Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40
Joined 2022-11-02 Message
Incoming links: OurBigBook.com
OurBigBook.com Why it is hard to make money from this website Updated 2025-07-16
There is basically only one scalable business model in education as of the 2020's: helping teenagers pass university entry exams. And nothing else. Everything else is a "waste" of time.
Perhaps there is a little bit of publicity incentive to helping them win knowledge olympiads as well, but it is tiny in comparison, and almost certainly not a scalable investment. This may also depend on whether universities consider anything but exams, which varies by country.
That marked is completely saturated, and Ciro Santilli refuses to participate in it for moral reasons.
Beyond that, there is no scalable investment. Other non-scalable investments that could allow one to make a lifestyle business are:
- extra-curricular initiatives to get younger children interested in science. These may have some money stream coming from the parents of the children. This happens because for young children, the parents are more in control, and the parents, unlike the students, have some money to spend. An example: www.littlehouseofscience.com/This business model is possible because experiments for young children may be cheap to realize, unlike any experiment that would matter to a teenager or adult.
- creating a private university, for profit or not. Of course, at this point, you would be either:
- competing against the reputation and funding of century old universities
- or be offering more boring, lower tech or techless courses, to (God forbid the phrasing) "worse students", i.e. at a "worse university"
Teenagers and young adults:
- don't have money to give you if you want to "help them learn for real"
- are somewhat forced to obtain their "reputable university" reputation to kickstart their careers
It is this perfect storm that places this specific section of education in such a bad shape that it is today.
This project is likely to fail. It could become the TempleOS of wikis. The project' autism score is quite high. It might be an impossible attempt at a lifestyle business. But Ciro is beyond caring now. It must be done. Other things that come to mind:
- www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLibNZv5Zd0dzvoxXrjA9xNHLpdgLhTkZz "Obsessed" playlist by Wired. Helps Ciro feel better about himself.
- Don Quixote
- pipe dream
- Video "Don't Try - The Philosophy of Charles Bukowski by Pursuit of Wonder (2019)"
Dangerous combination:and for any crazy person who might wish to join: Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey.
In some ways, Ciro was reminded of OurBigBook.com by this documentary. Ken built his ultimate audio system without regard to money and time, to enjoy until he dies. Ciro is doing something similar. There is one fundamental difference however: everyone can enjoy a website all over the world.
A bit ominous though that the whole thing was eventually sold off for a fraction of the building cost: www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/ken-fritz-greatest-stereo-auction-cost/.
OurBigBook Markup Updated 2025-07-16
The markup language of OurBigBook.com.
The one markup language to rule them all?
Documentation at: docs.ourbigbook.com.
OurBigBook Web Updated 2025-07-16
The website system that runs OurBigBook.com. For further information see:Relies on the OurBigBook Library to compile OurBigBook Markup.
- OurBigBook.com: rationale
- cirosantilli.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-web: project documentation
Paul Dirac Updated 2026-08-21
Eccentric nerdy slow speaking physicist mostly based in University of Cambridge.
Created the Dirac equation, what else do you need to know?!
QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 1.3 "P.A.M. Dirac and the Birth of Quantum Electrodynamics" quotes Dirac saying how being at high school during World War I was an advantage, since all slightly older boys were being sent to war, and so the younger kids were made advance as fast as they could through subjects. Exactly the type of thing Ciro Santilli wants to achieve with OurBigBook.com, but without the need for a world war hopefully.
Dirac was a staunch atheist having said during the Fifth Solvay Conference (1927)[ref]:
If we are honest - and scientists have to be - we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards - in heaven if not on earth - all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.
Physics Updated 2025-07-16
Physics (like all well done science) is the art of predicting the future by modelling the world with mathematics.
Ciro Santilli doesn't know physics. He writes about it partly to start playing with some scientific content for: OurBigBook.com, partly because this stuff is just amazingly beautiful.
Ciro's main intellectual physics fetishes are to learn quantum electrodynamics (understanding the point of Lie groups being a subpart of that) and condensed matter physics.
Every science is Physics in disguise, but the number of objects in the real world is so large that we can't solve the real equations in practice.
Luckily, due to emergence, we can use uglier higher level approximations of the world to solve many problems, with the complex limits of applicability of those approximations.
Therefore, such higher level approximations are highly specialized, and given different names such as:
Unifying those two into the theory of everything one of the major goals of modern physics.
xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity
. Source. Reductionism comes to mind.
PlanetMath Updated 2025-07-16
Joe Corneli, of of the contributors, mentions this in a cool-sounding "Peeragogy" context at metameso.org/~joe/:
I earned my doctorate at The Open University in Milton Keynes, with a thesis focused on peer produced support for peer learning in the mathematics domain. The main case study was planetmath.org; the ideas also informed the development of “Peeragogy”.
Popular science Updated 2025-07-16
On one hand, yes, we need knowledge at all levels, and it is fine to start top-to-bottom with an overview.
The problem is, however, that there is a huge knowledge gap between the one liner "this is the truth" and the much more important "this is how we know it, these are the experiments" as mentioned at how to teach and learn physics.
Therefore, if you have that extremely rare knowledge, you should be writing that in addition to the dumbed down version with an open knowledge license. It takes time, but that's what really changes the world.
Ciro Santilli has always felt that there is a huge gap between "the very basic" and "the very advanced", as mentioned at: Section "The missing link between basic and advanced", which existing scientific vulgarization is not doing enough to address. In a sense, filling out this "middle path" is the main goal of OurBigBook.com.
Ciro really enjoyed the description of the "Arindam Kumar Chatterjee" YouTube channel:
Theoretical/mathematical physics at the graduate level and above. This is NOT a popular science channel. Here you find real theoretical physicists doing real theoretical physics. We think it is important for people to get a taste of the real deal, and for aspiring theoretical physicists to see what they are working towards, i.e., to provide the public with something beyond the ubiquitous Michio Kaku and Brian Cox.
One thing must be said however: there seems to be an actual bias against researchers tho try to create vulgarization material: How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University by Sean Carroll (2011), and that is terrible.
There is often more value in a tutorial by a beginner who is trying to fully learn and explain a subject, than by an expert who is trying to "dumb it down" too much.
Quantum Field Theory lecture notes by David Tong (2007) Updated 2025-07-16
Number of pages circa 2021: 155.
It should also be noted that those notes are still being updated circa 2020 much after original publication. But without Git to track the LaTeX, it is hard to be sure how much. We'll get there one day, one day.
Some quotes self describing the work:
- Perhaps for this reason Ciro Santilli was not able to get as much as he'd out of those notes either. This is not to say that the notes are bad, just not what Ciro needed, much like P&S:
In this course we will not discuss path integral methods, and focus instead on canonical quantization.
A follow up course in the University of Cambridge seems to be the "Advanced QFT course" (AQFT, Quantum field theory II) by David Skinner: www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/dbs26/AQFT.html
Quora Updated 2025-07-16
Quora is crap in many, many senses, but in part due to some bad Stack Overflow policies, it is the best crap we've got for certain (mostly useless) subjects. Until OurBigBook.com dominates the world.
The worst thing about quora is that you cannot subscribe only to certain subjects on your feed. Quora just keeps pumping shit you never subscribed to, no matter what. Ciro, for sport, unfollowed every single idiotic subject it was proposing, but it didn't work, sooner or later Quora just keeps pumping more shit back. Mind you, some of that shit is fun. But it's still shit. Though on second thought, YouTube also randomly decides to reset Ciro's humongous "don't recomend this shitty channel" choices from time to time, which is not much different...
Other terrible things, they just seem to have an incredible ability of making the website worse and more annoying over time! Truly amazing:
- around 2022, quora started showing "related" answers to other questions, possibly before actualy answers to the question itself. This, together with an insane number of inline ads that look very similar to answers, makes it very hard to decide what is an actual answer or not!!! E.g.: people complaining:
- around 2021, quora started expanding any link as a huge preview box that completely takes over the answer, and it is very hard to stop it from doing so
- Quora used to show question details beyond the title by default, but stopped: www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/uqyvfp/comment/jd6go1b/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Quora is getting so bad that it is basically being killed by Reddit, especially after they lifted the 6-month hard thread lock...
See also: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/quora for a coverage of the intense pro-CCP astroturfing present on the website.
Saylor Academy Updated 2025-07-16
This is an interesting initiative which has some similarities to Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook project.
The fatal flaw of the initiative in Ciro Santilli's opinion is the lack of user-generated content. We will never get there without UGC and algorithms, never.
Also as of 2021, it mostly useless business courses: learn.saylor.org unfortunately.
But it has several redeeming factors which Ciro Santilli aproves of:
- exam as a service-like
- they have a GitHub: github.com/saylordotorgo
The founder Michael J. Saylor looks a bit crooked, Rich people who create charitable prizes are often crooked comes to mind. But maybe he's just weird.
Michael Saylor interview by Lex Fridman (2022)
Source. At the timestamp:What statement... maybe he's actually not crooked, maybe it was just an accounting mistake... God, why.
When I go, all my assets will flow into a foundation, and the foundation's mission is to make education free for everybody forever.
If only Ciro Santilli knew how to contact him and convince him that his current approach is innefective and that Ciro has something better! Michael, please Google into this page some day, Ciro Santilli needs funding for OurBigBook.com. A hopeless Tweet at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1548350114623660035. Also tried to hit his
[email protected]. School must offer free accommodation for students Created 2024-11-15 Updated 2025-07-16
More precisely, for students whose parents don't live near the school. Or alternatively, online-only courses that offer the same diploma as the presencial version. Or a compromise where the best N% students get accommodation, where N is a parameter of how decent your society is overall.
Since all the learning resources will be available online on OurBigBook.com, or through online 1-to-1 chats with mentors, it might be cheaper for students to work either from their parent's homes if their home has reasonable work conditions: a silent room with reasonable Internet access and no drug addicts in the house.
Alternatively, a public local library with free WiFi would do as well. But there would need to be a strict silence policy enforced, unlike most public libraries we see today. Ciro once saw a bird shaped noise detector that would sing if the noise went above a certain threshold, that was a good idea. Just like linting, it is easier to let machines decide deterministically on subjective questions to reduce useless arguments over who is right. Ciro has even seen libraries where the local council uses the same library open space as a citizen counsel area. What's the fucking point... these people have never done any deep work in their lives.
Then the state only needs to pay transportation and temporary accommodation to attend concentrated month-long laboratory workshop courses and week-long conferences, since the only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories. In cases where the home conditions are not good enough, the state can either pay for on-demand WeWork-like offices near the student's home, of for a full on-campus accommodation as in a boarding school. What is indispensable is that all students who pass the entry criteria must have such working conditions. Students who stay home can also earn a scholarship to help pay for their rent, food and Internet access.
Anything else is just incredibly unfair to the poor. Ciro Santilli has already witnessed two cases, in developed, and under-developed countries, where very high potential poorer students were forced to work to support themselves in parallel to a demanding degree because their parents couldn't pay their rent on a different city, and the students mental health issues due to this. In one of those cases the student had to abandon the course altogether.
It doesn't help that school has become a pure student-evaluation system, which basically implies putting studets through a lot of useless pressure.
One of the stories that Ciro Santilli's father tells is about how when they were dating, one of Ciro Santilli's mother's greatest wish for her hypotetical child would be that "they should not need to work during their studies as she had". As destiny would have it, Ciro Santilli's family had good conditions and Ciro never thought even once about money. And even then, school still sucked. Imagine without that basic, mandatory, stability!
Second brain Updated 2025-07-16
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.
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.
Bibliography:
Social inequality Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli is extremely passionate about this issue, partly due to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.
One of Ciro's most direct experiences with social inequality is described at: São Remo, the favela next to USP.
We have to be careful not to make everyone poorer when trying to reduce inequality.
But as things stand as of 2020, increasing taxes on the very richest, and notably wealth tax, and investing it in free gifted education, seems like a safe bet to achieve any meaningful level of equal opportunity and meritocracy.
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com Updated 2026-10-18
Ciro Santilli is actively looking for donations and contracts so he can continue to work full time on OurBigBook.com sustainably, and develop free hardcore university-level STEM education for all ages!
For 1M USD I will quit my job to work on OurBigBook for three more years to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. Status: ~44k / 1M USD. MacArthur fellowship wink. At 4M USD I retire and work on open STEM forever.
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. In this first year I improved project tech, but didn't go and solve university courses to create super targeted content, and didn't obtain a single contributing user except myself, see a summary at Section "OurBigBook Project Update March 2025". Day job total compensation as of August 2026 for reference: 205k USD/year. This may be inflated by the AI bubble. I try to keep the value up to date on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli/
For a followup, it would be an interesting experiment to spend on year full time solving as many courses as I can from a world class university in the city where I live in the UK, and adding that as content to the platform to see if that would attract interest, and reaching out directly to course takers at their university environment to try and help them. I intended to do that in year one but my got distracted by tech. It is quite possible that no one has ever done that before in history: a highly motivated technical person with the time and opportunity to do one single thing: help top university students learn their STEM courses better and have more fun doing so. I have in particular identified one course where this would be particularly feasible: the mathematics course, given that much of their course materials, and also their building are quite open. I do sometimes wonder if doing this would be just a waste of my life. But part of me tells me it could generate big interest and is worth a try. It would also be fun for you to watch me continue to commit career seppuku.
At 4M USD I retire and work on open STEM projects forever. At these timelines, I can't guarantee it will be specifically on education technology specifically all the way, but I guarantee that whatever it is it will be open and extremely well explained as usual.
It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant - James Watson
Total donations to date ~144k USD. Donation breakdown:More details: Section "Accounting method"
- 2024-03-18: $126,352 (!!!): anonymous 1000 Monero donation to self-custody wallet. Further comments: Section "1000 Monero donation"
- 2024-03-13: $1,375: anonymous 10 Monero donation to self-custody wallet
- 2023-11-20: $14.563: anonymous 100 Monero donation to Binance wallet
- 2023-09: $810: anonymous 0.032 Bitcoin donation to Coinbase wallet
- subscriptions up to 2024-01: $143,795
Note to potential anonymous crypto donors: I live in the UK, and after some fun back and forth that included Barclays freezing my account for one week at one point, Barclays finally decided that they do not allow me to receive further anonymous donations. And I'm pretty sure that the same would happen on any other British bank sooner or later. Therefore, while I continue to accept anonymous donations, they will not count towards my "if I get X I do Y"-type donation goals, since I can't reliably spend that money. If you want to donate in crypto, and clearly give me your real identity and an explanation of how you got the money, then that is fine, it can count. Just be warned that I will need to give that information to my bank and clear it with them beforehand, and if they are still not happy with it, I'll just give it all back. Your identity does not have to be publicly disclosed, only the dates and amounts. But my bank has to know. Now, if you still want to donate a "retirement level amount" and treat me as a guinea pig in "find the best country for money laundering", well, go for it. But I make no promises! I don't want my children to grow up in shitcountries.
How to give:And if you have a different preferred payment mechanism not listed above, please contact Ciro, and he will set it up.
- one time donations:
- cryptocurrency: note that Ciro is not a regular crypto user, so you might want to make a smaller test donation and confirm that it worked by contacting Ciro before going for colossal amounts (one can dream):
- Monero address: 4A1KK4uyLQX7EBgN7uFgUeGt6PPksi91e87xobNq7bT2j4V6LqZHKnkGJTUuCC7TjDNnKpxDd8b9DeNBpSxim8wpSczQvzf. Secret view key: 7ccaf885ff5540b0ff18927e6ac5da30130afb1eaee09ad95d3c4536a6337e0f. This is a self-custody wallet on a "clean" dedicated Monero laptop connected the Internet. I check for incoming transactions from my dirty main laptop via a view-only wallet each weekend. The cash out method used is latest simplest thing that wasn't yet blocked in my country on a given week, the last time that was centralized swappers[ref]. The fact that the cash out method changes weekly confirms that Monero privacy hadn't yet been broken by countries and that Monero is still one of the most useful cryptocurrencies: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?". For transparency, I announce all non-trivial transactions on social media, and the full list of transactions can be seen by anyone with the secret view key provided. I previously had different addresses, so pre-existing donations on older addresses will not be visible there.
- Bitcoin address: 3KRk7f2JgekF6x7QBqPHdZ3pPDuMdY3eWR. This is a Coinbase wallet, off-chain transactions with no transaction fees accepted from other Coinbase users. This method has been tested, I have been able to receive funds from this address in 2023. Fees: non-fixed trading fees[ref] + 0% withdrawal fee on top of any Bitcoin network for on-chain transactions[ref]
- Ethereum address: 0x44cF8C9C015F46d3b2Df730b6492823FD7A91044. Test transaction recommended.
- **Solana** address: DjdaGawoVFdqxJEqpBGsSWuR4G4MVFNiNkAEu89HuKcE. Test transaction recommended.
- **USDC** address: 0x1dFABf2cdE6384f6Fdd4e6Dae3B9FA2d323e6F95
- TransferWise tag: wise.com/pay/me/cirod3. No fees apparently? Love it!
- PayPal: paypal.me/cirosantilli. Note that dots in Gmail address are ignored, and it is perfectly normal if the email you see has some extra dots in it. Fees: 2.9% + 0.30 GBP[ref].
- bank transfer: prove you are rich and you can have my bank details :-)
- cryptocurrency: note that Ciro is not a regular crypto user, so you might want to make a smaller test donation and confirm that it worked by contacting Ciro before going for colossal amounts (one can dream):
- monthly subscriptions of 1$/month or more on either:Symbolic 1 dollar/month donation are extremely welcome to signal your interest! This way if a certain critical mass of sponsors is ever reached (~100?), Ciro can start to more actively asking slightly higher amounts to really try to achieve full time self sufficiency.
- GitHub Sponsors: github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli. Fees: 0% for individuals, up to 6% for organizations[ref]
- Patreon: www.patreon.com/cirosantilli. Fees: 8% pro plan + 1% PayPal withdrawal capped at 20 USD[ref]. We are waiting to reach the cap to withdraw!
- larger grants/contracts from filthy rich individuals or organizations: contact Ciro as mentioned at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to discuss.Ciro is interested in contracts/voluntary work that would be compatible/synergic with the OurBigBook.com project. Some possibilities include:
- interacting directly with classes of university students to help them learn the class subject, while at the same time spreading the university knowledge outside of the university walls
- one-to-one mentoring of individuals of any age that are looking to make an impact in the world, and not just pass their exams
- fixing specific bugs in related projects Ciro has experience in. These could be either via one-off contracts, or on platforms such as:
Ciro's current ambitions require him to remain in developed countries, because Ciro wants to document advanced science and technology by liaising with top universities, and there is not nearly as much high technology in poor countries. Remaining in developed countries is also a required due to family reasons.
If you would like public acknowledgement for your support, Ciro will very gladly give it, just let Ciro know how you'd prefer it. Due to Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, many supporters have chosen to be anonymous, and that is totally fine, not everyone is interested in politics, or has a situation where going public is acceptable, so we don't have a standard setup yet, let's build it together. A acknowledgement section at the bottom of this page would be a minimum, but I for larger donations we could add a your advertisement in a locations such as:
- near the top of of the accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli, e.g. one of Ciro Santilli's Twitter accounts, github.com/cirosantilli or stackoverflow.com/users/895245
- near the top of cirosantilli.com
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.Intro to the OurBigBook Project
. Source. 
Although totally disqualified for it, Ciro would really like to understand and explain cool scientific experiments in insane detail much as he does with computer software, related:
Maybe if he ever gets enough credibility, such opportunities would actually materialize. It could be a bit like Periodic Videos, but for molecular biology and physics, and backed by OurBigBook text/tree with minimal openly licensed videos. The fact that such opportunities are essentially impossible outside of the boredom of the university system is something we should really change about education.
Ciro's Edict #4 ourbigbook.com Updated 2025-07-16
I had meant to make an update earlier, but I wanted to try and add some more "visible end-user changes" to OurBigBook.com.
Just noticed BTW that signup on the website is broken. Facepalm. Not that it matters much since it is not very useful in the current state, but still. Going to fix that soon. EDIT: nevermind, it wasn't broken, I just had JavaScript disabled on that website with an extension to test if pages are visible without JavaScript, and yes, they are perfectly visible, you can't tell the difference! But you can't login without JavaScript either!
I still haven't the user visible ones I wanted, but I've hit major milestones, and it feels like time for an update.
I have now finished all the OurBigBook CLI features that I wanted for 1.0, all of which will be automatically reused in ourbigbook.com.
The two big things since last email were the following:
A secondary but also important advance was: further improvements to the website's base technology.
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com Why you should give money to Ciro Santilli Updated 2025-07-16
So that he can work full time on OurBigBook.com and revolutionize advanced university-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics eduction for all ages.
Donating to Ciro is the most effective donation per dollar that you can make to:
- improve hardcore university-level STEM education for all ages
- help make every child into the next Nobel Prize/Fields Medal/deep tech unicorn co-founder
Ciro's goal in life is to help kids as young as possible to reach, and the push, the frontiers of natural sciences human knowledge, linking it to applications that might be the the next big thing as early as possible. Because nothing is more motivating to students than that feeling of:rather than repeating the same crap that everyone is already learning.
To do this, Ciro wants to work in parallel both on:
- the multi-user website e-learning platform of OurBigBook.com
- creating amazing teaching content that motivates that platform, and that deeply interests Ciro, notably quantum mechanics and its related applications:
- quantum computing
- molecular biology
- condensed matter physics and chemistry
- slightly more theoretical stuff in somewhat related fields of:
- continue to dump his brain/research in areas Ciro has expertise in: software engineering and open source software
Ciro believes that this rare combination of both:produces a virtuous circle, because Ciro:
- proven passion and capability to learn and teach science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects
- proven programming skills, including web development
- wants to learn and teach, so he starts to create content
- then he notices the teaching tools are crap
- and since he has the ability to actually improve them, he does
As explained at OurBigBook.com and high flying bird scientist, Ciro is most excited to make contributions at the "missing middle level of specialization" that lies around later undergrad and lower grad education:in a way that is:
But on that middle sweet spot, Ciro believes that something can be done, in such as way that delivers:
- beauty
- power
- in your face, without requiring you to study for a year
- Ciro's programming skills can also be used to create educational, or actually more production-like, simulations and illustrations.
Ciro believes that today's society just keep saying over and over: "STEM is good", "STEM is good", "STEM is good" as a religious mantra, but fails miserably at providing free learning material and interaction opportunities for people to actually learn it at a deep enough level to truly appreciate why "STEM is good". This is what he wants to fix.
The following quote is ripped from Gwern Branwen's Patreon page, and it perfectly synthesizes how Ciro feels as well:
In addition to all of this, financial support also helps Ciro continue his general community support activities:
- writing and updating his amazing Stack Overflow answers: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions"
- saving the world from the CCP: Section "Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China"
Stack Overflow content deletion Updated 2025-07-16
Stack overflow allows deleting content/making it visible only to 10k rep users.
Ciro Santilli is strictly against this, and this is an intended core policy of OurBigBook.com.
If you delete people's content randomly, they will be much less likely to write anything.
Getting downvoted to oblivion is one thing, but data loss? Unacceptable.
Only illegal content must ever be deleted. Or extremely obvious spam. But anything in a gray area should never be removed.
Deletion can be done by either:
- votes of high reputation users
- moderators
- or worse of all, which happens often on the smaller websites: auto-deletion because come content has not received enough views/votes above some treshold! stackoverflow.com/help/auto-deleted-questions. The most illogical thing of all is that the question is not even permanently removed from the system, only hidden from other/low reputation users! So it does not save any disk space at all! Mind blowing!
Stack Overflow is doomed Created 2024-07-29 Updated 2025-07-16
Stack Overflow does have an super naive reputation and moderation system and overly restrictive subject matter, which Ciro Santilli wants to improve upon with OurBigBook.com.
However, it is the best that we have now, and if you use it like Ciro, you won't get tired:What else would you expect from a naive algorithm system that has 10 million newbies asking stuff?
- monitor only rare tags that you know a lot about, let others answer duplicates on big tags for you
- only answer on bigger tags when you find a better answer than can be found on the page
- accept that sometimes things are bound to go wrong, that reputation is meaningless, and move on
The key problem of Stack Overflow is closurism. The answer close feature is just not made for purpose. The sole purpose of "closing" should be to prevent easy reputation farming. What it should do instead, is remove points gained from duplicates and off topic questions. But it should not prevent new answers. The disk space costs nothing, and Google doesn't care about the closed status of a question.
As of 2024, the only competitor of Stack Overflow is Reddit (besides LLMs, which do nothing but extract data from those two and other sites). Reddit removed the mandatory thread locking after 6 months, but still lacks the Q&A focus required for greatness. Its community however is much more chill and doesn't close and downvote the fuck out of everything.
Related posts:
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro feels that this resonates a lot with his OurBigBook.com.
Supercut:
The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Then:
You've got to find what you love.Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.So keep looking until you find it.Don't settle.
And:Mirror and morning are not required though, a computer screen will do just fine: www.reddit.com/r/depression/comments/6jtamj/im_at_work_just_staring_at_my_computer_screen/
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."
And then he quotes form the Whole Earth Catalog, a paper Atlas from the '70s he admired:
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish
Students must have a flexible choice of what to learn Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro believes that the only thing students must be forced to learn is to speak read and write English and that a teacher's main job after that is to help students find their next big goals and also ties into the backward design philosophy.
Everything else, the student must choose.
This idea is generally known as self-directed learning.
This is most notable in University entry examinations of poor countries, where students often have to waste one extra year of their lives to go through preparation for the useless university entry exams. And then, surprise surprise, if they actually get in, they find that this is not what they really wanted to do, and they just go through to the end miserably because they understandably they don't want to risk another year of their lives.
And importantly: It must be easy to change your area of study.
Steve Jobs's university dropout stories from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address also come to mind.
Interesting projects:
The Purpose of Education by Noam Chomsky (2012)
Source.- 0:00 discusses Education as a system of indoctrination: indoctrination for people to comply with the Establishment and pass tests, vs the Age of Enlightenment in which education should help you achieve your own intellectual/life goals. He suggests without specific evidence that after the 60's there was explicit intervention in the US to increase the indoctrination aspect, of which debt is a part.
- 15.45: assessment vs autonomy: exams are useless, except as a tool to help improve teaching and self assess. Tells anecdote about little girl who wanted to learn more about a subject, asked teacher how to learn more, teacher said you can't, you have to study for this useless national exam instead which will determine your future, and if I'm rehired or not.
Godfrey Hounsfield, 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine:[ref]
They tried hard to educate me but I responded only to physics and mathematics