Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

This one has students must have a flexible choice of what to learn on the name! Sounds interesting!

Good Portuguese overview: www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1806-11172017000300301&lng=pt&tlng=pt

A fantastic sounding full time 4-year course that any student could transfer to called that teaches various natural science topics, notably mathematics, physics, chemistry and molecular biology.

Many past students Ciro talked to however share a common frustration with the course: in the first 2 years at least, the "basic cycle", you have infinitely many courses, and no time to study, and no choice of what to study, it is only in the latter 2 years (the advanced cycle) that you get the choices.

Also, if you get low grades in a single subject, your out. And exams are useless of course.

Here's a Quora question in Portuguese about the course: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP, the only decent answer so far being: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP/answer/Victor-Soares-31. Very disappointing to hear.

On the advanced cycle, you have a lot of academic freedom. You are basically supposed to pick a research project with an advisor and go for it, with a small amount of mandatory course hours. Ciro was told in 2022 that you can even have advisors from other universities or industry, and that it is perfectly feasible to take courses in another university and validate the course hours later on. Fantastic!!!

Students from the entire University of São Paulo can apply to transfer to it only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they don't adapt to the new course, which is great!

Not doing it is one of Ciro Santilli's regrets in life, see also: don't be a pussy.

Around 2007, they were in a really shady building of the University, but when Ciro checked in 2021, they had apparently moved to a shiny new entrepreneurship-focused building. Fantastic news!!!

This place has one of the best changes of spawning the first Brazilian Nobel Prize or unicorn.

One of the Brazilians who came to École Polytechnique together with Ciro was from this course. The fact that he is one of the most intelligent people Ciro knows gave further credit to that course in his eyes.

Amazing self-directed learning direction:

world.hey.com/gwyn/no-excuses-bc4152fb mentions that the founder was inspired by other schools: High Tech High and Expeditionary Learning.

Lots of focus on showcase student work.

The founder Gwyn ap Harri is quite dirty mouthed, which is also cool.

Ciro Santilli tried to contact them in 2021 at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1448924419016036353 and on website contact form to see if we could do some project together, but no reply.

Appears to be analogous to the dot product, but also defined for infinite dimensions.

No teachers, no courses, no tuition fees. Yes please!!! By Xavier Niel.

It's not super easy to use at first.

And it sometimes says that the basic drawing thing you want to do is off the project's scope.

But as you learn more about it and further generalize the concepts, there are often reasonable reasons for those design choices.

And the UI looks good :-)

Examples:

Some answers by Ciro Santilli:

Inkscape is a a good software for editing/creating SVG files.

Its functionality is fundamental for as a software for drawing geometry diagrams, as it is a good middle ground between algorithmic generation, and raster graphics.

At 1.0.2, its UI is a bit terrible:

And it crashes from time to time on Ubuntu 21.04. And it has some glaring bugs, e.g.:

But still, it is a very good initiative.

This is a family of computers. It was a big success. It appears that this was a big unification project of previous architectures. And it also gave software portability guarantees with future systems, since writing software was starting to become as expensive as the hardware itself.

Media:

This was the first major commercial computer hit. Stlil vacuum tube-based.