Silk Road (film) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-09-09
We need a mini-series, this just doesn't have enough time. Notably, too much focus on dob, and not enough on the development of Silk Road iteslf. Though it is cool to see what his motivations might have been like. One wonders how realistic the character is. Though him meeting Ross Ulbricht personally sounds exceptionally unlikely.
youtu.be/HBTYVVUBAGs?t=178 claims to contain a photo of him without source. He has no easy to find online profiles.
Variety Jones: IRL, is there anyone with a clue at all? A girlfriend, boyfriend, buddy you talk to, etc?
myself: Unfortunately yes, there are two but they think I sold the site and got out, and they're quite convinced of it.
His email was published: baronsyntax@gmail.com. They actaully talked on Google Chat. OMG.
Evil. Just use Python instead for software, and a well known data file format for data, please.
EPUB by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is a good thing. It basically contains an entire website, with HTML and assets inside a single ZIP, and a little bit of metadata.
It is incomprehensible why browsers don't just implement it as they already have all the web part, and also ZIP stuff:
The situation is so sad. Ubuntu 21.04 doesn't come with a reader installed by default:
AI game by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Our Final Invention - Artificial General Intelligence by Sciencephile the AI (2023)
. Source. AGI via simulation section.
Ciro Santilli defines an "AI game" as:
a game that is used to train AI, in particular one that was designed with this use case in mind, and usually with the intent of achieving AGI, i.e. the game has to somehow represent a digital world with enough analogy to the real world so that the AGI algorithms developed there could also work on the real world
Most games played by AI historically so far as of 2020 have been AI for games designed for humans: Human game used for AI training.
Ciro Santilli took a stab at an AI game: Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, but he didn't sink too much/enough into that project.
A closely related and often overlapping category of simulations are artificial life simulations.
pdftk by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Extract certain pages of a PDF:
pdftk input.pdf cat 2-4 output out1.pdf
Calibre (software) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Sometimes Ciro Santilli says half jokingly that user interface does not matter.
This software circa 2010-2020 makes that joke not be funny.
How can a UI feel so clunky!
The most aggravating thing is that it is not immediately obvious why it feels so bad.
Okular by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is generally good, especially compared to how crappy Evince, the default Ubuntu one, has been around 2014-2020.

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