Closed standard Updated +Created
ISO is the main culprit of this bullshit, some notable examples related to open source software:
The only low level thing that escaped this was OpenGL via Khronos, what heroes those people are.
How the hell are you supposed to develop an open source implementation of something that has a closed standard?
Not to mention open source test suites, that would be way too much to ask for, those always end up being made by some shady small companies that go bankrupt from time to time, see e.g. .
Closurism Updated +Created
Closurism is a term invented by Ciro Santilli to refer to content moderation policies that lock threads in online forums, preventing people from adding new comments from that point onward.
This is similar to deletionism but a bit less worse, as the pre-existing content is maintained. But new relevant content that comes up cannot be added in the future, so it is still bad.
The outcome of closurism is that new forum posts must then be made about up-to-date aspects of the topic. But then those may fail to reach the same PageRank, so most people never get the new information, or create new posts leading to useless duplication of work.
Cody'sLab Updated +Created
This dude is mind blowing. Big respect.
Some of the most impressive videos are the ones in which he goes and extracts metals from minerals himself all the way.
But God, the typography of the channel name is so insane! Why no space???
Shame the academic system wasn't compatible with him: www.reddit.com/r/codyslab/comments/f5531p/codys_qualifications/ Maybe there were safety issues involved though.
Video 1.
What's Been Going On With Cody'sLab? by Cody'sLab (2019)
Source. Cody opening up about some issues he's having life. Notably: being naughty and creative are correlated.
Coinbase Bitcoin hello world Updated +Created
Test buy 2023-04-10 in the UK:
  • fee: 0.99 pounds, minimum buy: 1.99 pounds
  • bought 10 pounds, minus 0.99 fee, totalled: 0.00039162 BTC (£8.92) presumably after further fees/spread
  • bitcoin price on Google on that day: 22,777.54 GBP / BTC
  • bitcoin transaction fees were about 2.7 BTC on that day
Sending 5 pounds to wallet 12dg2FaiZLp3VzDtLvwPinaKz41TQcEGbs
  • network fee: 0.00001989 BTC
  • total bitcoin cost: -0.00023928 BTC
  • new balance: 15,234 satoshi (39,162 - 23,928).
  • total spent: £5.45
  • time est.: about 30 minutes
This worked and I received 21939 satoshis (23928 - 1989) on Electrum on one of the outputs of transaction 1177268091cbeaacbcaac5dc4f6d1774c4ec11b4bcffafa555cd2775eafb954c.
Sending 1 satoshi back! The lowest fee in Electron is 1120 Satoshis targeting 25 blocks (4 hours). Let's do it. Failed, server forbids dust, minimum is 1000 satoshi. OK, sending 1000 satoshi, at 1139 fee.
ColdQuanta Updated +Created
Not a quantum computing pure-play, they also do sensing.
Collatz conjecture Updated +Created
Given stuff like arxiv.org/pdf/2107.12475.pdf on Erdős' conjecture on powers of 2, it feels like this one will be somewhere close to computer science/Halting problem issues than number theory. Who knows. This is suggested e.g. at The Busy Beaver Competition: a historical survey by Pascal Michel.
Collected Papers On Wave Mechanics by Deans (1928) Updated +Created
Published on Nature at www.nature.com/articles/122990a0 and therefore still paywalled there as of 2023, it's ridiculous.
In 2024 it will fall into the public domain in the US.
Comma-separated values Updated +Created
CommonMark Updated +Created
CommonMark is a good project. But its initial release method was not very nice, they first developed everything behind closed doors with the big adopters like GitHub and Stack Overflow, and only later released the thing read, thus wasting the time of people who were working on alternative in the meanwhile, e.g. github.com/karlcow/markdown-testsuite which Ciro contributed to: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.
Common Table Expression Updated +Created
rm -f tmp.sqlite
sqlite3 tmp.sqlite 'create table t(i integer)'
sqlite3 tmp.sqlite 'insert into t values (1), (2)'
sqlite3 tmp.sqlite 'with mycte as ( select * from t ) delete from mycte where i = 1'
sqlite3 tmp.sqlite 'select * from t'
Commutative property Updated +Created
Company with a semiconductor fabrication plant Updated +Created
A list of fabs can be seen at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants and basically summarizes all the companies that have fabs.
High-frequency trading as a form of Nirvana Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli once talked to a man who had been working on high-frequency trading for the last six years.
He was quite nice.
Ciro asked him in what way did he feel his job contributed to the benefit of society.
He replied that it didn't contribute at all. It was completely useless. More than that, it so completely useless, that it was even pure. A bit like advanced mathematics, but not even providing beauty for anybody outside of the company, since everything is a closely guarded trade secret, unlike mathematics which is normally published for the vanity recognition.
A great mind can work in the most useless branches of finance, without the desire to improve the world, nor make it worse. Not to compete, nor be afraid, nor anxious. A sand mandala.
Only being. Being, in the exact fraction of a moment where bid meets ask.
High Mountain and Flowing Water Updated +Created
Composed by Bo Ya for the guqin.
But there is an awesome guzheng adaptation which is perhaps better known in modern times, partly because it is not as long/slow. TODO origin.
Video 1.
High Mountain and Flowing Water performed on the guzheng by Xiang SiHua (2000)
Source. Performer Chinese name: 項斯華
History of Bitcoin Updated +Created
Compile MicroPython code for Micro Bit locally Updated +Created
To use a prebuilt firmware, you can just use uflash, tested on Ubuntu 22.04:
git clone https://github.com/bbcmicrobit/micropython
cd micropython
git checkout 7fc33d13b31a915cbe90dc5d515c6337b5fa1660
uflash examples/led_dance.py
What that does is:
To build your own firmware see:
Complete metric space Updated +Created
In plain English: the space has no visible holes. If you start walking less and less on each step, you always converge to something that also falls in the space.
One notable example where completeness matters: Lebesgue integral of is complete but Riemann isn't.
Computable function Updated +Created
History of polarization Updated +Created
Particularly cool is to see how Fresnel fully understood that light is somehow polarized, even though he did not know that it was made out of electromagnetism, clear indication of which only came with the Faraday effect in 1845.
spie.org/publications/fg05_p03_maluss_law:
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the only known way to generate polarized light was with a calcite crystal. In 1808, using a calcite crystal, Malus discovered that natural incident light became polarized when it was reflected by a glass surface, and that the light reflected close to an angle of incidence of 57° could be extinguished when viewed through the crystal. He then proposed that natural light consisted of the s- and p-polarizations, which were perpendicular to each other.

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