Balance of power Updated 2025-07-16
Bare metal Updated 2025-07-16
Or in other words, it is basically implementing an operating system/firmware yourself ad hoc, together with your actual program.
Baryon vs meson vs lepton Updated 2025-07-16
"Barys" means "heavy" in Greek, because protons and neutrons was what made most of the mass of known ordinary matter, as opposed notably to electrons.
Baryons can be contrasted with:
- mesons, which have an even number of elementary particles. The name meson comes from "medium" since their most common examples have two quarks rather than three as the most common baryons such as protons. So they have less mass than a proton, but more than an electron, this medium mass.
- leptons, which are much lighter particles such as the electron. "Leptos" means "fine, small, thin".
Bash HOWTO Updated 2025-07-16
Bat Updated 2025-07-16
gnuplot Updated 2025-07-16
Tends to be Ciro Santilli's first attempt for quick and dirty graphing: github.com/cirosantilli/gnuplot-cheat.
When it doesn't, you Google for an hours, and then you give up in frustration, and fall back to Matplotlib.
Couldn't handle exploration of large datasets though: Survey of open source interactive plotting software with a 10 million point scatter plot benchmark by Ciro Santilli
Battlecode Updated 2025-07-16
Some mechanics:
- inter agent communication
- compute power is limited by limiting Java bytecode count execution per bot per cycle
Battlecode Final Tournament 2023
. Source. Introduction to Battlecode by MIT OpenCourseWare (2014)
Source. How to become a good programmer? Updated 2025-07-16
Or: how to learn X.
That is the wrong question.
Then, once you decide to try one, if that involves programming, only then learn to program to achieve that goal. And don't stop learning what's needed until you either get the thing done, or decide that it is actually not a good idea, or not possible, or that there is something else more important to be done first.
But if doesn't involve programming, then don't learn to program, and learn whatever you actually need to reach that goal instead.
Having that goal is the only way to be motivated to do something.
This is the essence of backward design.
Another very important point to keep in mind is: Section "When in doubt, choose the course that has the most experimental work".
How to cite a book on Wikipedia Updated 2025-07-16
To avoid duplication when citing multiple pages: Section "How to use a single source multiple times in a Wikipedia article?"
A good big sample definition:There is also
<ref name="googleStory">{{cite book |last1=Vise |first1=David |author-link1=David A. Vise |last2=Malseed |first2=Mark |author-link2=Mark Malseed |title=The Google Story |date=2008 |publisher=Delacorte Press |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780385342728}}</ref>title-link to link to a wiki page. But it is incompatible with url= for Internet Archive Open Library links which is a shame. Floating-point arithmetic Updated 2025-07-16
Microelectromechanical systems Updated 2025-07-16
Emergence Updated 2025-07-16
Basically the opposite of reductionism.
Figure "xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity" must again be cited.
How to develop Ciro Santilli's website before the OurBigBook migration Updated 2025-07-16
The website moved from AsciiDoctor to OurBigBook Markup in 2020, making this section mostly useless. But hey, history!
The source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io
Build locally, watch for changes and rebuild automatically, and start a local server with:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io
cd cirosantilli.github.io
bundle install
npm install
./runSource:
./run.The website will be visible at: localhost:4000.
Tested on the latest Ubuntu.
Publish changes to GitHub Pages:
git add -u
git commit -m 'make yourself look sillier'
./publishSource:
./publish.GitHub forces us to use the master branch for the build output... so the actual source is in the branch
dev.Update the gems with:
bundle update
git add Gemfile.lock
git commit -m 'update gems'His website was originally written in markdown, however those were deprecated in favour of AsciiDoctor when Ciro saw the light, rationale shown at: markdown-style-guideuse-asciidoc
GitHub pages is chosen instead of a single page GitHub README.adoc for the following reasons:
- Ciro will want some unsupported extensions, notably mathematics, likely with KaTeX server side:
- github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/pull/3338
- stackoverflow.com/questions/11256433/how-to-show-math-equations-in-general-githubs-markdownnot-githubs-blog
- g14n.info/2014/09/math-on-github-pages/
- stackoverflow.com/questions/11256433/how-to-show-math-equations-in-general-githubs-markdownnot-githubs-blog
- www.quora.com/How-can-I-combine-latex-and-markdown-in-GitHub
- when GitHub dies, Ciro's website URL still lives and retains the PageRank!
Scientific American Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli's hardware 2020-04 DECARETA Pedal Spanner Updated 2025-07-16
www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07VL2MLYY DECARETA Pedal Spanner Bike Pedal Wrench Three-in-one Function Bicycle Pedal Spanner 24mm Front and Rear Axle Spanner Pedal Install Spanner Repair Tool with Anti-Skidding Long Handle (Silver) £10.99.
How to extract data from the Bitcoin blockchain Updated 2025-07-16
TODO: it would be cool to have something like bitcoinstrings.com but including the actual transactions:
Local methods:
- Bitcoin Inscription Indexer
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/30295/how-can-i-search-for-transaction-text-on-the-blockchain
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/22500/is-there-a-lightweight-blockchain-parser-library-server/101472#101472
- github.com/alecalve/python-bitcoin-blockchain-parser
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/84266/wondering-how-to-use-bitcoin-parser
- github.com/bitcoinprivacy/Bitcoin-Graph-Explorer stores the blockchain in a database, and should allow more intelligent querying.
Further bibliography:
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/799/can-i-download-the-whole-block-chain-from-somewhere
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/68925/how-can-data-be-accessed-searched-for-in-a-blockchain
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/55188/download-single-and-specific-block-for-study-purposes
- www.fiverr.com/usefulshine/embed-your-logo-or-brand-art-on-blockchain user usefulshine from India embeds ASCII art for you into the blockchain starting at 260 dollars! XD
How to hardcode subtitle into a video with FFmpeg? Updated 2025-07-16
To change font size: stackoverflow.com/questions/21363334/how-to-add-font-size-in-subtitles-in-ffmpeg-video-filterThe default appears to be 24, so just multiply that by whatever seems like a reasonable factor.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=subtitle.srt:force_style='Fontsize=64'" output.mp4Note howver that .ass subtitle files can contain style information, which ffmpeg respects. Aegisub can produce and preview such styles, making .ass one of the best options.
Physicist Updated 2025-07-16
How to mine Monero Updated 2025-07-16
Ubuntu 20.10 as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/build/ubuntu:At minexmr.com/#getting_started we see that all you then need is a single CLI command:Seems simple, well done devs!
sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
mkdir xmrig/build && cd xmrig/build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)xmrig -o pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u <your-monero-address>Benchmark on Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/benchmark:gives:which according to the minexmr.com mining pool would generate 0.0005 XMR/day, which at the February 2021 rate of 140 USD/XMR is 0.07 USD/day. The minimum payout in that pool is 0.004 XMR so it would take 8 days to reach that.
./xmrig --bench=1M948.1 h/sSo clearly, application-specific integrated circuit mining is the only viable way of doing this.
www.makeuseof.com/cryptos-you-can-mine-at-home/ is a completely full of bullshit article that says otherwise. How can someone publish that!
Being proud of low level programming is stupid Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro's word of caution for 2019 aspiring system programmers: Should you waste your life with systems programming?
This is basically a direct consequence of backward design.
The higher the level you can operate at, the better.
The ideal level to operate at, and one of humankind's greatest ambitions is "AGI, make me money", the highest possible level.
Only go down a level when it seems necessary.
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.