The Engineering Puzzle of Storing Trillions of Bits in your Smartphone / SSD using Quantum Mechanics by Branch Education (2020)
Source. Nice animations show how quantum tunnelling is used to set bits in flash memory.scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=5051&context=etd_theses proves that the Mathieu group is simple in just 200 pages. Nice.
How AMD went from nearly Bankrupt to Booming by Brandon Yen (2021)
Source. - youtu.be/Rtb4mjIACTY?t=118 Buldozer series CPUs was a disaster
- youtu.be/Rtb4mjIACTY?t=324 got sued for marketing claims on number of cores vs number of hyperthreads
- youtu.be/Rtb4mjIACTY?t=556 Ryzen first gen was rushed and a bit buggy, but it had potential. Gen 2 fixed those.
- youtu.be/Rtb4mjIACTY?t=757 Ryzen Gen 3 surpased single thread performance of Intel. Previously Gen 2 had won multicore.
Open source driver/hardware interface specification??? E.g. on Ubuntu, a large part of the nastiest UI breaking bugs Ciro Santilli encountered over the years have been GPU related. Do you think that is a coincidence??? E.g. ubuntu 21.10 does not wake up from suspend.
How Nvidia Won Graphics Cards by Asianometry (2021)
Source. - Doom was the first killer app of personal computer 3D graphics! As opposed to professional rendering e.g. for CAD as was supported by Silicon Graphics
- youtu.be/TRZqE6H-dww?t=694 they bet on Direct3D
- youtu.be/TRZqE6H-dww?t=749 they wrote their own drivers. At the time, most drivers were written by the computer manufacturers. That's insane!
Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence by
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-11 +Created 1970-01-01
The idea the the wave function of a small observed system collapses "obviously" cannot be the full physical truth, only a very useful approximation of reality.
Because then are are hard pressed to determine the boundary between what collapses and what doesn't, and there isn't such a boundary, as everything is interacting, including the observer.
The many-worlds interpretation is an elegant explanation for this. Though it does feel a bit sad and superfluous.
The Schrodinger equation Hamiltonian has to be Hermitian by
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-11 +Created 1970-01-01
The Schrödinger equation Hamiltonian has to be a Hermitian so we will have only positive energies I think: quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12113/why-does-a-hamiltonian-have-to-be-hermitian
Contains the full state of the quantum system.
This is in contrast to classical mechanics where e.g. the state of mechanical system is given by two real functions: position and speed.
The wave equation in position representation on the other hand encodes speed in "how fast does the complex phase spin around", and direction in "does it spin clockwise or counterclockwise", as described well at: Video "Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics) by udiprod (2017)". Then once you understand that, it is more compact to just view those graphs with the phase color coded as in Video "Simulation of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation (JavaScript Animation) by Coding Physics (2019)".
Analogous problem to the secondary structure of proteins. Likely a bit simpler due to the strong tendency for complementary pairs to bind.
Or in other words: there is no Turing machine that always halts for every input with the yes/no output.
Every undecidable problem must obviously have an infinite number of "possibilities of stuff you can try": if there is only a finite number, then you can brute-force it.
Lists of undecidable problems.
Coolest ones besides the obvious boring halting problem:
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