Ciro's Edict #7 by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Baby hardware by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Existing data sources by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Some possible/not possible sources that could be used to manually bootstrap content:
Lecture note upload website:
Exams uploads:
How to convince teachers to use CC BY-SA by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
A major difficulty of getting such this to work is that may university teachers want to retain closed copyright of their work because they:
Therefore the only way is to find teachers who are:
  • enlightened to use such licenses
  • forced by their organizations to use such licenses
The forced option therefore seems like a more bulk efficient starting point for searches.
No matter how much effort a single person puts into writing perfect tutorials, they will never beat 1000x people + an algorithm.
It is not simply a matter of how much time you have. The fundamental reason is that each person has a different background and different skills. Notably the young students have radically different understanding than that of the experienced teacher.
Therefore, those that refuse to contribute to such platforms, or at least license their content with open licenses, will inevitably have their work forgotten in favor of those that have contributed to the more open platform, which will eventually dominate everything.
Perhaps OurBigBook.com is not he killer platform that will make this happen. Perhaps the world is not yet ready for it. But Ciro believes that this will happen, sooner or later, inevitable, and he wants to give it a shot.
Also worth checking:
Figure 1. Source. Convincing academics that their tutorial are not always perfect is one of blocking points to the acceptance of solutions such as OurBigBook.com. To thrive in the competition of academia, those people are amazing at publishing novel results. Explaining to beginners however, not necessarily so.
Politics by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
2017-04 Nike Flex Experience RN 6 Grey running shoes by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Amazing shoes! Wore them to their destruction.
Shoestring length: 1.185m
Replaced with after bicycle ate it: 1.0m, also worked but at limit.
Size: EUR 45.
University lecture notes by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Basically everything that applies to the blogs section also applies here, but university lecture notes are so important to us that they deserve a bit more talk.
It is arguable that this is currently the best way to learn any university subject, and that it can already be used to learn any subject.
We basically just want to make the process more efficient and enjoyable, by making it easier:
  • to find what you want based on an initial subject hit across the best version of any author
  • and to publish your own stuff with one click, and get feedback if people like it or not, and improvement suggestions like you do you GitHub
One major problem with lecture notes is that, as the name suggests, they are merely a complement to the lecture, and don't contain enough detail for you to really learn solely from them without watching the lecture.
The only texts that generally teach in enough depth are actual books, which are almost always commercial.
So in a sense, this project can be seen as a path to upgrade free lecture notes into full blown free books, from which you can learn from scratch without any external material.
And a major way in which we believe this can be done is through the reuse of sections of lecture notes by from other universities, which greatly reduces the useless effort of writing things from scratch.
The intended mental picture is clear: the topics feature docs.ourbigbook.com/#ourbigbook-web-topics will is intended to act as the missing horizontal topic integration across lecture notes of specific universities, e.g:
MIT calculus course             UCLA calculus course

* Calculus                <---> * Calculus
  * Limit                 <--->   * Limit
    * Limit of a function
    * Limit of a series   <--->     * Limit of a series
  * Derivative            <--->   * Derivative
                                    * L'Hôpital's rule
  * Integral              <--->   * Integral
Figure 1.
Example topics page of OurBigBook.com
.
One important advantage of lecture notes is that since they are written by the teacher, they should match exactly what "students are supposed to learn to get good grades", which unfortunately is a major motivation for student's learning weather we want it or not.
One big open question for this project is to what extent notes written for lectures at one university will be relevant to the lectures at another university?
Is it possible to write notes in a way that they are naturally reusable?
It is our gut feeling that this is possible. But it almost certainly requires an small intentional effort on the part of authors.
The question then becomes whether the "become famous by getting your content viewed in other universities" factor is strong enough to attract users.
And we believe that it might, it just might be.
Shoes by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
For sizing see also: Ciro Santilli's body.
Blogs by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Where blog is taken in a wide sense, including e.g. Medium, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc.
The main shortcoming of blogs is the lack of topic convergence across blogs. Each blog is a moderated castle. So who is the best user for a given topic, or the best content for a given tag, across the entire website?
The only reasonable free material we have for advanced subjects nowadays are university lecture notes.
While some of those are awesome, when writing a large content, no one can keep quality high across all sections, there will always be knowledge that you don't have which is enlightening. And Googlers are more often than not interested only in specific sections of your content.
Our website aims to make smaller subjects vertically curated across horizontal single author tutorials.
MIT calculus course             UCLA calculus course

* Calculus                <---> * Calculus
  * Limit                 <--->   * Limit
    * Limit of a function
    * Limit of a series   <--->     * Limit of a series
  * Derivative            <--->   * Derivative
                                    * L'Hôpital's rule
  * Integral              <--->   * Integral
Some more links:
  • prose.sh/ multiblog, the only feature is easy of publishing from CLI
Polytechnique USB flash drives by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
~8GB, lsblk reports 7796176 * 1KB = 7983284224 bytes.
We got a handful of those from École Polytechnique at the end of studies I think.
They are shaped like bicornes, which is super cool, but also super impractical!
Markings: "AX ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE PROMOTION X2009"
20.04 gnome-disks program reports it as: "SMI USB DISK".
From Ubuntu 20.04 on an ext4 formatted one:
/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   28656 MB in  1.99 seconds = 14421.31 MB/sec
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 Timing buffered disk reads:  42 MB in  3.03 seconds =  13.88 MB/sec
With Linux Unified Key Setup + ext4 the results are similar, maybe hdparam bypasses it?
/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   28326 MB in  1.99 seconds = 14251.55 MB/sec
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 Timing buffered disk reads:  38 MB in  3.11 seconds =  12.23 MB/sec
gnome-disks LUKS + ext4 benchmark with default params also gives about 14 MB/s.
Micro Bit v1 by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
General information: Micro Bit v1
The file:
/media/$USER/MICROBIT/DETAILS.TXT
contains:
DAPLink Firmware - see https://mbed.com/daplink
Version: 0234
Build:   Oct 12 2015 14:53:22
2022-10-14: stopped being able to connect to Ubuntu 22.04. Was trying to do a UART video demo, connected USB, disconnected, connected, disconnected several times on different filming attempts. Was working some of the time, Ubuntu did recognize it, I even saw UART output for sure, but was a bit unstable. But then at one point it just stopped getting recognized by Ubuntu 100% of the time. The board is still being powered by USB, and the previously flashed program still runs, but nothing showed on sudo dmesg -w at all, and I can't reprogram it!
A day later, managed to get tit to connect once more with a different cable, but just once!
[15310.385055] usb 1-5: new full-speed USB device number 38 using xhci_hcd
[15310.534996] usb 1-5: New USB device found, idVendor=0d28, idProduct=0204, bcdDevice=10.00
[15310.535000] usb 1-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[15310.535001] usb 1-5: Product: MBED CMSIS-DAP
[15310.535002] usb 1-5: Manufacturer: MBED
[15310.535003] usb 1-5: SerialNumber: 9900023436424e45001d30150000005d00000000cb8928bd
[15310.541267] usb-storage 1-5:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[15310.541643] scsi host4: usb-storage 1-5:1.0
[15310.542658] hid-generic 0003:0D28:0204.000A: hiddev1,hidraw2: USB HID v1.00 Device [MBED MBED CMSIS-DAP] on usb-0000:00:14.0-5/input3
[15310.543121] cdc_acm 1-5:1.1: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
[15311.549969] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access     MBED     DAPLINK VFS      0.1  PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[15311.550273] scsi 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[15311.550825] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 16512 512-byte logical blocks: (8.45 MB/8.06 MiB)
[15311.551052] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[15311.551054] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
[15311.551204] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[15311.551207] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[15311.572160] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
[15316.317438] usb 1-5: reset full-speed USB device number 38 using xhci_hcd
[15316.445093] usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[15316.681102] usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[15316.917102] usb 1-5: reset full-speed USB device number 38 using xhci_hcd
[15317.045028] usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[15317.281149] usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[15317.517154] usb 1-5: reset full-speed USB device number 38 using xhci_hcd
[15317.517466] usb 1-5: Device not responding to setup address.
[15317.725358] usb 1-5: Device not responding to setup address.
[15317.933042] usb 1-5: device not accepting address 38, error -71
[15318.061027] usb 1-5: reset full-speed USB device number 38 using xhci_hcd
[15318.061347] usb 1-5: Device not responding to setup address.
[15318.269270] usb 1-5: Device not responding to setup address.
[15318.477018] usb 1-5: device not accepting address 38, error -71
[15318.477153] usb 1-5: USB disconnect, device number 38
[15318.652912] usb 1-5: new full-speed USB device number 39 using xhci_hcd
[15318.785044] usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[15319.021068] usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[15319.257030] usb 1-5: new full-speed USB device number 40 using xhci_hcd
[15319.385075] usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[15319.621147] usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[15319.729170] usb usb1-port5: attempt power cycle
[15320.384941] usb 1-5: new full-speed USB device number 41 using xhci_hcd
[15320.385176] usb 1-5: Device not responding to setup address.
[15320.593188] usb 1-5: Device not responding to setup address.
[15320.801023] usb 1-5: device not accepting address 41, error -71
[15320.928909] usb 1-5: new full-speed USB device number 42 using xhci_hcd
[15320.929073] usb 1-5: Device not responding to setup address.
[15321.137244] usb 1-5: Device not responding to setup address.
[15321.344947] usb 1-5: device not accepting address 42, error -71
[15321.345173] usb usb1-port5: unable to enumerate USB device
[15321.384929] FAT-fs (sdb): unable to read boot sector to mark fs as dirty
Exact same USB and port could still mount the Raspberry Pi Pico.
R (programming language) by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Ubuntu 23.04 install:
sudo apt install rbase
Hello world:
R -e 'print("hello world")'
Install a package, e.g. Bookdown:
sudo R -e 'install.packages("bookdown")'
Internationalism by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Social science by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Laptop by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Funding by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Ciro is looking for:
The initial incentive for the creators is to make them famous and allow them to get more fulfilling jobs more easily, although Ciro also wants to add money transfer mechanisms to it later on.
We can't rely on teachers writing materials, because they simply don't have enough incentive: publication count is all that matters to their careers. The students however, are desperate to prove themselves to the world, and becoming famous for amazing educational content is something that some of them might want to spend their times on, besides grinding for useless grade.
Controlled English by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Consulting by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Start with consulting for universities to get some cash flowing.
Help teachers create perfect courses.
At the same time, develop the website, and use the generated content to bootstrap it.
Choose a domain of knowledge, generate perfect courses for it, and find all teachers of the domain in the world who are teaching that and help them out.
Then expand out to other domains.
TODO: which domain of knowledge should we go for? The more precise the better.
  • maths is perfect because it "never" changes. But does not make money.
  • computer science might be good, e.g. machine learning.
Size scale by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Some of the contributions are subjectively self evaluated based on:
  • How many significant lines changed (no indentation changes, moves, mass refactoring, trivial tests, etc.):
    0only trivial changes
    1< 20
    2< 150
    3
    150
  • How hard it was to make it. 4 algorithmic lines are harder than 100 web development/documentation lines.

Pinned article: ourbigbook/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!
Video 1.
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source.
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
    Video 2.
    OurBigBook Web topics demo
    . Source.
  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:
    • 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
    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 5. . 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