20% time rule by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The Google Story suggests that this practice existed in academia, where it was brought from. But I can't find external references to it easily:
At Google, the preference is for working in small teams of three, with individual employees expected to allot 20 percent of their time to exploring whatever ideas interest them most. The notion of "20 percent time" is borrowed from the academic world, where professors are given one day a week to pursue private interests.
SmartNIC by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A network interface controller that does more than just the base OSI model protocols, notably in a programmable way.
Video 1.
Hyperscalers Lead The Way To The Future With SmartNICs by The Next Platform (2019)
Source.
Associated article: www.nextplatform.com/2019/10/31/hypercalers-lead-the-way-to-the-future-with-smartnics/ mentions that:
Google is widely believed to be working on its own design.
Ciro Santilli participated in a double degree program, so he obtained have engineering degrees in both:
Despite studying in great institutions with great teachers, Ciro feels that:
This motivated Ciro to work on OurBigBook.com.
Quantum algorithm by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is the true key question: what are the most important algorithms that would be accelerated by quantum computing?
Some candidates:
Do you have proper optimization or quantum chemistry algorithms that will make trillions?
Maybe there is some room for doubt because some applications might be way better in some implementations, but we should at least have a good general idea.
However, clear information on this really hard to come by, not sure why.
Cycler Turing machine by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
These are very simple, they just check for exact state repetitions, which obviously imply that they will run forever.
Unfortunately, cyclers may need to run through an initial setup phase before reaching the initial cycle point, which is not very elegant.
Also, we have no way of knowing the initial setup length of the actual cycle length, so we just need an arbitrary cutoff value.
And unfortunately, this can lead to misses, e.g. Skelet machine #1, a 5 state machine, has a (translated) cycle that starts at around 50-200M steps, and takes 8 trillion steps to repeat.
chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/7696/how-do-i-distinguish-between-internal-energy-and-enthalpy/7700#7700 has a good insight:
To summarize, internal energy and enthalpy are used to estimate the thermodynamic potential of the system. There are other such estimates, like the Gibbs free energy G. Which one you choose is determined by the conditions and how easy it is to determine pressure and volume changes.
Big O notation by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Module bound above, possibly multiplied by a constant:
is defined as:
E.g.:
  • . For , is enough. Otherwise, any will do, the bottom line will always catch up to the top one eventually.
The Sims by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A young Ciro Santilli really liked this game, the way it makes you feel.

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