en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honourable_Schoolboy#Adaptations mentions:
Jonathan Powell, producer of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), said the BBC considered producing The Honourable Schoolboy but a production in South East Asia was considered prohibitively expensive and therefore the BBC instead adapted the third novel of the Karla Trilogy, Smiley's People (1979)
The lower level you go into a computer, the harder it is to observe things Updated 2025-07-11 +Created 1970-01-01
The most extreme case of this is of course the integrated circuit itself, in which it is essentially impossible (?) to observe the specific value of some indidual wire at some point.
Somewhat on the other extreme, we have high level programming languages running on top of an operating system: at this point, you can just GDB step debug your program, print the value of any variable/memory location, and fully understand anything that you want. Provided that you manage to easily reach that point of interest.
And for anything in between we have various intermediate levels of complication. The most notable perhaps being developing the operating system itself. At this level, you can't so easily step debug (although techniques do exist). For early boot or bootloaders for example, you might want to use JTAG for example on real hardware.
In parallel to this, there is also another very important pair of closely linked tradeoffs:
- the lower level at which something is implemented, the faster it runs
- emulation gives you observability back, at the cost of slower runtime
Emulation also has another potential downside: unless you are very careful at implementing things correctly, your model might not be representative of the real thing. Also, there may be important tradeoffs between how much the model looks like the real thing, and how fast it runs. For example, QEMU's use of binary translation allows it to run orders of magnitude faster than gem5. However, you are unable to make any predictions about system performance with QEMU, since you are not modelling key elements like the cache or CPU pipeline.
Instrumentation is another technique that has can be considered to achieve greater observability.
The Magnetic Moment of the Electron by Kusch and Foley (1948) Updated 2025-07-11 +Created 1970-01-01
Published on Physical Review by Polykarp Kusch and Foley.
Which boundary conditions lead to existence and uniqueness of a second order PDE Updated 2025-07-11 +Created 1970-01-01
www.cns.gatech.edu/~predrag/courses/PHYS-6124-12/StGoChap6.pdf 6.1 "Classification of PDE's" clarifies which boundary conditions are needed for existence and uniqueness of each type of second order of PDE:
is:
- complete under the Lebesgue integral, this result is may be called the Riesz-Fischer theorem
- not complete under the Riemann integral: math.stackexchange.com/questions/397369/space-of-riemann-integrable-functions-not-complete
And then this is why quantum mechanics basically lives in : not being complete makes no sense physically, it would mean that you can get closer and closer to states that don't exist!
God this song.
White snow in sunny spring performed by Liu Dehai
. Source. From the 1996 album: "A Collection of Chinese Music Masterpieces: Pipa": www.amazon.com/Collection-Chinese-Music-Masterpieces-Pipa/dp/B000QZYN8E TODO recording date. Why can't you collimate incoherent light as well as a laser? Updated 2025-07-11 +Created 1970-01-01
You could put an LED in a cavity with a thin long hole but then, most rays, which are not aligned with the hole, will just bounce inside forever producing heat.
So you would have a very hot device, and very little efficiency on the light output. This heat might also behave like a black-body radiation source, so you would not have a single frequency.
The beauty of lasers is the laser cavity (two parallel mirrors around the medium) selects parallel motion preferentially, see e.g.: youtu.be/_JOchLyNO_w?t=832 from Video "How Lasers Work by Scientized (2017)"
Sometimes, these are more than just mechanics, but also have deeper life analogues. The title of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind. Sometimes they are just mechanics.
With more philosophical metaphors:
- when your bike breaks, that provides an unique opportunity to learn how to fix it: try to fix your own bike before taking it to the shop
- if the wind is blowing against you on the way out, it will likely blow behind you on the way back. But remember that the other way around also applies.
- always take one extra clothing layer than what you think you will need in your back pocket or sport bag, especially when time is changing fast in Sprint and Autumn. The weather on the road outside of town can change very quickly!
- if you took a turn, and it feels wrong, stop to check the map, and possibly backtrack to safety. When it feels wrong, it usually is a bad idea, e.g. roads where cars are too fast/too many. But if you take a wrong turn and it feels right, then follow it without fear and see what it leads to!
- don't carry a speedometer on your bike. Analysis can be done afterwards on Strava. The only measurement that matters is "how awesome am I feeling right now?". Live in the moment instead of checking your speedometer every 10 seconds.
- cycle when you body calls it out of addiction, not out a goal that you've made up that must be reached
With less philosophical metaphors:
- learn how much water and food you need to take for a trip. Otherwise, you will bonk at some time, when you least expect, it happens very suddenly.And then you better hope to God that you can find a food shop nearby. Luckily this was the case for Ciro's first and only bonk so far.And besides bonking all out, being tired and hungry makes you make stupid decision, especially where traffic is involved!Food is safety. Light is safety. Time is safety. Calm is safety. Chocolate bars and candy cannot count as lunch food, only delay lunch. A sandwich with ham cheese and salad is food. A bag of M&M's with a can of soda can bring you back from the dead.When you are not in familiar grounds, take twice as much as you think you might possibly ever need. Hofstadter's law.You will also learn that, surprise surprise, carbohydrates that you ate one or two days before a ride stay stored in your liver and muscles, and also greatly affect how quickly you will bonk, thus the concept of carbohydrate loading.
- correct saddle hight is fundamental, your legs must be almost fully stretched at the bottom position
- it is impossible to reach the correct tire pressure with (cheap?) hand pumps, their only purpose is to fill up a flat tire so you can get home after a long ride. But a track pump.
- clean and lube your chain. The speed benefit is instantaneous and mind blowing. It also greatly improves gear shifting.This also prevents the chain from rusting, because the lube takes up the place where water would stay, and the muck makes it harder for water to evaporate.This is the most common bike maintenance mistake you see on the streets: people with that high pitched overly dry chain noise.
- when a piece on your bike breaks and has no clear name written on it, you can try to identify it Google images
- the more you watch YouTube maintenance videos without haste, the more you end up learn random new stuff that unexpectedly saves you later
- if you took a turn, and it feels wrong, stop to check the map, and possibly backtrack to safety. When it feels wrong, it usually is a bad idea, e.g. roads where cars are too fast/too many
- public place with lots of people are bicycle parking Hell, because due to anonymity and the large number of distractions, it becomes exponentially more likely that someone will fuck you bike somehow, e.g. by dropping it on the ground. Always search a bit for a reasonable place to park, and avoid overcrowded parking spaces at all costs.
- gear change matters
- when you get on your bike to start riding, start riding slowly and gradually switch up pedal forces and gears. Things may have shifted in a weird position as it gets kicked around in parking. Ciro managed to bend his derailleur like that!
- spin to win, AKA learn to user your gears
- it is not shameful to ride on your lower gears on a hill. You can actually go surprisingly fast with them, and conserve energy for later. Learn when to use each gear ratio.
- learn to identify your suppliers:
- www.wiggle.co.uk/: in Europe, this is best place to buy clothing from, and also good for some bike parts. It is the most organized website, and contains non-generic shit which Amazon is full of.For bike parts Amazon is also worth looking into however. Bike parts a bit different from clothing because you have to make sure that stuff fits, so you hopefully know exactly the part name before before buying it, and therefore website organization is not as crucial.Wiggle is however guilty of shameless: discounts that happen more often than not
- always take your lights off the bike into your bag when you park, anywhere, and for any amount of time, even if a quick stop. Drug addicts are everywhere, always ready love to steal and resell them.
- sometimes you do something stupid like going into a really muddy path, and it is really fun, because you've never been there in your life. But then your bike gets really dirty, and your feet are wet and freezing, and you promise yourself you will never do something that stupid again. But then you do it again in a different location, because it was too much fun. Once more unto the breach just comes to Ciro's mind every such time. Embrace this.
Ciro Santilli has felt that perhaps what is missing in 2020's AGI research is:
- the interface between:The key question is somewhat how to extract symbols out of the space-time continuous experiences.
- the continuous/noisy level (now well developed under artificial neural network techniques of the 2010's)
- and symbolic AI level AI
- more specialized accelerators that somehow interface with more generic artificial neural networks. Notably some kind of speialized processing of spacial elements is obviously hardcoded into the brain, see e.g. Section "Grid cell"
Forcing these boundaries to be tested was one of the main design goals of Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games.
In those games, for example:Therefore, those continuous objects would also have "magic" effects that could not be explained by "simple" "what is touching what" ideas.
- when you press a button here, a door opens somewhere far away
- when you touch certain types of objects, a chemical reaction may happen, but not other types of objects
Bibliography:
Videos should be found/made for all of those: videos of all key physics experiments
- speed of light experiment
- basically all experiments listed under Section "Quantum mechanics experiment" such as:
- Davisson-Germer experiment
Why are complex numbers used in the Schrodinger equation? Updated 2025-07-11 +Created 1970-01-01
This useless video doesn't really explain anything, he just says "it's needed because the equation has an in it".
The real explanation is: they are not needed, they just allow us to write the equation in a shorter form, which is always a win: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32422/qm-without-complex-numbers/557600#557600
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.