Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
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?
No-Nonsense Quantum Field Theory by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2020) Updated 2025-06-02 +Created 1970-01-01
This book really tries to recall basic things to ensure that the reader will be able to understand the more advanced ones.
But Ciro Santilli really prefers it when authors error on the side of obvious.
Term invented by Ciro Santilli, it refers to Richard Feynman, after helping to build the atomic bomb:
Ciro Santilli once visited the chemistry department of a world leading university, and the chemists there were obsessed with NMR. They had small benchtop NMR machines. They had larger machines. They had a room full of huge machines. They had them in corridors and on desk tops. Chemists really love that stuff. More precisely, these are used for NMR spectroscopy, which helps identify what a sample is made of.
Introduction to NMR by Allery Chemistry
. Source. - only works with an odd number of nucleons
- apply strong magnetic field, this separates the energy of up and down spins. Most spins align with field.
- send radio waves into sample to make nucleons go to upper energy level. We can see that the energy difference is small since we are talking about radio waves, low frequency.
- when nucleon goes back down, it re-emits radio waves, and we detect that. TODO: how do we not get that confused with the input wave, which is presumably at the same frequency? It appears to send pulses, and then wait for the response.
How to Prepare and Run a NMR Sample by University of Bath (2017)
Source. This is a more direct howto, cool to see. Uses a Bruker Corporation 300. They have a robotic arm add-on. Shows spectrum on computer screen at the end. Shame no molecule identification after that!This video has the merit of showing real equipment usage, including sample preparation.
Says clearly that NMR is the most important way to identify organic compounds.
- youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=41 lists some of the most common targets, including hydrogen and carbon-13
- youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=124 ethanol example
- youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=251 they use solvents where all protium is replaced by deuterium to not affect results. Genius.
- youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=354 usually they do 16 radio wave pulses
Introductory NMR & MRI: Video 01 by Magritek (2009)
Source. Precession and Resonance. Precession has a natural frequency for any angle of the wheel.Introductory NMR & MRI: Video 02 by Magritek (2009)
Source. The influence of temperature on spin statistics. At 300K, the number of up and down spins are very similar. As you reduce temperature, we get more and more on lower energy state.Introductory NMR & MRI: Video 03 by Magritek (2009)
Source. The influence of temperature on spin statistics. At 300K, the number of up and down spins are very similar. As you reduce temperature, we get more and more on lower energy state.NMR spectroscopy visualized by ScienceSketch
. Source. 2020. Decent explanation with animation. Could go into a bit more numbers, but OK.
A weapons-grade ring of electrorefined plutonium, typical of the rings refined at Los Alamos and sent to Rocky Flats for fabrication
. Source. The ring has a purity of 99.96%, weighs 5.3 kg, and is approx 11 cm in diameter. It is enough plutonium for one bomb core. Which city shall we blow up today?
Ciro Santilli is mildly obsessed by nuclear reactions, because they are so quirky. How can a little ball destroy a city? How can putting too much of it together produce criticality and kill people like in the Slotin accident or the Tokaimura criticality accident. It is mind blowing really.
More fun nuclear stuff to watch:
- Dr. Strangelove (1964)
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)
- The World Of Enrico Fermi by Harvard Project Physics (1970)
- Fat Man and Little Boy (1987) shows a possibly reasonably realistic of the history of the development of the Trinity
The Ultimate Guide to Nuclear Weapons by hypohystericalhistory (2022)
Source. Good overall summary. Some interesting points:- youtu.be/8uIPQBOCJ64?t=2946 talks about the difference between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons
- youtu.be/8uIPQBOCJ64?t=3291 mentions variable yield devices, this is the main new thing Ciro Santilli learned from this video
- youtu.be/8uIPQBOCJ64?t=3416 discusses if a strategic nuclear weapon usage would inevitably lead to tactical nuclear weapon escalation. It then mentions one case in which a possibly comparable escalation didn't happen: the abstinence of using chemical weapon during World War II.
All those dedicated applied mathematicians languages are a waste of society's time, Ciro Santilli sure applied mathematicians are capable of writing a few extra braces in exchange for a sane general purpose language, we should instead just invest in good libraries with fast C bindings for those languages like NumPy where needed, and powerful mainlined integrated development environments.
And when Ciro Santilli see the closed source ones like MATLAB being used, it makes him lose all hope on humanity. Why. As of 2020. Why? In the 1980s, maybe. But in the 2020s?
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!
Ollama is a highly automated open source wrapper that makes it very easy to run multiple Open weight LLM models either on CPU or GPU.
Its README alone is of great value, serving as a fantastic list of the most popular Open weight LLM models in existence.
Install with:
curl https://ollama.ai/install.sh | shOn P14s it runs on CPU and generates a few tokens per second, which is quite usable for a quick interactive play.
As mentioned at github.com/jmorganca/ollama/blob/0174665d0e7dcdd8c60390ab2dd07155ef84eb3f/docs/faq.md the downloads to under
/usr/share/ollama/.ollama/models/ and ncdu tells me:--- /usr/share/ollama ----------------------------------
3.6 GiB [###########################] /.ollama
4.0 KiB [ ] .bashrc
4.0 KiB [ ] .profile
4.0 KiB [ ] .bash_logoutWe can also do it non-interactively with:which gave me:but note that there is a random seed that affects each run by default. This was apparently fixed however: github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/2773, but Ciro Santilli doesn't know how to set the seed.
/bin/time ollama run llama2 'What is quantum field theory?'0.13user 0.17system 2:06.32elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 17280maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+2203minor)pagefaults 0swapsSome other quick benchmarks from Amazon EC2 GPU on a g4nd.xlarge instance which had an Nvidia Tesla T4:and on Nvidia A10G in an g5.xlarge instance:
0.07user 0.05system 0:16.91elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 16896maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+1960minor)pagefaults 0swaps0.03user 0.05system 0:09.59elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 17312maxresident)k
8inputs+0outputs (1major+1934minor)pagefaults 0swapsIt tends to babble quite a lot by default, but eventually decides to stop.
And of course, 4chan just takes that to a whole new level, usually closing on the same day, and then getting deleted within a week. Why would anyone contribute non-illegal content to that king of system?!
Ridiculous, so when new information comes out, we just duplicate all the old comments on a new thread again?
Remember, Ciro Santilli is the Necromancer God.
Things actually have gotten more and more closed, e.g. of stuff getting paywalled with time:
It appears that things got really bad starting in 2017, possibly when WebLearn was introduced. When things migrated to Canvas, they were closed by default, apparently with any mechanism to publish publicly.
Therefore, they managed to make things more closed than when teachers would just upload to good old
ox.ac.uk/~name static websites!!Ciro Santilli has also heard that some people in the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford opposed to moving away from their Moodle instance precisely because the new options did not support open publishing, so kudos to those people. But most teachers likely don't care and just do whatever is the best internally supported default.
Their "open" video material: podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ A somewhat small part is Creative Commons, but most proprietary. Despite the name "podcasts", they do contain video, it is just a relic.
podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open contains actual Creative Commons only it seems.
It does however appear that professors own their lecture notes, so there some hope maybe: governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/statute-xvi-property-contracts-and-trusts#collapse1383636
Talks: talks.ox.ac.uk/. Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences (MPLS) subset: talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/department/id/oxpoints:23232639
University of Oxford documentary by the British Council (1941)
Source. In the context of wave-like equations, an open-boundary condition is one that "lets the wave go through without reflection".
This condition is very useful when we want to simulate infinite domains with a numerical method. Ciro Santilli wants to do this all the time when trying to come up with demos for his physics writings.
Here are some resources that cover such boundary conditions:
- www.asc.tuwien.ac.at/~arnold/pdf/graz/graz.pdf lots of slides
- hplgit.github.io/wavebc/doc/pub/._wavebc_cyborg002.html mentions them and gives a 1D formula. It mentions that things get complicated in 2D and 3D TODO why.The other page: hplgit.github.io/wavebc/doc/pub/._wavebc_cyborg003.html shows solution demos.
The outcome of closed knowledge is reverse engineering.
What happens when the underdogs get together and try to factor out their efforts to beat some evil dominant power, sometimes victoriously.
Or when startups use the cheapest stuff available and randomly become the next big thing, and decide to keep maintaining the open stuff to get features for free from other companies, or because they are forced by the Holy GPL.
Open source frees employees. When you change jobs, a large part of the specific knowledge you acquired about closed source a project with your blood and tears goes to the trash. When companies get bought, projects get shut down, and closed source code goes to the trash. What sane non desperate person would sell their life energy into such closed source projects that could die at any moment? Working on open source is the single most important non money perk a company can have to attract the best employees.
Open source is worth more than the mere pragmatic financial value of not having to pay for software or the ability to freely add new features.
Its greatest value is perhaps the fact that it allows people study it, to appreciate the beauty of the code, and feel empowered by being able to add the features that they want.
And "can reverse engineer the undocumented GPU hardware APIs", Ciro would add.
While software is the most developed open source technology available in the 2010's, due to the "zero cost" of copying it over the Internet, Ciro also believes that the world would benefit enormously from open source knowledge in all areas on science and engineering, for the same reasons as open source.
These people have good intentions.
The problem is that they don't manage to go critical because there's to way for students to create content, everything is manually curated.
You can't even publicly comment on the textbooks. Or at least Ciro Santilli hasn't found a way to do so. There is just a "submit suggestion" box.
This massive lost opportunity is even shown graphically at: cnx.org/about (archive) where there is a clear separation between:Maybe this wasn't the case in their legacy website, legacy.cnx.org/content?legacy=true, but not sure, and they are retiring that now.
- "authors", who can create content
- "students", who can consume content
By Rice University.
TODO what are the books written in?
- github.com/openstax/openstax-cms Uses Wagtail CMS. So presumaby they just Wagtail's WYSIWYG.
- github.com/openstax/os-webview
Not really dedicated to open source course material, nor to free courses...
The "Open" in its name only made sense in the 60's, when it was founded, nowadays, there isn't much about this institution that is very different compared to traditional Oxbridge. "Cheap more online university" would be a more adequate name for it.
A system that would truly live up to the name "Open" in the year 2020 is the one described at the ideal university by Ciro Santilli.
Wikipedia even says that the initial focus was on broadcasting learning material on television and radio, so what happened to that now that we have an even more powerful on-demand tool called Internet!
They even created their own MOOC website, FutureLearn. But www.freecodecamp.org/news/massive-open-online-courses-started-out-completely-free-but-where-are-they-now-1dd1020f59/ mentions:OMG. God why.
The course content is still free to access, but it’s only available for the duration of the course, and for two weeks after it ends.
A few open sources at: www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses. The 5-hour course on particle physics says it all. Stated as of 2023 at www.open.ac.uk/about/open-educational-resources/openlearn/free-learning:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj0rbafFBak What's an Open University Degree Like? by Luke Cutforth (2021) mentions that it is more autodidactic/online, and it encourages part time learning.
youtu.be/rsWwffX-u0A?t=99 Open University - How does it work? by Matt Greg Vlogs (2017) shows that they do have their own custom institutional material. And it is not open???? Please. youtu.be/rsWwffX-u0A?t=222 mentions that there is no entry exam, and you can change your courses at any time, that is good at least.
Israel apparently also created their own version in the 70's inspired by the British one: Open University of Israel. Same story it seems.
The website is the reference instance of OurBigBook Web, which is part of the OurBigBook Project, the other main part of the project are software that users can run locally to publish their content such as the OurBigBook CLI.
The project documentation is present at: docs.ourbigbook.com#ourbigbook-web-user-manual
The topics feature allows you to find the best version of a subject written by other users user
. Live demo: derivative.