Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Invented for Bitcoin.

Yet another name for a personal knowledge base, some usages:

Lists of digital gardens:

A function that takes input function and outputs a real number.

In the context of wave-like equations, an open-boundary condition is one that "lets the wave go through without reflection".

This condition is very useful when we want to simulate infinite domains with a numerical method. Ciro Santilli wants to do this all the time when trying to come up with demos for his physics writings.

Here are some resources that cover such boundary conditions:

The first thing we had to do with the sample was to extract the DNA present in the water in a pure form for the PCR.

We did that with a Qiagen DNeasy PowerWater Kit.

As you would expect, this consists of a purification procedure with several steps.

In each step we take a physical or chemical action on the sample, which splits it into two parts: the one with the DNA and the one without.

We then take the part with the DNA, and throw away the one without the DNA.

The first steps are coarser, and finer and finer splits are done as we move forward.

What happens when the underdogs get together and try to factor out their efforts to beat some evil dominant power, sometimes victoriously.

Or when startups use the cheapest stuff available and randomly become the next big thing, and decide to keep maintaining the open stuff to get features for free from other companies, or because they are forced by the Holy GPL.

Open source frees employees. When you change jobs, a large part of the specific knowledge you acquired about closed source a project with your blood and tears goes to the trash. When companies get bought, projects get shut down, and closed source code goes to the trash. What sane non desperate person would sell their life energy into such closed source projects that could die at any moment? Working on open source is the single most important non money perk a company can have to attract the best employees.

Open source is worth more than the mere pragmatic financial value of not having to pay for software or the ability to freely add new features.

Its greatest value is perhaps the fact that it allows people study it, to appreciate the beauty of the code, and feel empowered by being able to add the features that they want.

That is why Ciro Santilli thought:

But quoting Ciro's colleague S.:

And "can reverse engineer the undocumented GPU hardware APIs", Ciro would add.

While software is the most developed open source technology available in the 2010's, due to the "zero cost" of copying it over the Internet, Ciro also believes that the world would benefit enormously from open source knowledge in all areas on science and engineering, for the same reasons as open source.

Evil company that desecrated the beauty created by Sun Microsystems, and was trying to bury Java once and or all in the 2010's.

Their database is already matched by open source e.g. PostgreSQL, and ERP and CRM specific systems are boring.

Oracle basically grew out of selling one of the first SQL implementations in the late 70's, and notably to the United States Government and particularly the CIA. They did deliver a lot of value in those early pre-internet days, but now open source is and will supplant them entirely.

PuntSeq is a side project led by a few University of Cambridge PhDs that aims to determine which bacteria are present in the River Cam.

In July 2019, the PuntSeq team got together with the awesome Cambridge Biomakespace, an awesome biology makerspace open to all, to create a two day science outreach activity showing their procedures.

The data collected in this experiment, together with other collection sessions done by the organizers actually led to a publication on eLife: elifesciences.org/articles/61504 "Freshwater monitoring by nanopore sequencing" by Lara Urban et al. (2021), so it is awesome to see that were are actual being part of "real science".

Ciro knows nothing about biology, but since he is very curious about it, he jumped at this opportunity, and decided to document things as well as his limited knowledge would allow.

All participants chipped in some money to help cover the experiment's costs. Ciro suspects that this activity was done partially to help crowdfund the experiment, but it was a worthy investment!

The impressions you get from the experiment as a software engineer will be:

www.bidspotter.com/en-us/auction-catalogues/bscsur/catalogue-id-bscsur10011/lot-c6605b41-1a14-40e5-a255-a5c5000866e0 (archive) Cannot exact same product on official website, but here is a similar one: www.fishersci.co.uk/shop/products/lm-26-2uv-transilluminator/12382038 (archive).

Ordinals are inscriptions created with the protocol described at: docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html The protocol was designed by developer Casey Rodarmor, and shares a few similarities with the AtomSea & EMBII protocol.

The protocol also includes a way to have ownership over inscriptions, effectively creating an NFT system on top of the bitcoin blockchain. AtomSea & EMBII also already had such a system however. In either case, Ciro Santilli couldn't give less of a fuck about who owns some random publicly viewable digital asset.

For whatever reason, orinals became extremelly popular compared to the AtomSea & EMBII format, leading to millions os inscriptions, and 10k+ images as of block 830k. They also started to take up a substatial portion of the available block space.

This in turn led to a lot of child porn rediscussion, and people linking back to this page to view earlier inscriptions: incoming links.

Unfortunately, unlike AtomSea & EMBII and even cryptograffiti.info uploads, most ordinals are designed to be just souless bulk collectibles, as with as much artistic merit as any random collectible card set or postage stamps you may find at a newpaper stall. To make things worse many of them are likely algorithmically generated. Eternal September had truly arrived to the Bitcoin blockchain. As a result, machine learning would be almost essential in order to find interesting uploads amidst such bulk.

The source code for the reference uploader and indexer is at: github.com/ordinals/ord

The reference viewer server for the runs at: ordinals.com.

The i0 at the end of the URL above means "inscription 0". This is because a single transaction can have multiple inscriptions.

Some of them have sold for high prices. Magic Eden is a popular interface for trading them:

The ordinals also started taking up large portions of the Bitcoin blockchain:

Apparently the "Taproot" Bitcoin update made it easier to upload image-sized data once again, which had become prohibitively expensive 2023 and much earlier:

Bibliography:

Where blog is taken in a wide sense, including e.g. Medium, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc.

The main shortcoming of blogs is the lack of topic convergence across blogs. Each blog is a moderated castle. So who is the best user for a given topic, or the best content for a given tag, across the entire website?

The only reasonable free material we have for advanced subjects nowadays are university lecture notes.

While some of those are awesome, when writing a large content, no one can keep quality high across all sections, there will always be knowledge that you don't have which is enlightening. And Googlers are more often than not interested only in specific sections of your content.

Our website aims to make smaller subjects vertically curated across horizontal single author tutorials.

MIT calculus course             UCLA calculus course

* Calculus                <---> * Calculus
  * Limit                 <--->   * Limit
    * Limit of a function
    * Limit of a series   <--->     * Limit of a series
  * Derivative            <--->   * Derivative
                                    * L'Hôpital's rule
  * Integral              <--->   * Integral

Some more links:

Start with consulting for universities to get some cash flowing.

Help teachers create perfect courses.

At the same time, develop the website, and use the generated content to bootstrap it.

Choose a domain of knowledge, generate perfect courses for it, and find all teachers of the domain in the world who are teaching that and help them out.

Then expand out to other domains.

TODO: which domain of knowledge should we go for? The more precise the better.

China stuff is mentioned at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/bitcoin-blockchain.

If Ciro Santilli were to write a book about quantum mechanics as of 2020 (before OurBigBook.com went live), he would upload an OurBigBook Markup website to GitHub Pages.

But there is one major problem with that: the entry barrier for new contributors is very large.

If they submit a pull request, Ciro has to review it, otherwise, no one will ever see it.

Our amazing website would allow the reader to add his own example of, say, The uncertainty principle, whenever they wants, under the appropriate section.

Then, people who want to learn more about it, would click on the "defined tag" by the article, and our amazing analytics would point them to the best such articles.