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Check out: **OurBigBook.com**, the best way to publish your scientific knowledge. It's an open source note taking system that can publish from lightweight markup files in your computer both to a multi-user mind melding dynamic website, or as a static website. It's like Wikipedia + GitHub + Stack Overflow + Obsidian mashed up. Source code: **github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook**.
Sponsor me to work on this project. For 1M USD I will quit my job and work on OurBigBook full time for three more years to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. Status: ~44k / 400k USD. At 4M USD I retire/tenure and work on open STEM forever. How to donate: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
I first quit my job 1st June 2024 to work on the project for 1 year after I reached my initial 100k goal mostly via a 1000 Monero donation.
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous. More rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
Explaining things is my superpower, e.g. I was top user #17 on Stack Overflow in 2025[ref][ref] and I have a few 1k+ star educational GitHub repositories[ref][ref][ref][ref]. Now I want to bring that level of awesomeness to masters level Mathematics and Physics. But I can't do it alone! So I created OurBigBook.com to allow everyone to work together towards the perfect book of everything.
My life's goal is to bring hardcore university-level STEM open educational content to all ages. Sponsor me at github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli starting from 1$/month so I can work full time on it. Further information: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". Achieving what I call "free gifted education" is my Nirvana.
To contact Ciro, see: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". He likes to talk with random people of the Internet.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/ID_photo_of_Ciro_Santilli_taken_in_2013.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Ciro_Santilli's_learn_teach_apply_logo.png
Besides that, I'm also a freedom of speech slacktivist and recreational cyclist. I like Chinese traditional music and classic Brazilian pop. Opinions are my own, but they could be yours too. Tax the rich.
I offer:
My approach is to:
For minors, parents are welcome to join video calls, and all interactions with the student will be recorded and made available to parents.
I am particularly excited about pointing people to the potential next big things, my top picks these days are:
I am also generally interested in:
Figure 1.
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
. Ciro contributes almost exclusively by answering question he Googles into out of his own need, and never by refreshing the newest question of big tags for low hanging fruit! More information at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions".
Figure 2.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats
. Further methodology details at: Figure "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats".
Video 1.
The problem with education by Ciro Santilli
. In this video Ciro Santilli exposes his fundamental philosophy regarding why Education is broken. This philosophy was the key motivation behind the failed OurBigBook Project. Source.
Video 2.
Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
. Source.
Video 3.
OurBigBook Web topics demo
. The OurBigBook topic feature allows users to "merge their minds" in a "sort by upvote"-stack overflow-like manner for each subject. This is the killer feature of OurBigBook Web. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-topics. Source.
Video 4.
OurBigBook dynamic article tree demo
. The OurBigBook dynamic tree feature allows any of your headers to be the toplevel h1 header of a page, while still displaying its descendants. SEO loves this, and it also allows users to always get their content on the correct granularity. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-dynamic-article-tree. Source.
Video 5.
OurBigBook local editing and publishing demo
. With OurBigBook you can store your content as plaintext files in a Lightweight markup, and then publish that to either OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features, or as a static website where you are in full control. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/publish-your-content. Source.
Video 6.
Top Down 2D continuous game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)
More information: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games". This is Ciro's underwhelming stab at the fundamental question: Can AGI be trained in simulations?. This project could be taken much further. Source.
Video 7.
Water Margin tribute to Chinese dissidents by Ciro Santilli (2022)
Part of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, see also: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/water-margin. Source.
Figure 3.
Lenovo ThinkPad T430 running a BIOS hello world
. This uses Ciro Santilli's project x86 bare metal examples with source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/x86-bare-metal-examples
Video 8.
Linux Kernel Module Cheat presentation
. This project, with source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat, aims to be the perfect emulation setup to study and develop the Linux kernel, kernel modules, QEMU, gem5 as well as x86_64, ARM userland and baremetal assembly and more. Source.
Video 9.
My Bitcoin inscription museum by Ciro Santilli
. Introductory video to Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain". Source.
 -------------------------------------
|  Force of Will               3 U U  |
|  ---------------------------------  |
| |                  ////////////   | |
| |                ////() ()\////\  | |
| |               ///_\ (--) \///\  | |
| |        )      ////  \_____///\\ | |
| |       ) \      /   /   /    /   | |
| |    ) /   \     |   |  /   _/    | |
| |   ) \  (  (   /   / /   / \     | |
| |  / ) ( )  / (    )/(    )  \    | |
| |  \(_)/(_)/  /UUUU \  \\\/   |   | |
| .---------------------------------. |
| Interrupt                           |
| ,---------------------------------, |
| | You may pay 1 life and remove a | |
| | blue card in your hand from the | |
| | game instead of paying Force of | |
| | Will's casting cost.  Effects   | |
| | that prevent or redirect damage | |
| | cannot be used to counter this  | |
| | loss of life.                   | |
| | Counter target spell.           | |
| `---------------------------------` |
|                                     l
| Illus.  Terese Nelsen               |
 -------------------------------------
Code 1.
ASCII art of a Force of Will Magic: The Gathering card inscribed in the Bitcoin blockchain
.
Artist unknown, uploaded December 2014. Part of Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" where Ciro Santilli maintains a curated list of such interesting inscriptions.
This was a small project done by Ciro for artistic purposes that received some attention due to the incredible hype surrounding cryptocurrencies at the time. Ciro Santilli's views on cryptocurrencies are summarized at: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?".
Figure 4.
YellowRobot.jpg
. Source.
JPG image fully embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain depicting some kind of cut material art depicting a yellow robot, inscribed on January 29, 2017.
Ciro Santilli found this image and others during his research for Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" by searching for image fingerprints on every transaction payload of the blockchain with a script.
The image was uploaded by EMBII, co-creator of the AtomSea & EMBII upload mechanism, which was responsible for a large part of the image inscriptions in the Bitcoin blockchain.
The associated message reads:
Chiharu [EMBII's Japanese wife] and I found this little yellow robot while exploring Chicago. It will be covered by tar or eventually removed but this tribute will remain. N 41.880778 E -87.629210
This is one of Ciro Santilli's favorite AtomSea & EMBII uploads, as it perfectly encapsules the "medium as an art form" approach to blockchain art, where even non-novel works can be recontextualized into something interesting, here depicting an opposition between the ephemeral and the immutable.
At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1615389973343268871 EMBII announced that he would be giving off shares of that image on Sup!?, a Bitcoin-backed NFT system he was; making. In December 2023, he gave some shares of the robot to Ciro Santilli.
Figure 5.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
.
This website was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites, a covert system the CIA used to communicate with its assets. More details at: Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites".
Ciro Santilli had some naughty OSINT fun finding some of the websites of this defunct network in 2023 after he heard about the 2022 Reuters report on the matter, which for the first time gave away 7 concrete websites out of a claimed 885 total found. As of November 2023, Ciro had found about 350 of them.
Figure 6.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of noticiasmusica.net
.
This is another website that was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites. This website is written in Brazilian Portuguese, and therefore suggests that the CIA had assets in Brazil at the time, and thus was spying on a "fellow democracy".
Although Snowden's revelations made it extremely obvious to the world that the USA spies upon everyone outside of the Five Eyes, including fellow democracies, it is rare to have such a direct a concrete proof of it visible live right on the Wayback Machine. Other targeted democracies include France, Germany, Italy and Spain. More details at: USA spying on its own allies.
This investigative report by Ciro Santilli was featured on the Daily Mail after 404 Media reported on it in 2025.
Video 10.
How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA by Ciro Santilli
. Slightly edited VOD of the talk Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects about the CIA 2010 covert communication websites. Source.
Figure 7.
Diagram of the fundamental theorem on homomorphisms by Ciro Santilli (2020)
Shows the relationship between group homomorphisms and normal subgroups.
Figure 8.
Spacetime diagram illustrating how faster-than-light travel implies time travel by Ciro Santilli (2021)
Used in the Stack Exchange answer to Does faster than light travel imply travelling back in time?. One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Figure 9.
Average insertion time into heaps, binary search tree and hash maps of the C++ standard library by Ciro Santilli (2015)
Used in the Stack Overflow answer to Heap vs Binary Search Tree (BST). One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli". Source.
Video 11.
Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture in two minutes by Ciro Santilli
. Quick and direct explanation of the statement of the BSD conjecture for people who know basic university mathematics. This is one of the Millennium Prize Problems, and you will get a million dollars if you can solve it! This therefore falls in the Simple to state but hard to prove of Ciro Santilli's the beauty of mathematics aesthetics. Source.
Figure 10.
Top view of an open Oxford Nanopore MinION
. This is Ciro Santilli's hand on the Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Nanopore_Technologies. He put it there after working a bit on Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it" :-) And he would love to document more experiments like that one Section "Videos of all key physics experiments", but opportunities are extremely rare. Source.
A quick 2D continuous AI game prototype for reinforcement learning written in Matter.js, you can view it on a separate page at cirosantilli.com/-/raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport. This is a for-fun-only prototype for Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, C++ or maybe Python (for the deep learning ecosystem) seems inevitable for a serious version of such a project. But it is cute how much you can do with a few lines of Matter.js!
HTML snippet:
<iframe src="-/raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport" width="1000" height="850"></iframe>
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108 Stars of Destiny Updated 2025-07-16
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The concept is a strong part of Water Margin.
The very first chapter opens with Grand Commander Hou disrespecting spirits by opening up a sealed tomb and unintentionally releasing 108 demons who presumably reincarnate as humans, a backstory to the events that follow years later.
This is well shown in the Japanese The Water Margin, but is skipped in the Chinese The Water Margin unfortunately.
The concept is also central to the Suikoden video game.
Actually, now that Ciro Santilli thinks about it, these were already likely meant as a "collectible" element by the author of the original book, as is strongly suggested by all the little illustrations of each character present on the Wikipedia page. Just like e.g. Catholic saints. It's Pokemon, but 2000 years earlier.
Ciro would notably feel many years later, that as he met random people online who were interested in improving eduction, or was otherwise networking to reach his goals, as if he were actually building up his 108 stars of destiny.
A central part, and perhaps the most interesting part of the novel, is how each character has been motivated by injustice to join the rebellion. This reminds Ciro of Final Fantasy VI
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Aaron Swartz Updated 2025-07-16
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Aaron, Ciro Santilli will complete your quest to make eduction free. Just legally this time, with the and with the Creative Commons license you helped to create.
Ciro likes how The Internet's Own Boy (2014) explains how Aaron felt like high school was bullshit, and that he could learn whatever he wanted from books, which is one of Ciro's key feelings.
It also mentions how he was a natural teacher from a very early age.
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Ainan Celeste Cawley Updated 2025-07-16
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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.
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.
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Amit Singhal Updated 2025-07-16
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Pitched OurBigBook.com to him:
Idea: make all Sitare University materials open, and allow students to write the content
Also, allow anyone to take the exams without enrolling (possibly for a fee if they don't have scholarship).
This is the way to go if you really want to increase your impact/dollar and do something truly innovative that ill make a mark. Why just mirror existing university models that haven't yet caught up to the Internet Age?
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Autodidacticism Updated 2025-07-16
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There are two types of people:
  • those who are autodidacts
  • those who didn't really learn
Some possible definitions:
  • learning without a gun pointed at your head
  • learning from an e-book or video rather than from a talking head 5 rows of chairs in front of you
    How that is different from a video, you tell me.
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CIA 2010 covert communication websites Updated 2026-02-12
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This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the mid 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of some of the targeted countries, notably Iran and China, circa 2010-2013.
This article uses publicly available information to publicly disclose for the first time a few hundred of what we feel are extremely likely candidate sites of the network. The starting point for this research was the September 2022 Reuters article "America’s Throwaway Spies" which for the first time gave nine example websites, and their analyst from Citizenlabs claims to have found 885 websites in total, but did not publicly disclose them. Starting from only the nine disclosed websites, we were then able to find a few hundred websites that share so many similarities with them, i.e. a common fingerprint, that we believe makes them beyond reasonable doubt part of the same network.
If you enjoy this article, consider dropping some Monero at: 4A1KK4uyLQX7EBgN7uFgUeGt6PPksi91e87xobNq7bT2j4V6LqZHKnkGJTUuCC7TjDNnKpxDd8b9DeNBpSxim8wpSczQvzf so I can waste it on my foolish attempts to improve higher education. Other sponsorship methods: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/CIA_Star_Wars_website_promo.jpg
Video 1.
How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Slightly edited VOD of the talk Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects.
The discovery of these websites by Iranian and Chinese counterintelligence led to the imprisonment and execution of several assets in those countries, and subsequent shutdown of the channel by the CIA when they noticed that things had gone wrong. This is likely a Wikipedia page that talks about the disastrous outcome of the websites being found out: 2010–2012 killing of CIA sources in China, although it contained no mention of websites before Ciro Santilli edited it in.
Of particular interest is that based on their language and content, certain of the websites seem to have targeted other democracies such as Germany, France, Spain and Brazil.
If anyone can find others websites, or has better techniques feel free to contact Ciro Santilli at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". Contributions will be clearly attributed if desired. Some of the techniques used so far have been very heuristic, and that added to the limited amount of data makes it almost certain that some websites have been missed. Broadly speaking, there are two types of contributions that would be possible:
The fact that citizenlabs reported exactly 885 websites being found makes it feel like they might have found find a better fingerprint which we have not managed to find yet. We have not yet had to pay for our data. If someone wants to donate to the research, some ideas include:
Disclaimers:
May this article serve as a tribute to those who spent their days making, using, and uncovering these websites under the shadows.
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CIA 2010 covert communication websites / Backlinks Updated 2026-10-26
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Announcements and updates by self:
Pings by self:
Reactions by others:
Notable reactions to the websites themselves:
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CIA 2010 covert communication websites / Overview of Ciro Santilli's investigation Created 2025-05-07 Updated 2025-07-19
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Ciro Santilli hard heard about the 2018 Yahoo article around 2020 while studying for his China campaign because the websites had been used to take down the Chinese CIA network in China. He even asked on Quora about it, but there were no publicly known domains at the time to serve as a starting point. Chris, Electrical Engineer and former Avionics Tech in the US Navy, even replied suggesting that obviously the CIA is so competent that it would never ever have its sites leaked like that:
Seriously a dumb question.
Figure 1.
"Seriously a dumb question" Quora answer by Chris from the US Navy
. Source.
In 2023, one year after the Reuters article had been published, Ciro Santilli was killing some time on YouTube when he saw a curious video: Video 1. "Compromised Comms by Darknet Diaries (2023)". As soon as he understood what it was about and that it was likely related to the previously undisclosed websites that he was interested in, he went on to read the Reuters article that the podcast pointed him to.
Being a half-arsed web developer himself, Ciro knows that the attack surface of a website is about the size of Texas, and the potential for fingerprinting is off the charts with so many bits and pieces sticking out. And given that there were at least 885 of them, surely we should be able to find a few more than nine, right?
In particular, it is fun how these websites provide to anyone "live" examples of the USA spying on its own allies in the form of Wayback Machine archives.
Given all of this, Ciro knew he had to try and find some of the domains himself using the newly available information! It was an irresistible real-life capture the flag.
Chris, get fucked.
Video 1.
Compromised Comms by Darknet Diaries (2023)
. Source.
It was the YouTube suggestion for this video that made Ciro Santilli aware of the Reuters article almost one year after its publication, which kickstarted his research on the topic.
Full podcast transcript: darknetdiaries.com/transcript/75/
Ciro Santilli pinged the Podcast's host Jack Rhysider on Twitter and he ACK'ed which is cool, though he was skeptical about the strength of the fingerprints found, and didn't reply when clarification was offered. Perhaps the material is just not impactful enough for him to produce any new content based on it. Or also perhaps it comes too close to sources and methods for his own good as a presumably American citizen.
The first step was to try and obtain the domain names of all nine websites that Reuters had highlighted as they had only given two domains explicitly.
Thankfully however, either by carelessness or intentionally, this was easy to do by inspecting the address of the screenshots provided. For example, one of the URLs was:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-spies-iran/screencap-activegaminginfo.com.jpg?v=192516290922
which corresponds to activegaminginfo.com.
Figure 2.
Inspecting the Reuters article HTML source code
. Source. The Reuters article only gave one URL explicitly: iraniangoals.com. But most others could be found by inspecting the HTML of the screenshots provided, except for the Carson website.
Once we had this, we were then able to inspect the websites on the Wayback Machine to better understand possible fingerprints such as their communication mechanism.
The next step was to use our knowledge of the sequential IP flaw to look for more neighbor websites to the nine we knew of.
This was not so easy to do because the websites are down and so it requires historical data. But for our luck we found viewdns.info which allowed for 200 free historical queries (and they seem to have since removed this hard limit and moved to only throttling), leading to the discovery or some or our own new domains!
This gave us a larger website sample size in the order of the tens, which allowed us to better grasp more of the possible different styles of website and have a much better idea of what a good fingerprint would look like.
Figure 3.
viewdns.info activegameinfo.com domain to IP
. Source.
Figure 4.
viewdns.info aroundthemiddleeast.com IP to domain
. Source.
The next major and difficult step would be to find new IP ranges.
This was and still is a hacky heuristic process for us, but we've had the most success with the following methods:
Figure 5.
DNS Census 2013 website
. Source. This source provided valuable historical domain to IP data. It was likely extracted with an illegal botnet. Data excerpt from the CSVs:
amazon.com,2012-02-01T21:33:36,72.21.194.1
amazon.com,2012-02-01T21:33:36,72.21.211.176
amazon.com,2013-10-02T19:03:39,72.21.194.212
amazon.com,2013-10-02T19:03:39,72.21.215.232
amazon.com.au,2012-02-10T08:03:38,207.171.166.22
amazon.com.au,2012-02-10T08:03:38,72.21.206.80
google.com,2012-01-28T05:33:40,74.125.159.103
google.com,2012-01-28T05:33:40,74.125.159.104
google.com,2013-10-02T19:02:35,74.125.239.41
google.com,2013-10-02T19:02:35,74.125.239.46
Figure 6.
The four communication mechanisms used by the CIA websites
. Java Applets, Adobe Flash, JavaScript and HTTPS
Figure 7.
Expired domain names by day 2011
. Source. The scraping of expired domain trackers to Github was one of the positive outcomes of this project.
Finally, at the very end of our pipeline, we were left with a a few hundred domains, and we just manually inspected them one by one as far as patience would allow it to confirm or discard them.
Figure 8.
You can never have enough Wayback Machine tabs open
. This is how the end of the fingerprint pipeline looks like: as many tabs as you have the patience to go through one by one!
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Ciro Santilli Updated 2026-08-21
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Quick facts:
Other people with the same name are listed at Section "Ciro Santilli's homonyms".
Figure 1.
19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong
. Source.
Sun Wukong (孙悟空) is a playful and obscenely powerful monkey Journey to the West. He protects Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, and likes eating fruit, just like Ciro. Oh, and Goku from Dragon Ball is based on him. His japanese name is "Sun Wukong" (same Chinese characters with different Japanese pronunciation) for the love. His given name "Wukong" means literally "the one who mastered the void", which is clearly a Dharma name and fucking awesome in multiple ways. This is another sad instance of a Chinese thing better known in the West as Japanese.
It is worth noting however that although Wukong is extremely charming, Ciro's favorite novel of the Four Great Classic Novels is Water Margin. Journey to the West is just a monster of the week for kids, but Water Margin is a fight for justice saga. Sorry Wukong!
Figure 2.
Ciro Santilli playing with a pipette at the University of Cambridge circa 2017
.
The photo was taken in an open event organized by the awesome Cambridge Synthetic Biology outreach group, more or less the same people who organize: www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Synthetic-Biology-Meetup/ and who helped organize Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it".
Taking part in such activities is what Ciro tries to do to overcome his lifelong regret of not having done more experimental stuff at university. Would he have had the patience to handle all the bullshit of the physical word without going back to the informational sciences? Maybe, maybe not. But now he will probably never know?!
Notice the orange high visibility cycling jersey under the lab coat, from someone who had just ridden in from work as fast as possible as part of his "lunch break". It is more fun when it is hard.
Figure 3.
Scribe Jean Miélot, 15th century
.
Ciro Santilli fantasizes that he would have make a good scribe in the middle ages, partly due to his self diagnosed graphomania, but also appreciation for foreign languages, and his mild obsession with the natural sciences.
OurBigBook.com is Ciro's view of a modern day scriptorium, except that now the illuminations are YouTube videos.
The job of a Internet-age scribe is basically that of making knowledge more open, legally extracting it from closed copyrighted sources, and explaining your understanding of it to the wider world under Creative Commons licenses on the web. And in the process of greater openness, given a well organized system, we are able combine the knowledge of many different people, and thus make things more understandable than any single/few creator closed source source could ever achieve.
Ciro once saw some cartoon on Wikipedia help pages of a turtle with a book in one hand, and typing into Wikipedia on its computer, TODO find it. That cartoon summarizes well the modern scribe life.
Another analogous version of this fantasy more in touch with Ciro's sinophily is the ideal of the Chinese scholar, notably including their stereotypical attributes such as mastery of the Four arts.
Figure 4.
Ciro Santilli piling boxes as a child
. A natural born engineer.
Figure 5.
Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared.
More info at: Figure "Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared".
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cirosantilli.com Updated 2025-07-16
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Ciro Santilli's website is a dump of his brain, see also: braindumping.
However it won't remain like that for long, because it will be migrated to OurBigBook.com, and therefore become a brain dump of society itself.
Video 1.
Who Wants To Live Forever by Queen (1986)
Source.
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Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory Updated 2025-07-16
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Ciro Santilli has a bad memory for events that happened a medium time ago, for example in order of months/years. Especially if they are one-off things that have no relation to anything else.
For example, Ciro never remembers which places he travelled to just once, and who was in each trip! He has images of several places he travelled to in his head, and would recognize them, but he just doesn't know where they were!
Another example, Ciro was looking at the carpet at their house, and asked where it came from. His wife replied immeidately: from Bercy shopping quarter in Paris about 10 years ago, and you took it on your back for a long walk until we could find the bus back home because we were concerned it wouldn't fit in the train!
The same goes for scenes from movies and passages from music, which explains why Ciro's art consumption focuses on innovative discrete "what happened" and "general gist" ideas, rather than, analog details such as colors and shapes.
Going back even further in time, Ciro starts to forget the less close friends he had, because the events start to fade away.
Paradoxically however, Ciro believes that this bad memory is one of his greatest strengths and key defining characteristics, because it leads Ciro to want to write down every interesting thing he learns, which motivated OurBigBook.com and his Stack Overflow contributions and his related Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers.
It also somewhat leads Ciro to like physics and mathematics, because in these fields you "can deduce everything" from very few base principles, so if you forget them, it does not matter that much as you can re-deduce stuff over and over. Which is somewhat where the high flying bird attitude comes from. It is hard to go deep when you have to re-prove everything every time. But the upside is that anything that sticks, does so because it has a broad net to stick to, and therefore allows Ciro to make unusual and unexpected connections that others might not.
Ciro believes that there are two types of people, and most notably software engineers, which are basically data wranglers: those with bad memory and those with good memory.
Those with bad memory, tend to focus on automating and improving their processes a lot. They take much longer to do one-off specific deep knowledge tasks however.
The downside of the good memory ones is that sooner or later they will find tasks that no matter how much memory they have, they cannot solve without automation, and they will fail at those.
Also, good memory people don't enable others to join the project efficiently as much.
This dichotomy also explains why Ciro sucks at code reviews, but is rather the person who runs the interesting patches by himself and finds some critical problems that the more theoretical code reviewers missed.
If Ciro had become a scientist, he would without doubt be an experimentalist, just like in this reality he is a GDB/runtime person rather than a "static source analysis" person. Those who have bad memory prefer to just run experiments over and over and observe system state at runtime.
Other effects of having a bad memory include:
  • code duplication, or a constant fear of it at least, because Ciro forgets that some functionality exists already
  • meeting aversion, because everything that is not recorded will fade away
  • passion for backward design, because by the time a piece of knowledge learnt in school might be useful (and 99.99% won't), it will have been long forgotten
Related: jakobschwichtenberg.com/about/ from Jakob Schwichtenberg:
I'm a physicist and I try to write down things during my own learning process.
In some sense, one of the biggest benefits I have over other people in physics is that I'm certainly not the smartest guy! I usually can't grasp complex issues very easily. So I have to break down complex ideas into smaller chunks to understand it myself. This means, whenever I describe something to others, everyone understands, because it's broken down into such simple terms.
On C2 wiki, therefore it cannot be wrong wiki.c2.com/?QuasiGreatTeacher:
Some people have learning disabilities, [... bullshit ...]. A lot of classic spiritual texts have been produced this way. Basically, the stupidest but most dogged disciple, if he has a neurotic habit of writing things down, will make the best teacher for the third and subsequent generations.
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Ciro Santilli's formal education Updated 2025-07-16
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Ciro Santilli participated in a double degree program, so he obtained have engineering degrees in both:
Despite studying in great institutions with great teachers, Ciro feels that:
This motivated Ciro to work on OurBigBook.com.
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Ciro Santilli's knowledge hoarding Updated 2025-07-16
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Ciro Santilli is a collector at heart. But a collector of knowledge.
His uncle, which Ciro rassembles in many ways, was like that. But he collected physical objects such as wines and stamps. Or even worse, objects that were meant to be collected such Panini soccer sticker albums! This Ciro looks down on.
With computers, knowledge takes no physical space and can be immediately shared with the hole world, and there is great beauty to that, as you can just keep collecting forever without filling up your house.
But of course, physical or not, all attachments futile.
Like other types collecting, once Ciro decides that "he must know everything about a given subject", he will keep coming back to that subject over and over. Not in a systematic way of course, since Ciro is a lazy bastard, but he will keep coming back for a very long time, and eventually become an expert at it.
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Ciro Santilli's minor projects Updated 2025-07-16
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These are some smaller projects that Ciro Santilli carried out. They are all either for fun, or misguided use of his time done by an younger self:
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Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment Updated 2025-07-16
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Firstly, in 2012, while he was at École Polytechnique, Ciro Santilli was introduced to LaTeX (thank God for French mathematical obsession), and his mind was blown:
Ha, so I can write my own books, and so can anyone, for free?
he though. Why isn't everyone doing that!
One particular event stood out: Ciro made a small change to his teacher's course material, who blessed be him (dude's a legend, Ciro just noticed he has some Chinese publications with another French dude, e.g. www.amazon.co.uk/高效算法-应试与提高必修128例-克里斯托弗-Christoph-Durr/dp/B078SJQPVK "High-efficiency algorithm competitions 128 examples", did he write it the Chinese himself?? Must be of course to complement the notoriously low French professor salaries), made it available, and then Ciro gave him back the .tex file. Ciro was just a bit worried about how the teacher would be able to tell what he had changed in the file to validate the change. The teacher just said of course, "no problem, I'll just use diff". Ciro had never heard of diff. Let alone Git of course, though yes, this was a bit early in Git's history version control systems had been around since forever of course. This was 2011 or 2012, about 4 or 5 years into a superior education curricula with various courses involving computers, some requiring quite a lot of "fill these empty functions" style programming. Education is a joke. Anyways, this was a prelude to exactly what Ciro wanted to do in OurBigBook.com. This might have been the one actually: webia.lip6.fr/~durrc/Iut/Notes580.pdf
Not long afterwards, Ciro started playing with Linux. Until then, Ciro had had some contacts with the mysterious operating system at university, and was a bit puzzled what the point of it was! He clearly remembers:
University should be forced to use only open source software and hardware in undergrad teaching courses by law BTW.
Then came an Ubuntu live disk on his own machine, and finally a measly 40GB dual book partition in a Microsoft Windows machine on a laptop. At first, it took a lot of time to learn all the crazy new terminal stuff! Yes, at this point, Ubuntu was already usable enough without the terminal, an accomplishment actually. But as a programmer, Ciro felt obliged to learn. Many hours were spent reading man pages at the library. But it all just felt so right, and sometimes powerful... true wizardry.
And ten years later, Ciro was seriously considering buying a computer without Windows pre-installed. He had not used Windows a single tie on a personal machine even once in those ten years!
Finally, to finish things off Ciro found two websites that changed his life forever, and made be believe that there was an alternative: Stack Overflow and GitHub.
The brutal openness of it all. The raw high quality content. Ugliness and uselessness too no doubt. But definitely spark in a sea of darkness.
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Ciro Santilli's psychology and physiology Updated 2025-07-16
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Ciro Santilli's energy throughout the day varies as follows:
  • morning: highest
  • 11AM: peak exercise performance
  • after lunch: brain death. Possibly due to Ciro's partial Spanish descent?
  • late afternoon and evening: can do some stuff
Ciro has low tolerance to sleep deprivation which makes him very irritable, and low ability to sleep if there is any light. It must have to do with those damned ganglion cell photoreceptors. On the other hand, Ciro Santilli's wife can sleep without any problems with some morning light! It is definitely genetic. Ciro conjectures that people from very Northern parts of the world must have a gene that allows them to sleep even if there is some light, while more equatorial people don't. Maybe: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33049062/
Ciro has mild olfactory synesthesia for star anise (八角, bajiao), which is widely used in Chinese cuisine and makes Ciro think uncontrollably of the color blue. Ciro does not have any other known synesthesias. He is also prone to nerd sniping form time to time.
Ciro is a reptilian-like being with cold hands and feet and low blood pressure. For this reason he believes that he will die of cancer or some respiratory problem. If the Chinese government doesn't get him first that is. This also partly explains why Ciro is not a big fan of swimming.
Besides Chinese food, Ciro really likes eating fruits and roasted nuts, maybe partly because he was born in Brazil, and partly because of monkey nature, see his Chinese name. At home he is known as "水果大王" (the big king of the fruits). Ciro is also a sucker for yoghurt (natural without added sugars and full fat, fat-tree yoghurt is terrible, often eaten with fruits). Ciro's "favorite drink" could be tonic water with freshly squeezed lemon. Tied with fresh fruit juices. Chocolate-wise, although not a huge fanatic, a Lindt dark chocolate with whole hazelnut pieces bar will do the job.
Ciro does not like receiving or giving gifts on expected social situations like birthdays or Christmas. Ciro believes that every day is equally precious, and can be a day to give, be it through awesome open source software contributions, or if you find something that your friend will like
Ciro has some respiratory allergies. When he was around 5, he had relatively serious asthma crisis which scared his parents to death. Throughout his life, he appears to be allergic at an intermediate level to: mold or dust mites (or whatever it is that old books/pillows have), cats (itching on touch), hay fever (in May in the UK, likely grass pollen). But even outside of hayfever season, Ciro's nose is constantly either running in the cold, or often partially blocked while sleeping throughout the year. Ciro believes however that this also gives him higher resistance to viral infections, since it has been many many years since he had a cold/flu, and when everyone in the office is going down with it, he's just fine. Ciro wonders if his active immune system will actually kill off cancers early, which he ranks as his most likely causes of death, along with respiratory and gastro-intestinal problems. Ciro has low blood pressure and cannot get fat, so cardio vascular problems seem much less likely.
Ciro is generally democrat due to his high compassion level. He believes that politics is highly genetically determined, and that just like you enter a room full of people and immediately like some and dislike others, the same goes for politics. People just vote for whoever they want to see more of because their way of speaking makes them feel good. There is not rationality involved in it at all.
Ciro self diagnoses a slight graphomania in the early 2020's. This is largely what led him to create OurBigBook.com, and contribute to Stack Overflow. Literature Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz also suffers from the condition however, so maybe good can also come out of it:
If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.
When Ciro was quite young, maybe around 7-10, when he got very angry or sad for some stupid reason (bullying perhaps? Ciro forgot), he would have a psychosomatic manifestation: his spine would become visibly curved sideways (scoliosis). While writing this paragraph, Ciro Googled it, and found e.g. medium.com/@michaelrosen_94192/the-root-cause-of-scoliosis-5c461002b634 that describes:
The Root Cause of Idiopathic Scoliosis
It is proposed that Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) is a condition created by emotional stress. Evidence is presented that unresolved emotional stress can cause unbalanced tensions in the fascia and growing muscles that gradually deform the spinal column.
so it is a somewhat well known thing! Incredible. Can you imagine the level of the passions that lead to such physical deformations? But of course, it was all for nothing.
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Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality Updated 2025-07-16
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Ciro Santilli fantasizes that he is more compassionate than average.
He feels that this manifests itself notably through his desire/ability to create amazing documentation content and notably for free.
Also related is Ciro's worry about social inequality and how to reduce it.
In school, especially before university, Ciro felt that he always treated "the ugly/unpopular" (it is horrifying that such perception of a person exists! but true) girls really well, which led some of them to like him romantically. In part this was de to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality and enter through the narrow gate approach to life. But was also partly Ciro's fault, he should have been clearer that he was not truly interested, but he was also lonely, curious about how it was like having girlfriend, and it feels good to have someone like you. This was a sin.
He also feels like he treated working class employees (and don't forget, this is Brazil, e.g. his building janitors in São Paulo lived in the nearby favela!) with extreme equality, sometimes even better, than other richer people.
One thing Ciro does not do however is give money to beggars on the street. Those beggars do make Ciro feel extremely bad for not giving, but he feels that they must be drug addicts to be out on the street like that, and that this money would be better invested in OurBigBook.com. But maybe this is just wrong. How fucked up the world is, how far away are we from unconditional basic income???
Once Ciro was hanging out with one of his father's on a group tourist, and she was a lesbian borderline/actually activist social reform person, and she promptly gave to a beggar without batting an eye, and that made a big impression on Ciro, making him feel even worse about himself.
It must be said that at times this compassion can be a weakness see Ciro's trip to the Municipal Market of São Paulo.
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Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions Updated 2026-01-30
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Figure 1.
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
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Figure 2.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats
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Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions have, unsurprisingly, centered around the subjects he has worked with: systems programming and web development, and necessary tooling to get those done, such as Git, Python, Bash and Ubuntu.
His best answers are listed at: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Stack Overflow has been the initial centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, until Ciro noticed that GitHub might be potentially even more effective for it.
In Stack Overflow Ciro likes to:
  • answer important questions found through Google which he needs to solve an actual problem he has right now, and for which none of the existing answers satisfied him, and close duplicates.
  • monitor less known tags which very few people know a lot about and where the knowledge sharing desperately lacking, but in which Ciro specializes and therefore has some uncommon knowledge to share
In practice it also happens that Ciro:
When he gets an upvote on one of his more obscure answers, Ciro often re-reads it, and often finds improvements to be made and makes them.
He doesn't like to refresh the homepage looking for easy reputation on widely known subjects. See also: online forums that lock threads after some time are evil.
The result is that Ciro ends up getting relatively a lot of reputation without much work! The term passive income, much beloved by fake investment gurus, comes to mind. But now it's "passive reputation"! And it is useless! Yay!
For this reason, Necromancer is Ciro's favorite badge (get 5 upvotes on a question older than 60 days), and as of July 2019, he became the #1 user with the most of this badge. Announcement on Twitter.
The number two at the time was VonC (see also: Section "Epic Stack Overflow users"), who had about 16 times more answers than Ciro in total! From this query: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1072396?&Date=2019-07-01&UserId=895245 it can be seen that as of July 2019, 1216 out of his 1329 answers were answered 60 days after the questions and constitute potential necromancers! Compare that to VonC's 1643 potential necromancers out of 21767 answers!
VonC eventually took back the lead in 2022, dude's a machine!!! twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1546389532014247936
Someone at Ciro's work once said something along:
The more patents a research project generates, the less actually working products it produces.
and this does ring true in Stack Overflow as well. When you are answering stuff, it means that you either didn't know, or that the information wasn't well available, and so your specific application is progressing slowly because of that. Once the generic prerequisites are well solved and answered, you will spend much more time on your business specific things rather than anything else that can be factored out across projects, and so you will get more "directly useful work" done, and less Stack Overflow answers. Of course, without the prior research in place, you can't get the final product done either.
In terms of per year reputation ranks, Ciro was in the top 100 in of the 2018 ranking with 38,710 reputation gained in that year: stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2018-01-01?sort=reputationchange&page=4 (archive). He reached top 50 in 2022. Note that daily reputation is mostly capped to 200 per day, leading to a maximum 73000 per year. It is possible to overcome this limit either with bounties or accepts, and Ciro finds it amazing that some people actually break the 73k limit by far with accepts, e.g. Gordon Linoff reached 135k in 2018 (archive)! However, this is something that Ciro will never do, because it implies answering thousands and thousands of useless semi duplicate questions as fast as possible to get the accept. Ciro's reputation comes purely from upvotes on important question, and is therefore sustainable without any extra effort once achieved. Interestingly, Ciro appeared on top of the quarter SE rankings around 2019-11: web.archive.org/web/20191112100606/https://stackexchange.com/leagues but it was just a bug ;-)
There is no joy like answering an old question, and watching your better answer go up little by little until it dominates all others.
Stack Overflow reputation is of course, in itself, meaningless. People who contribute to popular subjects like web development will always have infinitely more reputation than those that contribute to low level subjects.
What happens on the specialized topics though is that you end up getting to know all the 5 users who contribute 95% of the content pretty soon as you study those subjects.
Like everything that man does, the majority of Ciro's answers are more or less superficial subjects that many people know but few have the patience to explain well, or they are updates to important questions reflecting upstream developments. But as long as they save 15 minutes from someone's life, that's fine.
There is great beauty when you are involved in a programming problem, and you suddenly remember: wait, I answered something related a few years ago! And especially so when you can go back and improve your old answer with new insight. This has great value, because when you were more newbie, you would have typed different words into Google Search than you would now. So by updating posts from when you were a newbie, you are helping other newbies more, as they are more likely to be also searching for those keywords. It is also very nice to have some head start on the answer's upvote count and not have to bootstrap yet another answer from 0 upvotes and have to go through all the competition!
For example, Ciro's most upvoted answer as of July 2019 is stackoverflow.com/questions/18875674/whats-the-difference-between-dependencies-devdependencies-and-peerdependencies/22004559#22004559 was written when he spent his first week playing with NodeJS (he was having a look at Overleaf, later merged into Overleaf, for education), which he didn't touch again for several years, and still hasn't "mastered" as of 2019! This did teach a concrete life lesson to Ciro however: it is impossible to know what is the most useful thing you can do right now very precisely. The best bet is to follow your instincts and do as much awesome stuff as you can, and then, with some luck, some of those attempts will cover an use case.
Ciro also derives great joy from his "media related answers" (3D graphics, audio, video), which are immensely fun to write, and sometimes borderline art, see answers such as those under "OpenGL" and "Media" under the best articles by Ciro Articles or even simpler answers such as:
There is something of greater value in perfectly presented technical knowledge, that goes beyond than simply getting something done. The pleasure of understanding and mastering something, and perhaps of the explanation itself. Sometimes when answering, Ciro feels like a tailor, where ASCII is his cloth. See also: Section "The art of programming", Section "Physics and the illusion of life".
Ciro's deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: OurBigBook.com. So it is a bit funny to think that after all time Ciro spent on the website, he actually wants to destroy it and replace it with something better. There can be no innovation without some damage. It also led to Ciro's creation of Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script.
After answering so many questions, he ended up converging to a more or less consistent style, which he formalized at:
Like any other style guide, this answer style guide, once fully incorporated and memorized, allows Ciro to write answers faster, without thinking about formatting issues.
Ciro also made a question title style guide: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903 but for some reason the Stack Overflow community prefers their semi-defined title meta-language to proper English. Go figure.
Ciro started contributing to Stack Overflow in 2012 when he was at École Polytechnique.
Like all things that end up shaping the course of one's life, Ciro started contributing without thinking too much about it.
His first answer was to the LaTeX question: Standalone diagrams with TikZ?, which reflects the fact that this happened while Ciro was reaching his Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment.
When he started contributing, Ciro was still a newbie. One early event he will never forget was when someone mentioned a "man page", and Ciro commented saying that there was a typo!
When Ciro reached 15 points and gained the ability to upvote, it felt like a major milestone, he even took a screenshot of the browser! 1k, 10k and 100k were also particularly exciting. When the 100k cup (archive) arrived in 2018, Ciro made a show-off Facebook post (archive). At some point though, your brain stops caring, and automatically filters out any upvotes you get except on the answers that you are really proud of and which don't yet have lots of upvotes. The last remaining useless gamed achievement that Ciro looked forward to was legendary (archive), and which he achieved on 2021-02-16.
Figure 4.
Ciro Santilli with his Stack Overflow 100k reputation cup
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From the start, Ciro's motivations for contributing to Stack Overflow have been a virtuous circle of:
  • save the world through free education
  • It feels especially amazing when people in the real world start taking note of you, and either close friends tell you straight out that you're a Stack Overflow God, or as you slowly and indirectly find out that less close know or came to you due to your amazing contributions.
It is also amazing when you start having a repertoire of answers, and as you are writing a new answer, you remember: "hey, the knowledge of that answer would be so welcome here", and so you link to the other answer as well at the perfect point. This somewhat achieves does what OurBigBook.com aims to do: for each small section of a tutorial, gather the best answers by multiple people.
Ciro feels that his Stack Overflow alter ego is kenorb.
Another one is Aaron Hall, who is also very high on the necromancer list, answers in Python which is a topic Ciro cares about, and states on his profile:
Follow me on Twitter and tell me what canonical questions you would like me to respond to!
so another necromancer.
Way to go.
Ciro also asks some questions on a ratio of about 1 question per 10 answers. But Ciro's questions tend to be about extremely niche that no one knows/cares about, and a high percentage of them ends up getting self answered either at asking time or after later research.
Some fun reactions to Ciro's Stack Overflow activity:
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Closed access academic journals are evil Updated 2025-07-16
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You are nothing but useless leeches in the Internet age.
You must go bankrupt all of you, ASAP.
Fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer, and fuck all the like.
Research paid with taxpayer money must be made available for free.
Researchers and reviewers all work for peanuts, while academic publishers get money for doing the work that an algorithm could do. OurBigBook.com.
When Ciro learned URLs such as www.nature.com/articles/181662a0 log you in automatically by IP, his mind blew! The level of institutionalization of this theft is off the charts! The institutionalization of theft is also clear from article prices, e.g. 32 dollars for a 5 page article.
Key physics papers from the 50's are still copyright encumbered as of 2020, see e.g. Lamb-Retherford experiment. Authors and reviewers got nothing for it. Something is wrong.
Infinite list of other people:
  • blog.machinezoo.com/public-domain-theft by Robert Važan:
    Scientific journals are perhaps one of the most damaging IP rackets. Scientists are funded by governments to do research and publish papers. Reviews of these papers are done by other publicly funded scientists. Even paper selection and formatting for publication is done by scientists. So what do journals actually do? Nearly nothing.
Video 1.
Academic Publishing by Dr. Glaucomflecken (2022)
Source.
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