ScopeFun by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
899 USD as of 2022, takes a year to ship as they gather up a lot of orders before producing.
Sounds so cool, especially the multi functionality. Shame so expensive.
UNION (SQL) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Basic example tested on SQLite 3.40.1, Ubuntu 23.04:
sqlite3 :memory: 'select 1 union select 2'
output:
1
2
Two columns two rows:
sqlite3 :memory: <<EOF
select * from (values (1, 2), (2, 3))
union
select * from (values (2, 3), (3, 4))
EOF
output:
1|2
2|3
3|4
Note how duplicates are removed, to keep them we UNION ALL instead:
sqlite3 :memory: <<EOF
select * from (values (1, 2), (2, 3))
union all
select * from (values (2, 3), (3, 4))
EOF
output:
1|2
2|3
2|3
3|4
Photoelectric effect by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
No matter how hight the wave intensity, if it the frequency is small, no photons are removed from the material.
This is different from classic waves where energy is proportional to intensity, and coherent with the existence of photons and the Planck-Einstein relation.
Video 1.
Photoelectric effect by UCSB Physics Lecture Demonstrations (2021)
Source.
IDEs are absolutely essential for developing complex software.
The funny thing is that you don't notice this until someone shows it to you. But once you see it, there is not turning back, just like Steve Jobs customers don't know what they want quote.
Unfortunately, after the Fall of Eclipse (archive), the IDE landscape in 2019 is horrible and split between:
  • highly buggy but still feature rich Eclipse
  • many may many other feature lacking options using possibly more trendy and forward lasting implementations like Electron
  • awesome cross-platform proprietary JetBrains IDEs
  • the God-like Windows-only proprietary language-lacking Visual Studio
Programmers of the world: unite! Focus on one IDE, and make it work for all languages and all build systems. Give it all the features that Eclipse has, but none of the bugginess. Work with top project to make sure the IDE works for all top projects.
Projects of the world: support one IDE, with in-tree configuration. Complex integration is often required between the IDE and the build system, and successful projects must to that once for all developers. Either do this, or watch you complex project wither away.
Build tool maintainers: make it possible for IDEs to support your tool! E.g., implement JSON Compilation Database output so that IDEs can read the exact compiler commands from that, in order to automatically determine how files should be parsed! Or better, just use libllvm in your IDE itself as the main parser.
Ciro is evaluating some IDEs at: github.com/cirosantilli/ide-test-projects
Eclipse (IDE) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Once upon a time (early 2010's), Eclipse dominated the IDE landscape and all was good. NetBeans was around too. And Java was still unmarred by Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc..
But then something happened.
For some reason, Eclipse started to decay.
And the project that had once been a vibrant community of awesomeness, started to become... a zombie of its former self.
Buggyness started increasing. And not even hard to fix bugs. One liners that affect every user immediately after startup.
Sometimes, to Eclipse's defense they weren't "bugs". Just features that it became evident with time every programmer expected from a modern IDE.
But somehow the Eclipse community had a deep problem. A cancer. It had completely lost touch with user experience.
Perhaps is was due to the increasing interest of the several corporations that had adopted Eclipse as the base IDE for the proprietary solutions?
Perhaps.
Many users stuck to the IDE.
Some heroic efforts were made as plugins that drastically improved certain defects. The Darkest Dark plugin comes to mind.
But all those efforts required configuration. A setup time that most users simply don't have. The core devteam had become dumb and dead, unable to incorporate such changes.
This greatly opened up the space for other competing IDEs to come along. The "semi feature complete but at least easy to use and not so buggy" Visual Studio Code and the proprietary JetBrains IDEs being some of the most notable ones.
Using Eclipse as of the early 2020's is such a mixed experience. If you spend enough time to configure out the key buggyness, there are moments where you can feel "OMG, this feature is amazing".
But the effort is just too great, and soon another bug or obvious missing feature hits you and brings you back to reality.
Every young person uses VS Code now. Eclipse is dead, and there is no way back, usage will just continue dropping.
RIP, Eclipse. It wasn't meant to be.
Figure 1.
Eclipse. usage from 2012 to 2016 according to a JRebel survey
. Source.
Discord (software) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli's discord ID: cirosantilli#8921. See also: how to contact Ciro Santilli.
You gotta be born after the year 2000 to understand it.
This is becoming more and more popular as a group chat with channels and threads possibility as of 2020.
Very similar to Slack.
Not possible to anonymously join just one server without creating a new account? What's the point of servers then! www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6gmjl7/changing_nick_before_joining_a_new_server/ Oh, also nicks don't hide your username from the server in any way, you can get the original username by just clicking on the person's username.
No proper threaded discussion without creating new channels? As of 2022 there is kind of a way, but it was a bit obtuse.
As of 2022 they also have a school hub: support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-Discord-Student-Hubs-FAQ which auto creates groups by university email access. Good idea, and shows popularity amongst that user group.

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