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Placozoan by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Now that's some basal shit! It's basically a fucking blob!!! Except that it is flat. No nervous system. Not even tissues. It is basically a multicellular
Figure 1. Source.
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Paywall by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Closed access academic journal by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Closed access academic journals are evil by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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You are nothing but useless leeches in the Internet age.
You must go bankrupt all of you, ASAP.
Fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer, and fuck all the like.
Research paid with taxpayer money must be made available for free.
Researchers and reviewers all work for peanuts, while academic publishers get money for doing the work that an algorithm could do. OurBigBook.com.
When Ciro learned URLs such as www.nature.com/articles/181662a0 log you in automatically by IP, his mind blew! The level of institutionalization of this theft is off the charts! The institutionalization of theft is also clear from article prices, e.g. 32 dollars for a 5 page article.
Key physics papers from the 50's are still copyright encumbered as of 2020, see e.g. Lamb-Retherford experiment. Authors and reviewers got nothing for it. Something is wrong.
Infinite list of other people:
  • blog.machinezoo.com/public-domain-theft by Robert Važan:
    Scientific journals are perhaps one of the most damaging IP rackets. Scientists are funded by governments to do research and publish papers. Reviews of these papers are done by other publicly funded scientists. Even paper selection and formatting for publication is done by scientists. So what do journals actually do? Nearly nothing.
Video 1.
Academic Publishing by Dr. Glaucomflecken (2022)
Source.
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CIA 2010 covert communication websites / iranfootballsource.com by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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CIA 2010 covert communication websites / Backlinks by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-08-08
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Announcements and updates by self:
Pings by self:
Reactions by others:
Notable reactions to the websites themselves:
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webpack by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Webpack is like a magic hydra that can eat any type of file and bundle it into a single output: .js, .ts, .ccs, .scss, .jsx, .tsx, require, import, import css from .js, it doesn't matter at all, it just digests all into the same dump.
When it works, you are just left in awe and with a single Js file. When it doesn't, you're fucked and have to debug for several hours.
Demos under: webpack/. To run all of them by default:
cd webpack/min
npm install
npm run build
xdg-open index.html
To easily make changes and reload the .js output live let this run on a terminal:
npx webpack watch
Examples:
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The best articles by Ciro Santilli by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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These are the best articles ever authored by Ciro Santilli, most of them in the format of Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro posts update about new articles on his Twitter accounts.
A chronological list of all articles is also kept at: Section "Updates".
Some random generally less technical in-tree essays will be present at: Section "Essays by Ciro Santilli".
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DPhil by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Short for Doctor of Philosophy, it's how some weird places like the University of Oxford say PhD. In Oxford they also analogously say MPHil.
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All but dissertation by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Reviews of Modern Physics by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Institute of Physics by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Royal Society by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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They do two things:
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Arthropod by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Drosophila melanogaster by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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NeuroMechFly by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Just imagine this together with a Drosophila connectome on a single brain-in-the-loop simulation.
Figure 1. Source.
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German learned society by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Prussian Academy of Sciences by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Exam by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Exams as a prerequisite for a degree are useless. Exams as part of a degree must be abolished. And degrees must be abolished. Ultimately the only metrics that really matter are money and fame. See also: motivation.
The only thing exams should matter for is as a screening tool to select people with specific abilities that you care about as an employer or principal investigator. If:
  • you have no idea about what the content of specific exams are (and you don't because they are all ad-hoc university secrets)
  • or don't have a way to machine learn what grades correlate with your desired performance (you don't because where's the data?)
then exams are useless for your purposes. then might as well just go by interviews (basically what all employers do already, though not PIs). Degrees are too course grained to mean anything to anybody. Employers and PIs likely only care about very few specific subjects.
Once the question of an exam has been formulated, the usefulness of the problem is already been completely destroyed, because formulating the problem that matters is the most important part of things. And any problem with an answer, is useless to put effort into: give answers.
Furthermore, preventing people from searching for answers while answering an exam, AKA preventing "cheating", also makes absolutely no sense. In the real world, we want people to find answers as quickly as possible! We should be teaching people how to "cheat"! What we should teach them instead is what a fucking license is, and what you have to do to comply with it.
And if you pass the exam, you pass the course, without any further time requirements.
And those exams must be applied by professional test application companies to ensure no cheating and to factor out the anti-cheat work, while still making the tests available to people anywhere.
A quote from Richard Feynman present in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!:
You cannot get educated by this self-propagating system in which people study to pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.
You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting.
The only metric that matters is "to feel that you've satisfied youre curiosity". When one studies for that, it can take a lot more time to actually learn everything, because it is sometimes not as clear when you should stop. But it is the only way to go deeper.
A person's understanding is the most illiquid asset that exists, to judge that based only on standardized exams, is a certain way to fail to identify top talent.
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Evil by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Things that are not nice such as:
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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!
Video 1.
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source.
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
    Video 2.
    OurBigBook Web topics demo
    . Source.
  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
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