CommonMark is a good project. But its initial release method was not very nice, they first developed everything behind closed doors with the big adopters like GitHub and Stack Overflow, and only later released the thing read, thus wasting the time of people who were working on alternative in the meanwhile, e.g. github.com/karlcow/markdown-testsuite which Ciro contributed to: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.
Ciro Santilli was contributing to this, when CommonMark left private mode and killed it, thus wasting many hours of Ciro's time.
See also: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.
Yet another awk-like domain-specific language to do things from the CLI in a ridiculously short humber of character? Oh yes.
Build failed with
undefined reference to pcre_config on Ubuntu 23.04: github.com/DavyLandman/csvtools/issues/18Unfortunately it is lacking some basic options, like optional header + selecting column by index on
csvgrep (though csvcut has it). The project seems kind of dead.Also unclear if it allows to filter + print only selected columns.
Lots of similar ideologies to Ciro Santilli, love it:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/reaching-climbing/: don't be a pussyOne is also reminded of Gwern Branwen. Sandy is also into self-improvement stuff, so even more like Gwern. This is a point Ciro diverges on. Ciro works actively on self-worsening.
Last Friday was my final day at work. According to my facebook profile, I am now "happily retired." As of today, I don't plan to do another day of "traditional work" in my life. That's not to say that I'll be sitting idle playing tiddly winks. I want to build things, to dedicate my life to independent study, and to get really, really good with building communities. I don't have time for any of this "work" stuff that somehow pervades our entire culture, choking our inspiration and sapping our energy away from the things we'd rather be doing.
- he thinks university is useless:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/where-uni-fails/ Where University Fails (2018), mostly talking about backward design
- sandymaguire.me/blog/gatekept/ rejected from Imperial College PhD program due to grade being slightly too low for their stupid requirements, even though he had a referral already, and an amazing CV
- he likes jazz: sandymaguire.me/blog/too-smart/
Other interesting points:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/sandy-runback/ he changed his own name to Sandy because he didn't like it, he was born Alexander
- algebradriven.design/ closed source books though, ouch. At least they seem to have been made with leanpub though, could be worse.
Accounts:He posts insanely much on these websites. It's a bit like Ciro Santilli on Stack Overflow.
- news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern
- www.lesswrong.com/users/gwern LessWrong
- twitter.com/gwern locked 2021: www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kp2fek/does_anybody_know_what_happened_to_gwern/
- www.reddit.com/user/gwern/
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gwern on Wikipedia. Self summary: gwern.net/wikipedia-resume. Also he is a critic of deletionism on Wikipedia like Ciro Santilli
Ciro Santilli envies this guy a bit. He dumps his brain more or less full time on his highly customized static website partly due to early Bitcoin investments gwern.net/me says:
Also unsurprisingly he likes Haskell:
Ciro Santilli considers Gwern Ciro Santilli's e-soulmates due to his interest in "dark web things" like Bitcoin and Silk Road, his immense writing output in encyclopedic book-sized articles on a static website, and his desire to live frugally and just research and write all day. Ah, if only Ciro had some old coins!!!
This is likely a pseudonym, his real name not being publicly unknown, e.g. at news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5659278:
Why do you choose relative anonymity?For the reasons I've said in the past. To which I can add personal safety: my Silk Road page is a bit questionable legally, and we all know that there are ways to exploit knowledge of one's True Name and address (even if, as far as I know, I have no enemies willing to resort to, say, 'swatting' me) - one group of stalkers called up a college they thought I worked at to see if they could get me fired or otherwise ruin my day.
Filter graphs are a thing of great beauty. What an amazingly obscure domain-specific language, but which can produce striking results with very little!!!
A quick example from stackoverflow.com/questions/59551013/how-to-generate-stereo-sine-wave-using-ffmpeg-with-different-frequencies-for-eac/77730492#77730492 illustrates some of the fundamentals:
ffplay -autoexit -nodisp -f lavfi -i '
sine=frequency=500[a];
sine=frequency=1000[b];
[a][b]amerge, atrim=end=2
' +--------+
[sine=frequency=500]--->[a]-->| |
| amerge |-->[atrim]-->[output]
[sine=frequency=1000]-->[b]-->| |
+--------+So we see the following syntax patterns:
sine,amergeandatrimare filterssine=frequency=500: the first=says "araguments follow";: separates statements[a],[b]: sets the name of an edge,: creates unnamed edge between filters that have one input and one output
A list of all filters can be obtained ith:and parameters for a single filter can be obtained with:Related question: stackoverflow.com/questions/69251087/in-ffmpeg-command-line-how-to-show-all-filter-settings-and-their-parameters-bef
ffmpeg -filtersffmpeg --help filter=sineTODO dump graph to ASCII art? trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/FilteringGuide#Visualizingfilters mentions a
-dumpgraph option, but haven't managed to use it yet.Bibliography:
- ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html official documentation
- trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/FilteringGuide some handy tips from the FFMpeg Wiki
It doesn't need to be a bipedal robot. We can let Boston Dynamics worry about that walking balance crap.
It could very well instead be on wheels like arm on tracks.
Or something more like a factory with arms on rails as per:
- Transcendence (2014)
- youtu.be/MtVvzJIhTmc?t=112 from Video "Rotrics DexArm is available NOW! by Rotrics (2020)" where they have a sliding rail
Algovivo demo
. github.com/juniorrojas/algovivo: A JavaScript + WebAssembly implementation of an energy-based formulation for soft-bodied virtual creatures.What makes Ciro especially mad when programming is not the hard things.
Especially when you are already a few levels of "simple problems" down from your original goal, and another one of them shows up.
This is basically the cause of Hofstadter's law.
But of course, it is because it is hard that it feels amazing when you achieve your goal.
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!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- 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-calculusArticles 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/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - 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.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
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. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
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