You aren't gonna need it Updated 2025-07-16
Sometimes you are really certain that something is a required substep for another thing that is coming right afterwards.
When things are this concrete, fine, just do the substep.
But you have to always beware of cases where "I'm sure this will be needed at some unspecified point in the future", because such points tends to never happen.
YAGNI is so fundamental, there are several closely related concepts to it:
Figure 1.
xkcd 2730: Code Lifespan
. Source.
Bash HOWTO Updated 2025-07-16
Bat Updated 2025-07-16
As of 2020, account for about 20% of the known mammal species!!! www.sciencefocus.com/nature/why-are-there-so-many-species-of-bat/ mentions some reasons:
  • they can fly, so they can move out further
  • their eating habits are highly specialized
Battlecode Updated 2025-07-16
Some mechanics:
  • inter agent communication
  • compute power is limited by limiting Java bytecode count execution per bot per cycle
Video 1.
Battlecode Final Tournament 2023
. Source.
Video 2.
Introduction to Battlecode by MIT OpenCourseWare (2014)
Source.
gnuplot Updated 2025-07-16
Tends to be Ciro Santilli's first attempt for quick and dirty graphing: github.com/cirosantilli/gnuplot-cheat.
domain-specific language. When it get the jobs done, it is in 3 lines and it feels great.
When it doesn't, you Google for an hours, and then you give up in frustration, and fall back to Matplotlib.
YouTube poop Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Kazoo Kid - Trap Remix by Mike Diva (2016)
Source.
Video 2.
Ravioli Remix: Black and Yellow by Wiz Krablifa by TheDoubleAgent (2015)
Source.
Video 3.
Afraid of Technology by adarkenedroom (2008)
Source. TODO source show, appears "Brass Eye", TODO episode www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/jpyfi/technology_scares_the_crap_out_of_me/
How to cite a book on Wikipedia Updated 2025-07-16
A good big sample definition:
<ref name="googleStory">{{cite book |last1=Vise |first1=David |author-link1=David A. Vise |last2=Malseed |first2=Mark |author-link2=Mark Malseed |title=The Google Story |date=2008 |publisher=Delacorte Press |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780385342728}}</ref>
There is also title-link to link to a wiki page. But it is incompatible with url= for Internet Archive Open Library links which is a shame.
Ytterbium Updated 2025-07-16
Not "Yt" because that is already "Yttrium". God.
Zatoichi effect Updated 2025-07-16
This is a neologism by Ciro Santilli, it refers to the fact that Zatoichi was not fully blind, but extremely hard of sight, which makes him:
  • too capable for the blind people, who did not trust him
  • too incapable for non-blind people, who despised him
and metaphorically refers to similar situations where a person or group of people are in the middle of two groups and not part of either of them.
A related thing that comes to mind is Aum Shinrikyo's Prophet Shoko Asahara, who was semi blind, and would bully the fully blind people of his school for blind people.
On Ubuntu 20.10, just:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=subtitle.srt" output.mp4
To change font size: stackoverflow.com/questions/21363334/how-to-add-font-size-in-subtitles-in-ffmpeg-video-filter
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=subtitle.srt:force_style='Fontsize=64'" output.mp4
The default appears to be 24, so just multiply that by whatever seems like a reasonable factor.
Note howver that .ass subtitle files can contain style information, which ffmpeg respects. Aegisub can produce and preview such styles, making .ass one of the best options.
Physicist Updated 2025-07-16
Figure 1.
xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity
. Source.
Shelter Island Conference Updated 2025-07-16
Sponsored by National Academy of Sciences, located in Long Island.
This is where Isidor Rabi exposed experiments carried out on the anomalous magnetic dipole moment and Willis Lamb presented his work on the Lamb shift.
It was a very private and intimate conference, that gathered the best physicists of the area, one is reminded of the style of the Solvay Conference.
Beta decay Updated 2025-07-16
Uranium emits them, you can see their mass to charge ratio under magnetic field and so deduce that they are electrons.
Caused by weak interaction TODO why/how.
The emitted electron kinetic energy is random from zero to a maximum value. The rest goes into a neutrino. This is how the neutrino was first discovered/observed indirectly. This is well illustrated in a decay scheme such as Figure "caesium-137 decay scheme".
better-sqlite3 Node.js package Updated 2025-07-16
As claimed on their README, their operation truly appears to be 10x faster than the node-sqlite package!! It is insane!! How can that other package still exist at all?
The only big problem was the lack of ORM, but people are looking into that by adding it to Sequelize:
Zeeman effect Updated 2025-07-16
Split in the spectral line when a magnetic field is applied.
Non-anomalous: number of splits matches predictions of the Schrödinger equation about the number of possible states with a given angular momentum. TODO does it make numerical predictions?
www.pas.rochester.edu/~blackman/ast104/zeeman-split.html contains the hello world that everyone should know: 2p splits into 3 energy levels, so you see 3 spectral lines from 1s to 2p rather than just one.
p splits into 3, d into 5, f into 7 and so on, i.e. one for each possible azimuthal quantum number.
It also mentions that polarization effects become visible from this: each line is polarized in a different way. TODO more details as in an experiment to observe this.
Video 1.
Experimental physics - IV: 22 - Zeeman effect by Lehrportal Uni Gottingen (2020)
Source.
This one is decent. Uses a cadmium lamp and an etalon on an optical table. They see a more or less clear 3-split in a circular interference pattern,
They filter out all but the transition of interest.
Video 2. Source. Does not appear to achieve a crystal clear split unfortunately.

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