This means that e.g. if you do an UPDATE query on multiple rows, and power goes out half way, either all update, or none update.
This is different from isolation, which considers instead what can or cannot happen when multiple queries are running in parallel.
Google Street View by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Street View's go into the past mode is the dream of every archaeologist. Ciro can only dream of a magic street view that allows going back to earlier centuries and beyond... isn't it amazing to think that people in the future will have that ability to time travel back to around the year 2006? Ciro wonders how long Google will be able to keep storing data like that.
Thanks, CIA.
Vim by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Before we get a decent open source integrated development environment, what else can you do?
But also perfect for small one-off files when you don't have the patience to setup said IDE.
vim's defaults are atrocious for the 21st century! Vundle is reasonable as an ad-hoc package manager, but it can't set fixed versions of packages:
ProtonMail by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
One of the very few encrypted emails... beauty. And they also have an encrypted password manager!!! Using this is a must as of 2023 basically. The only missing thing now is to find a fully open source alternative!!!
Sure, search capabilities have to be somewhat limited: proton.me/blog/engineering-message-content-search
techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-address-of-french-activist-after-order-by-swiss-authorities/ you've fucking got to use Tor Browser with it if you want your IP to remain hidden, learn that...
Are daily notifications without a recovery email possible? www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/yjau8f/allow_daily_email_notifications_without_having_a/ OK, they do work actually.
The lack of Gmail dot trick is tragic however, and you have to pay for multiple aliases. But you can however create separate inboxes with the same cell phone verification however.
FFmpeg by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
FFmpeg is the assembler of audio and video.
As a result, Ciro Santilli who likes "lower level stuff", has had many many hours if image manipulation fun with this software, see e.g.:
As older Ciro grows, the more he notices that FFmpeg can do basically any lower level audio video task. It is just an amazing piece of software, the immediate go-to for any low level operation.
FFmpeg was created by Fabrice Bellard, which Ciro deeply respects.
Resize a video: superuser.com/questions/624563/how-to-resize-a-video-to-make-it-smaller-with-ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i input.avi -filter:v scale=720:-1 -c:a copy output.mkv
Unlike every other convention under the sun, the height in scale is the first number.
Interestingly, the very first programming language with an actual implementation was interpreted: Short Code in 1950.
This is not surprising, as interpreters are easier to write than compilers.
And just like modern scripting languages, it reduced execution speed by about 50x.
TypeScript by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
TypeScript is good. It does find errors in your JavaScript. But it is a form of "turd polishing". But Ciro Santilli would rather have a polished turd than a non-polished one.
Part of the reason TypeScript became popular is due to the universality of asset bundlers. Once you are already using an asset bundler, changing the .js extension into .ts to get a less shitty experience is an easy choice.
The other big reason is that JavaScript is so lose with type conversions, notably undefined happily converting to strings without problems, and any missing properties of Object happily being undefined. We should actually use ES6 Map everywhere instead of using Objects as maps.
Since TypeScript is not the default form of the language however, it inevitably happens that you need to add external types for a gazillion projects that are using raw JavaScript, and sometimes fight a lot to get things to work. And so we have: github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped. Not sure if this is beautiful, or frightening.
But in the end, as with other type of static linters, TypeScript generally transforms a few hard to debug runtime issues, into a bunch of stupid to solve compile time issues, which is generally a good thing.
The fact that this it parses comments JSDoc comments in JavaScript files is quite amazing.
Examples under typescript. Run each one of them with:
npx tsc example.ts
node example.js
Helper:
tsr() (
  # ts Run
  f="$1"
  npx tsc "$f"
  node "${f%.*}.js"
)
tsr example.ts
Some major annoyances of TypeScript:

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