GDB reverse debugging by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The best open source implementation as of 2020 seems to be: Mozilla rr.
Pernosco by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Proprietary extension to Mozilla rr by rr lead coder Robert O'Callahan et. al, started in 2016 after he quit Mozilla.
Ciro Santilli is obsessed by those in order to learn any new concept, not just for bug reporting.
This includes to learn more theoretical subjects like physics and mathematics.
One of the most beautiful things is how they paywall even public domain works. E.g. here: www.nature.com/articles/119558a0 was published in 1927, and is therefore in the public domain as of 2023. But it is of course just paywalled as usual throughout 2023. There is zero incentive for them to open anything up.
Video 1.
What they don't tell you about academic publishing by Andy Stapleton (2021)
Source.
Video 2.
The publishing scandal happening right now by Andy Stapleton (2023)
. Source. TOOD get the name of the academic who quit.
Microsoft by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
And also their monopolistic practices: United States v. Microsoft Corp.
However, like all big tech companies with infinite money, they do end up doing some cool things in their research department, Microsoft Research, notably for Ciro Santilli being:
Microsoft Windows by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
A monopolistic operating system that only exists in the 2010's because of the IBM-linked historical lock-in and constant useless changes of the Microsoft Word document format to prevent cross operability.
It offers no technical advantages over free Linux distros in the late 2010's, and it is barely impossible to buy a non-Mac computer without paying for it, which should be illegal. European Union, time to use your regulatory powers.
The following anecdote illustrates Windows' pervasiveness. Ciro Santilli was once tutoring a high school student in Brazil, and decided to try and get her into programming. When the "Windows is not free" subject came up, the high school student was shocked: "I paid 100 dollars for this?". She never even knew it was there. To her, it was "just a computer".
Laws should really be passed forcing OEMs to allow you to not buy Microsoft Windows when buying a computer, European Union, why have you failed me in 2016??? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/ I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower Than Other Operating Systems. Here Is Why. by Marc Bevand (2013) has some interesting remarks:
There's also little incentive to create changes in the first place. On linux-kernel, if you improve the performance of directory traversal by a consistent 5%, you're praised and thanked. Here, if you do that and you're not on the object manager team, then even if you do get your code past the Ob owners and into the tree, your own management doesn't care. Yes, making a massive improvement will get you noticed by senior people and could be a boon for your career, but the improvement has to be very large to attract that kind of attention.
Video 1.
Bomb disposal robot by The IT Crowd
. Source.
Video 2.
Gabe Newell Blue Screen
. Source. During Game Developers Choice Awards acceptance presentation. TODO year.
Bill Gates by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The enemy?
It does not matter how many trillions you donate to charity, Bill. If you want to prove your point, make MS Word free and open source and port it to Linux. And then Window implements POSIX-compatible APIs and then deprecate non-POSIX APIs.
Video 1.
Bill Gates Jumps Over Chair
. Source.
quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/26/lazy-job/ (archive):
I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

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