These are websites that offer somewhat overlapping services, many of which served inspirations, and why we think something different is needed to achieve our goals.
Notably, OurBigBook is the result of Ciro Santilli's experiences with:OurBigBook could be seen as a cross between those three websites.
- Wikipedia
- GitHub
- Stack Exchange (or as non techies might point out, Urban Dictionary, or Quora before it was such an incomprehensible shitshow)
Quick mentions:
- handwiki.org/wiki/HandWiki:About: technically the same as Wikipedia, but with more aligned moderation policies
- ecotext.co/ similar goals. Their website seems quite broken now though as of 2021, can't see text properly. Crunchbase entry: www.crunchbase.com/organization/ecotext says they are from Durham, New Hampshire, United States. Cannot see how to publish, curated material only? Twitter: twitter.com/ecotextinc?lang=en One of the founders: twitter.com/BigNel_21 | www.linkedin.com/in/ecotextnelsonthomas/. Their LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ecotext/people/
- fiveable.me/ bad: separates students and teachers, as a student I don't see where to create my content. Good: focus on teaching university level stuff to people outside of university via Advanced Placement. Bad: Lots of video content. Bad: Can't see the issue tracker attached to each page.
- LessWrong: their website system does have some similar feature sets to what we want. Reputation, Q&A sections, links between articles most likely, sort by upvote everywhere.
- crowdpub.org collaborative writing website, somehow goes to paragraph level, TODO how they reconcile different authors? Closed beta as of writing, so hard to be sure. From quick presentation on beta website, appears to attempt to share revenue to authors proportionally to the size of their contribution. Some blockchain-based reputation. Meh.
- TODO migrate all from: github.com/booktree/booktree/blob/master/alternatives.md
- studynotes.ie/. Admin approval on everything. No ToC. Fixed tag list for university entry exams topics.
- mindstone.com: there appears to be no sharing focus? File upload basesd? Not sure.
- EverybodyWiki
- looking for open source Confluence-alternatives is an interesting way to go:
- lists:
- BookStack:
- fixed 3-level page hierarchy
- writen in PHP
- Markdown support: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/markdown-editor/
- no source-level import-export apparently: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/backup-restore/, youtu.be/WUvtzJfCAKE?t=904
- WYSIWYG: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/wysiwyg-editor/ via TinyMCE
- page content repeating: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/reusing-page-content/ (will be useful for course modelling)
- github.com/shuding/nextra converts Markdown links to Next.js links. We should look into how it works.
- zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ "The Archive" from zettelkasten.de/. Closed source. By German software engineer Christian Tietze twitter.com/ctietze?lang=en
- LLM generated wiki e.g.:
- docs.tigyog.app/cli beautiful website, but doesn't achieve much. Has a Markdown upload mechanism. Ah, those newbs who think the average user will care about markup upload to DB... Oh, wait...
- www.stuvia.com/en-gb/school/uk/oxford-university/physics. PDF uploads. In theory you have to own copyright: www.stuvia.com/en-gb/copyright/guidelines but it feels unlikely that most material was uploaded by the copyright owners. If those people are up, then why can't we? Maybe... Registred in the UK. People: some Dutch dudes:
- Project Xanadu: crazy overlaps, though that project is vaporware apparently?
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
Static website-only alternatives:
- quarto.org/
- vitepress.dev. vitepress.dev/guide/markdown unmanaged internal links. Sample website: wiki.nikiv.dev/.
Conceptual:
- The Final Encyclopedia: science fiction concept, but the name was reused by Paul Allen in a research project
- second brain
- collective intelligence
- you don't get any/sufficient recognition for your contributions. The closest they have to upvotes and reputation is the incredibly obscure "thank" feature which is only visible to the receiver itself: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Notifications/Thanks
- deletionism is a tremendous problem on Wikipedia, for two main causes:The stuff you wrote can be deleted anytime by some random admin/opposing editor, examples at: Section "Deletionism on Wikipedia".
- tutorial-like subjectivity
- notability
- Scope too limited, and politics defined. Everything has to sound encyclopedic and be notable enough. This basically excludes completely good tutorials.
- Insane impossible to use markup language-base talk pages instead of issue trackers?! Ridiculous!!! That change alone could make Wikipedia so much more amazing. Wikipedia could become a Stack Exchange killer by doing that alone + some basic reputation system. Some work on that is being done at: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DiscussionTools, already in Beta as of 2022.
- Edit wars
This just works, but it is also so incredibly slow that it is useless (or at least the quality it reaches in the time we have patience to wait from), at least on any setup we've managed to try, including e.g. on an Nvidia A10G on a g5.xlarge. Running:would likely take hours to complete.
time imagine "a house in the forest"Someone should package this better for end user "just works after Conda install" image generation, it is currently much more of a library setup.
Tested on Amazon EC2 on a g5.xlarge machine, which has an Nvidia A10G, using the AWS Deep Learning Base GPU AMI (Ubuntu 20.04) image.
First install Conda as per Section "Install Conda on Ubuntu", and then just follow the instructions from the README, notably the Reference sampling script section.This took about 2 minutes and generated 6 images under
git clone https://github.com/runwayml/stable-diffusion
cd stable-diffusion/
git checkout 08ab4d326c96854026c4eb3454cd3b02109ee982
conda env create -f environment.yaml
conda activate ldm
mkdir -p models/ldm/stable-diffusion-v1/
wget -O models/ldm/stable-diffusion-v1/model.ckpt https://huggingface.co/CompVis/stable-diffusion-v-1-4-original/resolve/main/sd-v1-4.ckpt
python scripts/txt2img.py --prompt "a photograph of an astronaut riding a horse" --plmsoutputs/txt2img-samples/samples, includining an image outputs/txt2img-samples/grid-0000.png which is a grid montage containing all the six images in one:
A quick attempt at removing their useless safety features (watermark and NSFW text filter) is:but that produced 4 black images and only two unfiltered ones. Also likely the lack of sexual training data makes its porn suck, and not in the good way.
diff --git a/scripts/txt2img.py b/scripts/txt2img.py
index 59c16a1..0b8ef25 100644
--- a/scripts/txt2img.py
+++ b/scripts/txt2img.py
@@ -87,10 +87,10 @@ def load_replacement(x):
def check_safety(x_image):
safety_checker_input = safety_feature_extractor(numpy_to_pil(x_image), return_tensors="pt")
x_checked_image, has_nsfw_concept = safety_checker(images=x_image, clip_input=safety_checker_input.pixel_values)
- assert x_checked_image.shape[0] == len(has_nsfw_concept)
- for i in range(len(has_nsfw_concept)):
- if has_nsfw_concept[i]:
- x_checked_image[i] = load_replacement(x_checked_image[i])
+ #assert x_checked_image.shape[0] == len(has_nsfw_concept)
+ #for i in range(len(has_nsfw_concept)):
+ # if has_nsfw_concept[i]:
+ # x_checked_image[i] = load_replacement(x_checked_image[i])
return x_checked_image, has_nsfw_concept
@@ -314,7 +314,7 @@ def main():
for x_sample in x_checked_image_torch:
x_sample = 255. * rearrange(x_sample.cpu().numpy(), 'c h w -> h w c')
img = Image.fromarray(x_sample.astype(np.uint8))
- img = put_watermark(img, wm_encoder)
+ # img = put_watermark(img, wm_encoder)
img.save(os.path.join(sample_path, f"{base_count:05}.png"))
base_count += 1A major difficulty of getting such this to work is that may university teachers want to retain closed copyright of their work because they:
- want to publish a book later and get paid. Yes, the root problem is that teachers get paid way too little and have way too little job security for the incredibly important and difficult extremely difficult job they are doing, and we have to vote to change that
- are afraid that if amazing material is made freely available, then they would not be needed and lose their jobs. Once again, job security issue.
- believe that if anyone were allowed to touch their precious content, those people would just "screw it up" and make it worse
- don't even want to publish their notes online because "someone will copy it and take their credit". What a mentality! In order to prevent a theft, you are basically guaranteeing that your work will be completely forgotten!
- don't want students to read the notes and skip class, because spoken word has magic properties and imparts knowledge that cannot otherwise conveyed by a book
- are afraid that mistakes will be found in their material. Reputation is of course everything in academia, since there is no money.So it's less risky to have closed, more buggy notes, than open, more correct ones.This can be seen clearly for example on Physics Stack Exchange, and most notably in particle physics (well, which is basically the only subject that really gets asked, since anything more experimental is going to be blocked off by patents/interlab competition), where a large proportion incredibly amazing users have anonymous profiles.They prefer to get no reputation gains from their amazing contributions, due to the fear that a single mistake will ruin their career.This is in stark contrast for example to Stack Overflow, where almost all top users are not anonymous:List of top users: physics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&filter=all and some notable anonymous ones:
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/2451/qmechanic
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/50583/acuriousmind
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/43351/profrob
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/84967/accidentalfouriertransform
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/56997/curiousone
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/139781/probably-someone
- physics.stackexchange.com/users/206691/chiral-anomaly
Therefore the only way is to find teachers who are:The forced option therefore seems like a more bulk efficient starting point for searches.
- enlightened to use such licenses
- forced by their organizations to use such licenses
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:
- jornal.usp.br/universidade/usp-de-sao-carlos-oferece-aulas-de-graduacao-em-matematica-e-estatistica-abertas-ao-publico/ "Open Classroom" program from the University of São Paulo. We should Google for "Open Classroom" a bit more actually.
- open.ed.ac.uk/about/: talk only
The Grad Student Brain by PhD Comics (2010)
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.Many subjects have changed very little in the last hundred years, and so it is mind-blowing that people have to pay for books that teach them!
Since Ciro Santilli was young, he has been bewildered by the natural sciences and mathematics due to his bad memory.
The beauty of those subjects has always felt like intense sunlight in a fresh morning to Ciro. Sometimes it gets covered by clouds and obscured by less important things, but it always comes back again and again, weaker or stronger with its warmth, guiding Ciro's life path.
As a result, he has always suffered a lot at school: his grades were good, but he wasn't really learning those beautiful things that he wanted to learn!
First, before university, school organization had only one goal: put you into the best universities, to make a poster out of you and get publicity, so that more parents will be willing to pay them money to put their kids into good university.
Ciro once asked a chemistry teacher some "deeper question" after course was over, related to the superficial vision of the topic they were learning to get grades in university entry exams. The teacher replied something like:Ciro feels that this was one of the greatest compliments he has ever received in his life. This teacher, understood him. Funny how some things stick, while all the rest fades.
You remind me of a friend of mine. He always wanted to understand the deeper reason for things. He now works at NASA.
Another interesting anecdote is how Ciro Santilli's mother recalls that she always found out about exams in the same way: when the phone started ringing as Ciro's friends started asking for help with the subjects just before the exam. Sometimes it was already too hopelessly late, but Ciro almost always tried. Nothing shows how much better you are than someone than teaching them.
Then, after entering university, although things got way better because were are able to learn things that are borderline useful.
Ciro still felt a strong emotion of nostalgia when after university his mother asked if she could throw away his high school books, and Ciro started tearing them all down for recycling. Such is life.
University teachers were still to a large extent researchers who didn't want to, know how to and above all have enough time and institutional freedom to teach things properly and make you see their beauty, some good relate articles:
The very fact that you had very little choice of what to learn so that a large group can get a "Diploma", makes it impossible for people to deeply learn what the really want.
This is especially true because Ciro was in Brazil, a third world country, where the opportunities are comparatively extremely limited to the first world.
Also extremely frustrating is how you might have to wait for years to get to the subject you really want. For example, on a physics course, quantum mechanics is normally only taught on the third year! While there is value to knowing the pre-requisites, holding people back for years is just too sad, and Ciro much prefers backward design. And just like the university entry exams, this creates an entry barrier situation where you might in the end find that "hey, that's not what I wanted to learn after all", see also: students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.
We've created a system where people just wait, and wait, and wait, never really doing what they really want. They wait through school to get into university. They wait through university to get to masters. They wait through masters to get to PhD. They wait through PhD to become a PI. And for the minuscule fraction of those that make it, they become fund proposal writers. And if you make any wrong choice along the, it's all over, you can't continue anymore, the cost would be too great. So you just become software engineer or a consultant. Is this the society that we really want?
And all of this is considering that he was very lucky to not be in a poor family, and was already in some of the best educational institutions locally available already, and had comparatively awesome teachers, without which he wouldn't be where he is today if he hadn't had such advantages in the first place.
But no matter how awesome one teacher is, no single person can overcome a system so large and broken. Without technological innovation that is.
The key problem all along the way is the Society's/Government's belief that everyone has to learn the same things, and that grades in exams mean anything.
Even if you wanted to really learn natural sciences and had the time available, it is just too hard to find good resources to properly learn it. Even attending university courses are hit and miss between amazing and mediocre teachers.
If you go into a large book shop, the science section is tiny, and useless popular science books dominate it without precise experiment descriptions. And then, the only few "serious" books are a huge list of formulas without any experimental motivation.
And if you are lucky to have access to an university library that has open doors, most books are likely to be old and boring as well. Googling for PDFs from university courses is the best bet.
Around 2012 however, he finally saw the light, and started his path to Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment. University was not needed anymore. He could learn whatever he wanted. A vision was born.
To make things worse, for a long time he was tired of seeing poor people begging on the streets every day and not doing anything about it. He thought:which like everything else is likely derived subconsciously from something else, here Schindler's list possibly adapted quote from the Talmud:
He who teaches one thousand, saves one million.
So, by the time he left University, instead of pursuing a PhD in theoretical Mathematics or Physics just for the beauty of it as he had once considered, he had new plans.
We needed a new educational system. One that would allow people to fulfill their potential and desires, and truly improve society as a result, both in rich and poor countries.
And he found out that programming and applied mathematics could also be fun, so he might as well have some fun while doing this! ;-)
So he started Booktree in 2014, a GitLab fork, worked on it for an year, noticed the approach was dumb, and a few years later started building this new version. The repo github.com/booktree/booktree is a small snapshot of Ciro's 2014 brain on the area, there were quite a few similar projects at the time, and most have died.
Ciro is basically a librarian at heart, and wants to be the next:
- Jimmy Wales
- Brewster Kahle
- Tim Berners Lee
- Tim O'Reilly, who once brilliantly described O'Reilly Media as "a lifestyle business that got out of control" [ref]
- Aaron Swartz. Minus suicide hopefully.
"Jimmy Wales: How a ragtag band created Wikipedia" 2005 TED talk
. Source. Original source: www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_wales_the_birth_of_wikipedia.Published as: arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03442.pdf Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior by Park et al.
Can be used to detect single photons.
Richard Feynman likes them, he describes the tube at Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979) at one point.
It uses the photoelectric effect multiple times to produce a chain reaction. In particular, as mentioned at youtu.be/5V8VCFkAd0A?t=74 from Video 1. "Using a Photomultiplier to Detect single photons by Huygens Optics" this means that the device has a lowest sensitive light frequency, beyond which photons don't have enough energy to eject any electrons.
This was the Holy Grail as of 2023, when text-to-image started to really take off, but text-to-video was miles behind.
The most classic thing he did perhaps was creating the LeNet neural network and using it on the MNIST dataset to recognize hand-written digits circ 1998.
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