Git design rationale by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The fundamental insight of Git design is: a SHA represents not only current state, but also the full history due to the Merkle tree implementation, see notably:
This makes it so that you will always notice if you are overwriting history on the remote, even if you are developing from two separate local computers (or more commonly, two people in two different local computers) and therefore will never lose any work accidentally.
It is very hard to achieve that without the Merkle tree.
Consider for example the most naive approach possible of marking versions with consecutive numbers:
  • Local 1:
  • Local 2:
    • 0: root commit
    • 1: commit 1
    • 2: commit 2 by local 2
    • 3: commit 3 by local 2
  • Remote
If Local 1 were to push to Remote first, how could Local 2 notice that when it tries to push itself? The navie method of just checking: "does Remote have commit "2"" does not work, because Local 2 has a different version of commit 2 than local 1.
AI generated porn by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-12-13
This is going to be the most important application of generative AI. Especially if we ever achieve good text-to-video.
Image generators plus human ranking:
www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph63c71351edece: Heavenly Bodies Part 1: Sister's Mary First Act. Pornhub title: "AI generated Hentai Story: Sexy Nun alternative World(Isekai) Stable Diffusion" Interesting concept, slide-narrated over visual novel. The question is how they managed to keep face consistency across images.
Drosophila connectome by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The hard part then is how to make any predictions from it:
2024: www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y Largest brain map ever reveals fruit fly's neurons in exquisite detail
As of 2022, it had been almost fully decoded by post mortem connectome extraction with microtome!!! 135k neurons.
That article mentions the humongous paper elifesciences.org/articles/66039 elifesciences.org/articles/66039 "A connectome of the Drosophila central complex reveals network motifs suitable for flexible navigation and context-dependent action selection" by a group from Janelia Research Campus. THe paper is so large that it makes eLife hang.

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