Lowering and raising Updated 2025-07-16
Lowering means translating to a lower level representation.
Raising means translating to a higher level representation.
Decompilation is basically a synonym, or subset, of raising.
MakeCode Miro Bit Updated 2025-07-16
Microbit simulator using some Microsoft framework.
TODO the Python code from there does not seem to run on the microbit via uflash, because it is not MicroPython.
forum.makecode.com/t/help-understanding-local-build-options/6130 asks how to compile locally and suggests it is possible. Seems to require Yotta, so presumably compiles?
Presumably this is because Microsoft ported their MakeCode thing to the MicroBit, and the Micro Bit foundation accepted them.
E.g. there toggling a LED:
led.toggle(0, 0)
but the code that works locally is a completely differently named API set_pixel:
microbit.display.set_pixel(0, 0, )
Microsoft going all in on adopt extend extinguish from an early age!
Mamonas Assassinas Updated 2025-07-16
This incredibly foul mouthed band was incredibly funny.
Ciro Santilli was a bit young to understand the songs at the time, but the older boys were singing them, and he sang along. So maybe there is a nostalgia factor in play.
But it can't be just that. They are just too funny and brutal, even when Ciro re-listens to it as of 2020.
Many Brazilian religious cranks in were really happy when their plane crashed and killed all of them in 1996.
Best songs:
Management Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
DealBook Conference 2015 - Activist Investing by New York Times Events (2015)
Source. At this timestamp, Carl Icahn tells an anecdote of how he found that an entire 12-floor building of the American Car and Foundry Company which he had recently bought was not doing anything useful, and fired the entire building.
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter III "Relativity, the special theory" mentions that this fact and its importance (we want the laws of physics to look the same on all inertial frames, AKA Lorentz covariance) was first fully relized by poincaré in 1905.
And at that same time poincaré also immediately started to think about the other fundamental force then known: gravity, and off the bat realized that gravitational waves must exist. general relativities is probably just "the simplest way to make gravity Lorentz covariant".
Metallurgical Laboratory Updated 2025-07-16
The lab that made Chicago Pile-1, located in the University of Chicago. Metallurgical in this context basically as in "working with the metals uranium and plutonium".
Given their experience, they also designed the important X-10 Graphite Reactor and the B Reactor which were built in other locations.
Meteor (web framework) Updated 2025-07-16
The idea is cool. It really unifies front-and back end.
But Ciro Santilli feels the approach proposed by FeathersJS of being a glue between bigger third-party Front-end web frameworks like React and backend (object-relational mapping) is more promising and flexible.
Minkowski space Updated 2025-07-16
with a weird dot product-like operation called the Minkowski inner product.
Because the Minkowski inner product product is not positive definite, the norm induced by an inner product is a norm, and the space is not a metric space strictly speaking.
The name given to this type of space is a pseudometric space.
Basically, energy supply has to be modulated rather quickly, because we spend a lot sometimes, and very little other times.
Even not turning it off quickly enough is a problem, as it starts to generate free radicals which fuck you up.
If control came from the nucleus, it has no way to address different mitochondria. But it might be that only one of the mitochondria needs the change. If the nucleus tells all mitochondria to stop producing when only one is full, the others are going to say: "nope, I'm not full, continue producing!" and the one that need to stop will have its signal overridden by the others.
Mitochondrial protein import Updated 2025-07-16
The process that imports proteins encoded in the nuclear DNA and made in the cytosol into the mitochondria.
The term is mentioned e.g. in this article: www.nature.com/articles/nrm2959.
Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) suggests that proteins are somehow tagged with extra amino acids for this.
MNIST database Updated 2025-07-16
70,000 28x28 grayscale (1 byte per pixel) images of hand-written digits 0-9, i.e. 10 categories. 60k are considered training data, 10k are considered for test data.
Playing with it is the de-facto computer vision hello world.
It was on this dataset that Yann LeCun made great progress with the LeNet model. Running LeNet on MNIST has to be the most classic computer vision thing ever. See e.g. activatedgeek/LeNet-5 for a minimal and modern PyTorch educational implementation.
But it is important to note that as of the 2010's, the benchmark had become too easy for many applications. It is perhaps fair to say that the next big dataset revolution of the same importance was with ImageNet.
The dataset could be downloaded from yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/ but as of March 2025 it was down and seems to have broken from time to time randomly, so Wayback Machine to the rescue:
wget \
 https://web.archive.org/web/20120828222752/http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz \
 https://web.archive.org/web/20120828182504/http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/train-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz \
 https://web.archive.org/web/20240323235739/http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/t10k-images-idx3-ubyte.gz \
 https://web.archive.org/web/20240328174015/http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/t10k-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz
but doing so is kind of pointless as both files use some crazy single-file custom binary format to store all images and labels. OMG!
Figure 1.
MNIST image 1 of a '0'
.
Figure 2.
MNIST image 21 of a '0'
.
Figure 3.
MNIST image 3 of a '1'
.
Momentum operator Updated 2025-07-16
One dimension in position representation:
In three dimensions In position representation, we define it by using the gradient, and so we see that
Video 1.
Position and Momentum from Wavefunctions by Faculty of Khan (2018)
Source. Proves in detail why the momentum operator is . The starting point is determining the time derivative of the expectation value of the position operator.
Monotreme Updated 2025-07-16
The weirdest mammal clade: they lay fucking eggs. Only 5 known species alive as of 2020.
Eggs are basal: they simply didn't evolve out of what other reptiles do. From which we conclude that milk came before eggs stopped.
So this is the most basal subclade of mammals.
Etymology: means "single hole" in Greek, because like other reptiles it has a single hole for shit, pee and fucking: the cloaca.
Moon Updated 2025-07-16
As of 2023 the most important ones economicaly were:
The main application is magnetic resonance imaging. Both of these are have to be Liquid helium, i.e. they are not "high-temperature superconductor" which is a pain. One big strength they have is that they are metallic, and therefore can made into wires, which is crucial to be able to make electromagnetic coils out of them.
Lower teens, before discovering more hardcore stuff that is more genial and adult-venerable:So a base mix of what you migth expect from a regular male teenager born in 1989 Brazil.
OK, Ciro still comes back to those from time to time, he confesses. Nostalgia, nostalgia.
The following are also adult venerable though :-)
Video 1.
Killing In the Name by Rage Against The Machine (1992)
Source.
As mentioned on Wikipedia, it has only 8 lines of lyrics.
And the most satisfying "Ugh"s ever recorded on tape. Rap rock perfectly describes the genre.
MySQL Updated 2025-07-16
Create user for further logins without sudo askubuntu.com/questions/915585/how-to-login-mysql-shell-when-mysql-have-no-password/1325689#1325689:
sudo mysql -e "CREATE USER $USER"
Create test user with password:
sudo mysql -e 'CREATE USER user0 IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY "a"'
sudo mysql -e 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON database_name.* TO "user0"'
and login as that user:
mysql -u user0 -p
Login with password given on the command line:
mysql -u user0 -pmypassword
The IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password part is to overcome "Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server" when connecting from Node.js.
List users:
sudo mysql -e 'SELECT * FROM mysql.user'
View permissions for each user on each DB: serverfault.com/questions/263868/how-to-know-all-the-users-that-can-access-a-database-mysql
sudo mysql -e 'SELECT * FROM mysql.db'
List databases:
sudo mysql -e 'SHOW DATABASES'
Create database:
sudo mysql -e 'CREATE DATABASE mydb0'
Destroy database:
sudo mysql -e 'DROP DATABASE mydb0'
Show tables in database:
sudo mysql -e 'SHOW TABLES' mydb0
or:
sudo mysql -e 'SHOW TABLES FROM mydb0'
Neil Fernandez Updated 2025-07-16
“Especially my father. He was doing most of it and he is a savoury, strong character. He has strong beliefs about the world and in himself, and he was helping me a lot, even when I was at university as an undergraduate.”
An only child, Arran was born in 1995 in Glasgow, where his parents were studying at the time. His father has Spanish lineage, having a great grandfather who was a sailor who moved from Spain to St Vincent in the Carribean. A son later left the islands for the UK where he married an English woman. Arran’s mother is Norwegian.
“My father was writing and my mother is an economist. They both worked from home which also made things easier,” Arran says.
A bit like what Ciro Santilli feels about himself!
One of the articles says his father has a PhD. TODO where did he work? What's his PhD on? Photo: www.topfoto.co.uk/asset/1357880/
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-everyday-genius-pxsq5c50kt9:
Neil, a political economist, attended state and private schools in Hampshire but was also taught for a period at home by his mother.
It’s strange because for most people maths is a real turn-off, yet maths is all about patterns and children of two or three love patterns. It just shows that schools are doing something seriously wrong.”
Network switch Updated 2025-07-16
A switch is a box with a bunch of Ethernet wires coming into it:
+--------------------+
| +-+  +-+  +-+  +-+ |
| |1|  |2|  |3|  |4| |
| +-+  +-+  +-+  +-+ |
+--------------------+
Except that it doesn't have to be Ethernet, e.g. it would also be a Wi-Fi.
What the switch does is:
  • an Ethernet request came in from wire 1
  • decide which wire to send it out on, e.g. wire 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. You likely don't want to send it back through 1 where it came from.
After the destination is found, a confirmation is somehow sent back to the switch, which then learns which wire to send each MAC address to.
A switch is a bit like a router but it is a bit dumber/operates at a lower level: it basically operates only on MAC addresses, not on IP addresses.
The Internet service provider boxes most people have at home combines a switch for the local network and a router for the ISP communication.

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