Update README.md

Author: spacejam

README.md

@@ -203,33 +203,3 @@ for a more detailed overview of where we're at and where we see things going!
 # fund feature development
 
 Like what we're doing? Help us out via [GitHub Sponsors](https://github.com/sponsors/spacejam)!
-
-# special thanks
-
-<p align="center">
-  <a href="https://www.meilisearch.com/">
-    <img src="https://avatars3.githubusercontent.com/u/43250847?s=200&v=4" width="20%" height="auto" />
-  </a>
-</p>
-
-Special thanks to [Meili](https://www.meilisearch.com/) for providing engineering effort and other support to the sled project. They are building [an event store](https://blog.meilisearch.com/meilies-release/) backed by sled, and they offer [a full-text search system](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliDB) which has been a valuable case study helping to focus the sled roadmap for the future.
-
-<p align="center">
-  <a href="http://worksonarm.com">
-    <img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7989673/29498525-38a33f36-85cc-11e7-938d-ef6f10ba6fb3.png" width="20%" height="auto" />
-  </a>
-</p>
-
-Additional thanks to [Arm](https://www.arm.com/), [Works on Arm](https://www.worksonarm.com/) and [Packet](https://www.packet.com/), who have generously donated a 96 core monster machine to assist with intensive concurrency testing of sled. Each second that sled does not crash while running your critical stateful workloads, you are encouraged to thank these wonderful organizations. Each time sled does crash and lose your data, blame Intel.
-
-# contribution welcome!
-
-want to help advance the state of the art in open source embedded
-databases? check out [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md)!
-
-# references
-
-* [The Bw-Tree: A B-tree for New Hardware Platforms](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/bw-tree-icde2013-final.pdf)
-* [LLAMA: A Cache/Storage Subsystem for Modern Hardware](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/llama-vldb2013.pdf)
-* [Cicada: Dependably Fast Multi-Core In-Memory Transactions](http://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2018/papers/06-mvcc2/lim-sigmod2017.pdf)
-* [The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/LFS.pdf)