Ciro Santilli views humans as biological robots, and therefore RTA videos can be thought of as probabilistic TAS with human achievable reflex constraints.
This aspect is especially highlighted in "speed run record evolution videos", which can be quite fun, e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmS9e7kzgS4 Ocarina of Time - World Record History and Progression (Any% Speedrun, 1990s-2017) by retro (2017)
From a similar point of view, Ciro also sometimes watches/learns a bit about competitive PvP games from a "could a computer play this better than a human" point of view.
Ciro also likes to watch commented manual speedruns of games as a way of experiencing the game at a high level without spending too much time on it, often from Games Done Quick. Their format is good because it generally showcases one player focusing more on the gameplay, and three couch commentators to give context, that's a good setup.
It is a
To some extent, the ultimate achievement of a TAS is to achieve arbitrary code execution (ACE) on a game, although this has been becoming rarer and rarer in newer consoles. The Nintendo 64 is the current interesting ACE discovery frontier as of 2020.
Post ACE, you then get into more subtle categories which tend to be more geometric clipping through wall glitches, but those can still be fun.
The most beautiful TAS content ever made are:
It is also amusing to see console verification of emulations, e.g.: Video 1. "Super Mario 64 '120 Stars' in 1:20:41.52 Console Verified by Soul Umbreon (2012)".
Video 1.
Super Mario 64 '120 Stars' in 1:20:41.52 Console Verified by Soul Umbreon (2012)
Source.
Bristol (synthesizer) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Simulates vintage hardware synthesizers, and includes some pretty complex ones!
Aims to show an UI that looks exactly like the synthesizers in question.
For example for the Minimoog on Ubuntu 20.04:
sudo apt install bristol
startBristol -mini -alsa
This is a really good piece of software. You can search on YouTube how some classic synths, work, and the immediately start playing them!
FluidSynth by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Supports only very basic effects it seems: chorus effect and reverberation. The main way to add instruments to it is via SoundFont files.
ZynAddSubFX by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Contains a large database of instruments, and allows you to edit them. This is a fun toy.
Instruments are edited on a GUI. It is a multi-window program, and you open new windows from new windows from new windows, all filled with hundreds of virtual knobs that you drag with your keyboard, and which would be better done from textual software like Csound. It is a thing of beauty.
It does not seem possible to program arbitrary modular synthesizer circuits therefore. But if you understand additive synthesis and subtractive synthesis well, you can make some funky sounds with it.
It is basically a superset of all popular hardware synthesizers ever made.
Has its own built-in MIDI keyboard which is nice.
On Ubuntu 20.04 Version: 3.0.5:
sudo apt install zynaddsubfx
zynaddsubfx -O alsa
as per askubuntu.com/questions/220802/no-sound-zynaddsubfx-and-jack-wont-run/1297988#1297988
To do anything of interest, switch to the Advanced UI:
The UI is completely different form what is shown on the website as of 2020: zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.io/, it looks instead like: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVPr6iUuO3g Maybe on the website it is the new zyn-fusion UI... www.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio/comments/bxn3ur/some_help_for_installing_zynfusion_zynaddsubfx/ so confusing.
And they have some crappy policy of asking for 45 USD for binary downloads.
Compiling from source:
git clone https://github.com/zynaddsubfx/zynaddsubfx
cd zynaddsubfx
git checkout a789866de4d45a784c1f4d95fcf5a1938347baef
sudo apt build-dep zynaddsubfx
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j`nproc`
fails with:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/cxxtestgen", line 7, in <module>
    import cxxtest.cxxtestgen
  File "/usr/share/cxxtest/cxxtest/__init__.py", line 33, in <module>
    from cxxtest.cxxtestgen import *
  File "/usr/share/cxxtest/cxxtest/cxxtestgen.py", line 18, in <module>
    import __release__
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named '__release__'
Ciro gives up for now.
This is notably what the United States emerged to be after World War II. But it was likely what Nazi Germany also was, and many other superpowers.
Ciro Santilli feels that much more relevant would be to also include academia as in "military-industrial-academic" complex, the Wikipedia page actually mentions precedents to this idea.
The addition of congress/politicians is also relevant.
But hey, the name wouldn't sound so slick with three parts.
It is basically in this context that American science and technology flourished after World War II, including notably the development of quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman being a prototypical example, having previously worked on the Manhattan Project.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact