Please, use AsciiDoc and one page to rule them all.
Ciro's parents put him to play the piano. This is partly influenced by Ciro's paternal grandfather, an energetic Italian descendant who liked music
The teachers were nice old ladies who followed a very traditional and methodic approach which was just like regular school, instead of doing what actually needed to be done: inspire kids into becoming creative musical geniuses that can compose their own stuff.
The electric guitar environment was much less formalized in general, and he took courses with an awesome teacher (archive), who actually tried to inspire his students to create their own music and improvisation.
In his early teens, Ciro listened to the usual canned music his friends listened to: music teenager Ciro Santilli liked to listen to, until he started to stumble upon jazz.
Ciro remembers clearly rainy weekend days where he would go to a run down second hand shop near his home in someone's garage (Sebo do Alfaiate, R. Frei Francisco de Sampaio, 183 - Embaré, Santos - SP, 11040-220, Brazil :-)), and buy amazing second hand Jazz CDs. It was just a matter of time until he would start scouring the web for "the best jazz albums of all time" and start listening to all of them, see e.g. the best modern instrumental Western music. digitaldreamdoor.com/index.html was a good resource from those times!
Ciro ultimately decided his bad memory and overwhelming passion for the natural sciences would better suit a scientific carrier.
He also learnt that the computer is also an extremely satisfying artistic instrument.
Also, with a computer, boring dexterity limitations are no more: you can just record perfect played segments or program things note by note to achieve whatever music or action you want!
Although Ciro quit playing musical instruments, his passion for the music has remained, and who knows how it has influenced his life.
In Ciro's ASCII art circuit diagram notation, it is a loop with three Josephson junctions:
+----X-----+
| |
| |
| |
+--X----X--+
Superconducting Qubit by NTT SCL (2015)
Source. Offers an interesting interpretation of superposition in that type of device (TODO precise name, seems to be a flux qubit): current going clockwise or current going counter clockwise at the same time. youtu.be/xjlGL4Mvq7A?t=1348 clarifies that this is just one of the types of qubits, and that it was developed by Hans Mooij et. al., with a proposal in 1999 and experiments in 2000. The other type is dual to this one, and the superposition of the other type is between N and N + 1 copper pairs stored in a box.
Their circuit is a loop with three Josephson junctions, in Ciro's ASCII art circuit diagram notation:
+----X-----+
| |
| |
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+--X----X--+When half the magnetic flux quantum is applied as microwaves, this produces the ground state:where and cancel each other out. And the first excited state is:Then he mentions that:
- to go from 0 to 1, they apply the difference in energy
- if the duration is reduced by half, it creates a superposition of .
Major projects can be seen at: Section "The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli".
These are some smaller projects that Ciro Santilli carried out. They are all either for fun, or misguided use of his time done by an younger self:
- small naughty stuff is listed at: Section "Ciro Santilli's naughty projects"
- Because Ciro cares about education, around 2014 he looked into markup languages and version control for books, before he noticed that this approach was useless and that ranking algorithms are all that matter:
- He implemented some large features and several smaller improvements.
- Markdown Style Guide
- karlcow/markdown-testsuite improvements: Ciro has implemented the test runner a few months before CommonMark left stealth mode and killed it instantaneously.At least MacFarlane was able to reuse part of the HTML normalizer he wrote, and he extracted the multi-engine comparison to: CommonMark Implementation Compare.Playing with this project has led Ciro to find and report many Markdown bugs/bad behavior on other software, e.g. GitHub and MultiMarkdown-4.
- isaacs/github public unofficial GitHub issue tracker: he has commented there so often that he was made a collaborator
- Node Express Sequelize Next.js realworld example app
- VCDVCD: value change dump command-line pretty printer!!! The type of thing that a billion dollar EDA tool vendor will never implement ;-)
0 time 1 counter_tb.clock 2 counter_tb.enable 3 counter_tb.out[1:0] 4 counter_tb.reset 5 counter_tb.top.out[1:0] 0 1 2 3 4 5 =========== 0 1 0 x 0 x 1 0 0 x 1 x 2 1 0 0 1 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 4 1 0 0 0 0 5 0 1 0 0 0 - Vim: sometimes Ciro want crazy and wasted his time with Vimscript:
- Vim Markdown: the owner
plasticboywas really nice and made Ciro a collaborator for his contributions, notably a live ToC outline and the header mappings - Vundle Plugin Tester, which he used to start the testing system of Vim Markdown
- Vim Markdown: the owner
- Breakthrough Message: aliens!!! Creative/media project, powered by some Python scripts.
- making Google Maps reviews of places he's visited to help other people. Ciro's photos reached 1 million views in 2019: www.google.com/maps/contrib/106598607405640635523/photos (archive)
The Engineering Puzzle of Storing Trillions of Bits in your Smartphone / SSD using Quantum Mechanics by Branch Education (2020)
Source. Nice animations show how quantum tunnelling is used to set bits in flash memory. Ciro Santilli's hardware 2019-03 Giant Control Tower 3 floor pump bike pump by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-0120 pounds. Works on both Schrader and Presta.
Fizeau's determination of the speed of light with a rotating cogwheel by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01Ciro Santilli participated in a double degree program, so he obtained have engineering degrees in both:
- 2010 - 2014: École PolytechniqueMaster 2 degree in applied mathematics.
- Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo
Despite studying in great institutions with great teachers, Ciro feels that:
- most of what he knows came from the Internet, man pages, books and his parents
- actual projects matter much more than those pieces of paper called Diplomas. You should not do like Ciro who basically did nothing but school mandated work, but instead grow some balls and focus much more or entirely on your projects
This motivated Ciro to work on OurBigBook.com.
Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01Ciro Santilli has the power to document stuff in a way that makes using them awesome, as evidenced by his his Stack Overflow contributions (notably those in the best articles by Ciro Articles), and other online contributions.
If your project does something awesome, hiring Ciro means that more people will be able to notice that it is actually awesome, and use it.
He likes to do this in parallel to contributing new features, quickly switching between his "developer" and "technical documentor" hats.
This means of course that he will develop new features a bit slower than others, but he feel it is more valuable if end users can actually use your project in the first place.
His technique is to provide upfront extremely interactive and reproducible getting started setups that immediately show the key value of the project to users.
He backs those setups with:A prime example of kind of setup is Ciro's Linux Kernel Module Cheat.
- scripts that automate the setup much as possible to make things enjoyable and reproducible
- a detailed description of the environment in which he tested: which OS, version of key software, etc.
- a detailed description of what is expected to happen when you take an action, including known bugs with links to bug reports
- theory and rationale on the sections after the initial getting started, but always finely interspersed with concrete examples
- all docs contained in a Git-tracked repo, with the ability to render to a single HTML with one TOC
- short sentences and paragraphs, interspersed with many headers, lists and code blocks
While he create this setup, he inevitably start to notice and fix:
- bugs
- annoyances on the public interface of the project
- the devs were using 50 different local scripts to do similar things, all of them semi-broken and limited. Every new hire was copying one of those local scripts, and hacking it up further.
- your crappy build / test / version control setup
Exploiting this skill, however, requires you to trust him.
When he tells to managers that he's good at documenting, they always say: great, we need better documentation! But then, one of the following may happen:
- managers forget that they wanted good documentation and just tell him to code new features as fast as possible
- they don't let him own the getting started page, but rather and expect him to try and fix the existing crappy unfixable existing getting started, without stepping on anyone's pride in the process >:-)Good documentation requires a large number of small iterative reviews, and detailed review of every line is not always feasible.Too many cooks.
Ciro's passion for documentation and tooling has the effect that if you have crappy documentation and tooling and don't want them to be fixed, Ciro will end up trying to fix those tools instead of doing what you tell him to do anyways, which might lead to him quitting because he can't stand the tools, or you firing him because he's not doing the job you think I should be doing. So please, don't bother hiring Ciro if you have crappy documentation and tooling.
Psychological analysis of why Ciro has this gift: How Ciro Santilli manages to write so much.
Ciro often has the following metaphor in his mind:
New discoveries are like very rough trails where you have to cut through heavy bushes (an original research paper).After a brave explorer goes through this rough path for the first time and charts it, it does become much easier for others to follow it later on, but it still requires a lot of effort to go through them, because there are still a lot of rough bushes and some parts of the map are not very clear (reading and reproducing the research paper to further advance the state of the art).As enough people start going through, the probability that someone with a bad memory ends up walking it increases, and that person ends up pounding the earth into a beaten track and increasing the trail clearance of the beginning of the trail at least (review paper).There finally comes a point when even the local government starts to notice this trail is important, and pays someone to add some stone pavement and rails on the most exposed parts of the trail (post and undergrad education).And at last, Ciro Santilli comes with a bulldozer and creates an autoroute that thousands of people can cruise at high speed without any effort (Q&A, open knowledge HTML websites).
Ciro's documenation obsession is partly part of his braindumping effort of dumping his brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
Vertebrates minus tetrapods.
This paraphyletic subgroup is easy to form the "acquatic only" (fishes) vs "things that come out of water" (tetrapods). Though mudfishes make that distinction harder.
Which kind of makes sense, why would you want for limbs unless you are going to stay out of water!
Fiscal paradises must be invaded and destroyed.
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!
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 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
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. 
- 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