Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Publicly released documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory are marked with this identifier. This is for example the case of each video on ther YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@LosAlamosNationalLab. E.g. Video "Historic, unique Manhattan Project footage from Los Alamos by Los Alamos National Lab" is marked with "LA-UR 11-4449".

www.osti.gov/biblio/1372821 contains "How to Get an LA-UR: Using RASSTI to Release Your Work" which is of interest: permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/lareport/LA-UR-17-26023. That document documents the acronym's expansion, plus it leaks some internal-only URLs such as lasearch.lanl.gov/oppie/service.

TODO is there somewhere you can search for the document for a given identifier? Some PDFs are listed at: sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/index2b.html

The busy beaver game consists in finding, for a given $n$, the turing machine with $n$ states that writes the largest possible number of 1's on a tape initially filled with 0's. In other words, computing the busy beaver function for a given $n$.

There are only finitely many Turing machines with $n$ states, so we are certain that there exists such a maximum. Computing the Busy beaver function for a given $n$ then comes down to solving the halting problem for every single machine with $n$ states.

Some variant definitions define it as the number of time steps taken by the machine instead. Wikipedia talks about their relationship, but no patience right now.

The Busy Beaver problem is cool because it puts the halting problem in a more precise numerical light, e.g.:

Bibliography:

Project trying to compute BB(5) once and for all. Notably it has better presentation and organization than any other previous effort, and appears to have grouped everyone who cares about the topic as of the early 2020s.

Very cool initiative!

By 2023, they had basically decided every machine: discuss.bbchallenge.org/t/the-30-to-34-ctl-holdouts-from-bb-5/141

In June 2024 they felt that they had verified the result after a full Coq proof was published: So now onto BB(6) I guess.

Founded partly due to the influence of Edward Teller who thought Los Alamos National Laboratory was not making good progress on thermonuclear weapons, large part of which was developed there.

The name is a bit obscure if you don't think in very generalized terms right out of the gate. It refers to a linear polynomial of multiple variables, which by definition must have the super simple form of:and then we just put the unknown $y$ and each derivative into that simple polynomial:except that now the $c_i$ are not just constants, but they can also depend on the argument $x$ (but not on $y$ or its derivatives).

Explicit solutions exist for the very specific cases of:

A more photon-specific version of the Bloch sphere.

In it, each of the six sides has a clear and simple to understand photon polarization state, either of:

The sphere clearly suggests for example that a rotational or diagonal polarizations are the combination of left/right with the correct phase. This is clearly explained at: Video "Quantum Mechanics 9b - Photon Spin and Schrodinger's Cat II by ViaScience (2013)".

Nice looking and expensive operating system by Apple. Ciro Santilli believes that:

The story of how OS X was ported to x86 from PowerPC with large initial work up to boot by a single man in the year 2000, John Kullmann, is really worth reading: www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg on Quora, see also:

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!

Glissando: yes: musescore.org/en/handbook/arpeggios-and-glissandi

Quora is crap in many, many senses, but in part due to some bad Stack Overflow policies, it is the best crap we've got for certain (mostly useless) subjects. Until OurBigBook.com dominates the world.

The worst thing about quora is that you cannot subscribe only to certain subjects on your feed. Quora just keeps pumping shit you never subscribed to, no matter what. Ciro, for sport, unfollowed every single idiotic subject it was proposing, but it didn't work, sooner or later Quora just keeps pumping more shit back. Mind you, some of that shit is fun. But it's still shit. Though on second thought, YouTube also randomly decides to reset Ciro's humongous "don't recomend this shitty channel" choices from time to time, which is not much different...

Other terrible things, they just seem to have an incredible ability of making the website worse and more annoying over time! Truly amazing:

Quora is getting so bad that it is basically being killed by Reddit, especially after they lifted the 6-month hard thread lock...

See also: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/quora for a coverage of the intense pro-CCP astroturfing present on the website.

A glitch is more precisely a software bug that is hard to reproduce. But it has also been used to mean a software bug that is not very serious.

Matthew 10:16-23 Coming Persecutions, where Jesus before being persecuted warns his disciples that there is evil in the world and that they must be aware of it, all while being pure at heart: