AI accelerator by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
The Coming AI Chip Boom by Asianometry (2022)
Source.
Video 1.
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.
Setting: you are sending bits through a communication channel, each bit has a random probability of getting flipped, and so you use some error correction code to achieve some minimal error, at the expense of longer messages.
This theorem sets an upper bound on how efficient you can be in your encoding, for any encoding.
The next big question, which the theorem does not cover is how to construct codes that reach or approach the limit. Important such codes include:
But besides this, there is also the practical consideration of if you can encode/decode fast enough to keep up with the coded bandwidth given your hardware capabilities.
news.mit.edu/2010/gallager-codes-0121 explains how turbo codes were first reached without a very good mathematical proof behind them, but were still revolutionary in experimental performance, e.g. turbo codes were used in 3G/4G.
But this motivated researchers to find other such algorithms that they would be able to prove things about, and so they rediscovered the much earlier low-density parity-check code, which had been published in the 60's but was forgotten, partially because it was computationally expensive.
E Ink by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Electronic Ink such as that found on Amazon Kindle is the greatest invention ever made by man.
Once E Ink reaches reasonable refresh rates to replace liquid crystal displays, the world will finally be saved.
It would allow Ciro Santilli to spend his entire life in front of a screen rather in the real world without getting tired eyes, and even if it is sunny outside.
Ciro stopped reading non-code non-news a while back though, so the current refresh rates are useless, what a shame.
OMG, this is amazing: getfreewrite.com/
Teleprinter by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Way, way before instant messaging, there was... teletype!
Video 1.
Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal by CuriousMarc (2020)
Source.
Hyperscale computing by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Basically means "company with huge server farms, and which usually rents them out like Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform
Figure 1.
Global electricity use by data center type: 2010 vs 2018
. Source. The growth of hyperscaler cloud vs smaller cloud and private deployments was incredible in that period!
A sequence \((a_n)_{n=1}^\infty\) is said to be logarithmically concave if for all \(n \geq 1\), the following condition holds: \[ a_n^2 \geq a_{n-1} \cdot a_{n+1} \] This condition can also be equivalently expressed using logarithms.
Amazon EC2 hello world by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
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 asdf
Once HTTP inbound traffic is enabled on security rules for port 80, you can:
while true; do printf "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n\r\n`date`: hello from AWS" | sudo nc -Nl 80; done
and then you are able to curl from your local computer and get the response.

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 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.
  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