Ciro Santilli is just too old to understand what the point of that website is compared to Twitter. There must be one, right?
Also, it is impossible to use it on the browser without a cell phone, similar critique as Section "Messaging software that force you to have a mobile phone" but a bit more aggravating, because, well, you would expect creators want people to see their stuff on a browser unlike private messages?
United States Department of Defense by
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-07 +Created 1970-01-01
There is only space for two languages at most in the world: the compiled one, and the interpreted one.
Those two are languages not by any means perfect from a language design point of view, and there are likely already better alternatives, they are only chosen due to a pragmatic tradeoff between ecosystem and familiarity.
Ciro predicts that Python will become like Fortran in the future: a legacy hated by most who have moved to JavaScript long ago (which is slightly inferior, but too similar, and with too much web dominance to be replaced), but with too much dominance in certain applications like machine learning to be worth replacing, like Fortran dominates certain HPC applications. We'll see. Maybe non performance critical scripting languages are easier to replace.
C++ however is decent, and is evolving in very good directions in the 2010's, and will remain relevant in the foreseeable future.
Bash can also be used when you're lazy. But if the project goes on, you will sooner or later regret that choice.
The language syntax in itself does not matter. All that matters is how many useful libraries and tooling it has.
This is how other languages compare:
- C: but cannot make a large codebase DRY without insanity
- Ruby: the exact same as Python, and only strong in one domain: web development, while Python rules everything else, and is not bad on web either. So just kill Ruby, please.
- JavaScript: it is totally fine if Node.js destroys Python and becomes the ONE scripting language to rule them all since Python and JavaScript are almost equally crappy (although JavaScript is a bit more of course).One thing must be said tough:
someobject.not_defined_property
silently returningundefined
rather than blowing up is bullshit. - Go: likely a good replacement for Python. If the ecosystem gets there, will gladly use it more.
- Java: good language, but has an ugly enterprisey ecosystem, Oracle has made/kept the development process too closed, and API patenting madness on Android just kills if off completely
- Haskell: many have tried to learn some functional stuff, but too hard. Sounds really cool though.
- Rust: sounds cool, you will gladly replace C and C++ with it if the ecosystem ramps up.
- C: Microsoft is evil
- Tcl, Perl: Python killed them way back and is less insane
- R, GNU Octave and any other "numerical computing language": all of this is a waste of society's time as explained at: Section "Numerical computing language"
- Swift: Ciro would rather stay away from Apple dominated projects if possible since they sell a closed source operating system
By William Shockley in 1948 also at Bell Labs Murray Hill.
Session reports of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences at Berlin by
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-07 +Created 1970-01-01
Publications by the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
Links to their publications: de.wikisource.org/wiki/Sitzungsberichte_der_K%C3%B6niglich_Preu%C3%9Fischen_Akademie_der_Wissenschaften_zu_Berlin
Notable papers:
Year 2 of the physics course of the University of Oxford by
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-07 +Created 1970-01-01
The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin (1953) by
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-07 +Created 1970-01-01
Silk Road 1: Theory & Practice by Gwern Branwen by
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-07 +Created 1970-01-01
This was the Holy Grail as of 2023, when text-to-image started to really take off, but text-to-video was miles behind.
- microbit/micropython/uart.py: the Micro BIt comes with a UART simulator via the USB connection, it is very convenient: support.microbit.org/support/solutions/articles/19000022103-outputing-serial-data-from-the-micro-bit-to-a-computer To output data to the computer simply use Python
print
. To receive you can e.g. use GNU screen:It appears to be very unreliable however, some times it shows up, sometimes it doesn't.screen /dev/ttyACM0 115200
React function components do produce shorter code. But they are also impossible to understand without knowing what is their corresponding class component.
Hooks were introduced much after classes, and just require less code, so everyone is using them now instead of classes.
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:
- 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
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