Google custom silicon by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Google has put considerable effort into custom hardware to greatly optimize its stack, in a way that is quite notable compared to other tech companies.
Largey Brage by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The outcome of Larry Page and Sergey Brin performing a Dragon Ball fusion dance.
Both of them attended Montessori education at some point. Interesting! Mentioned in a talk by Sergey and highlighted at The Google Story.
But in 2023 they were somewhat pulled back in by the AI race and competition with ChatGPT.[ref]
As The Google Story puts it about Largey:
Scholarship was not just emphasized in their homes; it was treasured.
Ciro Santilli likes that.
Carl Victor Page by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Larry Page's father.
Carl is mentioned in The Google Story Chapter 2 "When Larry Met Sergey".
He divorced from Larry's mother Gloria in 1980 or 1981, "when he [Page] was eight years old" according to The Google Story. He then moved on to Joyce Wildenthal, another MSU professor. Larry had a good relation with both Gloria and Joyce:
Larry came to feel that he was showered with love and wisdom from two mothers: his real mom, and Joyce Wildenthal, a Michigan State professor who had a long-term relationship with his dad.
His obituary on the website of the Michigan State University, where he taught most of his life: www.cse.msu.edu/Alumni_Friends/Alumni/PageMemorial.php:
Page served as CSE’s [MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering] first graduate director and had a critical role in promoting the department’s research mission. In 1967, when he joined MSU, the computer science program consisted of only undergraduate courses. Just three years later, the department offered eighteen graduate courses in computer science.
[...]
Page taught courses in Automata and Formal language theory and Artificial intelligence. He was a beloved teacher and mentor to innumerable students until his death in 1996.
Figure 1.
Carl Victor Page's obituary by Matt Collar
. Source.
Found by Googling into his Wikidata entry: www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15791098 which cites this random German Wikipedia page: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Victor_Page which cites the obituary from this WordPress blog: tao221.wordpress.com/ TODO find the page of the blog that uses that image.
Figure 2. . Source.
Another useful hit from tao221.wordpress.com found by... Googling! Contains the best photo of Carl we've found so far. The screenshot seems to be a Ctrl + P of some website, if only the author knew about Wayback Machine! The links on that screenshot would be of interest. The screenshot also mentions other family members:
Anne Wojcicki by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
She's truly passionate about health research and keeping healthy, almost obsessed by it. Also she's strong willed, and energetic. Good traits for founding 23andMe.
As www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/style/anne-wojcicki-23andme-genetics.html puts it well:
The Wojcickis grew into Silicon Valley royalty. It’s the sort of family, Anne jokes, where “you’re only a viable fetus once you have your Ph.D.
Video 1.
Anne Wojcicki interview by Talks at Google (2018)
Source. She's athletic! As mentioned at: www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-rosenberg-affair. And despite the name, and unlike Sergey, she's completely american as seen from her perfect accent!
Early Google employee by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
ChatGPT produces:
  • Heather Cairns (Employee #4) - Joined in 1998. She handled HR and was one of the earliest administrative hires.
  • Harry Cheung (Employee #5) - Joined in 1999. An early engineer.
  • Gerald Aigner (Employee #6) - Hired in 1999. Worked as a software engineer.
  • Susan Wojcicki (Employee #16) - Joined in 1999. She rented her garage to Larry and Sergey in 1998 and later became an integral part of Google's business and advertising teams.
  • Marissa Mayer (Employee #20) - Hired in 1999. Played a major role in Google Search and design.
Omid Kordestani - Joined in 1999 as Google’s first business hire, focusing on sales and revenue generation.
Sallie (FutureAI) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Not having a manipulator claw is a major issue with this one.
But they also have a co-simulation focus, which is a bit of a win.
Amazon Prime Video by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
As of 2021, Ciro Santilli feels strongly that Amazon originals are so much sillier compared to Netflix ones in average.
Of course, everything pales in comparison to The Criterion Collection.

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