As of 2020s and much earlier, Ciro Santilli believes that undergrad studies were fundamentally broken (considering the Information Age which completely changed what would be possible) because university had only two goals, with the exception of a few enlightened professors:
  • rank students from worse to best so they can get into PhD programs.
    For regular jobs grades didn't even matter as much compared the prestige of your university (and therefore, university entry exam grades) and your ability to stand the stress of exams to get minimal passing grade.
    In particular, being able to rank requires setting the difficulty level at a point where you can see a normal distribution in grades, and not have everyone at either 0 nor 100%.
    Also, this split could be caused by either shitty learning materials/conditions, or by mere volume. It doesn't matter.
  • get money from the students. Of course, in countries where university is "free", this means reporting how many students you had to some government office so they can give you a corresponding budget. But you still have an incentive to enroll as many as possible.
As a result, most students, who would not go on to do a PhD essentially do a simple trade: all their time, and possibly some money, in exchange for imbuing themselves with the incredible name of a respected institution so they can get better jobs later on.
Beauty, deep understanding, and learning awesome things comes basically as a second thought.
Students choose only one of the Cx courses.
Then there are PhDs corresponding to each of them: www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/mpls/physics
CIFAR-10 by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
60,000 tiny 32x32 color images in 10 different classes: airplanes, cars, birds, cats, deer, dogs, frogs, horses, ships, and trucks.
TODO release date.
This dataset can be thought of as an intermediate between the simplicity of MNIST, and a more full blown ImageNet.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250517192041im_/https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar-10-sample/airplane1.png
https://web.archive.org/web/20250517192041im_/https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar-10-sample/automobile1.png
https://web.archive.org/web/20250517192041im_/https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar-10-sample/bird1.png
https://web.archive.org/web/20250517192041im_/https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar-10-sample/cat1.png
Qualcomm by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli has always had a good impression of these people.
Spark-gap transmitter by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The first type of device that allowed sending Morse code without wires, as opposed to the wired electrical telegraph that previously existed.
Naval communications was one of the first major applications, as you can't have wires on boats!
Wireless voice transmission came about with modulation.
Video 1.
Spark-gap transmitter at the at the The Museum of Radio and Technology Jeri Ellsworth (2017)
Source.
Code drop by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Open source development model in which developers develop in private, and only release code to the public during releases.
Notable example project: Android Open Source Project.
This development model basically makes reporting bugs and sending patches a waste of time, because many of them will already have been solved, which is why this development model is evil.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact