This is an inspiring short video. This is very relevant to me because in many projects, especially the big ones, I feel like the things are not designed well. The situation is chaotic, it's burning all the time. Most of us are like those big resourceful animals in this story. Instead, if we be the hummingbird, the experience is well worth it.
No matter how many times I read this story, it never gets boring to me. I finished reading a two part article on Microsoft and IBM PC history featured in Ars Technica UK.
https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-1/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/ibm-pc-history-part-2/
If you are programmer working in this industry, go ahead and consume those pieces. You will turn out a bit more enlightened at the end.
Fundamentally, computer science is a science of abstraction — creating the right model for thinking about a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it. - From a Ullman book.
Abstraction is not a complex concept. And abstraction in the sense we use it implies simplification, the replacement of a complex and detailed real-world situation by an understandable model within which we can solve a problem. That is, we “abstract away” the details whose effect on the solution to a problem is minimal or nonexistent, thereby creating a model that lets us deal with the essence of the problem.
During the Gulf War in 1991, a U.S. Patriot missile failed to intercept an
Iraqi Scud missile, and 28 Americans were killed.
A later study determined that the problem was caused by the inaccuracy of the binary representation of 0.10.
The Patriot incremented a counter once every 0.10 seconds.
It multiplied the counter value by 0.10 to compute the actual time. However, the (24-bit) binary representation of 0.10 actually corresponds to 0.099999904632568359375, which is off by 0.000000095367431640625.
This doesn’t seem like much, but after 100 hours the time ends up being off by 0.34 seconds—enough time for a Scud to travel 500 meters!
Professor Skeel wrote a short article about this.
This video, titled How Security is 256-bit Security, provides an intuitive
understanding of the immense scale of 256-bit security. The discussion is framed
in the context of
Bitcoin
Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 by an unknown entity under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source implementation.: ch. 1 In 2021, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender. It is mostly seen as an investment and has been described by some scholars as an economic bubble. As bitcoin is pseudonymous, its use by criminals has attracted the attention of regulators, leading to its ban by several countries as of 2021.
, which uses the
SHA-256
SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compression function itself built using the Davies–Meyer structure from a specialized block cipher.
cryptographic algorithm. Other cryptocurrencies,
or alt-coins, may use different cryptographic algorithms, but the principles of
scale and security remain relevant.
The video helps to conceptualize the robustness of 256-bit encryption, emphasizing its importance in securing digital assets and communications in the modern world.
The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution
This is the story Semi-conductor revolution pioneered by Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby Author has done an excellent job of explaining the contribution of these engineers and success of American Industry as a result of these individuals.
I came across this Youtube channel, wherein a person by name Santhosh is explaining very hard to understand Compiler Design Concepts in Tamil
His playlist is here
I also came across compiler design lecture explanation in Hindi by a different people.
These are hard concepts. Even after reading the book, if I am struggling to understand; viewing these videos seems give a comfort and confidence. Something to say about the languages that we grew up with.
I like this anarchist movement of digital crypto-currency. People are betting on algorithms!
I spent time looking around and found that I liked z.cash, the concept of mining with hashpowers and effort that has gone into setting up cloud mining companies like genesis-mining.com and exchanges like kraken.com.
Trying with coindesk.com seems only like an entry point to this messy world.
When using Python3's async-await, not awaiting on coroutines was one of the common mistakes, I was making. I discovered that newer version of IntelliJ added a warning for it, so that it can spotted when you are writing the code itself.
It looks like children can learn multiple languages, and they can understand the structure of words used in language. Today we visited an ice-cream shop, and after enjoying ice-cream, Siddhartha said:
Siddhartha: I like the ice-cream.
Shalini: Say it in Sourashtra.
Siddhartha: Ice-cream love-ares.
The way his mind seems to have worked is. He placed the Subject of the sentence first, as it is usually in Sourashtra.
He did not know the equivalent of "like" in Saurashtra. So, he used the English word "love" and added the suffix "ares", which means, "being".
Correct translation should be: Ice-cream opa-ares.
It's interesting how close he was in constructing a sentence by intuitively forming the grammar and creating words using smaller parts.
I think, adults do this too.