Chordate by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2026-08-07
Chordate is a sad clade.
You read the name and think: hmm, neural cords!
But then you see that his is one of its members:
Yup. That's your cousin. And it's a much closer cousin than something like arthropods, which at least have heads eyes and legs like you.
Cloaca by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A single hole that is used for shit, pee and fucking. Amazing.
AMD CPU by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
They have been masters of second sourcing things for a long time! One can ony imagine the complexity of the Intel cross licensing deals.
Jerry Sanders by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
AMD Founder Jerry Sanders Interview (2002)
Source. Source: exhibits.stanford.edu/silicongenesis/catalog/hr396zc0393. Fun to watch.
Amazon custom silicon by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Like Google custom silicon, Amazon server operations are so large that with the slowdown of Moore's law, it started being worth it for them to develop custom in-house silicon to serve as a competitive advantage, not to be sold for external companies. Can you imagine the scale required to justify silicon development investment that is not sold externally!
Amazon is apparently notorious for having bought off many competitors, many of them just to kill off the competition and clear the way, not to actually reuse them.
youtu.be/tfAhTtBlb2Q?t=849 from Video "Jeff Bezos Revealed by Bloomberg (2015)" clearly shows Tim O'Reilly saying that very clearly about Bezos.
I do know of a number of cases in which he [Bezos] has acquired companies in order to take out competitors, potential future competitors. Rather than because he actually wants that business to continue.
Perhaps O'Reilly who is the bookselling business is not the greatest fan of Jeff. But still. My God.
www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf Amazon's Antitrust Paradox by Lina M . Khan from The Yale Law Journal raises this incredible issue.
Proxima Centauri by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
It is so close that we can notice its proper motion, and its distance to us will vary significantly across a few tens of thousands of years!

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!
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
  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:
    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 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    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.
  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