Software engineer by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Poet warriors monkeys? Or Code peasants (码农) according to the Chinese.
Ciro Santilli claims to be one of them.
Much like a pianist plays his piano, a software engineer plays his computer.
Ciro Santilli believes that there is a positive correlation between being a software engineer and liking Buddhist-like things.
Maybe it is linked to minimalism and DRY, which software engineers value so greatly.
Even Ciro had to try an unoriginal Buddhist joke intro in one of this Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro also feels that his "minimal reproducible example" scientific language/concept learning method obsession of breaking things into tiny sub-problems has a strong link with Koans.
Some notable Buddhism/programmer examples:
Another thing that points the correlation out is the existence of wattsalan.github.io/ on a github.io about Alan Watts.
Ciro Santilli's joke version of the Chinese Four Treasures of the Study!
  • web browser
  • Text editor
  • terminal. Though to be honest, circa 2022, Ciro learned of the ctrl + click to open file (including with file.c:123 line syntax) ability of Visual Studio Code (likely present in other IDEs), and he was starting considering dumping the terminal altogether if some implementation gets it really really right. The main thing is that it can't be a tinny little bar at the bottom, it has to be full window and super easily toggleable!
In the past, Ciro used to use file managers, which would be the fourth tresure. But he stopped doing so for years due to his cd alias... so it became three. He actually had exactly three windows open when he was checking if there was anything else he could not open hand of.
Figure 1.
The three Treasures of the Programmer
. Featuring: Gvim, tmux running in GNOME terminal, and Chromium browser on Ubuntu 22.04. The minimized windows are for demonstration purposes, Cirism mandates that all windows shall be maximized at all times. Splits withing a single program are permitted however.
The exact format of table entries is fixed by the hardware.
Each page entry can be seen as a struct with many fields.
The page table is then an array of struct.
On this simplified example, the page table entries contain only two fields:
bits   function
-----  -----------------------------------------
20     physical address of the start of the page
1      present flag
so in this example the hardware designers could have chosen the size of the page table to b 21 instead of 32 as we've used so far.
All real page table entries have other fields, notably fields to set pages to read-only for Copy-on-write. This will be explained elsewhere.
It would be impractical to align things at 21 bits since memory is addressable by bytes and not bits. Therefore, even in only 21 bits are needed in this case, hardware designers would probably choose 32 to make access faster, and just reserve bits the remaining bits for later usage. The actual value on x86 is 32 bits.
Here is a screenshot from the Intel manual image "Formats of CR3 and Paging-Structure Entries with 32-Bit Paging" showing the structure of a page table in all its glory: Figure 1. "x86 page entry format".
Figure 1.
x86 page entry format
.
The fields are explained in the manual just after.
Aaron Swartz by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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.
Amniote by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Name origin: amnion, a pellicle that covers embryos of both eggs and also during pregnancy.
Includes:
Does not include amphibians. If you include them, you have the tetrapods.
gwern.net by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
One thing that annoys Ciro Santilli about that website are the footnote overload. Ciro likes linear things.
Richard Stallman by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
TODO find the best source for the amazing "I have done your mother" quote.
Video 1.
Richard Stallman saying "I've never installed gnu/linux"
. Source.

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