Magic the gathering's banning of 7 cards due to "racism" (2020) Updated +Created
Magnetic dipole Updated +Created
A tiny idealized magnet! It is a very good model if you have a small strong magnet interacting with objects that are far away, notably other magnetic dipoles or a constant magnetic field.
The cool thing about this model is that we have simple explicit formulas for the magnetic field it produces, and for how this little magnet is affected by a magnetic field or by another magnetic dipole.
This is the perfect model for electron spin, but it can also be representative of macroscopic systems in the right circumstances.
The intuition for the name is likely that "dipole" means "both poles are on the same spot".
Figure 1.
Different macroscopic magnets can be approximated by a magnetic dipole when shrunk seen from far away
. Source.
Marie Curie Updated +Created
Like all big names in science, she was at the right place at the right time and with the right interest and passion.
Notably, the man she married, Pierre Curie, happened to be a the world master at precisely the technique that she needed to carefully measure radioactivity: he had the most precise electrometers in the world, which allowed to detect small amounts of radioactivity via the ionization of air by radiation . These used piezoelectricity, which Pierre Curie co-discovered with his brother.
Video 1.
Marie Curie section of The Mystery of Matter episode 2
. Source. Fantastic illustration of Marie's life and work!
Figure 1.
Marie Curie c. 1920
. Source.
How to mine Monero Updated +Created
Ubuntu 20.10 as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/build/ubuntu:
sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
mkdir xmrig/build && cd xmrig/build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)
At minexmr.com/#getting_started we see that all you then need is a single CLI command:
xmrig -o pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u <your-monero-address>
Seems simple, well done devs!
Benchmark on Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/benchmark:
./xmrig --bench=1M
gives:
948.1 h/s
which according to the minexmr.com mining pool would generate 0.0005 XMR/day, which at the February 2021 rate of 140 USD/XMR is 0.07 USD/day. The minimum payout in that pool is 0.004 XMR so it would take 8 days to reach that.
So clearly, application-specific integrated circuit mining is the only viable way of doing this.
www.makeuseof.com/cryptos-you-can-mine-at-home/ is a completely full of bullshit article that says otherwise. How can someone publish that!
Mastodon (software) Updated +Created
Of course those racist Nazis are a bunch of idiots, but how can you be surprised when freedom-of-speech focused tech gets used by them? www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking
Obviously, a few large instances dominate the user base for all practical purposes: kevq.uk/centralisation-and-mastodon/. And likely the network splits into hate-speech/non-hate-speech blacklist boundaries. And since the dominating closed networks will never lose user counts (???), the only instance that dominates will be the main hate speech one.
The flagship instance was mastodon.social and then in 2020 they closed signups for it and created a secondary mastodon.online.
The multi-instance thing is confusing and problematic. E.g. replies and likes might not show up across instances in some occasions: www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/ynt7ta/is_there_a_way_to_see_post_replies_displayed_on/
The "advanced interface" feature is bad. Really bad. MacOS file browser inspired.
Microscopy connectome extraction Updated +Created
This is the most plausible way of obtaining a full connectome looking from 2020 forward. Then you'd observe the slices with an electron microscope + appropriate Staining. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) really opened Ciro Santilli's eyes to this possibility.
Once this is done for a human, it will be one of the greatest milestone of humanities, coparable perhaps to the Human Genome Project. BUt of course, privacy issues are incrediby pressing in this case, even more than in the human genome project, as we would essentially be able to read the brain of the person after their death.
As of 2022, the Drosophila connectome had been almost fully extracted.
This is also a possible path towards post-mortem brain reading.
Figure 1. Source. Unconfirmed, but looks like the type of frozen brain where a Microtome would be used.
MIDI Updated +Created
In simple terms, represents keystrokes of a piano, but it can likely also represent other effects (TODO confirm: bend, vibrato, slides, attack strength)
Can contain multiple parallel tracks as seen from the Wikipedia example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MIDI_sample.mid
You can see what it contains well with GUI music editor.
MIDI is fun. It is a basic high level representation of most instrumental music, including beats.
To actually listen to MIDI, you need a software synthesizer, which knows what sound to make for each note. One way to specify such instruments is the SoundFont file format.
David Tong Updated +Created
A charismatic, perfect-English-accent (Received Pronunciation) physicist from University of Cambridge, specializing in quantum field theory.
He has done several "vulgarization" lectures, some of which could be better called undergrad appetizers rather, a notable example being Video "Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe by David Tong (2017)" for the prestigious Royal Institution, but remains a hardcore researcher: scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=felFiY4AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate. Lots of open access publications BTW, so kudos.
The amount of lecture notes on his website looks really impressive: www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html, he looks like a good educator.
David has also shown some interest in applications of high energy mathematical ideas to condensed matter, e.g. links between the renormalization group and phase transition phenomena. TODO there was a YouTube video about that, find it and link here.
Ciro Santilli wonders if his family is of East Asian, origin and if he can still speak any east asian languages. "Tong" is of course a transcription of several major Chinese surnames and from looks he could be mixed blood, but as mentioned at www.ancestry.co.uk/name-origin?surname=tong it can also be an English "metonymic occupational name for a maker or user of tongs". After staring at his picture for a while Ciro is going with the maker of tongs theory initially.
Deep learning Updated +Created
Deep learning is the name artificial neural networks basically converged to in the 2010s/2020s.
It is a bit of an unfortunate as it suggests something like "deep understanding" and even reminds one of AGI, which it almost certainly will not attain on its own. But at least it sounds good.
DeepMind Lab Updated +Created
TODO get one of the games running. Instructions: github.com/deepmind/lab/blob/master/docs/users/build.md. This may helpgithub.com/deepmind/lab/issues/242: "Complete installation script for Ubuntu 20.04".
It is interesting how much overlap some of those have with Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games
The games are 3D, but most of them are purely flat, and the 3D is just a waste of resources.
Video 1.
Human player test of DMLab-30 Collect Good Objects task by DeepMind (2018)
Source.
Video 2.
Human player test of DMLab-30 Exploit Deferred Effects task by DeepMind (2018)
Source.
Video 3.
Human player test of DMLab-30 Select Described Object task by DeepMind (2018)
Source. Some of their games involve language instructions from the use to determine the desired task, cool concept.
Video 4.
Human player test of DMLab-30 Fixed Large Map task by DeepMind (2018)
Source. They also have some maps with more natural environments.
DeepMind Lab2D vs gvgai Updated +Created
At twitter.com/togelius/status/1328404390114435072 called out on DeepMind Lab2D for not giving them credit on prior work!
This very much looks like like GVGAI which was first released in 2014, been used in dozens (maybe hundreds) of papers, and for which one of the original developers was Tom Schaul at DeepMind...
As seen from web.archive.org/web/20220331022932/http://gvgai.net/ though, DeepMind sponsored them at some point.
DeepMind project Updated +Created
Deepmind soccer simulation Updated +Created
  • From Motor Control to Team Play in Simulated Humanoid Football
Video 1.
From Motor Control to Team Play in Simulated Humanoid Football by Ali Eslami (2023)
Source. Likely a reupload by DeepMind employee: www.linkedin.com/in/smalieslami.
Video 2.
DeepMind’s AI Trained For 5 Years by Two Minute Papers (2023)
Source. The 5 years bullshit is of course in-game time clickbait, they simulate 1000x faster than realtime.
Military-industrial complex Updated +Created
This is notably what the United States emerged to be after World War II. But it was likely what Nazi Germany also was, and many other superpowers.
Ciro Santilli feels that much more relevant would be to also include academia as in "military-industrial-academic" complex, the Wikipedia page actually mentions precedents to this idea.
The addition of congress/politicians is also relevant.
But hey, the name wouldn't sound so slick with three parts.
It is basically in this context that American science and technology flourished after World War II, including notably the development of quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman being a prototypical example, having previously worked on the Manhattan Project.
Millennium Prize Problems Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli would like to fully understand the statements and motivations of each the problems!
Easy to understand the motivation:
Hard to understand the motivation!
MuJoCo getting started Updated +Created
Tested on Ubuntu 23.10;
git clone https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco
cd mujoco
git checkout 5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac
mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j
Now let's play. Minimal interactive UI simulation of a simple MJCF scene with one falling cube:
bin/basic ../doc/_static/hello.xml
Test soure code: github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco/blob/5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac/sample/basic.cc. The only thing you can do is rotate the scene with the computer mouse it seems. Mentioned at: mujoco.readthedocs.io/en/2.2.2/programming.html#sabasic
Some more interesting models can be found under the model/ directory: github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco/tree/5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac/model E.g. the imaginary humanoid robot DeepMind used in many demos can be seen with:
bin/basic ../model/humanoid/humanoid.xml
A very cool thing about that UI is that you can manually control joints. There are no joints in the hello.xml, but e.g. with the humanoid model:
bin/simulate ../model/humanoid/humanoid.xml
under "Control" you move each joint of the robot separately which is quite cool.
Video 1.
Demo of MuJoCo's built-in simulate viewer by Yuval Tassa (2019)
Source.
There's also a bin/record test executable that presumably renders the simulation directly to a file:
bin/record ../doc/_static/hello.xml 5 60 rgb.out
ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pixel_format rgb24 -video_size 800x800 -framerate 60 -i rgb.out -vf "vflip" video.mp4
Mentioned at: mujoco.readthedocs.io/en/2.2.2/programming.html#sarecord but TODO that produced a broken video, related issues:
Nintendo 64 Updated +Created
This is the one that hit Ciro Santilli the hardest, coming in at the point in which he started to discern between games and the real world a little better. His parents bought it for him during a trip to Disney World in Florida in 1996 (?), since electronics were much cheaper in the USA.
So as Ciro became older, and turned into a software engineer, he started to become more and more morbidly curious about "N64 internals": tool-assisted speedrun, how the devkit looks like, how games were developed for it, hardware leaks, etc.
Luckily Ciro's mind is not interested enough by that useless shit for Ciro to seriously study it himself. But that's what YouTube is for, right? Why do useless stuff when other more useless people can do it for you?
The console has only 4 MB of RAM memory. It is quite incredible what can be done with 8 MB, from the point of view of a 2020 worls where 16 GB laptops are the norm.
ImageNet Updated +Created
14 million images with more than 20k categories, typically denoting prominent objects in the image, either common daily objects, or a wild range of animals. About 1 million of them also have bounding boxes for the objects. The images have different sizes, they are not all standardized to a single size like MNIST[ref].
Each image appears to have a single label associated to it. Care must have been taken somehow with categories, since some images contain severl possible objects, e.g. a person and some object.
In practice, the ILSVRC subset of ImageNet is the most commonly used dataset.
Official project page: www.image-net.org/
The data license is restrictive and forbids commercial usage: www.image-net.org/download.php. Also as a result you have to login to download the dataset. Super annoying.
The categories are all part of WordNet, which means that there are several parent/child categories such as dog vs type of dog available. ImageNet1k only appears to have leaf nodes however (i.e. no "dog" label, just specific types of dog).
A major model that performed well on ImageNet starting on 2012 and became notable is AlexNet.
ImageNet subset Updated +Created
Subset generators:
Unfortunately, since ImageNet is a closed standard no one can upload such pre-made subsets, forcing everybody to download the full dataset, in ImageNet1k, which is huge!

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