A quote by Ciro's Teacher R.:
Sometimes, even if our end goals are too far from reality, the side effects of trying to reach them can have meaningful impact.
If the goals are not ambitious enough, you risk not even having useful side effects so show in the end!
By doing the prerequisites of the impossible goal you desire, maybe the next generation will be able to achieve it.
This is basically why Ciro Santilli has contributed to Stack Overflow, which has happened while was doing his overly ambitious projects and notice that all kinds of basic pre-requisites were not well explained anywhere.
This is especially effective when you use backward design, because then you will go "down the dependency graph of prerequisites" and smoothen out any particularly inefficient points that you come across.
There are of course countless examples of such events:
- youtu.be/qrDZhAxpKrQ?t=174 Blitzscaling 11: Patrick Collison on Hiring at Stripe and the Role of a Product-Focused CEO by Greylock (2015)
The danger of this approach is of course spending too much time on stuff that will not be done enough times to be worth it, as highlighted by several xkcds:
xkcd 1319: Automation
. Source. The standard model and general relativity are incompatible Updated 2025-07-16
TODO arguments, proofs
xsv Updated 2025-07-16
Is this the one?
AlphaZero Updated 2025-07-16
Generalization of AlphaGo Zero that plays Go, chess and shogi.
- www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aar6404 A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play by Silver et al. (2018), published without source code
- www.quora.com/Is-there-an-Open-Source-version-of-AlphaZero-specifically-the-generic-game-learning-tool-distinct-from-AlphaGo
www.quora.com/Which-chess-engine-would-be-stronger-Alpha-Zero-or-Stockfish-12/answer/Felix-Zaslavskiy explains that it beat Stockfish 8. But then Stockfish was developed further and would start to beat it. We know this because although AlphaZero was closed source, they released the trained artificial neural network, so it was possible to replay AlphaZero at its particular stage of training.
Alternating multilinear map Updated 2025-07-16
F2Pool Updated 2025-07-16
g4ad.xlarge Updated 2025-07-16
Galaxy in the Local Group Updated 2025-07-16
Timeline of quantum mechanics Updated 2025-07-16
- 1859-1900: see Section "Black-body radiation experiment". Continuously improving culminating in Planck's law black-body radiation and Planck's law
- 1905 photoelectric effect and the photon
- TODO experiments
- 1905 Einstein's photoelectric effect paper. Planck was intially thinking that light was continuous, but the atoms vibrated in a discrete way. Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect throws that out of the window, and considers the photon discrete.
- 1913 atomic spectra and the Bohr model
- 1885 Balmer series, an empirical formula describes some of the lines of the hydrogen emission spectrum
- 1888 Rydberg formula generalizes the Balmer series
- 1896 Pickering series makes it look like a star has some new kind of hydrogen that produces half-integer entries in the Pickering series
- 1911 Bohr visits J. J. Thomson in the University of Cambridge for his postdoc, but they don't get along well
- Bohr visits Rutherford at the University of Manchester and decides to transfer there. During this stay he becomes interested in problems of the electronic structure of the atom.
- 1913 february: young physics professor Hans Hansen tells Bohr about the Balmer series. This is one of the final elements Bohr needed.
- 1913 Bohr model published predicts atomic spectral lines in terms of the Planck constant and other physical constant.
- explains the Pickering series as belonging to inoized helium that has a single electron. The half term in the spectral lines of this species come from the nucleus having twice the charge of hydrogen.
- 1913 March: during review before publication, Rutherford points out that instantaneous quantum jumps don't seem to play well with causality.
- 1916 Bohr-Sommerfeld model introduces angular momentum to explain why some lines are not observed, as they would violate the conservation of angular momentum.
Developmental neurobiology Updated 2025-07-16
Gene expression profiling Updated 2025-07-16
Generator of a Lie algebra Updated 2025-07-16
Germline Updated 2025-07-16
It is quite mind blowing when you think about it, that the huge majority of your body's cells is essentially just there to support a tiny ammount of germline, which are the only cells that can actually pass on! It is fun to imagine the cell type tree for this, with a huge branching of somatic cells, and only a few germline going forward.
Huygens-Fresnel principle Updated 2025-07-16
Landau quantization Updated 2025-07-16
Post-order depth-first search Updated 2025-07-16
Has the property of visiting all descendants before the parent.
Pre-order depth-first search Updated 2025-07-16
Like breadth-first search, this also has the property of visiting parents before any children.
The orthogonal group is the group of all invertible matrices where the inverse is equal to the transpose Updated 2025-07-16
Let's show that this definition is equivalent to the orthogonal group is the group of all matrices that preserve the dot product.
Note that:and for that to be true for all possible and then we must have:i.e. the matrix inverse is equal to the transpose.
These matricese are called the orthogonal matrices.
TODO is there any more intuitive way to think about this?
A Mathematician's Apology Updated 2025-07-16
With major mathematicians holding ideas such as:it is not surprise that the state of STEM education is so shit as of 2020, especially at the the missing link between basic and advanced! This also implies that the number of people that can appreciate any advanced mathematics research is tiny, and consequently so is the funding.
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. [...] It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done.
Deep learning framework Updated 2025-07-16
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.