by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 34)
There are two ways:
rwxrob.github.io/zet visible at rwxrob.github.io/zet/dex/changes Custom closed source system? No table of contents.
Interesting and weird dude who is into livestreaming and living off his limousine and mentoring people about programming:
This is not "open" content. It is illegal to copy anything from this zettelkasten for any other purpose whatsoever that is not guaranteed under American "fair use" copyright law. Violators will be prosecuted. This is to protect myself from people straight-up lying about me and my current position on any topic based on what is here. I'm very serious about prosecution. I will find you and ensure you receive consequences if you abuse this content and misrepresent me in any way.
Also into bikes: rwxrob.github.io/zet/2587/ which is cool:
Wherever my wife is. I am not a solo digital nomad. I’m a guy who lives for months at a time while traveling around all over either in my car or on my bike. In fact, finding a temporary “home” for my car is usually the harder question. I like to drive to a centralized destination and do big loops of bike touring returning to that spot. Then, when I need a break, I drive home to my wife, Doris, recuperate, and prepare for next season.
The doing loops thing makes a lot of sense, it is how Ciro Santilli also likes to explore and eventually get bored of his current location.
Likely implies whole brain emulation and therefore AGI.
Wikipedia defines Mind uploading as a synonym for whole brain emulation. This sounds really weird, as "mind uploading" suggests much more simply brain dumping, or perhaps reuploading a brain dump to a brain.
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) section "Whole brain emulation" provides a reasonable setup: post mortem, take a brain, freeze it, then cut it into fine slices with a Microtome, and then inspect slices with an electron microscope after some kind of staining to determine all the synapses.
Likely implies AGI.
TODO look into those more:
Major downsides that most of those personal knowledge databases have:
  • very little/no focus on public publishing, which is the primary focus of OurBigBook.com
  • either limited or no multiuser features, e.g. edit protection and cross user topics
  • graph based instead of tree based. For books we need a single clear ordering of a tree. Graph should come as a secondary thing through tags.
Closed source dump:
Markdown based, Visual Studio Code based.
Publishing possible but not mandatory focus, main focus is self notes. Publishing guide at: foambubble.github.io/foam/user/recipes/recipes.html#publish Related: jackiexiao.github.io/foam/reference/publishing-pages/.
They seem to use graphs more than trees which will complicate publication.
TODO are IDs might be correctly implemented and independent from source file location? Are there any examples? github.com/foambubble/foam/issues/512
Intro/docs: www.jonmsterling.com/jms-005P.xml. It is very hard to find information in that system however, largely because they don't seem to have a proper recursive cross file table of contents.
This is the project with the closest philosophy to OurBigBook that Ciro Santilli has ever found. It just tends to be even more idealistic than, OurBigBook in general, which is insane!
Source code: sr.ht/~jonsterling/forester. Not on GitHub, too much idealism for that.
"Docs" at: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-jms-005P.xml Sample repo at: github.com/jonsterling/forest but all parts of interest are in submodules on the authors private Git server.
They have \Include like OurBigBook, nice: www.jonmsterling.com/jms-007L.xml, but OMG that name \transclude{xxx-NNNN}!! It seems to be possible to have human readable IDs too if you want: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-armaëlguéneau.xml is under trees/public/roladex/armaëlguéneau.tree.
Headers have open/close:
\subtree[jms-00YG]{}
OurBigBook considered this, but went with parent= instead finally to avoid huge lists of close parenthesis at the end of deep nodes.
One really cool thing is that the headers render internal links as clickable, which brings it all closer to the "knowledge base as a formal ontology" approach.
Does not encourage human readable IDs, uses stuff like jms-00YG.
The markup has relatively few insane constructs, notably you need explicit open paragraphs everywhere \p{}?! OMG, too idealistic, not enough pragmatism. There are however a few insane constructs:
  • [](): markdown like links
  • [[bluecat]]: wikilinks (but to raw IDs only, you can't seem to be able to do [[blue cat]]
  • #{} and ##{} for inline and block maths, though that might just be a sane construct with an insane name
The markup is documented at: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-jms-007N.xml
Jon has some very good theory of personal knowledge base, rationalizing several points that Ciro Santilli had in his mind but hadn't fully put into words, which is quite cool.
OCaml dependency is not so bad, but it relies on actually LaTeX for maths, which is bad. Maybe using JavaScript for OurBigBook wasn't such a bad choice after all, KaTeX just works.
Viewing the generated output HTML directly requires security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy which is sad, but using a local server solves it. So it appears to actually pull pieces together with JavaScript? Also output files have .xml extension, the idealism! They are reconsidering that though: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-jms-005P.xml#tree-8720.
The Ctrl+K article dropdown search navigation is quite cool.
\rel and \meta allows for arbitrary ontologies between nodes as semantic triples. But they suffer from one fatal flaw: the relations are headers in themselves. We often want to explain why a relation is true, give intuition to it, and refer to it from other nodes. This is obviously how the brain works: relations are nodes just like objects.
They do appear to be putting full trees on every toplevel regardless how deep and with JavaScript turned off e.g.:
which is cool but will take lots of storage. In OurBigBook Ciro Santilli only does that on OurBigBook Web where each page can be dynamically generated.
Good:
Crazy overlaps with Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook Project, Wikipedia states:
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
Video 1.
New Game in Town by TheTedNelson (2016)
Source.
Closed source, no local editing? PDF annotation focus.
Seems like a "organize ideas for my private academic research" use case.
Co-founded by this dude: x.com/iamdrbenmiles
Sponsored by Obsidian itself!
Written in TypeScript!
Markdown support!
Everything is forcibly is scoped to files quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/wikilinks:
[[Path to file#anchor|Anchor]]
Global table of contents based of in-disk file structure: quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/explorer with customizable sorting/filtering.
Interesting "gradual" WYSIWYG. You get inline previews for for things like images, maths and links. And if you click to edit the thing, the preview mostly goes away and becomes the corresponding source code instead.
Local only.
WYSIWYG:
  • bold
  • images
  • lists. But it is either hard or impossible to have a paragraph inside a list item.
Mathematics requires a plugin and a full LaTeX install: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Equation_Editor.html They have a bunch of plugins: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins.html
Can only link to toplevel of each source, not subheaders? And subpages get forced scope. github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki
Publishing to static HTML can be done with:
zim --export Notes -o out
The output does not contain any table of contents? There is a plugin however: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Table_Of_Contents.html
It is unclear if their markup is compatible with an existing language of if it was made up from scratch. Wikipedia says:
In Zim, text is written and saved in a lightweight mark-up that is a hybrid of DokuWiki and Markdown.
In the 2020's, this refers to writing down everything you know, usually in some graph structured way.
This is somewhat the centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers: dumping your brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
This is also the closest one can get to immortality pre full blown transhumanism.
Ciro's still looking for the restore this plaintext backup on a new body though.
It is a good question, how much of your knowledge you would be able to give to others with text and images. It is likely almost all of it, except for coordination/signal processing tasks.
His passion for braindumping like this is a big motivation behind Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook.com work.
Cute synonym for second brain, sample usage: beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/#cntnt
zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ mentions one page to rule them all:
How many Zettelkästen should I have? The answer is, most likely, only one for the duration of your life. But there are exceptions to this rule.
Ciro Santilli invented this term, derived from "hardware in the loop" to refer to simulations in which both the brain and the body and physical world of organism models are modelled.
E.g. just imagine running:
Ciro Santilli invented this term, it refers to mechanisms in which you put an animal in a virtual world that the animal can control, and where you can measure the animal's outputs.
A Drosophila melanogaster has about 135k neurons, and we only managed to reconstruct its connectome in 2023.
The human brain has 86 billion neurons, about 1 million times more. Therefore, it is obvious that we are very very far away from a full connectome.
Instead however, we could look at larger scales of connectome, and then try from that to extract modules, and then reverse engineer things module by module.
This is likely how we are going to "understand how the human brain works".
Some notable connectomes:
This is the most plausible way of obtaining a full connectome looking from 2020 forward. Then you'd observe the slices with an electron microscope + appropriate Staining. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) really opened Ciro Santilli's eyes to this possibility.
Once this is done for a human, it will be one of the greatest milestone of humanities, coparable perhaps to the Human Genome Project. BUt of course, privacy issues are incrediby pressing in this case, even more than in the human genome project, as we would essentially be able to read the brain of the person after their death.
As of 2022, the Drosophila connectome had been almost fully extracted.
This is also a possible path towards post-mortem brain reading.
Figure 1. Source. Unconfirmed, but looks like the type of frozen brain where a Microtome would be used.
This is not a label that Ciro Santilli likes to give lightly. But maybe sometimes, it is inevitable.
Bibliography:
His father fought a lot with the stupid educational system to try and move his son to his full potential and move to more advanced subjects early.
A crime of society to try and prevent it. They actually moved the family from Singapore to Malaysia for a learning opportunity for the son. Amazing.
This is the perfect illustration of one of Ciro Santilli's most important complaints about the 2020 educational system:
and why Ciro created OurBigBook.com to try and help fix the issue.
Possible social media
Video 1.
The Most Talented Children And Adults On The Planet by Our Life (2008)
Source. Has some good mentions of Ainan and others.
Video 2.
Ainan Cawley: Child prodigy (2013)
Source.
He's an actor and producer apparently: www.imdb.com/name/nm3438598/
Figure 1. Source.
“Especially my father. He was doing most of it and he is a savoury, strong character. He has strong beliefs about the world and in himself, and he was helping me a lot, even when I was at university as an undergraduate.”
An only child, Arran was born in 1995 in Glasgow, where his parents were studying at the time. His father has Spanish lineage, having a great grandfather who was a sailor who moved from Spain to St Vincent in the Carribean. A son later left the islands for the UK where he married an English woman. Arran’s mother is Norwegian.
“My father was writing and my mother is an economist. They both worked from home which also made things easier,” Arran says.
A bit like what Ciro Santilli feels about himself!
One of the articles says his father has a PhD. TODO where did he work? What's his PhD on? Photo: www.topfoto.co.uk/asset/1357880/
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-everyday-genius-pxsq5c50kt9:
Neil, a political economist, attended state and private schools in Hampshire but was also taught for a period at home by his mother.
It’s strange because for most people maths is a real turn-off, yet maths is all about patterns and children of two or three love patterns. It just shows that schools are doing something seriously wrong.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Lawrence
When Lawrence was five, her father gave up his job so that he could educate her at home.
At Oxford, her father continued to be actively involved in her education, accompanying her to all lectures and some tutorials. Lawrence completed her bachelor's degree in two years, instead of the normal three, and graduated in 1985 at the age of 13 with a starred first and special commendation.
www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3713768/Haunting-lesson-today-s-TV-child-geniuses-Ruth-Lawrence-Britain-s-famous-prodigy-tracked-father-drove-heard-troubling-tale.html
he had tried it once before - with an older daughter, Sarah, one of three children he had by a previous marriage.
That experiment ended after he separated from Sarah's increasingly concerned mother, Jutta. He soon found a woman more in tune with his radical ideas in his next spouse, Sylvia Greybourne
Figure 1. Source.
The hard part then is how to make any predictions from it:
  • 2024 www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02935-z Fly-brain connectome helps to make predictions about neural activity. Summary of "Connectome-constrained networks predict neural activity across the fly visual system" by J. K. Lappalainen et. al.
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.
Homepage: flywire.ai
The Neurokernel Project aims to build an open software platform for the emulation of the entire brain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster on multiple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).
Bibliography:
Video 1.
A Simulated Mouse Brain in a Virtual Mouse Body by Human Brain Project (2015)
Source. Nice brain-in-the-loop.
Grouping their mouse brain projcts here.
Video 1.
Tutorial: Allen Developing Mouse Brain by Allen Institute (2014)
Source.
Figure 1.
CCFv3 announcement image
. Source.
The brain of a human.
Ciro Santilli feels it is not for his generation though, and that is one of the philosophical things that saddens him the most in this world.
On the other hand, Ciro's playing with the Linux kernel and other complex software which no single human can every fully understand cheer him up a bit. But still, the high level view, that we can have...
Figure 1. Source.
  • 1: Ventriculus lateralis, Cornu frontale
  • 2: Ventriculus lateralis, Pars centralis
  • 3: Calcar avis
  • 4: Ventriculus lateralis, Cornu occipitale
  • 5: Trigonum collaterale
  • 6: Eminentia collateralis
  • 7: Hippocampus
  • 8: Ventriculus lateralis, Cornu temporale
  • 9: Capsula interna
  • 10: Nucleus caudatus
By cranks:
Figure 1.
External 3D view of the Brodmann areas
. Source.
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02600-x
Almost since it began, however, the HBP has drawn criticism. The project did not achieve its goal of simulating the whole human brain — an aim that many scientists regarded as far-fetched in the first place. It changed direction several times, and its scientific output became “fragmented and mosaic-like”, says HBP member Yves Frégnac
They overreached it seems.
Some good mentions of their dynamic duo status at The Race for the Double Helix. Their chemistry and love are palpable during their joint interviews.
Very clearly, Francis is the charismatic one, and James is the nerd.
Good mentions at The man who loved numbers, notably youtu.be/PqP2c5xNaTU?t=349 where Bela Bollobas, friend of Littlewood, talks about their collaboration.
Term invented by Ciro Santilli, it refers to Richard Feynman, after helping to build the atomic bomb:
And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.
This should come as no surprise, as to be come successful, you have to do something different than the masses, and often take irrational risks that make you worse off on average.
Some mentions:
www.quora.com/How-can-I-be-as-great-as-Bill-Gates-Steve-Jobs-Elon-Musk-or-Sir-Richard-Branson/answer/Justine-Musk is a fantastic ansewr by Justine Musk, Elon Musk's ex-fife, to the question:
How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Sir Richard Branson?
One of her key thesis is Many successful people are neurodiverse:
These people tend to be freaks and misfits who were forced to experience the world in an unusually challenging way. They developed strategies to survive, and as they grow older they find ways to apply these strategies to other things, and create for themselves a distinct and powerful advantage. They don't think the way other people think. They see things from angles that unlock new ideas and insights. Other people consider them to be somewhat insane.
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