Lost Horse LLC by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/mackenzie-scott-how-the-former-mrs-bezos-became-a-philanthropist-like-no-other-1.4850049 MacKenzie Scott: How the former Mrs Bezos became a philanthropist like no other (2020) has some good mentions:
But as Scott's fame for giving away money has grown, so too has the deluge of appeals for gifts from strangers and old friends alike. That clamour may have driven Scott's already discreet operation further underground, with recent philanthropic announcements akin to sudden lightning bolts for unsuspecting recipients.
This channel contains several 2D continuous simulations and explains AI techniques used.
The engine appears to be open source: github.com/Primer-Learning/PrimerTools (previously at: github.com/Helpsypoo/primer). Models are closed source however.
They have several interesting multiagent game ideas.
Claims Unity-based, so has the downside of relying on a non-FOSS engine.
Ciro became mildly jealous of this channel when he found out about it, because at 800k subscribers at the time, the creator is likely able to make a living off of it, something which Ciro thought impossible.
As of 2022 he was at 1.6M followers with only 17 videos! Of course, much of those videos is about the software and they require infinite development hours to video time ratios.
Much of this success hinges a large part on the amazing 3D game presentation.
Well done!
Created by Justin Helps. Awesome name.
To make things better, the generically named channel is also the title of one of the best films of al time: Primer (2004).
Video 1.
Simulating Foraging Decisions by Primer (2020)
Source.
Shel Kaphan by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
First Amazon hire, wrote and led the team that wrote v1.
He looks like an older and more experienced dude compared to Bezos at the time.
Bibliography:
. www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/2/ also mentions that unlike California, there's no sales tax in the state of Washington, which is important for selling books.
Video 1.
Shel Kaphan interview by Internet History Podcast (2015)
Source.
Video 2.
Amazon.com Continues to Grow by NBC 15 (2014)
Source. Features short excerpt of filmed interview with Shel.
Figure 1. . Source. TODO year. Presumably more or less close to publishing date of source at 2020.
Amazon is apparently notorious for having bought off many competitors, many of them just to kill off the competition and clear the way, not to actually reuse them.
youtu.be/tfAhTtBlb2Q?t=849 from Video "Jeff Bezos Revealed by Bloomberg (2015)" clearly shows Tim O'Reilly saying that very clearly about Bezos.
I do know of a number of cases in which he [Bezos] has acquired companies in order to take out competitors, potential future competitors. Rather than because he actually wants that business to continue.
Perhaps O'Reilly who is the bookselling business is not the greatest fan of Jeff. But still. My God.
www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf Amazon's Antitrust Paradox by Lina M . Khan from The Yale Law Journal raises this incredible issue.
They appear to piece together data from various sources. This is the most complete historical domain -> IP database we have so far. They don't have hugely more data than viewdns.info, but many times do offer something new. It feels like the key difference is that their data goes further back in the critical time period a bit.
TODO do they have historical reverse IP? The fact that they don't seem to have it suggests that they are just making historical reverse IP requests to a third party via some API?
E.g. searching thefilmcentre.com under historical data at securitytrails.com/domain/thefilmcentre.com/history/al gives the correct IP 62.22.60.55.
But searching the IP 62.22.60.55 is empty and there's no historical data option?
Account creation blacklists common email providers such as gmail to force users to use a "corporate" email address. But using random domains like ciro@cirosantilli.com works fine.
Their data seems to date back to 2008 for our searches.
Amazon custom silicon by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Like Google custom silicon, Amazon server operations are so large that with the slowdown of Moore's law, it started being worth it for them to develop custom in-house silicon to serve as a competitive advantage, not to be sold for external companies. Can you imagine the scale required to justify silicon development investment that is not sold externally!
There are two types of JavaScript found so far. The ones with SHA and the ones without. There are only 2 examples of JS with SHA:Both files start with precisely the same string:
var ms="\u062F\u0631\u064A\u0627\u0641\u062A\u06CC",lc="\u062A\u0647\u064A\u0647 \u0645\u062A\u0646",mn="\u0628\u0631\u062F\u0627\u0632\u0634 \u062F\u0631 \u062C\u0631\u064A\u0627\u0646 \u0627\u0633\u062A...\u0644\u0637\u0641\u0627 \u0635\u0628\u0631 \u0643\u0646\u064A\u062F",lt="\u062A\u0647\u064A\u0647 \u0645\u062A\u0646",ne="\u067E\u0627\u0633\u062E",kf="\u062E\u0631\u0648\u062C",mb="\u062D\u0630\u0641",mv="\u062F\u0631\u064A\u0627\u0641\u062A\u06CC",nt="\u0627\u0631\u0633\u0627\u0644",ig="\u062B\u0628\u062A \u063A\u0644\u0637. \u062C\u0647\u062A \u062A\u062C\u062F\u064A\u062F \u062B\u0628\u062A \u0635\u0641\u062D\u0647 \u0631\u0627 \u0628\u0627\u0632\u0622\u0648\u0631\u06CC \u06A9\u0646\u064A\u062F",hs="\u063A\u064A\u0631 \u0642\u0627\u0628\u0644 \u0627\u062C\u0631\u0627. \u062E\u0637\u0627 \u062F\u0631 \u0627\u062A\u0651\u0635\u0627\u0644",ji="\u063A\u064A\u0631 \u0642\u0627\u0628\u0644 \u0627\u062C\u0631\u0627. \u062E\u0637\u0627 \u062F\u0631 \u0627\u062A\u0651\u0635\u0627\u0644",ie="\u063A\u064A\u0631 \u0642\u0627\u0628\u0644 \u0627\u062C\u0631\u0627. \u062E\u0637\u0627 \u062F\u0631 \u0627\u062A\u0651\u0635\u0627\u0644",gc="\u0633\u0648\u0627\u0631 \u06A9\u0631\u062F\u0646 \u062A\u06A9\u0645\u064A\u0644 \u0634\u062F",gz="\u0645\u0637\u0645\u0626\u0646\u064A\u062F \u06A9\u0647 \u0645\u064A\u062E\u0648\u0627\u0647\u064A\u062F \u067E\u064A\u0627\u0645 \u0631\u0627 \u062D\u0630\u0641 \u06A9\u0646\u064A\u062F\u061F"
Good fingerprint present in all of them:
throw new Error("B64 D.1");};if(at[1]==-1){throw new Error("B64 D.2");};if(at[2]==-1){if(f<ay.length){throw new Error("B64 D.3");};dg=2;}else if(at[3]==-1){if(f<ay.length){throw new Error("B64 D.4")
Annapurna Labs by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Page contains a good summary of their hardware to date. They seem to still be the centerpiece of silicon development. There are still however people outside of Israel doing it, e.g.: www.linkedin.com/in/laurasharpless/ says as of 2021:
My team develops software for our next-generation Machine Learning accelerators: HAL, firmware, and SoC models.
2021: networking chip reports emerge: www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2021/3/30/22358633/amazon-reportedly-custom-network-switch-silicon-aws, presumably contesting with the likes of Cisco?
Google by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
One of the least evil of the big tech companies of the early 21st century, partly because Sergey Brin's parents fled from the Soviet Union and so he is anti censorship, although they have been tempted by it.
Google only succeeds at highly algorithmic tasks or at giving infinite storage to users to then mine their data.
It is incapable however of adding any obvious useful end user features to most of its products, most of which get terminated and cannot be relied on:
This also seems to extend to business-to-business: twitter.com/MohapatraHemant/status/1343969802080030720 ex-Googler tells how they lost the cloud to Amazon.
More mentions of that:
Too many genius engineers. They need some dumber people like Ciro Santilli who need to write documentation to learn stuff.
Ciro Santilli actually attempted two interviews to work at Google in the early 2010's but very quickly failed both on the first phase, because you have to be a fast well trained coding machine to pass that interview.
Ciro later felt better about himself by fantasizing how he would actually do more important things outside of Google and that they would beg to buy him instead.
He was also happy that he wouldn't have to use Google crazy internal tools: someone once said that Google's tools make easy tasks middle hard, and they also make impossible tasks middle hard. TODO 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