Michio Kaku by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Well known popular science character. He just looks futuristic and wraps stuff in exciting empty words. When he shows up, you won't be learning much.
Microwave by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Micro means "small wavelength compared to radio waves", not micron-sized.
Microwave production and detection is incredibly important in many modern applications:
Microsoft Windows by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
A monopolistic operating system that only exists in the 2010's because of the IBM-linked historical lock-in and constant useless changes of the Microsoft Word document format to prevent cross operability.
It offers no technical advantages over free Linux distros in the late 2010's, and it is barely impossible to buy a non-Mac computer without paying for it, which should be illegal. European Union, time to use your regulatory powers.
The following anecdote illustrates Windows' pervasiveness. Ciro Santilli was once tutoring a high school student in Brazil, and decided to try and get her into programming. When the "Windows is not free" subject came up, the high school student was shocked: "I paid 100 dollars for this?". She never even knew it was there. To her, it was "just a computer".
Laws should really be passed forcing OEMs to allow you to not buy Microsoft Windows when buying a computer, European Union, why have you failed me in 2016??? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/ I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower Than Other Operating Systems. Here Is Why. by Marc Bevand (2013) has some interesting remarks:
There's also little incentive to create changes in the first place. On linux-kernel, if you improve the performance of directory traversal by a consistent 5%, you're praised and thanked. Here, if you do that and you're not on the object manager team, then even if you do get your code past the Ob owners and into the tree, your own management doesn't care. Yes, making a massive improvement will get you noticed by senior people and could be a boon for your career, but the improvement has to be very large to attract that kind of attention.
Video 1.
Bomb disposal robot by The IT Crowd
. Source.
Video 2.
Gabe Newell Blue Screen
. Source. During Game Developers Choice Awards acceptance presentation. TODO year.
Mindmeld by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
A Small Talent for War by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Doctor of Philosophy by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
MIT 8.06 Quantum Physics III, Spring 2018 by Barton Zwiebach by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
100 10-20 minute videos properly split by topic, good resource!
Instructor: Barton Zwiebach.
Free material from university courses:
Consistency by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
A set of axioms is consistent if they don't lead to any contradictions.
When a set of axioms is not consistent, false can be proven, and then everything is true, making the set of axioms useless.
Deep tech by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli is a fan of this late 2010's buzzword.
It basically came about because of the endless stream of useless software startups made since the 2000's by one or two people with no investments with the continued increase in computers and Internet speeds until the great wall was reached.
Deep tech means not one of those. More specifically, it means technologies that require significant investment in expensive materials and laboratory equipment to progress, such as molecular biology technologies and quantum computing.
And it basically comes down to technologies that wrestle with the fundamental laws of physics rather than software data wrangling.
Computers are of course limited by the laws of physics, but those are much hidden by several layers of indirection.
Full visibility, and full control, make computer tasks be tasks that eventually always work out more or less as expected.
The same does not hold true when real Physics is involved.
Physics is brutal.
To start with, you can't even see your system very clearly, and often doing so requires altering its behaviour.
For example, in molecular biology, most great discoveries are made after some new technique is made to be able to observe smaller things.
But you often have to kill your cells to make those observations, which makes it very hard to understand how they work dynamically.
What we would really want would be to track every single protein as it goes about inside the cell. But that is likely an impossible dream.
The same for the brain. If we had observations of every neuron, how long would it take to understand it? Not long, people are really good at reverse engineering things when there is enough information available to do so, see also science is the reverse engineering of nature.
Then, even when you start to see the system, you might have a very hard time controlling it, because it is so fragile. This is basically the case of quantum computing in 2020.
It is for those reasons that deep tech is so exciting.
The next big things will come from deep tech. Failure is always a possibility, and you can't know before you try.
But that's also why its so fun to dare.
Stuff that Ciro Santilli considers "deep tech" as of 2020:
Greek alphabet by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Unfortunately, physicists and mathematicians keep using Greek letters in their formulas, so we just have to learn them.
A helpful way to remember is to learn a bit of their history/pronunciation: Section "Historical correspondence between Latin and Greek".
To learn the greek letters if you have a base latin alphabet, you must learn the sound of each letter, and which Latin letters they correspond to.
Symbols that look like Greek letters but are not Greek letters:
Is Ciro Santilli crazy (he is, but for this point specifically), or do many/most Greek letters represent the mouth position used in the pronunciation of the letter?
Molecule by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Mojim by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Leading Chinese lyrics website: mojim.com/twznew.htm
Monero ASIC resistance by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Googling does not lead to any commercial ASICs on sale that is not just a CPU or as efficient as certain CPUs, so perhaps they've actually manged it!
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
These people don't fuck around.
MuJoCo by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Was a closed source project by "Roboti LLC", which was then acquired by DeepMind in October 2021 and open sourced March 2022: www.deepmind.com/blog/open-sourcing-mujoco
This library is quite cool. Feel very brutally lean and mean.
Politician by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
MuseScore by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
This software feels amazing. You can really start composing very quickly, lots of features, good keyboard shortcuts.
GPL, and there's a backing company that makes money with an online and mobile version of it.
Can export to:
Ubuntu 20.04: sound preview worked, first hat that trailing Contra-like sound artifacts (like spd-say), but then it went away?
Feels like a lot of effort was put into usability, including keyboard shortcuts by default, seems like a powerful and easy to start using software to compose music!
Named matrix by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
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!
Video 1.
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source.
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
    Video 2.
    OurBigBook Web topics demo
    . Source.
  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:
    • 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
    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 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.
  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