Go UI by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Dense matrix by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Kardashev scale by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
GNU Free Documentation License by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Punycode inscription by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Namecoin examples are catalogued at: punycodes.xyz. The are small Unicode art or emoji code.
There seems to be nothing of particular artistic value as far as we've seen so far, the only interest in such tokens seems to be that:
  • there are some examples that came earlier than those in the Bitcoin blockchain, notably a bit earlier than Section "BitLen"
  • Namecoin is a NFT system unlike Bitcoin which is fungible, so those assets are naturally tradable
Australian company by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Brazilian Portuguese by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Human vs computer chess by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
As of 2020's and earlier, humans were far far behind. As of 2020s and earlier, even an average personal computers without a GPU, the hallmark of deep learning beats every human.
Chess is just too easy!
Video 1.
Will a computer defeat Garry Gasparov? by BBC (1993)
Source.
Computer chess interface by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Chess engine by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Are cryptocurrencies useful? by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
The key difficulties of cryptocurrencies are:
Until those problems are solved, the only real applications of cryptocurrency will by illegal activities, notably buying drugs, paying for ransomware. But also paying for anti-censorship services from inside dictatorships. Illegal activity can be good when governments are bad, and arguably selling drugs should be legal.
For this reason Ciro Santilli believes that privacy coins like Monero are currently the most useful cryptocurrencies. Also, people concerned with their privacy are likely to more naturally make fewer larger payments to reduce exposure rather than a bunch of small separate ones, and therefore transaction fees matter less, and can be seen as a reasonable privacy tax. Also drugs are expensive, just have a look at any uncensored Onion service search engine, so individual transactions tend to be large.
Hedgint against inflation due to money creation in fiat currencies is a another valid argument for cryptocurrencies. Money printing is a bad form of tax. But why not just instead invest in bonds or stocks, which actually have a specific intrinsic value and should therefore increase your capital and beat inflation? Even if crypto did take over, its value would eventually become constant, and just holding it would lose out to stocks and bonds. And pre-crypto, salaries should adjust relatively quickly to new inflation levels as they come, though there is always some delay. Also, without anonymity, governments will sooner or later find a way to regulate and pervert it. If you want to do things without anonymity, then what you really have to fight for is to change government itself, perhaps with a DAO-like approach, or pushing for a more direct democracy.
If crypto really takes off, 99.99% of people will only ever use it through some cryptocurrency exchange (unless scalability problems are solved, and they replace fiat currencies entirely), so the experience will be very similar to PayPal, and without "true" decentralization.
For those reasons, Ciro Santilli instead believes that governments should issue electronic money, and maintain an open API that all can access instead. The centralized service will always be cheaper for society to maintain than any distributed service, and it will still allow for proper taxation.
Ciro believes that it is easy for people to be seduced by the idealistic promise that "cryptocurrency will make the world more fair and equal by giving everyone equal opportunities, away from the corruption of Governments". Such optimism that new technologies will solve certain key social problems without the need for constant government intervention and management is not new, as shown e.g. at HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis (2016) when he talks about the cyberspace (when the Internet was just beginning): youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU?t=2375. Technologies can make our lives better. But in general, some of them also have to be managed.
In any case, cryptocurrencies are bullshit, the true currency of the future is going to be Magic: The Gathering cards. And Cirocoin.
One closely related thing that Ciro Santilli does think could be interesting exploring right now however, notably when having Monero-like anonymity in mind, would be anonymous electronic voting, which is a pre-requisite to make direct democracy convenient so people can vote more often.
TODO evaluate the possible application of cryptocurrency for international transfers:Of course, the ideal solution would be for governments to just allow for people from other countries to create accounts in their country, and use the centralized API just like citizens. Having an account of some sort is of course fundamental to avoid money laundering/tax evasion, be it on the API, or when you are going to cash out the crypto into fiat. So then the question becomes: suppose that governments are shit and never make such APIs, are international transfers just because traditional banks are inefficient/greedy? Or is it because of the inevitable cost of auditing transfers? E.g. how does TransferWise compare to Bitcoin these days? And if cryptocurrency is more desirable, why wouldn't TransferWise just use it as their backend, and reach very similar fees?
Sparse matrix by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Super-resolution microscopy by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Super-resolution means resolution beyond the diffraction limit.
First you shine a lot of light which saturates most fluorophores, leaving very few active.
They you can observe fluorophores firing one by one. Their exact position is a bit stochastic and beyond the diffraction limit, but so long as there aren't to many in close proximity, you can wait for it to fire a bunch of times, and the center of the Gaussian is the actual location.
From this we see that super-resolution microscopy is basically a space-time tradeoff: the more time we wait, the better spacial resolution we get. But we can't do it if things are moving too fast in the sample.
Tradeoff with cryoEM: you get to see things moving in live cell. Electron microscopy fully kills cells, so you have no chance of seeing anything that moves ever.
Caveats:
  • initial illumination to saturate most fluorophores I think can still kill cells, things get harder the less light you put in. So it's not like you don't kill things at all necessarily, you just get a chance not to
  • the presence fluorophore disturbs the system slightly, and is not at the same Exact location of the protein of interest
Overfitting by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Open-source intelligence by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
International Standard Music Number by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Why was this so rarely used as of 2020s compared to ISBNs? It would have been perfect for helping find obscure records from Chinese traditional music and Indian classical music!
But instead we have Discogs, which is not too bad.
Hugging Face by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Interesting website, hosts mostly:

There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.