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Design pattern

words: 15 articles: 5

Monolithic system

words: 15 articles: 4
Repeat this mantra:
Only descentralize when inevitable.
Only descentralize when inevitable.
Only descentralize when inevitable.

Engineering

articles: 2

Reverse engineering

words: 122 articles: 1
This is what society gets for not using open knowledge: some of its best minds will be bound to waste endless hours reversing some useless technology.
With that said, even when you do have the source code, reading run logs and using debuggers are a sort of reverse engineering at heart.
One of the most jaw dropping reverse engineering projects Ciro has ever seen is the Super Mario 64 reverse engineering project.
How software engineers view science:
Science is the reverse engineering of nature.
Ciro Santilli had once assigned this as one of Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts, but he later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering ("similar to scientific research, the only difference being that scientific research is about a natural phenomenon") so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.

Research institute

words: 571 articles: 46
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Area of technology

words: 140k articles: 4k

Clothing

articles: 1

Cryogenics

articles: 1
Ciro Santilli is a fan of this late 2010's buzzword.
It basically came about because of the endless stream of useless software startups made since the 2000's by one or two people with no investments with the continued increase in computers and Internet speeds until the great wall was reached.
Deep tech means not one of those. More specifically, it means technologies that require significant investment in expensive materials and laboratory equipment to progress, such as molecular biology technologies and quantum computing.
And it basically comes down to technologies that wrestle with the fundamental laws of physics rather than software data wrangling.
Computers are of course limited by the laws of physics, but those are much hidden by several layers of indirection.
Full visibility, and full control, make computer tasks be tasks that eventually always work out more or less as expected.
The same does not hold true when real Physics is involved.
Physics is brutal.
To start with, you can't even see your system very clearly, and often doing so requires altering its behaviour.
For example, in molecular biology, most great discoveries are made after some new technique is made to be able to observe smaller things.
But you often have to kill your cells to make those observations, which makes it very hard to understand how they work dynamically.
What we would really want would be to track every single protein as it goes about inside the cell. But that is likely an impossible dream.
The same for the brain. If we had observations of every neuron, how long would it take to understand it? Not long, people are really good at reverse engineering things when there is enough information available to do so, see also science is the reverse engineering of nature.
Then, even when you start to see the system, you might have a very hard time controlling it, because it is so fragile. This is basically the case of quantum computing in 2020.
It is for those reasons that deep tech is so exciting.
The next big things will come from deep tech. Failure is always a possibility, and you can't know before you try.
But that's also why its so fun to dare.
Stuff that Ciro Santilli considers "deep tech" as of 2020:

Power engineering

words: 184 articles: 16
Applicaitons of power, we have to remember it is there to notice how awesome it is!
  • lightning
  • motors
  • sending nad receiving communication signals
  • computers, which in turn can do computations and improved communication

Electricity generation

words: 151 articles: 15
Hydroelectricity
articles: 1
Nuclear power
words: 151 articles: 12
Fusion power
words: 151 articles: 11
Fusion power could be the next big thing.
Most promising approaches as of 2020:
Video 1. Why Private Billions Are Flowing Into Fusion by Bloomberg (2022) Source.
  • Joint European Torus
  • General Fusion: compress with liquid metal. Intends to demo in JET site.
  • Helion Energy: direct fusion to electricity conversion without steam, direct from magnetic field movements
  • First Light: shoot microscopic objct at a target to crush it so much that fusion happens
It is interesting that there are several different approaches to the problem. This feels a bit like quantum computing's development at the same time, increases hope that at least one will work.
Magnetic confinement fusion
words: 61 articles: 4
Once again, relies on superconductivity to reach insane magnetic fields. Superconductivity is just so important.
Ciro Santilli saw a good presentation about it once circa 2020, it seems that the main difficulty of the time was turbulence messing things up. They have some nice simulations with cross section pictures e.g. at: www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/937941.
Video 2. Inside JET: The world's biggest nuclear fusion experiment by Wired UK (2020) Source.
techcrunch.com/2022/12/12/breakthrough-fusion-power-announcement-expected-tomorrow-heres-what-it-means/
Lawson criterion
articles: 1

Electronics

words: 3k articles: 131
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Explosive

words: 10
Types:

Information technology

words: 89k articles: 2k

Computer

words: 86k articles: 2k
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Telecommunication

words: 1k articles: 60
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Lighter

articles: 1

Sensor

words: 927 articles: 30

Microscopy

words: 894 articles: 27
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Tomography

words: 17 articles: 1
Muon tomography
words: 17

Nanotechnology

words: 34 articles: 5
Video 3. MEMS: The Second Silicon Revolution? by Asianometry (2022) Source.
Digital micromirror device
words: 9 articles: 1
Video 4. The Insane Engineering of DLP by Zack Freedman (2022) Source.

Molecular machine

words: 18 articles: 1
The most beautiful ones:
see also Section "Animations of molecular biology processes"
Base machinery of the nervous system.

Social technology

words: 45k articles: 913
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Robotics

words: 118 articles: 25
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Transport

words: 292 articles: 24

Bicycle

words: 181 articles: 3
The images you have to have in mind are:
Yes, Sheldon he has separate American and British English versions of pages!!!
For example, Kross bicycle (2017) had a Schwalbe tyre with markings:
42-622 (28 x 1.60, 700x40C)
When inflated, the tires were about 3.5cm wide as measured with a ruler.
And the Mavic A319 rim had markings:
622x19C
In this:
Shimano
words: 60 articles: 1
Manuals: si.shimano.com/
Overview of Shimano brands 2018: www.evanscycles.com/coffeestop/advice/the-complete-guide-to-shimanos-mountain-bike-groupsets-and-their-hierarchy

Vehicle

words: 62 articles: 16
Aerospace
words: 59 articles: 5
Communications satellite
words: 54 articles: 1
SpaceX
words: 54
Video 5. What Elon Musk's 42,000 Satellites Could Do To Earth by Tech Insider (2020) Source. Good primer. The main difference from older systems is that they fly closer to Earth, and are not geostationary. As a result, you have better latency. But you also need a bunc of them to have continuous coverage of an area.
Satellite navigation
words: 5 articles: 1
They actually carry atomic clocks in them.
Watercraft
articles: 1
Motor vehicle
words: 3 articles: 7
Car
words: 3 articles: 3
Self-driving car
words: 3 articles: 2
Self-driving car company
words: 3 articles: 1
Oxbotica
words: 3
Funding:
Automotive company
articles: 2
Toyota
articles: 1

Train

words: 49
Video 6. The failure of the California's high-speed by Vox (2022) Source.
Basically:
  • too much local power
  • republican/democrat partition means federal projects start in one government, get killed on next
One is reminded of the Superconducting Super Collider on the federal level issues.
youtu.be/rcjr4jbGuJg?t=457 though mentions that the Palmdale detour was mainly to avoid some hills.

User interface (UI)

words: 127 articles: 8
For computer interfaces see: computer user-interface.

Windowing system

articles: 1

Wayland

words: 19
They've been trying to get it to work forever, and it's beeen buggy forever:
Became the default on Ubuntu 21.04: www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wayland-by-default
It is hard to pinpoint why, but the following useful software just feel bad for some reason:

Brain-computer interface

words: 87 articles: 3
The ultimate computer user-interface.
Brain-computer interfaces could be the next big thing.
And life extension? worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112022/would-an-invasive-spinal-cord-brain-computer-interface-allow-healthy-individuals
Brain-computer interface company
words: 80 articles: 2
Elon Musk's attempt.
Synchron
words: 33
Video 8. Syncron explanation video by Syncron (2018) Source.
Video 9. Rodney & Phil Use Our Brain Computer Interface by Syncron (2022) Source. It might be amazing for those dudes, but it still has a long way to go.

Technology bibliography

words: 681 articles: 9

Robert X. Cringely (Mark Stephens)

words: 515 articles: 2
Very very good. Those nice pre-Dot-com bubble vibes.
Might be freely watchable? Wikipedia links to:
But they do start with an FBI warning about copyright. So... erm.
Part 1 - Networking The Nerds talks about the TCP/IP and early machines implementing it:
  • 21:00: shows inside The Pentagon. The way the dude who works there opens a his locked office door with an electric switch is just amazing. Cringely also mentions that there's an actual official speed limit in the corridors as he rides a carrier bike slowly through them.
  • 21:45: the universities weren't enthusiastic, because people from other locations would be able to use your precious computer time. But finally ARPA forced the universities' hands, and they joined.
  • 24:24 mentions that some of the guys who created ARPANET were actually previously counting cards at Casinos in Las Vegas, just like in the 21 (2008) film
  • one of the centerpieces of development was at UCLA. The other was the BBN company. 33:55 shows the first router, then called them Interface Message Processor
  • the first message was from UCLA to Stanford University. He was trying to write "Login", and it crashed at the 'g'. Epic. They later debugged it.
  • towards the end talks about ALOHAnet, the first wireless computer communication done
Part 2 - Serving the Suits
  • Robert Metcalfe. He's nice. Xerox PARC. Ethernet.
  • Explains what is a "Workstation", notably showing one by Sun Microsystems. This is now an obscure "passé" thing in 2020 that young people like Ciro Santilli have only heard of in legend (or in outdated university computer labs!). Funny to think that so many people have had this idea before, including e.g. the Chromebook
  • 10:46 mentions that all of Cisco, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems and where founded at Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460, at Stanford University.
  • he then talks a lot about Sun. Sun became dominant in Wall Street.
  • 19:05: Novell, from Utah. How they almost went bust, but were saved at the last moment by Ray Noorda, who refocused them to their NetWare product which was under recent development. It allowed file and printer sharing in IBM PCs. 22:55 shows how they had a live radio host for people waiting on customer support calls!
  • 33:56 mentions how The Grateful Dead had in impact on the Internet, as people wanted computers to be able to access The WELL online forum. They still own the domain as of 2022: www.well.com/. It is interesting how Larry Page also liked The Grateful Dead as mentioned at The Google Story, his dad would take him to shows. Larry is a bit younger of course than the people in this documentary.
  • 37 show McAfee
  • 43:56: fantastic portrait of Cisco
Part 3 - Wiring the World:
  • Berners-Lee at CERN and the invention of the URL.
  • 1992: US Government allow commerce on the Internet
  • Web browser history, Mosaic and Marc Andresseeen.
  • 20:45: America Online
  • 23:29: search engines and Excite. Google was a bit too small to be on his radar!
  • 25:50: porn
  • 27: The Motley Fool and advertising
  • 30: Planet U grocery shopping
  • 31:50: Amazon
  • 33:00: immigrant workers, Indians playing cricket, outsourcing, Wipro Systems
  • 41:25: Java
  • 46:30: Microsoft joins the Internet. The Internet Tidal Wave Internet memo. Pearl Harbour day talk.
  • 56:40: Excite Tour. If they had survived, they would have been Google with their quirky offices.
www.youtube.com/channel/UCivA7_KLKWo43tFcCkFvydw
Host: Ben Krasnow.
Deals with materials, chemistry, microscopy, electronics.
Uber practical, well described setups deep science stuff, he is awesome and has been at Google since 2014: www.linkedin.com/in/ben-krasnow-6796a94/
Ben studied at University of California, Santa Barbara.

AlphaPhoenix

words: 32
www.youtube.com/channel/UCCWeRTgd79JL0ilH0ZywSJA
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiMR6yAFfyA He obtained PhD from UCSB in Materials, exploring, among other things, growth of a semiconductor called lead selenide.
Aweseome dude filmed a bit of the high end univeresity equipment while doing his thesis.

EngineerGuy

words: 17
www.youtube.com/c/engineerguyvideo
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Hammack
Does deliver good concise ideas. Now we need something on the less concise side of it.

NileRed

words: 11
www.youtube.com/channel/UCFhXFikryT4aFcLkLw2LBLA
Great chemistry content. Well detailed setups, notably substance extraction from off-the-shelf products.

Cody'sLab

words: 76
www.youtube.com/channel/UCu6mSoMNzHQiBIOCkHUa2Aw
This dude is mind blowing. Big respect.
Some of the most impressive videos are the ones in which he goes and extracts metals from minerals himself all the way.
But God, the typography of the channel name is so insane! Why no space???
Shame the academic system wasn't compatible with him: www.reddit.com/r/codyslab/comments/f5531p/codys_qualifications/ Maybe there were safety issues involved though.
Video 10. What's Been Going On With Cody'sLab? by Cody'sLab (2019) Source. Cody opening up about some issues he's having life. Notably: being naughty and creative are correlated.

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