hardware encrypted disks, you can even just erase the keys:
TODO does shredding the
PDF table of contents feature requests: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1459844683925008385
Way, way before instant messaging, there was... teletype!
Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal by CuriousMarc (2020)
Source. lspci is the name of several versions of CLI tools used in UNIX-like systems to query information about PCI devices in the system.On Ubuntu 23.10, it is provided by the pciutils package, which is so dominant that when we say "lspci" without qualitication, that's what we mean.
Is fog computing more efficient than cloud computing? by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01Advantages of fog: there is only one, reusing hardware that would be otherwise idle.
Disadvantages:
- in cloud, you can put your datacenter on the location with the cheapest possible power. On fog you can't.
- on fog there is some waste due to network communication.
- you will likely optimize code less well because you might be targeting a wide array of different types of hardware, so more power (and time) wastage. Furthermore, some of the hardware used will not not be optimal for the task, e.g. CPU instead of GPU.
All of this makes Ciro Santilli doubtful if it wouldn't be more efficient for volunteers simply to donate money rather than inefficient power usage.
Bibliography:
- greenfoldingathome.com/2018/05/28/is-foldinghome-a-waste-of-electricity/: useless article, does not compare to centralize, asks if folding the proteins is worth the power usage...
Let's get SSH access, instal a package, and run a server.
As of December 2023 on a
t2.micro instance, the only one part of free tier at the time with advertised 1 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM, 8 GiB disk for the first 12 months, on Ubuntu 22.04:$ free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 949Mi 149Mi 210Mi 0.0Ki 590Mi 641Mi
Swap: 0B 0B 0B
$ nproc
1
$ df -h /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 7.6G 1.8G 5.8G 24% /To install software:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install cowsay
cowsay asdfOnce HTTP inbound traffic is enabled on security rules for port 80, you can:and then you are able to
while true; do printf "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n\r\n`date`: hello from AWS" | sudo nc -Nl 80; donecurl from your local computer and get the response. AWS Deep Learning Base GPU AMI (Ubuntu 20.04) by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01These come with pre-installed drivers, so e.g. nvidia-smi just works on them out of the box, tested on g5.xlarge which has an Nvidia A10G GPU. Good choice as a starting point for deep learning experiments.
If the resource is replaceable, like fossil fuels, the free market will invest appropriately in alternatives as and when needed. As for irreplaceable resources, it would be a very rare situation for there to only exist a few sources of it globally, controlled by a few entities, and for them to all stop competing and fix prices. This would be a global crisis requiring international action and co-operation for diplomacy, sanctions, and acquiring new sources/technologies. Clearly not a usual scenario that can be used to dismiss libertarianism.
For a stable society, people need assurance that they will not be spied on, so we must slightly extend the concept of private property to include personal space. Otherwise, someone repeatedly coming within a centimeter of you and using the "I'm not touching you" kindergarten taunt would be totally allowed. The extent of this personal space is context dependent, and could be the toilet, changing room, bedroom, underneath a skirt, etc. If someone's personal space is in overlap with your private property, you cannot immediately violate said space, but can ask them to leave, and take measures to remove them only if they don't comply within a reasonable timeframe.
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