Good and evil Updated 2025-07-16
Notable lists:
Linguistics Updated 2025-07-16
R (complexity) Updated 2025-07-16
Set of all decision problems solvable by a Turing machine, i.e. that decide if a string belongs to a recursive language.
Reverse engineering Updated 2025-07-16
This is what society gets for not using open knowledge: some of its best minds will be bound to waste endless hours reversing some useless technology.
With that said, even when you do have the source code, reading run logs and using debuggers are a sort of reverse engineering at heart.
One of the most jaw dropping reverse engineering projects Ciro has ever seen is the Super Mario 64 reverse engineering project.
Ad hominem Updated 2025-07-16
Design pattern Updated 2025-07-16
Public domain archive Updated 2025-07-16
Quasiparticles vs elementary particles Updated 2025-07-16
As a phisicist once amazingly put it in a talk Ciro watched:
It all depends on how much energy you have to probe nature with. Previously, we thought protons were elementary particles. But then we used more energy and found that they aren't.If some alien race had even less energy, they might not know about electrons at all, and could think that anyons are actually elementary.Being an "elementary particle" is always a possibly temporary label.
Register transfer level Updated 2025-07-16
Register transfer level is the abstraction level at which computer chips are mostly designed.
The only two truly relevant RTL languages as of 2020 are: Verilog and VHDL. Everything else compiles to those, because that's all that EDA vendors support.
Much like a C compiler abstracts away the CPU assembly to:
- increase portability across ISAs
- do optimizations that programmers can't feasibly do without going crazy
Reinforcement learning Updated 2025-07-16
Radioactive decay Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli finds it interesting that radioactive decay basically kickstarted the domain of nuclear physics by essentially providing a natural particle accelerator from a chunk of radioactive element.
The discovery process was particularly interesting, including Henri Becquerel's luck while observing phosphorescence, and Marie Curie's observation that the uranium ore were more radioactive than pure uranium, and must therefore contain other even more radioactive substances, which lead to the discovery of polonium (half-life 138 days) and radium (half-life 1600 years).
Radio receiver Updated 2025-07-16
As well put by Wikipedia, a radio receiver has to perform three functions on the signal from the antenna:
- filtering, so you can tune the station you care about. This filters based on the frequency of the carrier wave you want. I.e. you use a bandpass filter.
- amplification: otherwise you won't be able to hear anything if the emitter is too far away
- demodulation: this means decoding the signal based on whatever way it was encoded, notably e.g. AM/FM
Rich people who create charitable prizes are often crooked Updated 2025-07-16
A friend of mine who's a rich man - he invented some kind of simple digital switch - tells me about these people who contribute money to make prizes or give lectures: "You always look at them carefully to find out what crookery they're trying to absolve their conscience of."
Anglo-Saxons Updated 2025-07-16
Audacity profile-based background noise removal Updated 2025-07-16
List of quotes Updated 2025-07-16
Positive-strand RNA virus Updated 2025-07-16
Applied mathematics Updated 2025-07-16
Archive Team Updated 2025-07-16
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