De novo Updated 2025-07-16
International Organization for Standardization Updated 2025-07-16
Paywall Updated 2025-07-16
Protein folding problem Updated 2025-07-16
Start codon Updated 2025-07-16
Theravada Updated 2025-07-16
Alice&Bob Updated 2025-07-16
About their qubit:
- alice-bob.com/2023/02/15/computing-256-bit-elliptic-curve-logarithm-in-9-hours-with-126133-cat-qubits/ Computing 256-bit elliptic curve logarithm in 9 hours with 126,133 cat qubits (2023). This describes their "cat qubit".
Allan Holdsworth Updated 2025-07-16
Allen Wu Updated 2025-07-16
This situation is the most bizarre thing ever. The dude was fired in 2020, but he refused to be fired, and because he has the company seal, they can't fire him. He is still going to the office as of 2022. It makes one wonder what are the true political causes for this situation. A big warning sign to all companies tring to setup joint ventures in China!
Computer Updated 2025-07-16
The artistic instrument that enables the ultimate art: coding, See also: Section "The art of programming".
Unlike other humans, computers are mindless slaves that do exactly what they are told to, except for occasional cosmic ray bit flips. Until they take over the world that is.
Steve Jobs talking about the Internet (1995)
Source. The web is incredibly exciting, because it is the fulfillment of a lot of our dreams, that the computer would ultimately primarily not be a device for computation, but [sic] metamorphisize into a device for communication.
Secondly it exciting because Microsoft doesn't own it, and therefore there is a tremendous amount of innovation happening.
Computers basically have two applications:Generally, the smaller a computer, the more it gets used for communication rather than computing.
- computation
- communication. Notably, computers through the Internet allow for modes of communication where:
- both people don't have to be on the same phone line at the exact same time, a server can relay your information to other people
- anyone can broadcast information easily and for almost free, again due to servers being so good at handling that
The early computers were large and expensive, and basically only used for computing. E.g. ENIAC was used for calculating ballistic tables.
Communication only came later, and it was not obvious to people at first how incredibly important that role would be.
This is also well illustrated in the documentary Glory of the Geeks. Full interview at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZAJY23xio. It is apparently known as the "Lost Interview" and it was by Cringely himself: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfgwCFrU7dI for his Triumph of the Nerds documentary.
Computer chess Updated 2025-07-16
Computerphile Updated 2025-07-16
Descriptive statistics Updated 2025-07-16
Symmetric bilinear map Updated 2025-07-16
Subcase of symmetric multilinear map:
The most important example is the dot product, which is also a positive definite symmetric bilinear form.
Computer science Updated 2025-07-16
Unfortunately, all software engineers already know the answer to the useful theorems though (except perhaps notably for cryptography), e.g. all programmers obviously know that iehter P != NP or that this is unprovable or some other "for all practical purposes practice P != NP", even though they don't have proof.
And 99% of their time, software engineers are not dealing with mathematically formulatable problems anyways, which is sad.
The only useful "computer science" subset every programmer ever needs to know is:
- for arrays: dynamic array vs linked list
- for associative array: binary search tree vs hash table. See also Heap vs Binary Search Tree (BST). No need to understand the algorithmic details of the hash function, the NSA has already done that for you.
- don't use Bubble sort for sorting
- you can't parse HTML with regular expressions: stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 because of formal language theory
Funnily, due to the formalization of mathematics, mathematics can be seen as a branch of computer science, just like computer science can be seen as a branch of Mathematics!
The Busy Beaver Competition: a historical survey by Pascal Michel Updated 2025-07-16
Discretization Updated 2025-07-16
CIA 2010 covert communication websites Updated 2026-02-12
This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the mid 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of some of the targeted countries, notably Iran and China, circa 2010-2013.
This article uses publicly available information to publicly disclose for the first time a few hundred of what we feel are extremely likely candidate sites of the network. The starting point for this research was the September 2022 Reuters article "America’s Throwaway Spies" which for the first time gave nine example websites, and their analyst from Citizenlabs claims to have found 885 websites in total, but did not publicly disclose them. Starting from only the nine disclosed websites, we were then able to find a few hundred websites that share so many similarities with them, i.e. a common fingerprint, that we believe makes them beyond reasonable doubt part of the same network.
If you enjoy this article, consider dropping some Monero at: 4A1KK4uyLQX7EBgN7uFgUeGt6PPksi91e87xobNq7bT2j4V6LqZHKnkGJTUuCC7TjDNnKpxDd8b9DeNBpSxim8wpSczQvzf so I can waste it on my foolish attempts to improve higher education. Other sponsorship methods: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
The discovery of these websites by Iranian and Chinese counterintelligence led to the imprisonment and execution of several assets in those countries, and subsequent shutdown of the channel by the CIA when they noticed that things had gone wrong. This is likely a Wikipedia page that talks about the disastrous outcome of the websites being found out: 2010–2012 killing of CIA sources in China, although it contained no mention of websites before Ciro Santilli edited it in.
Of particular interest is that based on their language and content, certain of the websites seem to have targeted other democracies such as Germany, France, Spain and Brazil.
If anyone can find others websites, or has better techniques feel free to contact Ciro Santilli at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". Contributions will be clearly attributed if desired. Some of the techniques used so far have been very heuristic, and that added to the limited amount of data makes it almost certain that some websites have been missed. Broadly speaking, there are two types of contributions that would be possible:
- finding new IP ranges: harder and more exiting, and potentially requires more intelligence
- better IP to domain name databases to fill in known gaps in existing IP ranges
The fact that citizenlabs reported exactly 885 websites being found makes it feel like they might have found find a better fingerprint which we have not managed to find yet. We have not yet had to pay for our data. If someone wants to donate to the research, some ideas include:
- dump $400 on WhoisXMLAPI to dump whois history of all known hits and search for other matches. Small discoveries were made like this in the past and we'd expect a few more to be left. We don't expect huge breakthroughs from this, but at only $400 it is not so bad
- dump a lot more ($15k+? needs confirmation as opaque pricing) on DomainTools. We are not certain that they have any superior data since there is no free trial of any kind, but it would be interesting to test the quality of the data they acquired from Farsight DNSDB if you are really loaded
Disclaimers:
- the network fell in 2013, followed by fully public disclosures in 2018 and 2022, so we believe that the benefit of giving the public this broader historic understanding outweighs the risks that agents could be found so many years later by sloppy secret services
- Ciro Santilli's political bias is strongly pro-democracy and anti-dictatorship, but with a good pinch of skepticism about the morality US foreign policy in the last century
Division algebra Updated 2025-07-16
An algebra over a field where division exists.
DNA amplification Updated 2025-07-16
DNA amplification is one of the key DNA technologies:
- it is one of the main ways in which DNA detection can be done.
- it is the first step of Illumina sequencing, since you need multiple copies of several parts of the genome for the method to work
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