PostgreSQL logging by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ubuntu 21.10 has a certain default level of logging by default to:
/var/log/postgresql/postgresql-13-main.log
but it does not log everything, only/mostly errors it seems.
Setting:
log_statement = 'all'
under:
/etc/postgresql/13/main/postgresql.conf
and then restarting the server:
sudo service restart postgresql
just works.
A quote by Ciro's Teacher R.:
Sometimes, even if our end goals are too far from reality, the side effects of trying to reach them can have meaningful impact.
If the goals are not ambitious enough, you risk not even having useful side effects so show in the end!
By doing the prerequisites of the impossible goal you desire, maybe the next generation will be able to achieve it.
This is basically why Ciro Santilli has contributed to Stack Overflow, which has happened while was doing his overly ambitious projects and notice that all kinds of basic pre-requisites were not well explained anywhere.
This is especially effective when you use backward design, because then you will go "down the dependency graph of prerequisites" and smoothen out any particularly inefficient points that you come across.
Going into such productive procrastination is also known informally as yak shaving.
There are of course countless examples of such events:
The danger of this approach is of course spending too much time on stuff that will not be done enough times to be worth it, as highlighted by several xkcds:
Figure 1.
xkcd 974: The general problem
. Source.
Figure 2.
xkcd 1205: Is it worth the time
. Source.
Oracle Database by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Often known simply as SQL Server, a terrible thing that makes it impossible to find portable SQL answers on Google! You just have to Google by specific SQL implementation unfortunately to find anything about the open source ones.
SQLite by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The minimalism, serverlessness/lack of temporary caches/lack of permission management, Hipp's religious obsession with efficiency, the use of their own pure Fossil version control[ref]. Wait, scrap that last one. Pure beauty!
Official Git mirror: github.com/sqlite/sqlite
Create a table
sqlite3 db.sqlite3 "
CREATE TABLE 'IntegerNames' (int0 INT, char0 CHAR(16));
INSERT INTO 'IntegerNames' (int0, char0) VALUES (2, 'two'), (3, 'three'), (5, 'five'), (7, 'seven');
"
List tables:
sqlite3 db.sqlite3 '.tables'
output:
IntegerNames
Show schema of a table:
sqlite3 db.sqlite3 '.schema IntegerNames'
outputs the query that would generate that table:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS 'IntegerNames' (int0 INT, char0 CHAR(16));
Show all data in a table:
sqlite3 db.sqlite3 'SELECT * FROM IntegerNames'
output:
2|two
3|three
5|five
7|seven
Skills by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Non-technical skills were moved to: Ciro Santilli's skills.
This has not been updated since 2016 after Ciro got a job, because it is too hard to put a number on any skill.
The default isolation level for SQLite is SERIALIZABLE
It does not appear possible to achieve the other two levels besides SERIALIZABLE and READ UNCOMMITED
As claimed on their README, their operation truly appears to be 10x faster than the node-sqlite package!! It is insane!! How can that other package still exist at all?
The only big problem was the lack of ORM, but people are looking into that by adding it to Sequelize:
Ciro like to interpret this as him having "a creative personality" with the tradeoff of generally not being amazing at his well defined jobs.
Ciro is a high flying bird scientist. As mentioned at by Tommaso Fontana at zom.wtf/about/
I'm what happened when you can't choose a single career path
Ciro is obsessed by that which is "quirky". This also often has a parallel with "naughty". He often fantasizes about an imaginary parallel between that feeling and Jobs and Wozniak's blue box.
Ciro's natural fight-or-flight response is to hide in a little corner, and try to solve the problem out. Then get distracted and start procrastinating. And then he tries to solve the unsolvable. Someone Ciro barely new once told him quite correctly:
In the event of war, you would be the type that hides away and makes the bombs.
This is also perhaps why Ciro likes prison decks in Magic: The Gathering. You just sit on your corner, making yourself safer and safer, until the opponent can't do you any harm and concedes.
There are of course infinitely many videos on the "entrepreneurial mindset" online, and it is impossible to know if they are bullshit, or if everyone just feels like that, but OK, just let Ciro feels that he is specially creative will you?
In the words of Rob Pike[ref]:
mostly building weird stuff no one uses, but occasionally getting it right, such as with UTF-8 and Go
Video 1.
What Predicts Academic Ability? by Jordan B Peterson (2017)
Source. Good quotes:
Creative people continuously step outside of the domain of evaluation structures
and:
If you are creative and you go off on tangents all the time, there's some probability that one of those tangents is going to be exactly what is needed at the time, and you are going to become hyper-successful as a consequence
[but the probability of that being the right time and place for the idea is extraordinarily low]
The sensible thing to tell anybody is "you shouldn't do it, your probability of success is so low, that its better to just to something sensible".
But the problem with that, is that creative people can't do that, because they are creative. A creative person who isn't being creative, they just wither and die.
Which brings Here's to the crazy ones to mind.
Ciro also one heard a story, likely apocryphal, but still nonetheless resonated with him, that went something like this (TODO find source, Google wasn't helping, stuff that happened before website as usual):
The newly hired manager of some subsection of DuPont (or some other gigantic chemical company) came into the office, and found a chemical engineer, completely drunk in the middle of the day.
Outraged, the manager searched for this colleagues who explained.
Ah, don't mind John (or some other name), the guy invented Teflon (or some other substance) which accounted for 20% of our revenue last year. Even if he does not do anything else in his entire career, his salary won't make any difference compared to those gains, and we take the chance that he might invent something else later.
Ciro likes this story because although he does not drink, he feels his work mind works in a related way. Often, when there is something really hard he knows needs doing he hides, and distracts himself with less important tasks, or by watching crap on YouTube, because he knows that the hard task will hurt his mind. Then one day he wakes up and says: OK, fuck it, let's do it, and does it.
Once Ciro got a performance review from a colleague that said:
If Ciro spent as much effort on his job as he does on side projects, he'd be the most amazing worker.
This is closely related to effortless effort.
Yes, low conscientiousness, give it to me.
Video 2.
And I am not and never have been 'familiar' scene from The Big Short (2015)
. Source.
People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar. And I am not and never have been familiar.
blog.sbensu.com/posts/high-variance-management/ High Variance Management:
Like movies, software projects have parts that require high variance and parts that don't. For most projects, the logging system can be off-the-shelf and predictable. But core parts of the product that require novel design should be as good as they can be.

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 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . 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.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  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