Silicon photonics Updated 2025-07-16
- youtu.be/29aTqLvRia8?t=714 GlobalFoundries seems to be one of the leaders at the time. E.g. quantum computing company PsiQuantum uses them. Part of this was from acquiring IBM's microelectronics division in 2014.
- youtu.be/t0yj4hBDUsc?t=566 mentions the paper Deep learning with coherent nanophotonic circuits
- youtu.be/t0yj4hBDUsc?t=440 block diagram
- youtu.be/t0yj4hBDUsc?t=456 Lightmatter lightmatter.co/ seems to be using an in-silicon Mach-Zehnder interferometer to do analog matrix multiplication with light. It is an actual analog computer element!
Silicon Photonics for Extreme Computing by Keren Bergman (2017)
Source. Silicon Graphics Updated 2025-07-16
This company is a bit like Sun Microsystems, you can hear a note of awe in the voice of those who knew it at its peak. This was a bit before Ciro Santilli's awakening.
Both of them and Sun kind of died in the same way, unable to move from the workstation to the personal computer fast enough, and just got killed by the scale of competitors who did, notably Nvidia for graphics cards.
Some/all Nintendo 64 games were developed on it, e.g. it is well known that this was the case for Super Mario 64.
Silicon Graphics Promo (1987)
Source. Highlights that this was one of the first widely available options for professional engineers/designers to do real-time 3D rendering for their designs. Presumably before it, you had to do use scripting to CPU render and do any changes incrementally by modifying the script. Signal (software) Updated 2025-09-09
Basic must haves:
Other cool stuff:
- sealed sender: signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ Nice!
TODO what's the fucking official discussion/feature request forum?
- community.signalusers.org appears to be the de-facto non-official one.
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/5372
- whispersystems.discoursehosting.net
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1318 closes and points to discoursehosting
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/549
- www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/lipo6z/community_signal_forum_vs_reddit/ gives some good history, says they pay for community.signalusers.org/ and have admin powers there.
PostgreSQL serialization failure Updated 2025-07-16
When using SQL REPEATABLE READ isolation level and SQL SERIALIZABLE isolation level, concurrent transactions may fail with a serialization failure, and then you might need to retry them. You server code or your ORM must always account for that.
Related questions:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/7705273/what-are-the-conditions-for-encountering-a-serialization-failure
- stackoverflow.com/questions/59351109/error-could-not-serialize-access-due-to-concurrent-update
- stackoverflow.com/questions/50797097/postgres-could-not-serialize-access-due-to-concurrent-update/51932824
Laplacian in Einstein notation Updated 2025-07-16
is by far the most important of because it is quantum mechanics states live, because the total probability of being in any state has to be 1!
has some crucially important properties that other don't (TODO confirm and make those more precise):
- it is the only that is Hilbert space because it is the only one where an inner product compatible with the metric can be defined:
- Fourier basis is complete for , which is great for solving differential equation
Kudos Updated 2025-07-16
Ahh, Ciro Santilli was certain this was some slang neologism, but it is actually Greek! So funny. Introduced into English in the 19th century according to: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kudo.
Hypercube Updated 2025-07-16
Convex hull of all (Cartesian product power) D-tuples, e.g. in 3D:
( 1, 1, 1)
( 1, 1, -1)
( 1, -1, 1)
( 1, -1, -1)
(-1, 1, 1)
(-1, 1, -1)
(-1, -1, 1)
(-1, -1, -1) Hydrogen line Updated 2025-07-16
PostgreSQL GIST Updated 2025-07-16
The highly underdocumented built-in module, that supports SQL spatial index and a lot more.
Quite horrendous as it only seems to work on geometric types and not existing columns. But why.
And it uses custom operatores, where standard operators would have been just fine for points...
Minimal runnable example with points:The index creation unfortunately took 100s, so it will not scale to 1B points very well whic his a shame.
set -x
time psql -c 'drop table if exists t'
time psql -c 'create table t(p point)'
time psql -c "insert into t select (point ('(' || generate_series || ',' || generate_series || ')')) from generate_series(1, 10000000)"
time psql -c 'create index on t using gist(p)'
time psql -c "select count(*) from t where p <@ box '(1000000,1000000),(9000000,2000000)'" How to teach Explain why the subject is beautiful Updated 2025-07-16
And if you really can't make money from a subject, there is only one other thing people crave: beauty.
You have to give the beauty motivations upfront, before boring people to death with endless prerequisites, otherwise no one will ever want to learn it.
How to store data in the Bitcoin blockchain Updated 2025-07-16
There are apparently two methods:
- in the script, e.g. as in the Genesis block message
- in output addresses
Specific implementations:
- eternitywall.it/ Eternity WallLaunched 2015 www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/eternity-wall-records-1150-documents-blockchain-first-year/Shutdown sometime after 2019, working archive: web.archive.org/web/20190417074034/https://eternitywall.it/ says "Sorry, the service is not properly working at the moment..." and last working message timestamped "April 16, 2019 8:02 PM GMT".
How can a chemical substance be unstable but not flammable? Updated 2025-07-16
Gridworld AI game Updated 2025-12-13
- github.com/google-deepmind/pushworld 2023 Too combinatorial, gripping makes it so much easier to move stuff around in the real world. But cool nonetheless.
History of the United States Updated 2025-07-16
History of special relativity Updated 2025-07-16
Bibliography:
- Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter III "Relativity, the special theory" has a good sketch as you may imagine.
Google X Updated 2025-07-16
Wikipedia reads:so basically exactly what Ciro Santilli wants to do on OurBigBook.com. Ominous.
Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.
Like any closed source "failure", everything was deleted. wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Knol
Good video game to watch Updated 2025-07-16
GitLab Updated 2025-07-16
See also: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.
GitHub's replacement of
master branch with main (2020) Updated 2025-07-16By GitHub around Black Lives Matter, due to a possible ludicrous relationship with slavery of black people:
For the love of God, the word "master" is much more general than black slavery. If you are going to ban it, you might as well ban the word "evil".
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.