Zhuangzi Updated 2025-07-16
- James Legge (1891):
- ctext.org/zhuangzi side by side with Chinese, one chapter per page. Dividies it into three parts:
- Inner Chapters
- Outer Chapters
- Miscellaneous Chapters
- ctext.org/zhuangzi side by side with Chinese, one chapter per page. Dividies it into three parts:
Yin and yang Updated 2025-07-16
Being proud of low level programming is stupid Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro's word of caution for 2019 aspiring system programmers: Should you waste your life with systems programming?
This is basically a direct consequence of backward design.
The higher the level you can operate at, the better.
The ideal level to operate at, and one of humankind's greatest ambitions is "AGI, make me money", the highest possible level.
Only go down a level when it seems necessary.
Bootloader Updated 2025-07-16
Operating system Updated 2025-07-16
Executable file format Updated 2025-07-16
Molecular biology feels like systems programming Updated 2025-07-16
Whenever Ciro Santilli learns about molecular biology, he can't help but to feel that it feels like programming, and notably systems programming and computer hardware design.
In some sense, the comparison is obvious: DNA is clearly a programmable medium like any assembly language, but still, systems programming did give Ciro some further feelings.
- The most important analogy perhaps is observability, or more precisely the lack of it. For the computer, this is described at: The lower level you go into a computer, the harder it is to observe things.And then, when Ciro started learning a bit about biology techniques, he started to feel the exact same thing.For example when he played with E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab, the main thing Ciro felt was: it is going to be hard to verify any of this data, because it is hard/impossible to know the concentration of each element in a cell as a function of time.More generally of course, this is exactly why making any biology discovery is so hard: we can't easily see what's going on inside the cell, and have to resort to indirect ways of doing so..This exact idea was highlighted by I should have loved biology by James Somers:
For a computer scientist, a biologist's methods can seem insane; the trouble comes from the fact that cells are too small, too numerous, too complex to analyze the way a programmer would, say in a step-by-step debugger.
And then just like in software, some of the methods biologists use to overcome the lack of visibility have direct software analogues:- add instrumentation to cells, e.g. GFP tagging comes to mind
- emulation, e.g. E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab
- The boot process is another one. E.g. in x86 the way that you start in 16-bit mode, largely compatible into the 70's, then move to 32-bit and finally 64, does feel a lot the way a earlier stages of embryo development looks more and more like more ancient animals.
Ciro likes to think that maybe that is why a hardcore systems programmer like Bert Hubert got into molecular biology.
Some other people who mention similar things:
- I should have loved biology by James Somers highlights the computer abstraction layer analogy between the two:
Virtualization Updated 2025-07-16
Systems programmer Updated 2025-07-16
Antisymmetric multilinear map Updated 2025-07-16
Change sign if you swap two input values.
Definite matrix Updated 2025-07-16
Skew-symmetric matrix Updated 2025-07-16
WTF is a skew? "Antisymmetric" is just such a better name! And it also appears in other definitions such as antisymmetric multilinear map.
Symmetric bilinear form Updated 2025-07-16
Hermitian form Updated 2025-07-16
The prototypical example of it is the complex dot product.
Note that this form is neither strictly symmetric, it satisfies:where the over bar indicates the complex conjugate, nor is it linear for complex scalar multiplication on the second argument.
Bibliography:
Quadratic form Updated 2025-07-16
Multivariate polynomial where each term has degree 2, e.g.:is a quadratic form because each term has degree 2:but e.g.:is not because the term has degree 3.
There is a 1-to-1 relationship between quadratic forms and symmetric bilinear forms. In matrix representation, this can be written as:where contains each of the variabes of the form, e.g. for 2 variables:
Strictly speaking, the associated bilinear form would not need to be a symmetric bilinear form, at least for the real numbers or complex numbers which are commutative. E.g.:But that same matrix could also be written in symmetric form as:so why not I guess, its simpler/more restricted.
Positive definite symmetric bilinear form Updated 2025-07-16
Skew-symmetric bilinear map Updated 2025-07-16
Subcase of antisymmetric multilinear map:
Skew-symmetric bilinear form Updated 2025-07-16
Supervised learning Updated 2025-07-16
Unsupervised learning Updated 2025-07-16
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.