Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

A language that allows you to talk to and command a computer.

There is only space for two languages at most in the world: the compiled one, and the interpreted one.

For 2020 now, when you have a choice, you must go for:

Those two are languages not by any means perfect from a language design point of view, and there are likely already better alternatives, they are only chosen due to a pragmatic tradeoff between ecosystem and familiarity.

Ciro predicts that Python will become like Fortran in the future: a legacy hated by most who have moved to JavaScript long ago (which is slightly inferior, but too similar, and with too much web dominance to be replaced), but with too much dominance in certain applications like machine learning to be worth replacing, like Fortran dominates certain HPC applications. We'll see. Maybe non performance critical scripting languages are easier to replace.

C++ however is decent, and is evolving in very good directions in the 2010's, and will remain relevant in the foreseeable future.

Bash can also be used when you're lazy. But if the project goes on, you will sooner or later regret that choice.

The language syntax in itself does not matter. All that matters is how many useful libraries and tooling it has.

This is how other languages compare:

Overview of Shimano brands 2018: www.evanscycles.com/coffeestop/advice/the-complete-guide-to-shimanos-mountain-bike-groupsets-and-their-hierarchy

Explains how it is possible that everyone observes the same speed of light, even if they are moving towards or opposite to the light!!!

This was first best observed by the Michelson-Morley experiment, which uses the movement of the Earth at different times of the year to try and detect differences in the speed of light.

This leads leads to the following conclusions:

All of this goes of course completely against our daily Physics intuition.

The "special" in the name refers to the fact that it is a superset of general relativity, which also explains gravity in a single framework.

Since time and space get all messed up together, you have to be very careful to understand what it means to say "I observed this to happen over there at that time", otherwise you will go crazy. A good way to think about is this:

Basically the opposite of reductionism.

Figure "xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity" must again be cited.

Quotient of a subgroup H of G by a normal subgroup of the subgroup H.

That normal subgroup does not have have to be a normal subgroup of G.

As an overkill example, the happy family are subquotients of the monster group, but the monster group is simple.

The first really good quantum mechanics theory made compatible with special relativity was the Dirac equation.

And then came quantum electrodynamics to improve it: Dirac equation vs quantum electrodynamics.

TODO: does it use full blown QED, or just something intermediate?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtnsHtYYKf0 "Mercury and Relativity - Periodic Table of Videos" by Periodic Videos (2013). Doesn't give the key juicy details/intuition. Also mentioned on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry#Mercury

Man-in-the-middle attack

quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/142/advantage-of-quantum-key-distribution-over-post-quantum-cryptography/25727#25727 Advantage of quantum key distribution over post-quantum cryptography has Ciro Santilli's comparison to classical encryption.

BB84 is a good first algorithm to look into.

Long story short:

QKD uses quantum mechanics stuff to allow sharing unsnoopable keys: you can detect any snooping and abort communication. Unsnoopability is guaranteed by the known laws of physics, up only to engineering imperfections.

Furthermore, it allows this key distribution without having to physically take a box by car somewhere: once the channel is established, e.g. optical fiber, you can just keep generating perfect keys from it. Otherwise it would be pointless, as you could just drive your one-time pad key every time.

However, the keys likely have a limited rate of generation, so you can't just one-time pad the entire message, except for small text messages. What you would then do is to use the shared key with symmetric encryption.

Therefore, this setup usually ultimately relies on the idea that we believe that symmetric encryption is safer than , even though there aren't mathematical safety proofs of either as of 2020.