Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

This single experimental observation/idea is the basis for all of special relativity.

Special relativity is the direct result of people bending their backs to accommodate for this really weird fact.

The equation that allows us to calculate stuff in special relativity!

Take two observers with identical rules and stopwatch, and aligned axes, but one is on a car moving at towards the $+x$ direction at speed $v$.

TODO image.

When both observe an event, if we denote:It is of course arbitrary who is standing and who is moving, we will just use the term "standing" for the one without primes.

Then the coordinates of the event observed by the observer on the car are:where:

Note that if $\frac{v}{c}$ tends towards zero, then this reduces to the usual Galilean transformations which our intuition expects:

This explains why we don't observe special relativity in our daily lives: macroscopic objects move too slowly compared to light, and $\frac{v}{c}$ is almost zero.

Programming is hard. To Ciro Santilli, it's almost masochistic.

What makes Ciro especially mad when programming is not the hard things.

It is the things that should be easy, but aren't, and which take up a lot of your programming time.

Especially when you are already a few levels of "simple problems" down from your original goal, and another one of them shows up.

This is basically the cause of Hofstadter's law.

But of course, it is because it is hard that it feels amazing when you achieve your goal.

Putting a complex and useful program together is like composing a symphony, or reaching the summit of a hard rock climbing proble.

Programming can be an art form. There can be great beauty in code and what it does. It is a shame that this is hard to see from within the walls of most companies, where you are stuck doing a small specific task as fast as possible.

A glitch is more precisely a software bug that is hard to reproduce. But it has also been used to mean a software bug that is not very serious.

Basically what register transfer level compiles to in order to achieve a real chip implementation.

After this is done, the final step is place and route.

They can be designed by third parties besides the semiconductor fabrication plants. E.g. Arm Ltd. markets its Artisan Standard Cell Libraries as mentioned e.g. at: web.archive.org/web/20211007050341/https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/physical-ip/logic This came from a 2004 acquisition: www.eetimes.com/arm-to-acquire-artisan-components-for-913-million/, obviously.

The standard cell library is typically composed of a bunch of versions of somewhat simple gates, e.g.:and so on.

Each of those gates has to be designed by hand as a 3D structure that can be produced in a given fab.

Simulations are then carried out, and the electric properties of those structures are characterized in a standard way as a bunch of tables of numbers that specify things like:Those are then used in power, performance and area estimates.