Arm product Updated 2025-07-16
ARPANET Updated 2025-07-16
Bibliography:
- some good interview excerpts with some of the pioneers on Glory of the Geeks
Arran Fernandez Updated 2025-07-16
Arrow of time Updated 2025-07-16
Arsenide Updated 2025-07-16
Arsenide compound Updated 2025-07-16
Art Updated 2025-07-16
Stuff that is beautiful but useless because it does not make food or houses cheaper.
Or from Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts:
Without technology, one cannot survive. Without art, one cannot live.
But that sure enough has a Jesus semi-precursor, and likely many others: man shall not live by bread alone.
1926 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
1922 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
Niels Bohr for the Bohr model.
1921 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
Einstein for the theoretical explanation of the photoelectric effect from 1905, notably published as on a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light by Einstein (1905).
The best articles by Ciro Santilli Updated 2025-07-16
These are the best articles ever authored by Ciro Santilli, most of them in the format of Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro posts update about new articles on his Twitter accounts.
Some random generally less technical in-tree essays will be present at: Section "Essays by Ciro Santilli".
- Trended on Hacker News:
- CIA 2010 covert communication websites on 2023-06-11. 190 points, a mild success.
- x86 Bare Metal Examples on 2019-03-19. 513 points. The third time something related to that repo trends. Hacker news people really like that repo!
- again 2020-06-27 (archive). 200 points, repository traffic jumped from 25 daily unique visitors to 4.6k unique visitors on the day
- How to run a program without an operating system? on 2018-11-26 (archive). 394 points. Covers x86 and ARM
- ELF Hello World Tutorial on 2017-05-17 (archive). 334 points.
- x86 Paging Tutorial on 2017-03-02. Number 1 Google search result for "x86 Paging" in 2017-08. 142 points.
- x86 assembly
- What does "multicore" assembly language look like?
- What is the function of the push / pop instructions used on registers in x86 assembly? Going down to memory spills, register allocation and graph coloring.
- Linux kernel
- What do the flags in /proc/cpuinfo mean?
- How does kernel get an executable binary file running under linux?
- How to debug the Linux kernel with GDB and QEMU?
- Can the sys_execve() system call in the Linux kernel receive both absolute or relative paths?
- What is the difference between the kernel space and the user space?
- Is there any API for determining the physical address from virtual address in Linux?
- Why do people write the
#!/usr/bin/envpython shebang on the first line of a Python script? - How to solve "Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"?
- Single program Linux distro
- QEMU
- gcc and Binutils:
- How do linkers and address relocation works?
- What is incremental linking or partial linking?
- GOLD (
-fuse-ld=gold) linker vs the traditional GNU ld and LLVM ldd - What is the -fPIE option for position-independent executables in GCC and ld? Concrete examples by running program through GDB twice, and an assembly hello world with absolute vs PC relative load.
- How many GCC optimization levels are there?
- Why does GCC create a shared object instead of an executable binary according to file?
- C/C++: almost all of those fall into "disassemble all the things" category. Ciro also does "standards dissection" and "a new version of the standard is out" answers, but those are boring:
- What does "static" mean in a C program?
- In C++ source, what is the effect of
extern "C"? - Char array vs Char Pointer in C
- How to compile glibc from source and use it?
- When should
static_cast,dynamic_cast,const_castandreinterpret_castbe used? - What exactly is
std::atomicin C++?. This answer was originally more appropriately entitled "Let's disassemble some stuff", and got three downvotes, so Ciro changed it to a more professional title, and it started getting upvotes. People judge books by their covers. notmain.o 0000000000000000 0000000000000017 W MyTemplate<int>::f(int) main.o 0000000000000000 0000000000000017 W MyTemplate<int>::f(int)Code 1.. From: What is explicit template instantiation in C++ and when to use it?nmoutputs showing that objects are redefined multiple times across files if you don't use template instantiation properly
- IEEE 754
- What is difference between quiet NaN and signaling NaN?
- In Java, what does NaN mean?
Without subnormals: +---+---+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+ exponent | ? | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | +---+---+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+ | | | | | | v v v v v v ----------------------------------------------------------------- floats * **** * * * * * * * * * * * * ----------------------------------------------------------------- ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ | | | | | | 0 | 2^-126 2^-125 2^-124 2^-123 | 2^-127 With subnormals: +-------+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+ exponent | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | +-------+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+ | | | | | v v v v v ----------------------------------------------------------------- floats * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ----------------------------------------------------------------- ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ | | | | | | 0 | 2^-126 2^-125 2^-124 2^-123 | 2^-127
- Computer science
- Algorithms
- Is it necessary for NP problems to be decision problems?
- Polynomial time and exponential time. Answered focusing on the definition of "exponential time".
- What is the smallest Turing machine where it is unknown if it halts or not?. Answer focusing on "blank tape" initial condition only. Large parts of it are summarizing the Busy Beaver Challenge, but some additions were made.
- Algorithms
- Git
| 0 | 4 | 8 | C | |-------------|--------------|-------------|----------------| 0 | DIRC | Version | File count | ctime ...| 0 | ... | mtime | device | 2 | inode | mode | UID | GID | 2 | File size | Entry SHA-1 ...| 4 | ... | Flags | Index SHA-1 ...| 4 | ... |tree {tree_sha} {parents} author {author_name} <{author_email}> {author_date_seconds} {author_date_timezone} committer {committer_name} <{committer_email}> {committer_date_seconds} {committer_date_timezone} {commit message}- How do I clone a subdirectory only of a Git repository?
- Python
- Web technology
- OpenGL
- Node.js
- Ruby on Rails
- POSIX
- What is POSIX? Huge classified overview of the most important things that POSIX specifies.
- Systems programming
- What do the terms "CPU bound" and "I/O bound" mean?
Figure 12. Plot of "real", "user" and "sys" mean times of the output of time for CPU-bound workload with 8 threads. Source. From: What do 'real', 'user' and 'sys' mean in the output of time?+--------+ +------------+ +------+ | device |>---------------->| function 0 |>----->| BAR0 | | | | | +------+ | |>------------+ | | | | | | | +------+ ... ... | | |>----->| BAR1 | | | | | | +------+ | |>--------+ | | | +--------+ | | ... ... ... | | | | | | | | +------+ | | | |>----->| BAR5 | | | +------------+ +------+ | | | | | | +------------+ +------+ | +--->| function 1 |>----->| BAR0 | | | | +------+ | | | | | | +------+ | | |>----->| BAR1 | | | | +------+ | | | | ... ... ... | | | | | | +------+ | | |>----->| BAR5 | | +------------+ +------+ | | | ... | | | +------------+ +------+ +------->| function 7 |>----->| BAR0 | | | +------+ | | | | +------+ | |>----->| BAR1 | | | +------+ | | ... ... ... | | | | +------+ | |>----->| BAR5 | +------------+ +------+Code 5.Logical struture PCIe device, functions and BARs. From: What is the Base Address Register (BAR) in PCIe?
- Electronics
- Raspberry Pi
Figure 13. . Image from answer to: How to hook up a Raspberry Pi via Ethernet to a laptop without a router? 
Figure 14. . Image from answer to: How to hook up a Raspberry Pi via Ethernet to a laptop without a router? 
Figure 15. . Image from answer to: How to emulate the Raspberry Pi 2 on QEMU? 
Figure 16. . Image from answer to: How to run a C program with no OS on the Raspberry Pi?
- Raspberry Pi
- Computer security
- Media
Video 2. . Source. The original question was deleted, lol...: How to programmatically synthesize music?- How to resize a picture using ffmpeg's sws_scale()?
- Is there any decent speech recognition software for Linux? ran a few examples manually on
vosk-apiand compared to ground truth.
- Eclipse
- Computer hardware
- Scientific visualization software
Figure 17. VisIt zoom in 10 million straight line plot with some manually marked points. Source. From: Section "Survey of open source interactive plotting software with a 10 million point scatter plot benchmark by Ciro Santilli"
- Numerical analysis
Video 3. Real-time heat equation OpenGL visualization with interactive mouse cursor using relaxation method by Ciro Santilli (2016)Source.
- Computational physics
- Register transfer level languages like Verilog and VHDL
- Verilog:
Figure 19. . See also: Section "Verilator interactive example"
- Verilog:
- Android
- Debugging
- Program optimization
- What is tail call optimization?
Figure 21. . Source. The answer compares gprof, valgrind callgrind, perf and gperftools on a single simple executable.
- Data
Figure 22. Mathematics dump of Wikipedia CatTree. Source. In this project, Ciro Santilli explored extracting the category and article tree out of the Wikipedia dumps.
- Mathematics
Figure 23. Diagram of the fundamental theorem on homomorphisms by Ciro Santilli (2020)Shows the relationship between group homomorphisms and normal subgroups.- Section "Formalization of mathematics": some early thoughts that could be expanded. Ciro almost had a stroke when he understood this stuff in his teens.
Figure 24. Simple example of the Discrete Fourier transform. Source. That was missing from Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_Fourier_transform!
- Network programming
- Physics
- Biology
- Quantum computing
- Section "Quantum computing is just matrix multiplication"
Figure 28. Visualization of the continuous deformation of states as we walk around the Bloch sphere represented as photon polarization arrows. From: Understanding the Bloch sphere.
- Bitcoin
- GIMP
Figure 29. GIMP screenshot part of how to combine two images side-by-side in GIMP?.
- Home DIY
Figure 30. Total_Blackout_Cassette_Roller_Blind_With_Curtains.Source. From: Section "How to blackout your window without drilling"
- China
A single exponential map is not enough to recover a simple Lie group from its algebra Updated 2025-07-16
Artificial general intelligence Updated 2025-07-16
Given enough computational power per dollar, AGI is inevitable, but it is not sure certain ever happen given the end of end of Moore's Law.
Alternatively, it could also be achieved genetically modified biological brains + brain in a vat.
Imagine a brain the size of a building, perfectly engineered to solve certain engineering problems, and giving hints to human operators + taking feedback from cameras and audio attached to the operators.
This likely implies transhumanism, and mind uploading.
Ciro Santilli joined the silicon industry at one point to help increase our computational capacity and reach AGI.
Ciro believes that the easiest route to full AI, if any, could involve Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games.
Artificial intelligence bibliography Updated 2025-07-16
Artificial neural network Updated 2025-07-16
ARTIQ Updated 2025-07-16
Artist Updated 2025-07-16
1918 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
Art trend Updated 2025-07-16
Art young Ciro Santilli consumed Updated 2025-07-16
Maybe those are genial. Maybe not. Nostalgia is just too strong to discern. Ciro still goes back to them for rest.
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.