Vector graphics Updated 2025-07-16
Smaller files, scalable image size, and editability. Why would you use anything else for programmatically generated images?!?!
Higgs boson Updated 2025-07-16
Initially there were mathematical reasons why people suspected that all boson needed to have 0 mass as is the case for photons a gluons, see Goldstone's theorem.
However, experiments showed that the W boson and the Z boson both has large non-zero masses.
So people started theorizing some hack that would fix up the equations, and they came up with the higgs mechanism.
Box2D Updated 2025-07-16
Wikipedia dumps Updated 2025-07-16
Per-table dumps created with mysqldump and listed at: dumps.wikimedia.org/. Most notably, for the English Wikipedia: dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
The tables are "documented" under: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_layout, e.g. the central "page" table: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Page_table. But in many cases it is impossible to deduce what fields are from those docs.
William Shockley Updated 2025-07-16
This dude is the charicature of the evil scientist! It is so funny. Brilliant, ambitious and petty!
Quantum compiler benchmark Updated 2025-07-16
These appear to be benchmarks that don't involve running anything concretely, just compiling and likely then counting gates:
Video 1.
The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire
. Source.
2017. Directed by Michael Oswald. Adam Curtis vibes.
Some notable points:
XPath Updated 2025-07-16
XPath kind of died with the rise of CSS selectors around the beginnning of the 2010's. But that is a shame. XPath is a good standard, and was generally more powerful than CSS selectors for many many years.
House mouse Updated 2025-07-16
SELECT FOR UPDATE Updated 2025-07-16
An example where SELECT FOR UPDATE is a good solution to an use case can be seen at: nodejs/sequelize/raw/parallel_select_and_update.js.
The horrors of Sequelize Updated 2025-07-16
Microsoft Updated 2025-07-16
And also their monopolistic practices: United States v. Microsoft Corp.
However, like all big tech companies with infinite money, they do end up doing some cool things in their research department, Microsoft Research, notably for Ciro Santilli being:

There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.