A compiled executable under
/usr/bin/csvtool, has an Ubuntu 23.04 package: manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lunar/en/man1/csvtool.1.htmlThere seems to be no sane filtering mechanism however: stackoverflow.com/questions/46540752/using-csvtool-call-to-filter-csv-in-bash
Some examples by Ciro Santilli follow.
Of the tutorial-subjectivity type:
- This edit perfectly summarizes how Ciro feels about Wikipedia (no particular hate towards that user, he was a teacher at the prestigious Pierre and Marie Curie University and actually as a wiki page about him):which removed the only diagram that was actually understandable to non-Mathematicians, which Ciro Santilli had created, and received many upvotes at: math.stackexchange.com/questions/776039/intuition-behind-normal-subgroups/3732426#3732426. The removal does not generate any notifications to you unless you follow the page which would lead to infinite noise, and is extremely difficult to find out how to contact the other person. The removal justification is even somewhat ad hominem: how does he know Ciro Santilli is also not a professional Mathematician? :-) Maybe it is obvious because Ciro explains in a way that is understandable. Also removal makes no effort to contact original author. Of course, this is caused by the fact that there must also have been a bunch of useless edits not done by Ciro, and there is no reputation system to see if you should ignore a person or not immediately, so removal author has no patience anymore. This is what makes it impossible to contribute to Wikipedia: your stuff gets deleted at any time, and you don't know how to appeal it. Ciro is going to regret having written this rant after Daniel replies and shows the diagram is crap. But that would be better than not getting a reply and not learning that the diagram is crap.
rm a cryptic diagram (not understandable by a professional mathematician, without further explanations
- en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Finite_field&type=revision&diff=1044934168&oldid=1044905041 on finite fields with edit comment "Obviously: X ≡ α". Discussion at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Finite_field#Concrete_simple_worked_out_example Some people simply don't know how to explain things to beginners, or don't think Wikipedia is where it should be done. One simply can't waste time fighting off those people, writing good tutorials is hard enough in itself without that fight.
- en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete_Fourier_transform&diff=1193622235&oldid=1193529573 by user Bob K. removed Ciro Santilli's awesome simple image of the Discrete Fourier transform as seen at en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete_Fourier_transform&oldid=1176616763:with message:
Hello. I am a retired electrical engineer, living near Washington,DC. Most of my contributions are in the area of DSP, where I have about 40 years of experience in applications on many different processors and architectures.
Thank you so much!!remove non-helpful image
Maybe it is a common thread that these old "experts" keep removing anything that is actually intelligible by beginners? Section "There is value in tutorials written by beginners"Also ranted at: x.com/cirosantilli/status/1808862417566290252Figure 1. Source at: numpy/fft_plot.py. - when Ciro Santilli created Scott Hassan's page, he originally included mentions of his saucy divorce: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scott_Hassan&oldid=1091706391 These were reverted by Scott's puppets three times, and Ciro and two other editors fought back. Finally, Ciro understood that Hassan's puppets were likely right about the removal because you can't talk about private matters of someone who is low profile:even if it is published in well known and reliable publications like the bloody New York Times. In this case, it is clear that most people wanted to see this information summarized on Wikipedia since others fought back Hassan's puppet. This is therefore a failure of Wikipedia to show what the people actually want to read about.This case is similar to the PsiQuantum one. Something is extremely well known in an important niche, and many people want to read about it. But because the average person does not know about this important subject, and you are limited about what you can write about it or not, thus hurting the people who want to know about it.
Notability constraints, which are are way too strict:There are even a Wikis that were created to remove notability constraints: Wiki without notability requirements.
- even information about important companies can be disputed. E.g. once Ciro Santilli tried to create a page for PsiQuantum, a startup with $650m in funding, and there was a deletion proposal because it did not contain verifiable sources not linked directly to information provided by the company itself: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/PsiQuantum Although this argument is correct, it is also true about 90% of everything that is on Wikipedia about any company. Where else can you get any information about a B2B company? Their clients are not going to say anything. Lawsuits and scandals are kind of the only possible source... In that case, the page was deleted with 2 votes against vs 3 votes for deletion.is very similar to Stack Exchange's own Stack Overflow content deletion issues. Ain't Nobody Got Time For That. "Ain't Nobody Got Time for That" actually has a Wiki page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain%27t_Nobody_Got_Time_for_That. That's notable. Unlike a $600M+ company of course.
should we delete this extremely likely useful/correct content or not according to this extremely complex system of guidelines"
In December 2023 the page was re-created, and seemed to stick: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:PsiQuantum#Secondary_sources It's just a random going back and forth. Author Ctjk has an interesting background:I am a legal official at a major government antitrust agency. The only plausible connection is we regulate tech firms
For these reasons reason why Ciro basically only contributes images to Wikipedia: because they are either all in or all out, and you can determine which one of them it is. And this allows images to be more attributable, so people can actually see that it was Ciro that created a given amazing image, thus overcoming Wikipedia's lack of reputation system a little bit as well.
Wikipedia is perfect for things like biographies, geography, or history, which have a much more defined and subjective expository order. But when it comes to "tutorials of how to actually do stuff", which is what mathematics and physics are basically about, Wikipedia has a very hard time to go beyond dry definitions which are only useful for people who already half know the stuff. But to learn from zero, newbies need tutorials with intuition and examples.
Bibliography:
- gwern.net/inclusionism from gwern.net:
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
- Quote "Golden wiki vs Deletionism on Wikipedia"
The new default homepage for a logged out user how shows a list of the topics with the most articles.
This is a reasonable choice for default homepage, and it immediately exposes users to this central feature of the website: the topic system.
Doing this required in particular calculating the best title for a topic, since it is possible to have different titles with the same ID, the most common way being with capitalization changes, e.g.:would both have topic ID
JavaScript
Javascriptjavascript.The algorithm chosen is to pick the top 10 most upvoted topics, and select the most common title from amongst them. This should make topic title vandalism quite hard. This was made in a single SQL query, and became the most complext SQL query Ciro Santilli has ever written so far: twitter.com/cirosantilli2/status/1549721815832043522
Screenshot showing the list of topics
. The page is: ourbigbook.com for the logged out user, ourbigbook.com/go/topics for the logged in user.Screenshot showing a topic page
. The page is: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/vector-space. Before this sprint, we didn't have the "Vector Space" at the top, as it wasn't necessarily trivial to determine what the preferred title would be.Infinitely many SQL answers.
As mentioned at Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions, he just answers every semi-duplicate immediatly as it is asked, and is therefore able to overcome the Stack Overflow maximum 200 daily reputation limit by far. E.g. in 2018, Gordon reached 135k (archive), thus almost double the 73k yearly limit due to the 200 daily limit, all of that with accepts.
This is in contrast to Ciro Santilli's contribution style which is to only answer questions as he needs the subject, or generally important questions that aroused his interest.
2014 Blog post describing his activity: blog.data-miners.com/2014/08/an-achievement-on-stack-overflow.html, key quote:so that suggests his contributions also take a meditative value.
For a few months, I sporadically answered questions. Then, in the first week of May, my Mom's younger brother passed away. That meant lots of time hanging around family, planning the funeral, and the like. Answering questions on Stack Overflow turned out to be a good way to get away from things. So, I became more intent.
www.data-miners.com/linoff.htm mentions he's an SQL consultant that consulted for several big companies.
Getting funding for the Chicago Pile Edward Teller interview by Web of Stories (1996)
Source. - youtu.be/mnScq24BEmc?t=114 the main cost for the reactor was the graphite. Presumably they already had the uranium in hand?. Edit, no, it is because it was a specialized graphite: Video 2. "German graphite from The Genius Behind the Bomb (1992)", i.e. nuclear graphite.
Physics (like all well done science) is the art of predicting the future by modelling the world with mathematics.
Ciro Santilli doesn't know physics. He writes about it partly to start playing with some scientific content for: OurBigBook.com, partly because this stuff is just amazingly beautiful.
Ciro's main intellectual physics fetishes are to learn quantum electrodynamics (understanding the point of Lie groups being a subpart of that) and condensed matter physics.
Every science is Physics in disguise, but the number of objects in the real world is so large that we can't solve the real equations in practice.
Luckily, due to emergence, we can use uglier higher level approximations of the world to solve many problems, with the complex limits of applicability of those approximations.
Therefore, such higher level approximations are highly specialized, and given different names such as:
Unifying those two into the theory of everything one of the major goals of modern physics.
xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity
. Source. Reductionism comes to mind.Physically accurate genie by Psychomic
. Source. This sane square composition from: www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/u08dw3/nice_guy_genie/.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.
This shows that viewing electromagnetism as gauge theory does have experimentally observable consequences. TODO understand what that means.
In more understandable terms, it shows that the magnetic vector potential matters where the magnetic field is 0.
He testified against Ross: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/friend-who-helped-ulbricht-build-silk-road-testifies-against-him/
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.
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









