There is basically only one scalable business model in education as of the 2020's: helping teenagers pass university entry exams. And nothing else. Everything else is a "waste" of time.

Perhaps there is a little bit of publicity incentive to helping them win knowledge olympiads as well, but it is tiny in comparison, and almost certainly not a scalable investment. This may also depend on whether universities consider anything but exams, which varies by country.

That marked is completely saturated, and Ciro Santilli refuses to participate in it for moral reasons.

Beyond that, there is no scalable investment. Other non-scalable investments that could allow one to make a lifestyle business are:

Teenagers and young adults:

It is this perfect storm that places this specific section of education in such a bad shape that it is today.

This project is likely to fail. It could become the TempleOS of wikis. The project' autism score is quite high. It might be an impossible attempt at a lifestyle business. But Ciro is beyond caring now. It must be done. Other things that come to mind:

Dangerous combination:and for any crazy person who might wish to join: Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey.

Once the ball starts rolling, these are people who should be contacted.

Basically anything under educational charitable organization counts.

It is also worth having a look under the Wikipedia page for open educational resources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources

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.

If enough people use it, we could let people sell knowledge content through us.

Teachers have the incentive of making open source to get more students.

Students pay when they want help to learn something.

We take a cut of the transactions.

However this goes a bit against our "open content" ideal.

Forced sponsorware would be a possibility.

Would be a bit like Fiverr. Hmmm, maybe this is not a good thing ;-)

Don't like this very much, but if it's the only way...

Maybe focus on job ads like Stack Overflow.

Then:

Maybe we should talk to innovative schools, as they might be more open to such use of technology.

Not a fun of giving up control for such a low-maintenance cost venture... but keeping a list just in case...

More info at: docs.ourbigbook.com#ourbigbook-web-topics

More info at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-dynamic-article-tree

As mentioned at Section "Linux Kernel Module Cheat", this should be merged into that other project.

If Ciro Santilli weren't a natural born activist, he chould have made an excellent intelligence analyst! See also: Section "Being naughty and creative are correlated".

Outside this website:

In this project Ciro Santilli extracted (almost) all Git commit emails from GitHub with Google BigQuery! The repo was later taken down by GitHub. Newbs, censoring publicly available data!

Ciro also created a beautifully named variant with one email per commit: github.com/cirosantilli/imagine-all-the-people. True art. It also had the effect of breaking this "what's my first commit tracker": twitter.com/NachoSoto/status/1761873362706698469

In 2016 Ciro made a script downloaded Facebook profile pictures.

This was possible at the time without any login by using a 2010 profile ID dump from originally announced at: blog.skullsecurity.org/2010/return-of-the-facebook-snatchers since profile picture access was not authenticated.

The profile ID dump was downloadable through a BitTorrent named fbdata.torrent of about 2.8GB, mostly compressed. Doing:on Ubuntu 20.04 gives:This dump widely reported e.g. on Hacker News at: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554558.

At some point however, Facebook finally started to require tokens to view public profile pictures, thus making such further collection impossible, e.g. as of 2021: developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v9.0/user/picture mentions:This is also mentioned e.g. at: stackoverflow.com/questions/11442442/get-user-profile-picture-by-id. This major privacy flaw was therefore finally addressed at some point, making it impossible to reproduce this project.

Ciro downloaded 10 thousand of those pictures, and did facial extraction with: stackoverflow.com/questions/13211745/detect-face-then-autocrop-pictures/37501314#37501314

He then created single a video by joining 10 thousand of those cropped faces which can be uploaded e.g. to YouTube. Ciro later decided it was better to make those videos private however, as sooner later he'd lose his account for it.

Companies like YouTube blocking this kind of content is the type of thing that makes companies take longer to fix such gaping privacy issues, and is a bit like security through obscurity. A video makes it clear to everyone that there is a privacy issue very effectively. But people prefer to hide and look away, and then 99% of people who know nothing about tech get their privacy busted by actual criminals/government spies and never learn about it.

But now that Facebook finally fixed it, it's fine, no need for the video anymore.

Ciro Santilli has enjoyed doing projects dealing with with lots of data! They usually have a large overlap with Ciro Santilli's naughty projects, but not always!

This mini-project walks the category hierarchy Wikipedia dumps and dumps them in various simple formats, HTML being the most interesting!

Scripts used:

This is mostly stuff from before 2016 when Ciro was anxious to document his contributions to get a job.

Most of the projects here are also minor contributions, or Ciro later noticed that the projects were not useful enough to work on and that he was actually wasting his time.

Some of the contributions are subjectively self evaluated based on: