Second brain by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
In the 2020's, this refers to writing down everything you know, usually in some graph structured way.
This is somewhat the centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers: dumping your brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
This is also the closest one can get to immortality pre full blown transhumanism.
Ciro's still looking for the restore this plaintext backup on a new body though.
It is a good question, how much of your knowledge you would be able to give to others with text and images. It is likely almost all of it, except for coordination/signal processing tasks.
His passion for braindumping like this is a big motivation behind Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook.com work.
stress-ng by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The interface is a bit annoying, but the tool is really cool.
100 cycles of matrixprod:
stress-ng -c1 --cpu-ops 100 --cpu-method matrixprod
man stress-ng gives the list of possible --cpu-method. It documents matrixprod as:
matrix product of two 128 × 128 matrices of double floats. Testing on 64 bit x86 hardware shows that this is provides a good mix of memory, cache and floating point operations and is probably the best CPU method to use to make a CPU run hot.
If you don't specify the --cpu-method it apparently loops through every method one by one.
Limit time to 1s instead of limiting cycles:
stress-ng -c1 -t1 --cpu-method matrixprod
Many/most companies are unable to give any beauty to its employees.
Hiring is simply a process of "let's get this money making project working ASAP", bring people in, without considering Brooks's law.
And then when that happens, companies put people in extremely narrow knowledge areas, making them unable to see or participate in the bigger picture of things, unless they spend 10 years there and reach architect status.
This is perhaps particularly painful for high flying birds like Ciro Santilli.
Companies need a higher top to down force that attempts to actually teach the business and tech to every employee to counter the low level manager get things done now pressure.
Companies that are able to do that, will have many more employees with a sense of purpose, and with the ability to innovate. Those companies will win.
Some of the software-based artificial life simulators can be used as AI training game.
Ciro Santilli just always feels that what can be classified as "artificial life" simulators have too much focus on beating more continuous population mechanics, and lack the discrete elements which he feels could be important to AGI: Section "The missing link between continuous and discrete AI".
There is great interest in this direction of research however quite clearly.
It should be illegal to give someone money to advertise your product.
We should just use tags and upvote-based algorithms.
TODO find Sergey Brin quote bout advertising being a form of perverting search engine ranking neutrality. In other words, there are neutral metrics to what people find good, like links and upvotes. And then advertising is a way to pervert that to someone's profit.
Sometimes Ciro Santilli thinks advertising should be on-subscription only, but that is too restrictive, e.g. imagine the local business owner who wears a t-shirt of their business.
Video 1.
What Do I Think When I Think About Advertising by Daniele Grosso
. Source.

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