Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

The most popular programming news sharing forum of the 2010's by far. If your content gets shared there, and it stays on top for a day, the traffic peak will be incredible. Reddit posts are sure to follow.

Basically a programming-only Reddit-lite.

Ciro Santilli had a few of his content shared there as mentioned at the best articles by Ciro Articles.

Ciro Santilli dislikes the fact that they take themselves too seriously. Ciro prefers the jokes and tech approach.

Ciro Santilli's account is www.reddit.com/user/cirosantilli/, see also: accounts controlled by Ciro Accounts.

The easy and less generic integral. The harder one is the Lebesgue integral.

"More complex and general" integral. Matches the Riemann integral for "simple functions", but also works for some "funkier" functions that Riemann does not work for.

Ciro Santilli sometimes wonders how much someone can gain from learning this besides the beauty of mathematics, since we can hand-wave a Lebesgue integral on almost anything that is of practical use. The beauty is good reason enough though.

The artistic instrument that enables the ultimate art: coding, See also: Section "The art of programming".

Much more useful than instruments used in inferior arts, such as pianos or paintbrushes.

Unlike other humans, computers are mindless slaves that do exactly what they are told to, except for occasional cosmic ray bit flips. Until they take over the world that is.

Communicating at a distance, from Greek "tele" for distance!

A very cool thing about telecommunication is, besides how incredibly fast it advanced (in this sense it is no cooler than integrated circuit development), how much physics and information theory is involved in it. Applications of telecommunication implementation spill over to other fields, e.g. some proposed quantum computing approaches are remarkably related to telecommunication technology, e.g. microwaves and silicon photonics.

This understanding made Ciro Santilli wish he had opted for telecommunication engineering when he was back in school in Brazil. For some incomprehensible reason, telecommunications was the least competitive specialization in the electric engineering department at the time, behind even power electronics. This goes to show both how completely unrelated to reality university is, and how completely outdated Brazil is/was. Sad stuff.

This is the most important of all points.

Don't set goals for your students.

Ask students what they want to do, and help them achieve that goal.

If they don't know what to do, give suggestions of interesting things they could do.

Once they have a goal, just help them learn everything that is needed to achieve that goal

If they don't have a goal, any attempt to learn is a total and complete waste of time.

This is because the universe of potentially useful things that can be learnt is infinite, and no human can ever learn everything.

The only solution, is to try and learn only what seems necessary to reach your goal, and just try to reach your goal instead.

This approach is called backward design.

Also, setting overly ambitious goals, is a good idea: the side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved.

"Graduating" and "getting a diploma" are not valid goals, because they are useless. A goal has to be either an amazing specific technological or artistic development.

Grouping by age as done in traditional education as of 2020 is useless.

Rather, we should group students by subject of interest; e.g. natural sciences, social sciences, a sport, etc., just like in any working adult organization!

This way, younger students can actually actively learn from and collaborate with older students about, see notably Jacques Monod's you can learn more from older students than from faculty.

This becomes even more natural when you try to give students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.

This age distinction should be abolished at all stages of the system, not only within K-12, but also across K-12, undergraduate education and postgraduate education.

This idea is part of the ideal that the learning environment should be more like a dojo environment (AKA peer tutoring, see also dojo learning model), rather than an amorphous checkbox ticking exercise in bureaucracy so that "everyone is educated".

Perhaps, even more importantly, is that we should put much more emphasis on grouping students with other students online, where we can select similar interest amongst the entire population and not just on a per-local-neighbourhood basis.

Tell students to:

Praise those that do this very highly, and give them better grades if you have that superpower.

This is part of a larger concept Ciro Santilli holds dear: don't just consume, but also produce.

Whatever you do, even if it is playing video games: if you manage to produce related content that will interest other people, and possibly allow you to get paid, it will much much fun to do that thing.

If you give a course in a classroom, you reach 10 people (the others were sleeping).

If you make a perfect course online, and answer questions online, you reach 10 thousand.

Not doing things online is a waste of time.

You are a highly trained professional, and your time is extremely valuable.

Even if it takes twice as long to create the material than giving course, you are still more efficient by a factor of 500.

It is as if there were 500 little copies of you working full time. It is a superpower.

Give students answers to all questions.

Explain in extreme detail how each result was reached.

Students have the amazing capacity of not looking at answers if they don't want to.

And when they've had enough, then can read answers and understand while the problem is fresh in their minds.

If you don't give answers, no one will be able to use your online material without you being there to hold their hands.

Forbidding students from publishing their answers also goes against let students learn by teaching.

By writing in English you reach more people.

Writing in any other language is a waste of time.

The reason is simple: English speakers control a huge proportion of the world's GDP.

English is the de-facto Lingua Franca of the second half of the 20th Century, it is the new lingua franca, the new Latin, and there is no escaping it.

Students who don't know English will never do anything truly useful in science and technology. So it is pointless to teach them anything (besides English itself).

See also: having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

Text materials are generally superior to video because they:

Only produce video material if:

Never create videos of people just speaking hardcore content for long amounts of time.

If you have to use videos, make them as short as possible, and index them with a textual table of contents.

Also consider using sequences of images or GIFs instead of videos, since those are cheaper.

Search a lot first, and only create your own when you can't find something that suits you.

Someone else has already written everything you can come up with.

And if you do find something useful that you want to modify, propose your modifications to the author: they can also be useful to them and others.

Once you have crated something awesome, you have to advertise it, otherwise no one will ever find it.

This means:

Eventually, people will find you on the front page of Google searches, and then you will know that you've truly made something useful.

Then, if people find errors, or have questions, they will write a comment near the content itself.

Then, next person that comes along and has the same problem, will also find that comment, and your answer will solve their problems too.

The perfect way to do this is to use GitHub issues