Rorogwela by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Rorogwela by Afunakwa (1970)
Source. Later used as a vocal sample in the Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest (1992), which notably featured in Where the hell is Matt (2006), an early YouTube viral video. The original destroys the Deep Forest version however.
SmartNIC by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A network interface controller that does more than just the base OSI model protocols, notably in a programmable way.
Video 1.
Hyperscalers Lead The Way To The Future With SmartNICs by The Next Platform (2019)
Source.
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.
Integrated circuit by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-08-08
It is quite amazing to read through books such as The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997), as it makes you notice that earlier CPUs (all before the 70's) were not made with integrated circuits, but rather smaller pieces glued up on PCBs! E.g. the arithmetic logic unit was actually a discrete component at one point.
The reason for this can also be understood quite clearly by reading books such as Robert Noyce: The Man Behind the Microchip by Leslie Berlin (2006). The first integrated circuits were just too small for this. It was initially unimaginable that a CPU would fit in a single chip! Even just having a very small number of components on a chip was already revolutionary and enough to kick-start the industry. Just imagine how much money any level of integration saved in those early days for production, e.g. as opposed to manually soldering point-to-point constructions. Also the reliability, size an weight gains were amazing. In particular for military and spacial applications originally.
However, many, many, many terrible horrors come with it:
Quantum computing by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Quantum is getting hot in 2019, and even Ciro Santilli got a bit excited: quantum computing could be the next big thing.
No useful algorithm has been economically accelerated by quantum yet as of 2019, only useless ones, but the bets are on, big time.
To get a feeling of this, just have a look at the insane number of startups that are already developing quantum algorithms for hardware that doesn't/barely exists! quantumcomputingreport.com/players/privatestartup (archive). Some feared we might be in a bubble: Are we in a quantum computing bubble?
To get a basic idea of what programming a quantum computer looks like start by reading: Section "Quantum computing is just matrix multiplication".
Some people have their doubts, and that is not unreasonable, it might truly not work out. We could be on the verge of an AI winter of quantum computing. But Ciro Santilli feels that it is genuinely impossible to tell as of 2020 if something will work out or not. We really just have to try it out and see. There must have been skeptics before every single next big thing.
Turbo code by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
TODO how close does it get to Shannon's limit?
IonQ by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 2. Source. Co-founder of IonQ. Cool dude. Starts with basic background we already know now. Mentions that there is some relationship between atomic clocks and trapped ion quantum computers, which is interesting. Then he goes into turbo mode, and you get lost unless you're an expert! Video 1. "Quantum Simulation and Computation with Trapped Ions by Christopher Monroe (2021)" is perhaps a better watch.
What if Process 1 tries to access 0x00003000, which is not present?
The hardware notifies the software via a Page Fault Exception.
When an exception happens, the CPU jumps to an address that the OS had previously registered as the fault handler. This is usually done at boot time by the OS.
This could happen for example due to a programming error:
int *is = malloc(1);
is[2] = 1;
but there are cases where it is not a bug, for example in Linux when:
  • the program wants to increase its stack.
    It just tries to accesses a certain byte in a given possible range, and if the OS is happy it adds that page to the process address space, otherwise, it sends a signal to the process.
  • the page was swapped to disk.
    The OS will need to do some work behind the processes back to get the page back into RAM.
    The OS can discover that this is the case based on the contents of the rest of the page table entry, since if the present flag is clear, the other entries of the page table entry are completely left for the OS to to what it wants.
    On Linux for example, when present = 0:
    • if all the fields of the page table entry are 0, invalid address.
    • else, the page has been swapped to disk, and the actual values of those fields encode the position of the page on the disk.
In any case, the OS needs to know which address generated the Page Fault to be able to deal with the problem. This is why the nice IA32 developers set the value of cr2 to that address whenever a Page Fault occurs. The exception handler can then just look into cr2 to get the address.

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!
We have two killer features:
  1. 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-calculus
    Articles 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
  2. 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.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . 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.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant 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