As mentioned on the introduction, the main objective of the course is to try predict qualitative properties of materials, notably the existence of certain phase transitions, starting from first principle toy models.
Everyone is beginner when the field is new, and there is value in tutorials written by beginners.
For example, Ciro Santilli felt it shocking how direct and satisfying Richard Feynman's scientific vulgarization of quantum electrodynamics were, e.g. at: Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979), and that if he had just assumed minimal knowledge of mathematics, he was about to give a full satisfactory picture in just a few hours.
Other supporters of this:
Stack Overflow Updated 2025-07-16
The best place to get answers to programming questions as of 2019. Google into Stack Overflow is always the best bet.
An overview of Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contribution can be found at: Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.
Figure 1.
Stack Overflow in a nutshell
. Source.
As the "WTF look at my points" guy, Ciro Santilli approves of this meme. A few more elements could be added, notably deletion of the last link-only answer, but good enough.
By the profile image, the "Grammar Nazi" editor is actually appropriately the notorious serial editor Peter Mortensen. Ciro Santilli welcomes grammar fixes, but more subjective style fixes can be a bit annoying.
Figure 2.
Catching mice by Nakanoart
. Possible non-canonical source: twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1376023938749190147
Figure 3.
How stack overflow hires meme using Welcome Aboard! meme template
. Source.
Video 1.
High Mountain and Flowing Water performed on the guzheng by Xiang SiHua (2000)
Source.
Video 2.
Suwu herding sheep performed on the erhu by Song Fei (2017)
Source.
Video 3.
Ambush from ten sides performed on the pipa by Jiaju Shen (2017)
Source.
Video 4.
White snow in sunny spring performed on the pipa by Liu Dehai
. Source.
Video 5.
Dance of the Yi People performed on the pipa by Liu Dehai
. Source.
Video 6.
Wang Jin beats Gao Qiu theme music from The Water Margin featuring a suona solo
. Source.
The Social Network Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
The Social Network: Winklevii pitch to Zuckerberg
. Source.
Video 2.
The Social Network: Eduardo Saverin tells the hearing how he was trapped into the shares dilution
. Source.
Video 3.
The Social Network: dinner with Sean Parker
. Source.
Video 4.
The Social Network: Eduardo Saverin tells the hearing how his shares were diluted
. Source.
Video 5.
The Social Network: I'm Not a Bad Guy
. Source.
Thiel Fellowship Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli approves of this one, related: Section "Free gifted education".
The downside of the Thiel Fellowship is that it is realistically impossible for its fellows to do anything in deep tech, only information science startups would be possible, as they would not have the labs, or lab skills required for any deep tech if they drop out before a PhD. Related: Section "The only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories".
The only solution is the harder process of actually remodelling our very broken educational system.
Endofunction Updated 2025-07-16
A function where the domain is the same as the codomain.
ENIAC Updated 2025-07-16
Eric W. Weisstein Updated 2025-07-16
Ahh, this dude is just like Ciro Santilli, trying to create the ultimate natural sciences encyclopedia!
In 1995, Weisstein converted a Microsoft Word document of over 200 pages to hypertext format and uploaded it to his webspace at Caltech under the title Eric's Treasure Trove of Sciences.
Eta (letter) Updated 2025-07-16
Lowercase looks like a lowercase letter N for some reason.
torchvision ResNet Updated 2025-07-16
That example uses a ResNet pre-trained on the COCO dataset to do some inference, tested on Ubuntu 22.10:
cd python/pytorch
wget -O resnet_demo_in.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Rooster_portrait2.jpg/400px-Rooster_portrait2.jpg
./resnet_demo.py resnet_demo_in.jpg resnet_demo_out.jpg
This first downloads the model, which is currently 167 MB.
We know it is COCO because of the docs: pytorch.org/vision/0.13/models/generated/torchvision.models.detection.fasterrcnn_resnet50_fpn_v2.html which explains that
FasterRCNN_ResNet50_FPN_V2_Weights.DEFAULT
is an alias for:
FasterRCNN_ResNet50_FPN_V2_Weights.COCO_V1
The runtime is relatively slow on P51, about 4.7s.
After it finishes, the program prints the recognized classes:
['bird', 'banana']
so we get the expected bird, but also the more intriguing banana.
By looking at the output image with bounding boxes, we understand where the banana came from!
Figure 1.
python/pytorch/resnet_demo_in.jpg
. Source.
Figure 2.
python/pytorch/resnet_demo_out.jpg
. The beak was of course a banana, not a beak!
gothinkster/realworld Updated 2025-07-16
Basically puts together every backend with Front-end web framework to create the exact same website.
The reference live demo can be found at: demo.realworld.io/#/ It is based on Angular.js as it links to: github.com/gothinkster/angularjs-realworld-example-app TODO backend?
There are however also live demos of other frontends, e.g.:
Note that all those frontends communicate with the same backend.
As of 2021 Devs are seemed a bit too focused on monetizing the project through their "how to use this project" premium tutorial, and documentation could be better: just getting the hello world of the most popular backend with the most popular frontend is not easy... come on.
github.com/gothinkster/realworld/issues/578 asks for community support, as devs have moved on since unfortunately.
Remember:
  • by default, the frontends hardcode the upstream public data API: https://conduit.productionready.io/api so you have to hack their code to match the port of the backend. And each backend can have a different port.
  • when you switch between backends, you must first manually clear client-side storage cookies/local new run will fail due to authentication issues!
Important missing things from the minimum base app:
First you should the most popular backend/frontend combination running, which is the most likely to be working. We managed to run on Ubuntu 20.10, React + Node.js Express.js as described at github.com/gothinkster/node-express-realworld-example-app/pull/116:
Then just:
npm install
npm start
on both server and client, and then visit the client URL: localhost:4100/
One cool thing is that the main repo has unified backend API tests:
git clone https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld
cd realworld
git checkout e7adc6b06b459e578d7d4a6738c1c050598ba431
cd api
APIURL=http://localhost:3000/api USERNAME="u$(date +%s)" ./run-api-tests.sh
so the per-repository tests are basically useless, and that single test can test everything for any backend! There is no frontend testing however: github.com/gothinkster/realworld/issues/269 so newb.
This is a good concept. For the ammount most people save, having a simple and easy to apply investment thesis is the best way to go.
Video 1.
All the financial advice you’ll ever need fits on a single index card
. Source.

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