Coursera Updated +Created
Some courses at least allow you to see material for free, e.g.: www.coursera.org/learn/quantum-optics-single-photon/lecture/UYjLu/1-1-canonical-quantization. Lots of video focus as usual for MOOCs.
It is extremely hard to find the course materials without enrolling, even if enrolling for free! By trying to make money, they make their website shit.
The comment section does have a lot of activity: www.coursera.org/learn/statistical-mechanics/discussions/weeks/2! Nice. And works like a proper issue tracker. But it is also very hidden.
Laszlo's pizzas Updated +Created
On May 19, 2020, Lazlo announced on the Bitcoin Forum at: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.msg1195
I'll pay 10,000 Bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I'm aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for bitcoins where I don't have to order or prepare it myself, kind of like ordering a 'breakfast platter' at a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you're happy!
I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc.. just standard stuff no weird fish topping or anything like that. I also like regular cheese pizzas which may be cheaper to prepare or otherwise acquire.
If you're interested please let me know and we can work out a deal.Ciro Santilli remembers his father always telling him how when Ciro was small, he would try to grasp the value of money by converting it into how many pizzas he could buy. Well, at least he was not alone.
User bitcoin2paysafe then asks the fundamental practical question:
In which country do you live?
and Lazslo replies:
Jacksonville, Florida
zip code 32224
United States
User ender_x then points out afterward:
10,000... Thats quite a bit.. you could sell those on www.bitcoinmarket.com/ for $41 USD right now..
so it is a slightly bad deal even then!
Three days later Lazlo's asks again on the thread:
So nobody wants to buy me pizza? Is the bitcoin amount I'm offering too low?
and one day later he confirms that the sale was made without naming the buyer:
I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza
Thanks jercos!
where "jercos" is presumably the Bitcoin Forum username of the buyer. en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Jercos gives his identity as Jeremy Sturdivant.
www.thesun.co.uk/news/15049566/other-bitcoin-pizza-jeremy-sturdivant-fortune-hanyecz/ mentions Jeremy sold too early however:
The cryptocash disappeared when Sturdivant used it to "cover expenses" while travelling the US with his girlfriend.
Figure 1.
Laszlo's Papa's Specialty pizzas
. Source. The most famous of Laszlo's pizzas, originally published on his website: web.archive.org/web/20210217220810/http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/lightning-pizza/.
Figure 2.
Laszlo's secondary pizza event
. Source. web.archive.org/web/20210217220810/http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/lightning-pizza/ documents another pizza event, as we have different pizza boxes from the most widely known one: web.archive.org/web/20211219130004/http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/pizza/ Only image thumbs are archived however. web.archive.org/web/20211016070745/https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15049566/other-bitcoin-pizza-jeremy-sturdivant-fortune-hanyecz/ however shows a large version that The Sun got their hands on before the takedown.
heliacal.net is presumably his personal website? But is was down as of 2023. But we have Wayback Machine archives of course :-) Latest working one of that page 2021: web.archive.org/web/20211219130004/http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/pizza/ And some other stalking:
Laszlo is truly, literally, the nerd who got very very very lucky!!!
On June 12, 2010 Laszlo re-offers:
This is an open offer by the way.. I will trade 10,000 BTC for 2 of these pizzas any time as long as I have the funds (I usually have plenty). If anyone is interested please let me know. The exchange is favorable for anyone who does it because the 2 pizzas are only about 25 dollars total, maybe 30 if you give the guy a nice tip. If you get me the upgraded extra large ones or something, I can throw in some more bitcoins, just let me know and we'll work something out.
My 1 year old daughter really enjoys pizza too! She just smears it all over her face if you give her a whole slice, but she does eventually manage to get most of it in her mouth (minus a few loose toppings of course).
and on August 4 user MoonShadow takes him up:
An open offer, you say? It's been a while since you had some pizza. Feeling a craving, Laszlo?
but finally Laszlo withdrawls the offer:
Well I didn't expect this to be so popular but I can't really afford to keep doing it since I can't generate thousands of coins a day anymore. Thanks to everyone who bought me pizza already but I'm kind of holding off on doing any more of these for now.
so we understand that the sales happened multiple times!!! Also, we understand that he was probably a miner.
TODO list all of the potential sales.
Manifesto Updated +Created
Education has become an expensive bureaucratic exercise, completely dissociated from reality and usefulness.
It completely rejects what the individual wants to achieve, and instead attempts to mass homogenize and test people through endless hours of boredom.
And the only goals it achieves are testing student's resilience to stress, and facilitating the finding of sexual partners. True learning is completely absent.
Teachers only teach because they have to do it to get paid, not for passion. Their only true incentive is co-authoring papers.
We reject this bullshit.
Education is meant to help us, the students, achieve our goals through passionate learning.
And, we, the students, are individuals, with different goals and capabilities.
The way we protest is to publish the knowledge from University for free, on the Internet, so that anyone can access it.
And we do this is a law-abiding way, without copyright infringement, so that no one can legally take it down.
We come to our courses just for the useless roll calls. But we already know all the subject better than the "teacher" on the very first day.
And we are already more famous than the "teacher" online, and through the Internet have already taught more way way more people than they ever will.
The effect of this is to demoralize the entire school system at all levels, until only one conclusion is possible: implosion.
And from the ashes of the old system, we will build a new one, which does only what matters with absolute efficiency: help the individual students achieve their goals.
A system in which the only reason why university exist will be to allow the most knowledgeable students to access million dollar laboratory equipment, and to pay the most prolific content creators so they can continue content creating.
No more useless courses. No more useless tests. Only passion, usefulness and focus.
OurBigBook Web Updated +Created
The website system that runs OurBigBook.com. For further information see:Relies on the OurBigBook Library to compile OurBigBook Markup.
runwayml/stable-diffusion Updated +Created
Conda install is a bit annoying, but gets the job done. The generation quality is very good.
Someone should package this better for end user "just works after Conda install" image generation, it is currently much more of a library setup.
Tested on Amazon EC2 on a g5.xlarge machine, which has an Nvidia A10G, using the AWS Deep Learning Base GPU AMI (Ubuntu 20.04) image.
First install Conda as per Section "Install Conda on Ubuntu", and then just follow the instructions from the README, notably the Reference sampling script section.
git clone https://github.com/runwayml/stable-diffusion
cd stable-diffusion/
git checkout 08ab4d326c96854026c4eb3454cd3b02109ee982
conda env create -f environment.yaml
conda activate ldm
mkdir -p models/ldm/stable-diffusion-v1/
wget -O models/ldm/stable-diffusion-v1/model.ckpt https://huggingface.co/CompVis/stable-diffusion-v-1-4-original/resolve/main/sd-v1-4.ckpt
python scripts/txt2img.py --prompt "a photograph of an astronaut riding a horse" --plms
This took about 2 minutes and generated 6 images under outputs/txt2img-samples/samples, includining an image outputs/txt2img-samples/grid-0000.png which is a grid montage containing all the six images in one:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Runwayml_stable-diffusion_a-photograph-of-an-astronaut-riding-a-horse.png
TODO how to change the number of images?
A quick attempt at removing their useless safety features (watermark and NSFW text filter) is:
diff --git a/scripts/txt2img.py b/scripts/txt2img.py
index 59c16a1..0b8ef25 100644
--- a/scripts/txt2img.py
+++ b/scripts/txt2img.py
@@ -87,10 +87,10 @@ def load_replacement(x):
 def check_safety(x_image):
     safety_checker_input = safety_feature_extractor(numpy_to_pil(x_image), return_tensors="pt")
     x_checked_image, has_nsfw_concept = safety_checker(images=x_image, clip_input=safety_checker_input.pixel_values)
-    assert x_checked_image.shape[0] == len(has_nsfw_concept)
-    for i in range(len(has_nsfw_concept)):
-        if has_nsfw_concept[i]:
-            x_checked_image[i] = load_replacement(x_checked_image[i])
+    #assert x_checked_image.shape[0] == len(has_nsfw_concept)
+    #for i in range(len(has_nsfw_concept)):
+    #    if has_nsfw_concept[i]:
+    #        x_checked_image[i] = load_replacement(x_checked_image[i])
     return x_checked_image, has_nsfw_concept


@@ -314,7 +314,7 @@ def main():
                             for x_sample in x_checked_image_torch:
                                 x_sample = 255. * rearrange(x_sample.cpu().numpy(), 'c h w -> h w c')
                                 img = Image.fromarray(x_sample.astype(np.uint8))
-                                img = put_watermark(img, wm_encoder)
+                                # img = put_watermark(img, wm_encoder)
                                 img.save(os.path.join(sample_path, f"{base_count:05}.png"))
                                 base_count += 1
but that produced 4 black images and only two unfiltered ones. Also likely the lack of sexual training data makes its porn suck, and not in the good way.
Sodium Updated +Created
Carbon Updated +Created
Interesting AtomSea & EMBII uploads Updated +Created
tx e3e37ed5c1de2631c147bd39429e42ff634e95b7d72423bc32d6c6b9d8eef8ee (2014-07-01):
For my first official Journal entry I've decided to archive some old poetry. Here are a few of the computational poems I've created using cyphers.
Figure 1.
Shiemaa&Vincent.jpg
. Source.
Message:
"Even if we tried to do it on purpose, never would have we succeeded." My beloved Vincent.
TODO identify Shiemaa and Vincent.
Figure 2.
BikeLady.jpg
. Source. Bike Lady by Allen Lee Vandever. tx 2c4b9497af8c0c0eb9383357b40c3de33dba0b4f481099a32719f2b9036da8e7, block 319927 (2014-09-10)
Figure 3.
Arecibo_message.svg
. Source.
An "artificially" colored visualization of the Arecibo message ripped from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arecibo_message.svg (with attribution).
The cool thing about this image is that it highlights the striking parallels between the encoding of the Arecibo message with crypto graffiti, because in both cases people were creating undocumented new ways of communicating with strangers on a new medium in those early blockchain days.
The associated message contains the Arecibo message as ASCII 0's and 1's. When properly cut at the newlines, they draw the message as ASCII art, as the original Arecibo encoding intends, here's a version with the 0's replaced by spaces to make it more readabale:
      1 1 1 1
  1 1     1 1       1
1   1   1   1  1 11  1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1  1  1

            11
          11 1
          11 1
          1 1 1
          11111

11    111   11    11
1             11  1
11 1   11   11    11 1
11111 11111 11111 11111

    1                 1

    1                 1
11111             11111

11    11    111   11
1       1         1
11 1    11   111  11 1
11111 11111 11111 11111

    1      11         1
          11
    1     11          1
11111     11      11111
          11
  1        1        1
    1      11       1
    11    11      1
      11   1    11
          11  11
      11   1    11
    11    11      1
    1      1        1
  1       11        1
  1        11        1
  1         1       1
  1       1       1
    1            11
    11        11
  1   111 1 11
  1       1
  1     11111
  1    1 111 1  1 11 11
      1  111  1  111111
1 111    111     11 111
          1 1     111 11
  1      1 1     111111
  1      1 1     11
  1     11 11

  111     1
  111 1 1   1 1 1 1 1 1
  111         1 1 1 1
              1 1
        11111
      111111111
    111       111
    11           11
  11 1         1 11
  11  11       11  11
  1   1 1     1 1   1
  1   1  1   1  1   1
      1   1 1   1
      1    1    1
      1         1
        1  1 1
  1111  11111 1  1111
Figure 4.
He sleeps in a temple.jpg
. TODO identify. Novel work by EMBII? TODO we need a geocacher to find it, some city in North America no doubt. tx 460ed23bea89176cdfe18e13fce51ad5386ad8e3e1f7d6f5b4711b3be97b0502, block 360565 (2015-06-12)
Figure 5.
PIA17563.jpg
. Source.
Associated message:
NASA: A purple nebula, in honor of #Prince, who passed away today. Image: Crab #Nebula, as Seen by Herschel and #Hubble Image credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS/MESS Key Programme Supernova Remnant Team; #NASA, ESA and Allison Loll/Jeff Hester (Arizona State University) #PIA17563
Figure 6.
Dr_Craig_Wright.jpg
. Source.
The image is present e.g. at: www.kitguru.net/channel/jon-martindale/australian-man-claims-he-is-satoshi-nakamoto-bitcoin-creator/ It was inscribed about two months after Craig publicly claimed that he is Satoshi.
This is a relatively unusual AtomSea & EMBII upload as it does not have the common toplevel transaction, everything, text + image fits into a single transaction. This is perhaps why the image is relatively low resolution to have a smaller size.
Figure 7.
YellowRobot.jpg
. Source.
Photography by EMBII, original art by TODO.
The associated message reads:
Chiharu and I found this little yellow robot while exploring Chicago. It will be covered by tar or eventually removed but this tribute will remain. N 41.880778 E -87.629210
This is one of Ciro's favorite AtomSea & EMBII uploads. This is the cutest thing ever, and perfectly encapsules the "medium as an artform" approach to blockchain art. More Chiharu stalking at: ILoveYouMore.jpg.
At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1615389973343268871 EMBII announced that he would be giving off shares of that image on a Bitcoin-based NFT sale system he's making called Sup!?, and in December 2023 gave some shares to Ciro Santilli. Amen.
Other possibly novel EMBII street photography:
Audio:
Dizi (instrument) Updated +Created
German learned society Updated +Created
Guzheng Updated +Created
Helium Updated +Created
IonQ Updated +Created
Video 1.
Quantum Simulation and Computation with Trapped Ions by Christopher Monroe (2021)
Source.
Video 2.
Quantum Computing with Trapped Ions by Christopher Monroe (2018)
Source. Co-founder of IonQ. Cool dude. Starts with basic background we already know now. Mentions that there is some relationship between atomic clocks and trapped ion quantum computers, which is interesting. Then he goes into turbo mode, and you get lost unless you're an expert! Video 1. "Quantum Simulation and Computation with Trapped Ions by Christopher Monroe (2021)" is perhaps a better watch.
Overdetermination of Maxwell's equations Updated +Created
As seen from explicit scalar form of the Maxwell's equations, this expands to 8 equations, so the question arises if the system is over-determined because it only has 6 functions to be determined.
As explained on the Wikipedia page however, this is not the case, because if the first two equations hold for the initial condition, then the othe six equations imply that they also hold for all time, so they can be essentially omitted.
It is also worth noting that the first two equations don't involve time derivatives. Therefore, they can be seen as spacial constraints.
TODO: the electric field and magnetic field can be expressed in terms of the electric potential and magnetic vector potential. So then we only need 4 variables?
State of the art Updated +Created
64-bit architectures Updated +Created
64 bits is still too much address for current RAM sizes, so most architectures will use less bits.
x86_64 uses 48 bits (256 TiB), and legacy mode's PAE already allows 52-bit addresses (4 PiB). 56-bits is a likely future candidate.
12 of those 48 bits are already reserved for the offset, which leaves 36 bits.
If a 2 level approach is taken, the best split would be two 18 bit levels.
But that would mean that the page directory would have 2^18 = 256K entries, which would take too much RAM: close to a single-level paging for 32 bit architectures!
Therefore, 64 bit architectures create even further page levels, commonly 3 or 4.
x86_64 uses 4 levels in a 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 scheme, so that the upper level only takes up only 2^9 higher level entries.
The 48 bits are split equally into two disjoint parts:
----------------- FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF
Top half
----------------- FFFF8000 00000000


Not addressable


----------------- 00007FFF FFFFFFFF
Bottom half
----------------- 00000000 00000000
A 5-level scheme is emerging in 2016: software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/2b/80/5-level_paging_white_paper.pdf which allows 52-bit addresses with 4k pagetables.
Cultured food Updated +Created
Cycle of an element of a group Updated +Created
Take the element and apply it to itself. Then again. And so on.
In the case of a finite group, you have to eventually reach the identity element again sooner or later, giving you the order of an element of a group.
The continuous analogue for the cycle of a group are the one parameter subgroups. In the continuous case, you sometimes reach identity again and to around infinitely many times (which always happens in the finite case), but sometimes you don't.
Oxygen Updated +Created
Aluminium Updated +Created

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