Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Transaction retries are inevitable, as some sQL isolation levels

Doesn't seem to have any simple built-in mechanism?

First Amazon hire, wrote and led the team that wrote v1.

He looks like an older and more experienced dude compared to Bezos at the time.

Bibliography:
. www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/2/ also mentions that unlike California, there's no sales tax in the state of Washington, which is important for selling books.

This experiment seems to be really hard to do, and so there aren't many super clear demonstration videos with full experimental setup description out there unfortunately.

Wikipedia has a good summary at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment#Overview

For single-photon non-double-slit experiments see: single photon production and detection experiments. Those are basically a pre-requisite to this.

photon experiments:

electron experiments: single electron double slit experiment.

Non-elementary particle:

On The Busy Beaver Challenge: bbchallenge.org/68329601

I copied this grading scale mechanism from a failed Google interview ;-)

One problem with it is that I am always very hesitant to put a 5 on anything, who can not look at the documentation?

It is also hard to scope things right. Who can claim to be a C++ or Linux kernel expert, even if you wrote a book about it, since those are such humongous topics?

As a result, I haven't updated this in a while, and things may be out of date.

If your project does something that interests me, I can what it takes to contribute. Tell me what I must know, how long I have to learn it, and I'll call you back when I've mastered it.

This is perhaps slightly worse than the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but still amazing.

Some difficult points:

Related:

A network interface controller that does more than just the base OSI model protocols, notably in a programmable way.

Quite good, Ciro Santilli played this a lot in 2021/2022, his user ID: ofo5fNy7wRNC1Cw94YVB4KMOW5f2.

The physics not as good as the original Mario Kart 64, and it is notably missing jump gliding, and generally not as sharp! But it is really not bad.

Some of the weapons were too useless that you are just better firing them straight away at wall immediately to get something better, they could have a little better balancing there. I'm talking about you gatling that takes 10 seconds to finish firing, and does not kill enemies immediately. You are better off just firing that gun immediately when you get it to be able to get another gun ASAP. They seem to have done some balancing there however.

It had no chat option, but in a way it was cool to be forced to communicate non-verbally with people whose usernames you got familiar with. Funny you can love people like that, without ever talking to them. The best way of doing so being tea-bagging by going back and forth on a player after winning.

Performance was sometimes a problem. When Ciro tried it again on December 2022, it was unplayable due to the impossibly large lag. Things were much better again in 2023 however it seems.

Looking for related games:

Bought by Illumina for 600 million in 2007 for 600 million dollars.

This is one of the prime examples of Europe's decline.

Instead of trying to dominate the sequencing market and gain trillions of dollars from it, they local British early stage investors were more than happy to get a 20x return on their small initial investments, and sold out to the Americans who will then make the real profit.

And now Solexa doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page, while Illumina is set out to be the next Microsoft. What a disgrace.

Here are some good articles about the company:

Cambridge visitors can still visit the Panton Arms pub, which was the location of the legendary "hey we should talk" founders meeting, chosen due to its proximity to the chemistry department of the University of Cambridge.

In 2021 the founders were awarded the Breakthrough Prize. The third person awarded was Pascal Mayer. He was apparently at Serono Pharmaceutical Research Institute at the time of development. They do have a wiki page unlike Solexa: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serono. They paid a 700 million fine in 2005 in the United States, and sold out in 2006 to Merck for 10 billion USD.

Bibliography:

As always, the best way to get some intuition about an equation is to solve it for some simple cases, so let's give that a try with different fixed potentials.

TODO. Can't find it easily. Anyone?

This is closely linked to the Pauli exclusion principle.

What does a particle even mean, right? Especially in quantum field theory, where two electrons are just vibrations of a single electron field.

Another issue is that if we consider magnetism, things only make sense if we add special relativity, since Maxwell's equations require special relativity, so a non approximate solution for this will necessarily require full quantum electrodynamics.

As mentioned at lecture 1 youtube.com/watch?video=H3AFzbrqH68&t=555, relativistic quantum mechanical theories like the Dirac equation and Klein-Gordon equation make no sense for a "single particle": they must imply that particles can pop in out of existence.

Bibliography:

Once upon a time, when Ciro Santilli had a job, he had a programming problem.

A senior developer came over, and rather than trying to run and modify the code like an idiot, which is what Ciro Santilli usually does (see also experimentalism remarks at Section "Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory"), he just stared at the code for about 10 minutes.

We knew that the problem was likely in a particular function, but it was really hard to see why things were going wrong.

After the 10 minutes of examining every line in minute detail, he said:and truly, that was the cause.

And so, Ciro was enlightened.

Why should I care when I can calculate new x and new time with Lorentz transformation?

Answer: it can give some qualitative intuition on what is larger/smaller happens before/after based only on arguably more intuitive geometric considerations, without requiring you to do any calculations, see e.g. Figure "Spacetime diagram illustrating how faster-than-light travel implies time travel".

The first type of device that allowed sending Morse code without wires, as opposed to the wired electrical telegraph that previously existed.

Naval communications was one of the first major applications, as you can't have wires on boats!

Wireless voice transmission came about with modulation.

Ciro Santilli's preferred visualization of the real projective plane is a small variant of the standard "lines through origin in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$".

Take a open half sphere e.g. a sphere but only the points with $z>0$.

Each point in the half sphere identifies a unique line through the origin.

Then, the only lines missing are the lines in the x-y plane itself.

For those sphere points in the circle on the x-y plane, you should think of them as magic poins that are identified with the corresponding antipodal point, also on the x-y, but on the other side of the origin. So basically you you can teleport from one of those to the other side, and you are still in the same point.

Ciro likes this model because then all the magic is confined just to the $z=0$ part of the model, and everything else looks exactly like the sphere.

It is useful to contrast this with the sphere itself. In the sphere, all points in the circle $z=0$ are the same point. But this is not the case for the projective plane. You cannot instantly go to any other point on the $z=0$ by just moving a little bit, you have to walk around that circle.

I like relativistic quantum mechanics.

Best mathematical explanation: Section "Spin comes naturally when adding relativity to quantum mechanics".

Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015) chapter 3.9 "Elementary particles" has an amazing summary of the preceding chapters the spin value has a relation to the representations of the Lorentz group, which encodes the spacetime symmetry that each particle observes. These symmetries can be characterized by small integer numbers:As usual, we don't know why there aren't elementary particles with other spins, as we could construct them.

Bibliography: