Good things from Japan are quite a few

This post was written by a human.

In late August my family and I visited Japan for the first time. I cannot say that we actually planned to visit Japan, since not all of us are crazy about it, but speaking for myself I wanted to visit it one day. I think it all started back in my childhood when I first saw Chinese characters and was intrigued by them. Then martial arts and movies about them were quite a few back in 80’s-90’s. Then I myself practiced Kyokushinkay Karate Do and other martial arts. This partially influenced me to enroll into East Asian Studies and Linguistics at the university. In the end I switched to engineering, but I had a chance to take courses on India, China and Japan cultures and Japanese language which I studied for a year and a half.

This brings me to these days. A couple of years ago I wrote a post about OHTO GS01 pen that I bought at the time. I very much liked it, but after visiting Japan I met a new love there OHTO GS01-05 roller gel pen, which felt as a right fit right away. The pen below feels solid in hand. It writes smoothly even though it has a 0.5 mm needle tip. And it’s a pleasure to use.

It comes with a black refill if you plan to buy it outside Japan. But in Japan it’s possible to buy a blue refill as well. What’s important this pen is a good companion in studying Chinese characters, also known as kanji in Japanese.

We visited a number of cities in Japan. Those that most of tourist visit as well, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara and Inari. Each one with its unique character, nature, mostly in Kyoto and Nara, and food.

Overall, I liked this trip very much for Japanese people, language and culture are quite distinct. Having studied Japanese a long time ago, helped a little bit in navigating in Japan on a daily basis. But what really helped was using Gen AI apps to get information about various places and Google Translate visual translation to buy things at stores.

What a person like me would buy in Japan except for a new pen? Well, Japanese textbooks and quite a few of them. Oh, well and a Japanese Hump Back rock-band CD. Yes, CDs can be still bought there, in particular this album: Ningen nanosa. If you’d like to listen to a full album it is here.

Speaking about textbooks and books from Japan. Following are the books that I bought there to study Japanese and which I recommend if you’d like to study Japanese as well. Pay attention, to be able to read bi-lingual books mentioned below there is a need to know hiragana and katakana beforehand.

  • The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji by by Christopher Seely, Kenneth G. Henshall, Jiageng Fan.
    • This one I didn’t buy in Japan. But was able to find online.
    • This book is the best in my opinion for studying kanji. It provides an etymological information that I find invaluable.
  • Learning Japanese Kanji by Glen Nolan Grant.
    • This book is interesting since it has mnemonic stories that help to remember kanji, but it fails to mention what are determinatives or radicals. Which in my opinion is an essential knowledge for a person learning kanji and Chinese characters.
  • Basic Japanese by Samuel E. Martin and Erico Sato.
    • This book provides a solid foundation of Japanese grammar and is one of the best books on the subject.
    • It turned out that books by Erico Sato are very good and helpful. I bought one more that she wrote below.
  • Japanese Stories for Language Learners by Anne McNulty and Erico Sato.
    • I find such books the best in studying Japanese. Kanji are there in context. Stories have some repetition so you practice reading same thing a number of times. Also, you learn about Japanese culture and history.
  • Japanese Folktales for Language Learners by Eriko Sato and Anna Sato.
    • Same comment as above. This book contains quite a few stories and it is 320 pages long. What I like the most that there is English and Japanese texts there. And Japanese text has detailed translations and grammar notes.
  • Tuttle Concise Japanese Dictionary by Samuel E. Martin.
    • I bought this book after returning home. It turns out that prof. Erico Sato updated the Basic Japanese book that Samuel E. Martin wrote. And Samule E. Martin was a world expert on Japanese and Korean languages.

I cannot finish this post without mentioning Japanese YouTube channels, and there are lots of them, that provide a learner with an opportunity to listen to speaking Japanese. There are channels that have slowly spoken Japanese or regular tempo Japanese. People speaking on various topics or traveling around Japan and later narrating what they saw while being there. I personally, find them very helpful in studying Japanese and will recommend the ones below. All of them provide subtitles in Japanese which is very helpful since you can read what is said.

  • Japanese Talk with Himawari channel provides Japanese spoken in a simple and slower fashion, which easy to understand if you already know some basics. Himawari speaks about topics related to Japanese day to day life like Japanese trains, seasons, places, culture etc. When I listen to it I copy and paste kanji or sentences that I’d like to translate and use MS Copilot to translate and explain kanji.
  • 【Wasabi】 listening daily Japanese channel provides visual Japanese by narrating what the author sees while traveling around Japan.
  • NihongoDekita Podcast and NihongoDekita with Sayaka channel features regular speed spoken Japanese which is a little bit more challenging to listen to.

Reading books in parallel may be interesting

I’ve got quite a few very good hard sci-fi books I’d like to read. I knew that each one was good, since I read a book by each author before getting the subsequent ones, except for Project Hail Mary. In this case, I saw the recent movie first and boy it was good.

Now, usually, I read books in a sequential manner. I start to read a book and finish it. Then, I take another book and continue with the same approach. I think I might change how I read books going forward, or at least I’ll try a nice small reading experiment.

Having finished reading Pandora’s Star, a very long novel, by Peter Hamilton I think I am ready to try reading, say, four or five sci-fi books at once. If you don’t know, Peter Hamilton’s books are very long, the one that I finished reading recently was 988 pages long. It was the first such a long book I ever read. Despite the length, the book actually was an easy and joyful reading. Peter Hamilton is writing hard sci-fi novels and is renowned for his worldbuilding, detailed and vivid descriptions and interesting plot twists, all carefully intertwined with captivating sci-fi ideas.

Readers’ feedback on his novels was that they, and Pandora’s Start in particular, read like a collection of stories. While the same approach to writing was praised by other readers, who liked a careful worldbuilding and plot lines that coalesce and make perfect sense later in the book. I belong to that second category of readers. I think the book only gains from such composition. And here comes my reading experiment. It feels like reading five different books in total by Stephen Baxter, Greg Bear, Peter Hamilton, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Andy Weir is a doable thing. I agree that they won’t coalesce into a coherent narrative, but still it can be an interesting endeavor to try.

Also, if you studied in college or university, you may have a familiar feeling if you recall taking a number of very different courses there at once. It may be daunting to have courses on, say, chemistry, mathematics, electronics and programming in parallel. Which all are technical subjects, but very different in nature and require different textbooks, which you need to read in parallel.

I’ve already read about 40 pages into each book and, mostly, have been focusing on Judas Unchained the second novel in the Commonwealth Saga by Peter Hamilton. So far, it doesn’t feel confusing or overwhelming, as I said, it reminds me of college times.
So there you have it, reading can be tedious, it can be also fun and it can be challenging on a good side of an intellectual challenge.

Stay tuned.

Reading is essential for learning and understanding

I continue with reading hard science-fiction books as planned. Recently, I’ve bought a number of used and new books, some I borrowed in the library. In my mind reading is essential for learning and understanding, for it’s possible to have a rudimentary understanding of things without knowing how to read or write, but there is a threshold which you won’t be able to pass if you don’t read.

At our current level of technological evolution we don’t know how to upload knowledge and understanding into brain and, frankly, it seems quite impossible. Sci-fi writers and, mostly, futurists have a strange conviction that it will be possible in the near future. But we are far away from even understanding how a single cell works. Actually, we really don’t know how a cell works, not to mention that a human body consists of trillions (1,000,000,000,000) of cells.

So, until that future time comes, if ever, we are stuck with the old way of knowledge acquisition and understanding, which is by reading books and trying to understand the concepts in them. Trying to play with the ideas and apply them in practice.

Reading hard sci-fi books makes you think

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Since my last post where I mentioned I enjoyed reading hard science-fictions books I made some progress. I’ve discovered and read another batch of very good quality books that make you think about our place in the Universe and think about what is possible and what could have been.

The books below vary in their style, themes and length, but all of them worth your time and money unless you have a public library access. But this doesn’t guarantee they have all the books below. In my case library doesn’t have a paper version of books by Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter and Peter F. Hamilton which is strange to say the least.

Only one of the books below I cannot recommend, which is The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu. This book is a collection of his stories. I did like The Wandering Earth story and a few others, but I stopped reading the book in the middle. For I didn’t find stories interesting to invest my time in reading them.

Very good books I recently read

To summarize from February 8th, 2026 until May 31st, 2026 which is a period of about four months I’ve read a couple of hard sci-fi books.

Each book on average had 365 pages which makes it on average 8 * 365 = 2920 pages long. Actual count was 2924 pages. Or 2924 / 4 about 731 page a month.

  1. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  3. A View From the Stars by Cixin Liu
  4. To Hold up the Sky by Cixin Liu
  5. The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu (first 1/3 of the book. This book only had a couple of stories I liked)
  6. Ring by Stephen Baxter
  7. Eon by Greg Bear
  8. Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton (in progress 400 out of 986 pages)

Some AI generated statistics

Book Page Count Breakdown

Book TitleAuthorPages Read Full Book Length
Children of TimeAdrian Tchaikovsky600600
Fahrenheit 451Ray Bradbury190190
A View From the StarsCixin Liu224224
To Hold up the SkyCixin Liu334334
The Wandering Earth (First 1/3)Cixin Liu160480
RingStephen Baxter512512
EonGreg Bear504504
Pandora’s Star (In Progress)Peter F. Hamilton400986
TOTAL–2,9244,330

Total Pages Read:

  • Actual progress: 2,924 pages.

Average Pages Per Book:

  • Current average progress: 365.5 pages per book.

What’s next?

As, I’ve mentioned I have been currently reading Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton, next Manifold: Space by Stephen Baxter, next Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky, next Judas Unchained by Peter Hamilton. Also, I consider reading In the Ocean of Night book by Gregory Benford, and The Forge Of God by Greg Bear.

Stay tuned.

Digital prison of focus. How social media is the same as ultra-processed food.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

It seems like there is no person left on Earth who wouldn’t spend some time connected to some type of social media. It can be Facebook, YouTube, Instagram etc.

These platforms provide endless content that is easy to watch, but difficult to stop watching. Though it seems like these services are for free, we know they are definitely not. In return for free shorts, reels etc. you pay with an access to your personal information and an easy compilation of your behavioral patterns that allow companies to manipulate you. But what is more problematic is that you trade your own time for a chance to waste it on, mostly, useless content.

Why is it a problem you may ask? Well, since we don’t live forever, spending time using social media puts you in a kind of digital prison, which is difficult to escape as more and more time spent there. It is known that social media is addictive and that is why its effects are dangerous.

A good analogy can be an analogy with junk or, as it’s now called, ultra-processed foods. It is known that such food is, relatively, cheap, devoid of healthy content and very addictive. People whose diet is full of such food are prone to a following progression: being overweight, then obese, then type 2 diabetic.

The same is applicable to social media content. It’s cheap. It’s, mostly, devoid of healthy content and it’s very addictive. Well, what can we do in this case? Using the same analogy, it is known that the main component that is harmful in ultra-processed food are refined carbohydrates, especially, when they combined with refined seed oils. Refined carbohydrates are harmful, because they raise insulin hormone, that in turns promotes fat storage and hence weight gain. Solutions to this problems are intermittent fasting, which allows insulin hormone to become low and hence utilize stored fat for energy. And ketogenic diets, that achieve weight loss with a similar effect on insulin hormone.

Well, how is this applicable to social media? It seems reasonable that intermittent fasting or complete fasting from social media can be an effective approach to reclaim your time and start focusing your efforts somewhere else. Somewhere, where your time and effort may be helpful to you and other people in your life. We are talking about focusing your time on things you’d like to achieve or change. Things that require concentrated effort for long periods of time. Such an effort isn’t possible with destructive social media interference.

So, there you have it. One possible way forward is to delete some or all of your social media apps from your phone. Start intermittent fasting from social media for 16 or more hours a day, just like is done in 16:8 intermittent fasting, where you fast for 16 hours, and eat only within 8 hour eating window. Practice complete abstinence from social media for a number of days. What is known as prolonged fasting in a fasting world. Search for other ways to break the addiction, for you have only limited time on this Earth.

Learning Windows NT internals just for fun

Photo by Philip Oroni on Unsplash

How has it all started as far as I can recall?

I was always intrigued by how operating systems worked under the hood. A couple of years ago I watched an interesting interview with David Cutler who was a chief architect of Windows NT. Microsoft started designing NT back in 1988 and released it in 1993 as Windows NT 3.1. David Cutler wrote most of the kernel himself and his code is still there in Windows 11.

Having watched the interview I searched for a book that would describe how Windows NT was designed and developed. What I found was a nonfiction book Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft by G. Pascal Zachary written in 1994. The book was interesting to read and it described what toll it took for developers to deliver Windows NT in a relatively short time period for OS development.

Last year I started to look for technical books on Windows that described design, architecture and hands-on details of the OS. There are only a few books that exist on the subject. Among the best known ones is Windows Internals series of books that had a number of editions since 1992 when Inside Windows NT book by Helen Custer was published. As of today, the latest edition of the two part Windows Internals series is 7th from 2016. These books are not cheap, but they are written by the experts in the field, such as Pavel Yosifovich, Alex Ionescu, Mark Russinovich, David Solomon and Andrea Alliev.

Since I wanted to start somewhere I chose to buy a used copy of Inside Windows NT. Even though the book is quite dated and is from 1992 it was still interesting to read and most parts of it are still relevant after 34 years. I think it’s because the book describes the design and architecture of Windows NT without going into specific technical details of OS implementation. Also, Helen Custer was a technical writer with Windows NT team and she did a very good job explaining how NT worked that is still enjoyable to read nowadays. Having said that there are parts of the book that are dated and no longer applicable, for example the Networking chapter. But, reading this book can provide a reader with the basic understanding of operating systems design that is a good foundation to next read books such as Windows Internals and other books on operating systems.

In parallel, I thought it’s good to get some hands on experience working with kernel related code. So, I searched for the books that authors of Windows Internals wrote and I found out that Pavel Yosifovich wrote a number of detailed technical books about Windows programming and among them Windows Kernel Programming book which I bought. This book provides hands-on lessons that can teach you how to write Windows software device drivers which are drivers that run in kernel mode. In general, in operating systems there are two modes of code execution. One is called a user mode where applications run with restricted privileges. When user applications need privileged access they call services that are executed in kernel mode to get the work done.

At this point I felt like I needed also to get a good understanding of operating systems design in general. So, I asked Gemini to give me a list of books which it did.

1. The “Gold Standard” for Theory

“Operating System Concepts” by Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne (Often called “The Dinosaur Book” because of its cover)

  • Why it’s great: This is the most widely used textbook in the world. It explains the “why” behind OS design—how CPU scheduling works, why we need virtual memory, and how file systems are structured.
  • Best for: A high-level, comprehensive overview of all concepts.
  • Note: It is very theoretical. You won’t see much actual code, but you will understand the logic that applies to all operating systems.

2. The Practical “In the Trenches” Choice

“Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces” (OSTEP) by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau

  • Why it’s great: This book is legendary for being readable, witty, and free (available online). It breaks the OS down into three pillars: Virtualization, Concurrency, and Persistence.
  • Best for: Someone who finds traditional textbooks dry. It includes homework assignments and coding projects that make the concepts “click.”
  • Link to Electronics: It does a fantastic job explaining how software abstractions interact with physical hardware (RAM and Disk).

3. For the Hardcore Implementation

“Modern Operating Systems” by Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Best for: Understanding the “Microkernel vs. Monolithic” debate you’ve been looking into. It provides a very detailed look at the interface between hardware and software.

Why it’s great: Tanenbaum is the creator of MINIX, the OS that inspired Linux. This book is famous for its depth. It doesn’t just tell you how a kernel works; it shows you the trade-offs involved in building one.

So, here I am reading some of the books above and working with the Windows Kernel Programming book at the moment.
Below, I’ll provide links to all the books above and some YouTube videos on the subject.

Resources

Technical tutorials

Open Source clone of Windows NT that you haven’t heard about

ReactOS is primarily a re‑implementation of the Windows NT 5.2 architecture — the version used in Windows Server 2003.

Books

YouTube videos

A two part interview with David Cutler

An interview with David Cutler by Dave Plummer

Developing Kernel Drivers with Modern C++ – Pavel Yosifovich

How using GenAI tools blindly makes you dumb

Photo by Đào Việt Hoàng on Unsplash

In the age of GenAI tools dominance it is easy to use these tools blindly, without thinking how the tools come up with their answers.

The main issue with treating these tools as a black box is the fact that people learn by making mistakes, while they apply what they try to learn. The problem with GenAI tools is that they give you a complete answer without you exerting any effort in trying to solve the problem on your own. Hence, you miss a critical step in a learning process, which is without a challenge there is no gain.

I can say this based on my own experience with using GenAI tools at work and at home for dozens if not hundreds times a day. The main issue with using GenAI tools at work, such as M365 Copilot Chat and the like, for software development tasks, is what I’ve mentioned above. These tools may give you a complete implementation that works, but you don’t learn anything new as a result, since you don’t try to implement that same thing on your own.

A good example, can be a situation where you’d like to have a Python script that can transform data from one format into another.
Recently, I needed to transform an OWASP Dependency Check plugin JSON report into a more user friendly format, specifically into a CSV file (aka Excel) to be able to see security vulnerabilities at a glance and to be able to sort them by the NVD last updated date.

To write such a script in Python would take me some time for sure. For I need to understand how to parse JSON file, extract various fields and then write the data in to CSV file. I had a bright idea to use GenAI to do it quickly to save time and effort. Indeed, after a few back and forth iterations with M365 Copilot Chat I had a working Python script that delivered what I needed, without me even looking into the implementation. It was what I’ve mentioned a black box treatment of the GenAI response. It worked and I didn’t care how. But, the main point was, that I didn’t learn anything in the process and felt actually as I was cheating.

I needed to update the script in the end, so I did indeed look at the implementation. And it took me some time to figure out how it worked. It was written well and in a modular fashion. But, I think I’d never do it in a similar way as a GenAI model did.
I was able to understand and adapt the code enough for it to work, but it didn’t work quite well. So, I said to myself, well it’s time to save my effort and asked GenAI to refactor it, which it did correctly first time.

So, in the end, I did save time on that script, and I did learn how it worked, since I was curious, but I didn’t get the same amount of experience, should I implement it on my own from start to finish.

In this case, I am not talking about GitHub Copilot, for I don’t use it currently. But, even using free GenAI tools can be harmful in the long run, if you treat them as black boxes, instead of tools that help you think better. They cannot substitute thinking, for then you become dumber in the process.

Also, with recent improvements in Anthropic Claude agents, people such as Andrej Karpathy state that we are in the new era of software programming. It sounds that it’s a valid statement to make, since he’s not the only one noticing this change in performance of GenAI agents, but the crucial point is that people who didn’t have software programming experience before starting to use such tools will certainly have a gap in programming skills, for they didn’t face challenges that taught them how to really think. Karpathy is a good example, since he was a programmer before GenAI tools where on the horizon.

In the end, GenAI tools can be very helpful and effective in helping you learn whatever topic you want, but they can be as effective in preventing you from gaining valuable experience while you master the subject.

Reading hard sci-fi books inspired by 3I/ATLAS

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

How it started

I think there’s hardly a person left who didn’t hear about 3I/ATLAS. Third interstellar object that has visited us and is currently moving through Solar System on its way towards Jupiter Hill radius.

This interstellar object is unlike any comet known to us so far. With its anomalies, that some of them have not been explained, it sparks imagination of observers. For it could be an artificial object visiting us from afar.

I am interested in astronomy, space exploration in general and Solar System exploration in particular. So, I tend to follow what’s new in this area. As soon as I heard about 3I/ATLAS I knew I needed to check what Avi Loeb had to say on the subject, for I knew he had provided an interesting hypothesis about Oumuamua being a light sail object of a potential artificial origin.

Lo and behold, back in the summer of 2025 Avi wrote a paper where he mentioned that 3I/ATALS could be a spacecraft that could release probes, but most importantly, he mentioned Dark Forest theory. I was curious what that dark forest was about and this way I found out about The Dark Forest book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy written by Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin.

I ordered the first book in a series on September 9th, 2025. It turned out that the book was very interesting to say the least. I think the trilogy is the best hard science fiction that I ever read. Maybe, I didn’t read a lot of sci-fi.

I forgot to mentioned that before reading the book I started to watch Netflix series that was based on the trilogy. I liked first few episodes a lot. But the book is much more better, and they changed almost everything in the series, which I found dubious. There is a Chinese movie adaptation of The Three-Body problem book which is quite faithful to the book content, but that series is a little bit boring because of this.

Well, having finished reading the trilogy I was curious whether other books of Liu Cixin were that good and bought Ball Lightning on Sep 29th, 2025. That book was interesting, but underwhelming in comparison to The Three-Bod Problem. I should mentioned that the book was written before the trilogy, though. Recently, he hasn’t written new sci-fi novels that could compare to the trilogy. I watched a couple of interviews with Liu Cixin and he mentioned that it’s difficult to write something significant after the trilogy.

The hard sci-fi books above were very influential, so I used Copilot Chat to search for similar books. In the end, I found Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds and on Oct 28th, 2025 I got Revelation Space book. This series was quite different in comparison to Three-Body Problem, but still it was very captivating reading. I ended up reading all the books in the series including the recent forth one Inhibitor Phase that I got on Dec 10th, 2025. I read a number of his other books since then.

Next, I figured out that buying books was quite expensive and discovered that borrowing books from a local library was free and it had most of the books by Alastair Reynolds and other sci-fi authors.

So, after reading 11 books by Reynolds, which I will list later in the post, I thought I needed to find something similar again. Watching a YouTuber that talks about sci-fi books he reads I found out about Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. I, actually, bought that book on Jan 1st, 2026, since library didn’t have it. I liked that book a lot. It is different in many ways in comparison to Three-Body Problem and books by Reynolds. It has a number of very interesting hard sci-fi ideas which you can discover by reading the book.

Then I checked what other books he wrote, and as a consequence read his The Chronoliths novel, which I borrowed in January 2025 from the library.

Well, what should I read next? I re-watched recently Contact movie which was based on the Contact novel by Carl Sagan. Well, I needed to read it too. So, I borrowed it from the library and finished recently.

Now, in February 2026 I am reading The Revelation Space Collection Volume 1 and 2, which is a collection of sci-fi stories happening in the Revelation Space Universe that Alastair Reynolds written throughout the years starting from 1990 and until 2021.

I also ordered Ring by Stephen Baxter on Feb 7th, 2026 and I have a book of stories by Ted Chiang Exhalation and a novel Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky on hold in the library.

Statistics

To summarize from Sep 9th 2025 until February 8th, 2026 which is a period of five months I’ve read 18 books.

Each book on average had 500 pages which makes it 18 * 500 = 9,000 pages. Or 9000 / 5 = 1800 pages a month, or 60 pages a day:

  1. The Three-Body Problem
  2. The Dark Forest
  3. Death’s End
  4. Ball Lightning
  5. Revelation Space
  6. Redemption Ark
  7. Absolution Gap
  8. Inhibitor Phase
  9. Chasm City
  10. Aurora Rising
  11. Elysium Fire
  12. Machine Vendetta
  13. House of Suns
  14. Pushing Ice
  15. Eversion
  16. Spin
  17. The Chronoliths
  18. Contact

What’s next?

As, I’ve mentioned I am reading The Revelation Space Collection Volume 1 and 2, and next Ring by Stephen Baxter, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Stay tuned.

Circuits, Symmetry, and Category Theory: A Fresh Look at the Memristor

Image generated by ChatGPT.

As it sometime happens to me while I was checking what’s new on YouTube the suggestions algorithm had a video about Memristor which was a forth basic electrical element that had a memory in it. While I was watching that interesting video that was created by prof. Giordano Scarciotti I saw the symmetry diagram that prof. Leon Chua came up with back in 1971. In that paper he proposed Memristor as a missing fundamental component in electrical circuit theory. So, what’s interesting about that diagram that it very much resembles diagrams in Category Theory.

Next, I’ve used Windows Copilot to elaborate on that idea. Chatting with it back and forth resulted in the blog post below:

Introduction

When we first learn electronics, we’re introduced to three fundamental passive elements: the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor. Each one ties together two physical quantities:

  • Resistor: relates voltage V and current i.
  • Capacitor: relates voltage V and charge q.
  • Inductor: relates current i and magnetic flux φ.

But in 1971, Leon Chua predicted a missing fourth element — the memristor — which connects charge q and flux φ. This completed the symmetry among the four fundamental electrical quantities.

🔎 Constitutive Relations and the “=0” Notation

In advanced circuit theory, each element is defined by a constitutive relation: a constraint between two variables. Instead of writing explicit formulas like Ohm’s Law (V = R·i), theorists often use an implicit form:

  • Resistor: R(V, i) = 0
  • Capacitor: C(V, q) = 0
  • Inductor: L(i, φ) = 0
  • Memristor: M(q, φ) = 0

This doesn’t mean resistance is zero. It means: the pair of variables must satisfy some relation enforced by the element. For a linear resistor, that relation is V − R·i = 0. For nonlinear devices, the relation could be more complex. The implicit form is powerful because it generalizes to nonlinear, time-varying, and memory-dependent behaviors.

🔄 Symmetry and Completeness

Chua’s insight was that with four fundamental quantities (V, i, q, φ), there should be six possible pairings. Three were already realized by resistor, capacitor, and inductor. The missing link — charge to flux — was filled by the memristor. This symmetry is what makes the framework elegant: every pair of quantities is connected by a constitutive relation.

🧩 A Category-Theoretic Perspective

Here’s where the categorical flavor comes in. The symmetry looks a lot like category theory:

  • Objects: The four quantities (V, i, q, φ).
  • Morphisms: The four elements (resistor, capacitor, inductor, memristor).
  • Composition: Just as morphisms compose in category theory, circuit elements combine to form networks.
  • Commutativity: The square diagram commutes:
    L ∘ R = M ∘ C
    meaning that whether voltage is mapped to flux via current (resistor → inductor) or via charge (capacitor → memristor), the structural mapping is consistent.

🖼️ ASCII Diagrams

Fundamental Square of Relations

   V ──R──▶ i
   │        │
   C        L
   │        │
   ▼        ▼
   q ──M──▶ φ
  • R : V → i (Resistor)
  • C : V → q (Capacitor)
  • L : i → φ (Inductor)
  • M : q → φ (Memristor)

Commutative Diagram

        V
       / \
      R   C
     /     \
    i       q
     \     /
      L   M
       \ /
        φ

Here, the two paths from V to φ are equivalent:
L ∘ R = M ∘ C

✨ Why This Matters

Thinking categorically opens new doors:

  • Circuits can be modeled as categories of physical quantities.
  • Functorial translations could connect circuit categories to computational categories (logic, automata).
  • Neuromorphic computing, where memristors play a central role, might benefit from categorical semantics.

The memristor isn’t just a missing device — it’s the morphism that makes the diagram commute, completing the symmetry both physically and mathematically.

🧠 The Main Idea

By reframing Chua’s symmetry in categorical terms, we see circuits not just as physical devices but as mathematical structures. The memristor completes not only the physics of passive elements but also the mathematics of a commutative square.

This perspective — born from blending electronics with category theory — is a fresh, original way of thinking about circuit theory. It shows how abstract mathematics can illuminate engineering, and how symmetry drives discovery.

Understand any programing language using chatbots

Generated by Windows Copilot

Using chatbots wisely

If you have some basic background in programming, or even if you don’t, but want to get some then you can turn to chatbots and in particular to Windows Copilot (I’ll refer to it as Copilot for shortness). You can use Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude etc. if you prefer, and they’ll be as useful.
This is what I did just recently when I stumbled upon a post by Dave Plummer at X, where he talked about the need for programmers to understand how compilers produced their output, hence the need to know assembly language. By the way, Dave Plummer developed Windows Task Manager when he was a programmer with Microsoft . He has a YouTube channel where he posts interesting videos related to programming.

Why chatbots can be helpful in this case? First, if you didn’t program in assembly before it can be difficult to approach it. Second, chatbots are very helpful in explaining existing code in any programming language they had in their training data. And, I guess, it means it should know details about most modern programing languages.

Well, next I’ll provide a screenshot of that post, then I’ll show you that chatbot can transcribe the code from an image alone and explain what we are looking at there. The short summary is that post was about binary to ASCII (BTOA) conversion program written in PDP-11 computer assembly. By the way, all these details where extracted by Copilot from the code in the image.
Then, I’ve used Copilot to explain to me in detail how the code works to get full understanding of it.

Pay attention, that I use line separator to mark when the response from chatbot has finished.

Original post

I suppose there’s a whole class of programmers for whom a compiler is akin to magic, but knowing what’s getting emitted and how it works is fundamental to your success over the long haul. Write some assembly. Read the Dragon book on an airplane. AI will still be here when you get back. In five years, anyone capable of structured thought will be able to become a prompt engineer, but only 1% of software developers will actually be able to debug the stuff that comes out the other end. Be the 1%

What did I do next?

As I’ve mentioned I’ve copy and pasted the image in Copilot and asked it to transcribe the code from the image and explain what it’s doing.

Prompt:
Transcribe the code from the image and explain (an image was attached as can be seen in the screenshot below).
Response:


Below comes a full response.

Here’s the full transcription of the PDP-11 assembly code using MACRO-11 syntax, followed by a detailed explanation:
Transcribed Code

.TITLE  BTOA                ; Program title
.MCALL  .PRINT,.EXIT,.TTYOUT ; System macros

HELLOMSG: .ASCIZ /BTOA Example/

        .EVEN               ; Ensure we're on a word boundary

START:  .PRINT  #HELLOMSG
        MOV     #12345., R0 ; Number to convert
        JSR     PC, BTOA
        .EXIT

BTOA:
        MOV     R0, -(SP)   ; Save R0 on stack
        MOV     R1, -(SP)   ; Save R1 on stack
        MOV     R2, -(SP)   ; Save R2 on stack

        MOV     R0, R1      ; Move number to R1 (low part of dividend)
        CLR     R0          ; Clear R0 (high part of dividend)
        DIV     #10., R0    ; Divide R0:R1 by 10, quotient in R0, remainder in R1

        TST     R0          ; Check if quotient is 0
        BEQ     PRINT       ; If quotient is 0, print digit
        JSR     PC, BTOA    ; Recursive call with quotient

PRINT:  ADD     #'0, R1     ; Convert remainder to ASCII
        MOV     R1, R0      ; Move ASCII digit to R0
        .TTYOUT R0          ; Print the digit

        MOV     (SP)+, R2   ; Restore R2
        MOV     (SP)+, R1   ; Restore R1
        MOV     (SP)+, R0   ; Restore R0
        RTS     PC          ; Return

.END    START

🧠 Explanation

This program converts a binary number (in this case, 12345) to its ASCII decimal representation and prints it to the terminal.

🔹 Header and Setup

  • .TITLE BTOA: Sets the title of the program.
  • .MCALL .PRINT,.EXIT,.TTYOUT: Declares macros for printing, exiting, and terminal output.
  • HELLOMSG: .ASCIZ /BTOA Example/: Defines a null-terminated string.
  • .EVEN: Ensures the next instruction is aligned on a word boundary.

🔹 Main Routine (START)

  • .PRINT #HELLOMSG: Prints the greeting message.
  • MOV #12345., R0: Loads the number 12345 into register R0.
  • JSR PC, BTOA: Calls the BTOA subroutine to convert and print the number.
  • .EXIT: Ends the program.

🔹 Subroutine (BTOA)

  • Saves registers R0, R1, and R2 to the stack.
  • Sets up for division: moves the number to R1, clears R0 to form a 32-bit dividend.
  • DIV #10., R0: Divides R0:R1 by 10. Quotient goes to R0, remainder to R1.
  • TST R0: Tests if quotient is zero.
    • If yes, go to PRINT.
    • If not, recursively call BTOA with the quotient.
  • PRINT: Converts the remainder (digit) to ASCII by adding '0', then outputs it using .TTYOUT.
  • Restores registers from the stack and returns.

This recursive approach ensures digits are printed in the correct order (most significant to least significant). Would you like to see how this would look in C or another language for comparison?

Let’s try to understand how it works in more detail.

Question: First of all, what is BTOA?

Response:

Great question! 🧠

BTOA stands for Binary To ASCII. It’s a common abbreviation used in programming to describe the process of converting a binary (or numeric) value into its ASCII character representation, typically for display or output purposes.

🔍 What does “Binary to ASCII” mean?

  • Binary: In this context, it refers to a numeric value stored in binary format (e.g., the number 12345 in machine-readable form).
  • ASCII: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange — a character encoding standard that maps numbers to printable characters like '0' to '9', 'A' to 'Z', etc.

Okay, now that we know what that mysterious BTOA was how about we understand what happens inside this block of code that resides inside the BTOA function?

        MOV     R0, R1      ; Move number to R1 (low part of dividend)
        CLR     R0          ; Clear R0 (high part of dividend)
        DIV     #10., R0    ; Divide R0:R1 by 10, quotient in R0, remainder in R1

        TST     R0          ; Check if quotient is 0
        BEQ     PRINT       ; If quotient is 0, print digit
        JSR     PC, BTOA    ; Recursive call with quotient

Also, before jumping to Copilot for help we can see assembly language program that is doing some computation using registers in CPU such as R0 and R1. We can see the data is moved, cleared, a division is done and then there is a conditional logic on lines 5, 6 and 7. In the screenshot it corresponds to lines 22, 23 and 24.

So what is the explanation ?
Response:

This block of PDP-11 assembly code is the core of the binary-to-ASCII conversion logic. It performs division by 10 to extract digits from a number and uses recursion to print them in the correct order. Here’s a breakdown of each line:

🔍 Line-by-Line Explanation

18 MOV R0, R1 ; Move number to R1 (low part of dividend)
  • Copies the number from R0 to R1.
  • This sets up the 32-bit dividend for division: R0:R1 (high:low).
19 CLR R0 ; Clear R0 (high part of dividend)
  • Clears R0 to zero.
  • Now the full dividend is 0:R1, effectively treating the original number as a 32-bit value with high word = 0.
20 DIV #10., R0 ; Divide R0:R1 by 10, quotient in R0, remainder in R1
  • Performs a 32-bit division of R0:R1 by 10.
  • After this:
  • R0 contains the quotient (i.e., number / 10)
  • R1 contains the remainder (i.e., number % 10), which is the rightmost digit
22 TST R0 ; Check if quotient is 0
  • Tests if the quotient is zero.
  • This determines whether there are more digits to process.
23 BEQ PRINT ; If quotient is 0, print digit
  • If R0 is zero, it means this is the last digit.
  • Branches to PRINT to output the digit.
24 JSR PC, BTOA ; Recursive call with quotient
  • If R0 is not zero, it means there are more digits.
  • Recursively calls BTOA with the quotient in R0, continuing the process.

🧠 Summary

This block:

  • Extracts the least significant digit of the number.
  • Uses division and recursion to process digits from most significant to least significant.
  • Ensures digits are printed in the correct order by printing only after recursion unwinds.

Conclusion

Well, I guess it clarifies a bit what the code is doing. And you probably got a point of how you can use a chatbot to help you understand a piece of code in a programming language you probably never saw and drill down to nitty gritty details of the implementation and really understand how it works.