But maybe "Everything you did brought you where you are now." applies, maybe it is during the "low impact activities" that one gets the inspiration and experience required for the "high impact ones".
The project's mission is one of, or perhaps the most important, life objective of Ciro Santilli. Reproductive goals aside. These two types of goal are incommensurable. This is one of the great challenges of life.
This is ongoing project.
Ciro's goals in advertising this half done project are is partly to obtain some feedback, and partly to give the idea to someone else who might help push it further, be it in this stack or not.
But besides that, it is already in broad strokes the best approach Ciro Santilli can come up with to try and reach the mission statement only with technical advances, i.e. without large amounts of money or political influence which Ciro Santilli does not have.
Maybe that website isn't enough of a technical advance to reach its mission. Maybe there is some further not yet imagined technical insight that would push it into viability. Maybe not. But one must try. Only God can know the answer to these questions.
Then around 2021 he put in some more 1.5year of full time work, now with a possibly overly complicated (or perhaps just insane/immature) Next.js/Sequelize from scratch website stack.
It makes Ciro abit ashamed to see that "so little user visible stuff was achieved in so much time". It is partly because he and many people underestimate the difficulty of web development. Perhaps there were some bad stack/useless feature choices issues. And agood dose of indulging in studying the natural sciences to bootstrap content and have fun. But really trying is the only way to learn.
Terminal dump of a LKMC session with two tmux panes with QEMU on left and GDB on right showing a backtrace of the Linux kernelcode currently being under QEMU
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:
Googles for his own answers to remember some detail he wrote down but with slightly different terms that were closer to mind at the time, and find other similar questions for which he has the perfect answer.
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!
The more patentsaresearch project generates, the less actually working products it produces.
and this does ring true in Stack Overflowas 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.
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.
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!
Ciro tends to take most pride on his systems programming answers, which is a subject that truly relatively few people know about. He likes it when he goes insanely deep into a subject, way beyond what OP had in mind, exposing full root causes and broader causes, see e.g.:
Ciro's deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: OurBigBook.com. So it is abit 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.
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.
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 aStack OverflowGod, 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 writinga 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.
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 aratio 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.
This was one of the profile pictures that Ciro Santilli used as part of his campaign.
Ciro later went on to prefer the "unmodified" Xi Jinping photo cover of some edition Xi Jinping Though, which also reminds Ciro very much of religious devotional pictures, e.g. those of Li Hongzhi.
Ciro understood that the best propaganda against a dictatorial enemy is recontextualized unmodified propaganda produced by the enemy itself. Their propaganda speaks for itself
Ciro feels that the view count started increasing more slowly since 2020 compared to his reputation, likely every single Chinese user has already viewed the profile.
GitLab sent Ciro afree swag bottle later after they got funding on to thank him for his contributions: Figure 1. "Ciro Santilli in adune lake in Jericoacoara, Brazil, with his GitLab bottle". He had to pay for the beach trip though.
Vim: sometimes Ciro want crazy and wasted his time with Vimscript:
Vim Markdown: the owner plasticboy was really nice and made Ciro a collaborator for his contributions, notably a live ToC outline and the header mappings
