No teachers, no courses, no tuition fees. Yes please!!! By Xavier Niel.
Interesting dude, with some interest overlaps with Ciro Santilli, like quantum computing:
It is a bit hard to decide if those people are serious or not. Sometimes it feels scammy, but sometimes it feels fun and right!
Particularly concerning is the fact that they are not a not-for-profit entity, and it is hard to understand how they might make money.
Charles Simon, the founder, is pretty focused in how natural neurons work vs artificial neural network models. He has some good explanations of that, and one major focus of the project is their semi open source spiking neuron simulator BrainSimII. While Ciro Santilli believes that there might be insight in that, he also has doubts if certain modules of the brain wouldn't be more suitable coded directly in regular programming languages with greater ease and performance.
FutureAI appears to be Charles' retirement for fun project, he is likely independently wealthy. Well done.
- www.aitimejournal.com/interview-with-charles-simon-ceo-and-founder-futureai
- 2022 raised 2 million USD:
Creativity and AGI by Charles Simon's at AGI-22 (2022)
Source. Sounds OK!- youtu.be/ivbGbSx0K8k?t=856 general structure of the human brain 86B total, matching number of neurons in the human brain, with:
- 14B: brainstem
- 16B: neocortex
- 56B: cerebelum
- www.youtube.com/watch?t=1433 some sequencing ideas/conjectures
Machine Learning Is Not Like Your Brain by Future AI (2022)
Source. Contains some BrainSimII demos.For more china-related stuff see: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/wife
Excerpt of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940), slightly adapted for brevity:Related: www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/hj7bfq/comment/fwkik5v/
"Yes," the girl said. "Truly.""For you, Inglés?" Pilar looked at Robert Jordan. "Don't lie.""Yes," he said. "Truly."
Teresinha performed by Maria Bethânia
. Source. Composed and previously performed by Chico Buarque in 1987: Video "Teresinha by Chico Buarque".
This video has English subtitles, click CC to enable them. This is one of the the best popular Brazilian music (MPB) of all time. A transcribed English translation adapted slightly by Ciro Santilli to be a bit less literal:
The first one came to me as if coming from the flower shop
Brought a stuffed toy, brought an amethyst pin
He told me about his journey and the perks he had
He showed me his watch and called me 'queen'
He found me so undefended that he touched my heart
But he denied me nothing, so, frightened, I said 'no'The second came to me as if coming back from the bar
Brought a bottle of brandy too bitter to swallow
He asked me about my past and sniffed my food
He searched through my drawer and called me 'the lost one'
He found me so undefended that he scratched my heart
But he gave me nothing, so, frightened, I said 'no'
Song of pig by Xiangxiang (2005)
Source. Chinese: 猪之歌 by 香香. Baidu Baike page: baike.baidu.com/item/猪之歌/16181836. A dude wrote the lyrics though: 毛慧 (Mao Hui), but wouldn't have been a hit if he had performed it given the insane gender imbalance in China. Chinese lyrics on mojim: mojim.com/cny104491x1x1.htm. A quick translation:Pig, you have two holes in your nose, and they have snot when you catch a cold
Pig, you have dark eyes, you can't see the edge
Pig, your ears are so big, you can't hear me calling you stupid
Pig, your tail is curled and curled. It turns out that you can't live without it when you run and jump.Pig head, pig brain, pig body, pig tail, a wise toy who is never picky about food
Every day sleep until after three in the afternoon, you never brush your teeth, and you never fightPig, your belly is so bulging, you can tell at a glance that you can't stand the hardships of life
Pig, your skin is so white, you must have been from a rich family in your past life, oh
Legend has it that your ancestor had eight rakes, and it hit a peach blossom criminal.
When you see a beautiful girl, you chuckle, won't blush, and isn't afraid
Count: 0.
Marek Rosa's play thing.
Ciro Santilli's full birth name is "Ciro Duran Santilli", with mother's last name "Duran" in the middle as per Brazilian tradition.
But Ciro's usage of "Duran" got gradually dropped to "Ciro Santilli", Ciro's official Italian name, as Ciro moved more and more definitively to Europe.
It can still however be seen in certain online places where Ciro didn't have the patience or power to change it e.g. some old École Polytechnique stuff: gitlab.binets.fr/ciro.duran-santilli/china-dictatorship
www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/b38hbk/what_do_my_fellow_ai_researchers_think_of_ben/ What do my fellow AI researchers think of Ben Goertzel and his research?
Some possible/not possible sources that could be used to manually bootstrap content:
- LibreTexts. Good project. "Teacher-only-content" unfortunately as usual. But besides that fundamental flaw, they do exactly what we want to do in a sense.
- OpenStax: CC BY. This could be a great entry point, as they already have some university integration going on, and might be interested in this project.
- physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6157/list-of-freely-available-physics-books "List of freely available physics books" explicitly asks for:but the thread was locked, and basically none of the sources in the answers have free licenses, nor do they note it. It just seems that the physicists don't know what a free license is.
a list of physics books with open-source licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL
- MIT OpenCourseWare: CC BY-NC-SA, so not really usable
- github.com/certik/theoretical-physics: MIT License. Workable but wonky.
- subwiki.org/: wiki with some upper graduate math subjects presumably by this Indian dude: www.linkedin.com/in/vipul-naik-0ab1898/. Description on his homepage: vipulnaik.com/subwiki/. He's also got other interesting but not so relevant projects:He's also into Stack Overflow, Quora and Wikipedia editing. That's a cool dude. He's into in LessWrong it seems.
- pro freer immigration laws: vipulnaik.com/openborders/
- vipulnaik.com/cognito-mentoring/ free mentoring project for interested students
- massive mathematics books
- Infinite Napkin.CC BY-SA mathematics infinite book: github.com/vEnhance/napkin/issues/77. Very similar type of content to what we want in this project!
- Stacks Project
Existing lecture notes by students:
- github.com/mb2g17/NotesNetworkArchive Google Docs-based: docs.google.com/document/d/1OIcQ8dJ_FAhdkirU94M29-ZbNZ4oQs1LbWF3Nz-mq_U/edit#heading=h.vehxib58w1iw. An actual student uploading tons of lecture notes in one coherent system. CC BY-NC-SA unfortunately.
- academia.stackexchange.com/questions/148261/do-you-keep-your-study-notes-publicly-available mentions:Related: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/40381/how-common-is-it-that-professors-have-their-students-write-textbooks
- Cambridge Mathematics Lecture Notes by Dexter Chua (2014-2018)Comments:
Lecture note upload website:
- nexusnotes.com likely illegal reuploads of PDFs from teachers
- www.studocu.com/en-gb Paywall. PDF uploads. Unclear if simple teacher reuploads or actual novel notes.
- www.studydrive.net/
- Chinese GitHub repos. Some of these are very advanced in terms of content quantity and organizational quality! The Chinese are miles ahead in this area:
- github.com/PKUanonym/REKCARC-TSC-UHT Guidance for courses in Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. Chinese. Appears to try and store all past exams.
- github.com/lib-pku/libpku
- github.com/openwhu/OpenWHU: Wuhan University
- github.com/USTC-Resource/USTC-Course: USTC
- github.com/Zeal-L/UNSW: UNSW from Australia, but by a Chinese dude
- github.com/apachecn/mit-18.06-linalg-notes: translation of MIT course to Chinese
- github.com/chenyang1999/MyComputerCollegeCourses: TODO which univeresity
- github.com/elder-frog/OpenCourseCatalog: nothing to do with this project, but since I'm making a list, this dude is copying YouTube videos to Bilibili. And he's edgy anti-CCP on Twitter, what a legend.
- github.com/TheBloodthirster/BUAA_Course_Sharing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beihang_University
- github.com/1051727403/SHU-CS-Source-Share: ShangHai University CS course source code
- github.com/Willie169/tw-gifted-k12-notes: Taiwanese high school notes
Exams uploads:
- questions.tripos.org/part-ib/all/ University of Cambridge Mathematics past examinations
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