This is a weak point of grep, it can't handle large lines that don't fit fully into memory:
- superuser.com/questions/1703029/is-there-a-limit-for-a-line-length-for-grep-command-to-process-correctly what is the grep line limit?
- unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223078/best-way-to-grep-big-binary-file/758528#758528 Ciro's
bgrepcanon - large not required but mentioning bgrep anyways:
- superuser.com/questions/1368263/use-grep-for-a-long-line-to-get-the-part-of-the-line/1811969#1811969
- unix.stackexchange.com/questions/217936/equivalent-command-to-grep-binary-files/758544#758544
- stackoverflow.com/questions/2034799/how-to-truncate-long-matching-lines-returned-by-grep-or-ack/77263826#77263826
- stackoverflow.com/questions/9988379/how-to-grep-a-text-file-which-contains-some-binary-data leaving this one alone for now
- stackoverflow.com/questions/65674717/how-to-check-if-a-binary-file-is-contained-inside-another-binary-from-the-linux search pattern from file
Extracted from this Stack Overflow answer.
Contains a lot of different flag masks.
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com Financial crime preventive measures by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16Crazy shady crypto people seem to like Ciro Santilli, so this is in order.
Giving to Ciro Santilli is the worst possible way to launder your money, as donations amounts are clearly publicly disclosed (though not donor identities if they with to remain anonymous), and clear records kept of every donation made (including private note of donor identities if known). Also suspicious donations are promptly reported to the authorities.
Donation refunds upon donor's requests are only made at our discretion, and may be declined, unless required by law of course. This is to reduce the risks of us unknowingly serving as money mules or aiding money laundering.
Ciro Santilli believes that he is not require to report large donations to either:But note that Ciro will preventively report if there are any further suspicious aspects to any donations received.
- charities have to report anonymous donations of £25,000 or more as "serious incident", but Ciro Santilli does not have a registered charity: www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-report-a-serious-incident-in-your-charity, related: docs.ourbigbook.com/project-governance
- dealers selling goods over 10,000 euros for cash must make a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) www.gov.uk/guidance/money-laundering-regulations-high-value-dealer-registration. However Ciro Santilli does not sell any goods, only provides services, and services are excluded from the report requirements
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com 1000 Monero donation by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16On 2024-03-18, Ciro Santilli received an anonymous 1000 Monero donation (worth ~126k USD at the time) to his self-custody wallet, which pushed him over his public plea for 100k USD goal to quit his job for one year.
The transaction ID was
5c6af4df39021f3a4a053ef169c9b397e6d6bf6c7e557d3f08e4e1675d7d3eed to self hist custody wallet with address 47kzoCeRMTohJhADejtsGmGimvQKzNsuST7u2aVhAD1VX5WDbh3v1FPUoJoTK3NTJVUgAM3dWCqC4Tmp9KSQaJi6GGYWgYn. This is a roof generated by his Monero wallet: InProofV2AVFBmFhofH4GoG5NsaDutkdNWRTaEhuFgHpHTkpprRmuZ54B8FdUwFp71gqfp2jJpDUrhB3GCzZ2p8CNbh2TW1Z88ShmYWEwtkZFLccEMw9PhH3vWcMVo9mKaRsH3WgJXqq9.Since this donation is so huge, it deserves some comments and a bit of a retrospective. The path to this donation has been an interactive one, and it is described below.
After starting the OurBigBook Project, Ciro started the sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com page on cirosantilli.com and setup some donation methods to help support the project, and possibly try to capitalize a bit on Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.
His sponsors are absolutely crazy amazing people, but Ciro simply could attract a large enough amount of small sponsors to reach life changing amounts under those circumstances. This is partly due to Video "And I am not and never have been 'familiar' scene from The Big Short (2015)".
As such, Ciro came to realize more and more that the best approach would be to reach out to a smaller number of rich people, given that the things he works on niche, but may appeal to a particularly wealthy tranche of the population: STEM people. Other experiences and ideas that contribute to this realization are:
- the creation of the OurBigBook Fellowship, which as of writing consisted of a single donation. During this exercise, Ciro Santilli gave about 2k USD to help a promising Brazilian student. In doing so, he understood a lot about what goes on inside a "rich person's" head when considering a donation
- it is hard to decide who to donate to and find those people. In part because as soon as you create a public donation system with an application process, people will game the fuck out of it. Perhaps the Lost Horse LLC approach of "they find you" is the best?
- it is basically impossible to donate more than 1% of your net worth if you have a family. Even 1% you may be discouraged about. Perhaps with reason due to previous bad donations they have made.
- the increasing wealth inequality of this world, perhaps one of the greatest problems we now face
Then, whenever a larger donation would come through and surprise Ciro, he would improve his sponsor page statements. First a private 150 USD by an awesome sponsor. Then the 2023-09 ~810$ Bitcoin one. Finally came the 2023-11-20 100 Monero one. And it was that one that pushed Ciro to start his "100k USD = 1 year campaign".
Finally on 2024-03-13, Ciro received an anonymous 10 Monero donation to self-custody wallet. He had clearly stated that one should make a test donation to that wallet before the big one, so 10 Monero felt like it could be the test one. Ciro communicated the reception at: mastodon.social/@cirosantilli/112112988286298258 and twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1769464788009066710:
I cashed out 10 XMR on @AgoraDesk for ~1,375 USD, and kept some change in the wallet for fun. This donation confirms that my self-hosted wallet and cash-out work just fine, so feel free to drop those millions whenever you want Mr. Anon :-)
Over the next few days, Ciro checked his wallet more often than his previously self imposed once a weekend max, and as expected, he found the big one on a slightly despaired around midnight sleepless night (partly due to parenthood). He was feeling particularly bored and a bit sad with his work life that night. And there it was. 1000 Monero on the wallet. Needless to say, not much sleep was done on that evening!!!
1000 Monero donation (~126,000 USD) reaction video by Ciro Santilli
. Source. 
Still of the reaction video after finding out about the big donation around about midnight
. Source. 
The following days were also tense, with Ciro having a trial by fire on selling large amounts of Monero on the UK, which is not trivial as it had been banned from all major exchanges. But he managed. Further notes on that at: www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/17arz9f/converting_xmr_to_gbp_in_the_uk/. Ciro also decided to keep about 200 Monero around just for fun as a crazy moonshot.
Another major factor likely Ciro having published his article: Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" in 2019. This is something he wrote entirely for fun during an intense 3 week side-time binge in 2019, though some large updates were made later on. It was this article that likely some crypto-dude attention to Ciro Santilli's profile. As of 2024, there is said to be about 20 crypto billionaires, so perhaps there are about 2000 crypto 10 millionaires[ref], which is the minimum net worth for a donation of 100k USD to be feasible (1% mark). And perhaps a reasonable number of them are just nerds who got rich, and want to improve the world. There are two lessons from this:
- follow your instincts, always. If something seems mega fun and quick, do it!
- making money from a few rich people (or entities like organizations) is easier than working for a bunch of poor people, because you have to convince less people. If you reach many poor people however, things are much more stable as you can lose a few customers and still be fine
Another factor in the donation, Ciro Santilli believes, is that many rich people thing that education is bullshit. Many successful people are neurodiverse and as such, it is only natural that a large number of rich people want to improve our educational system, which tends to be the very epitome of "boring and average normality" which Ciro Santilli so much detests. This can also be seen in people such as:
- Michael J. Saylor and his Saylor Academy
- Peter Thiel and his Thiel Fellowship
Announcements:
- pre-announcement before everything was clearly documented online:
- main announcement
Amazing reactions from the Monero Reddit community: www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1brryao/ciro_santilli_received_a_1000_xmr_donation_to/These people have some serious trust issues!!! Perhaps not surprising from a privacy coin community. Ciro's Twitter post: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1775961945193017790
geonic_comments:Reaction video is fake. Very bad acting.
Inaeipathycomments:-TrustyDwarf-comments:rbrunner7comments:
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com 1000 Monero donation Anonymity of the donation by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16The first sensation Ciro Santilli got was as if God himself had come down from heaven to toy with an unsuspecting human being. God running an experiment. Or perhaps an AGI that had already secretly taken over. Not very different.
Like with God, this was the answer to Ciro's prayers on Twitter. A one way conversation that leaves you uncertain of the details.
Whichever the case, Ciro is going to put on the best show he possibly can for your money, documenting every step along the way in usual fashion!
Ciro ran this over and over in his head, and the only big risk of anonymity is that if this money is ever proven to be from the proceeds of crime, he would have to give it back to the government and "lose one year's salary he would have otherwise gained".
However, that worst case scenario is not bad enough. If anything, it was a great excuse to quit his job for his family and wife is already worth it. Ciro could do it and survive, though situation would deteriorate slowly. But he was a coward previously.
Ciro does however feel that there is good chance that it is legitimate.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions are exceptional, he's amazing right! He deserves this! Of course, there is danger in this rationale which scammers could exploit. But bro, if scammers are going to send 100k USD to me, then please continue to do so!
Also which criminal would be stupid enough to donate proceeds of crime to a highly public person who is going to clearly announce it?
Just be warned, if you come with a baseball bat trying to get the money back by force, I will call the police immediately and by God you will not get it!!
Given this, Ciro just keeps thinking about the likely profile of the donor:
But the "why anonymous if not criminal" question remains. Generally rich people want recognition both for:Two options that come to mind:
- reputation washing
- to make their donation mechanisms higher profile which allows raising more and attracting better candidates and reach greater impact
- rich crypto dude that doesn't want thieves to know he is rich
- more public rich person that doesn't want association with Ciro Santilli's naughty projects, notably Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, but perhaps also CIA 2010 covert communication websites, which could hurt business.
- crazy rich person with a philosophy of "if they knew who I was it might interfere with what they do". AKA a God.
Ciro Santilli has sometimes wasted time with low impact projects such as those listed at Ciro Santilli's minor projects instead of doing higher impact projects such as those mentioned at: Section "The most important projects Ciro Santilli wants to do".
But maybe "Everything you did brought you where you are now." applies, maybe it is during the "low impact activities" that one gets the inspiration and experience required for the "high impact ones".
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats
. Data compiled for the plot: ciro-santilli-stack-overflow-stats.csv
- top obtained manually from pages such s=as: stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2023-01-01
- answer count obtained with this Stack Exchange Data Explorer data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/433214/count-of-answers-by-user-over-time and then manually pasting it in.
- total questions obtained with: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1882511/questions-asked-per-year-on-stack-overflow#resultSets
Plot generated with gnuplot with ciro-santilli-stack-overflow-stats.gnuplot
Related announcements:
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions have, unsurprisingly, centered around the subjects he has worked with: systems programming and web development, and necessary tooling to get those done, such as Git, Python, Bash and Ubuntu.
His best answers are listed at: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Stack Overflow has been the initial centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, until Ciro noticed that GitHub might be potentially even more effective for it.
In Stack Overflow Ciro likes to:
- answer important questions found through Google which he needs to solve an actual problem he has right now, and for which none of the existing answers satisfied him, and close duplicates.
- monitor less known tags which very few people know a lot about and where the knowledge sharing desperately lacking, but in which Ciro specializes and therefore has some uncommon knowledge to share
In practice it also happens that Ciro:
- Googles for his own answers to remember some detail he wrote down but with slightly different terms that were closer to mind at the time, and find other similar questions for which he has the perfect answer.
- learns something new by chance, e.g. some new flashy feature of a new version of the C++ standard, thinks "this is awesome, there must be a Stack Overflow question for it", and then there is a question and he answers it
When he gets an upvote on one of his more obscure answers, Ciro often re-reads it, and often finds improvements to be made and makes them.
He doesn't like to refresh the homepage looking for easy reputation on widely known subjects. See also: online forums that lock threads after some time are evil.
The result is that Ciro ends up getting relatively a lot of reputation without much work! The term passive income, much beloved by fake investment gurus, comes to mind. But now it's "passive reputation"! And it is useless! Yay!
For this reason, Necromancer is Ciro's favorite badge (get 5 upvotes on a question older than 60 days), and as of July 2019, he became the #1 user with the most of this badge. Announcement on Twitter.
The number two at the time was VonC (see also: Section "Epic Stack Overflow users"), who had about 16 times more answers than Ciro in total! From this query: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1072396?&Date=2019-07-01&UserId=895245 it can be seen that as of July 2019, 1216 out of his 1329 answers were answered 60 days after the questions and constitute potential necromancers! Compare that to VonC's 1643 potential necromancers out of 21767 answers!
VonC eventually took back the lead in 2022, dude's a machine!!! twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1546389532014247936
Someone at Ciro's work once said something along:and this does ring true in Stack Overflow as well. When you are answering stuff, it means that you either didn't know, or that the information wasn't well available, and so your specific application is progressing slowly because of that. Once the generic prerequisites are well solved and answered, you will spend much more time on your business specific things rather than anything else that can be factored out across projects, and so you will get more "directly useful work" done, and less Stack Overflow answers. Of course, without the prior research in place, you can't get the final product done either.
In terms of per year reputation ranks, Ciro was in the top 100 in of the 2018 ranking with 38,710 reputation gained in that year: stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2018-01-01?sort=reputationchange&page=4 (archive). He reached top 50 in 2022. Note that daily reputation is mostly capped to 200 per day, leading to a maximum 73000 per year. It is possible to overcome this limit either with bounties or accepts, and Ciro finds it amazing that some people actually break the 73k limit by far with accepts, e.g. Gordon Linoff reached 135k in 2018 (archive)! However, this is something that Ciro will never do, because it implies answering thousands and thousands of useless semi duplicate questions as fast as possible to get the accept. Ciro's reputation comes purely from upvotes on important question, and is therefore sustainable without any extra effort once achieved. Interestingly, Ciro appeared on top of the quarter SE rankings around 2019-11: web.archive.org/web/20191112100606/https://stackexchange.com/leagues but it was just a bug ;-)
There is no joy like answering an old question, and watching your better answer go up little by little until it dominates all others.
Stack Overflow reputation is of course, in itself, meaningless. People who contribute to popular subjects like web development will always have infinitely more reputation than those that contribute to low level subjects.
What happens on the specialized topics though is that you end up getting to know all the 5 users who contribute 95% of the content pretty soon as you study those subjects.
Like everything that man does, the majority of Ciro's answers are more or less superficial subjects that many people know but few have the patience to explain well, or they are updates to important questions reflecting upstream developments. But as long as they save 15 minutes from someone's life, that's fine.
There is great beauty when you are involved in a programming problem, and you suddenly remember: wait, I answered something related a few years ago! And especially so when you can go back and improve your old answer with new insight. This has great value, because when you were more newbie, you would have typed different words into Google Search than you would now. So by updating posts from when you were a newbie, you are helping other newbies more, as they are more likely to be also searching for those keywords. It is also very nice to have some head start on the answer's upvote count and not have to bootstrap yet another answer from 0 upvotes and have to go through all the competition!
For example, Ciro's most upvoted answer as of July 2019 is stackoverflow.com/questions/18875674/whats-the-difference-between-dependencies-devdependencies-and-peerdependencies/22004559#22004559 was written when he spent his first week playing with NodeJS (he was having a look at Overleaf, later merged into Overleaf, for education), which he didn't touch again for several years, and still hasn't "mastered" as of 2019! This did teach a concrete life lesson to Ciro however: it is impossible to know what is the most useful thing you can do right now very precisely. The best bet is to follow your instincts and do as much awesome stuff as you can, and then, with some luck, some of those attempts will cover an use case.
Ciro tends to take most pride on his systems programming answers, which is a subject that truly relatively few people know about. He likes it when he goes insanely deep into a subject, way beyond what OP had in mind, exposing full root causes and broader causes, see e.g.:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/1778538/how-many-gcc-optimization-levels-are-there/30308151#30308151
- stackoverflow.com/questions/34519521/why-does-gcc-create-a-shared-object-instead-of-an-executable-binary-according-to/55704865#55704865
- stackoverflow.com/questions/8352535/how-does-kernel-get-an-executable-binary-file-running-under-linux/31394861#31394861
Ciro also derives great joy from his "media related answers" (3D graphics, audio, video), which are immensely fun to write, and sometimes borderline art, see answers such as those under "OpenGL" and "Media" under the best articles by Ciro Articles or even simpler answers such as:
Figure 3. Ciro knows how to convert videos to GIFs.- Stereo "tone-generator" for linux?, related: FFmpeg sound synthesis
There is something of greater value in perfectly presented technical knowledge, that goes beyond than simply getting something done. The pleasure of understanding and mastering something, and perhaps of the explanation itself. Sometimes when answering, Ciro feels like a tailor, where ASCII is his cloth. See also: Section "The art of programming", Section "Physics and the illusion of life".
Ciro's deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: OurBigBook.com. So it is a bit funny to think that after all time Ciro spent on the website, he actually wants to destroy it and replace it with something better. There can be no innovation without some damage. It also led to Ciro's creation of Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script.
After answering so many questions, he ended up converging to a more or less consistent style, which he formalized at:Like any other style guide, this answer style guide, once fully incorporated and memorized, allows Ciro to write answers faster, without thinking about formatting issues.
- meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18614/style-guide-for-questions-and-answers/326746#326746. Key self-quote:
- meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903. Question title style only. After a few years later more people agreeing with that post which now had -12 votes: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422082/should-we-add-option-use-complete-sentences-to-first-answers-queue
Ciro also made a question title style guide: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903 but for some reason the Stack Overflow community prefers their semi-defined title meta-language to proper English. Go figure.
Ciro started contributing to Stack Overflow in 2012 when he was at École Polytechnique.
Like all things that end up shaping the course of one's life, Ciro started contributing without thinking too much about it.
His first answer was to the LaTeX question: Standalone diagrams with TikZ?, which reflects the fact that this happened while Ciro was reaching his Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment.
Ciro's first upvote was for his 2012 question: How to run a Python script portably without specifying its full path?
When he started contributing, Ciro was still a newbie. One early event he will never forget was when someone mentioned a "man page", and Ciro commented saying that there was a typo!
When Ciro reached 15 points and gained the ability to upvote, it felt like a major milestone, he even took a screenshot of the browser! 1k, 10k and 100k were also particularly exciting. When the 100k cup (archive) arrived in 2018, Ciro made a show-off Facebook post (archive). At some point though, your brain stops caring, and automatically filters out any upvotes you get except on the answers that you are really proud of and which don't yet have lots of upvotes. The last remaining useless gamed achievement that Ciro looked forward to was legendary (archive), and which he achieved on 2021-02-16.
Ciro Santilli with his Stack Overflow 100k reputation cup
. From the start, Ciro's motivations for contributing to Stack Overflow have been a virtuous circle of:
- save the world through free education
- It feels especially amazing when people in the real world start taking note of you, and either close friends tell you straight out that you're a Stack Overflow God, or as you slowly and indirectly find out that less close know or came to you due to your amazing contributions.
It is also amazing when you start having a repertoire of answers, and as you are writing a new answer, you remember: "hey, the knowledge of that answer would be so welcome here", and so you link to the other answer as well at the perfect point. This somewhat achieves does what OurBigBook.com aims to do: for each small section of a tutorial, gather the best answers by multiple people.
Another one is Aaron Hall, who is also very high on the necromancer list, answers in Python which is a topic Ciro cares about, and states on his profile:so another necromancer.
Follow me on Twitter and tell me what canonical questions you would like me to respond to!
Way to go.
Ciro also asks some questions on a ratio of about 1 question per 10 answers. But Ciro's questions tend to be about extremely niche that no one knows/cares about, and a high percentage of them ends up getting self answered either at asking time or after later research.
Some fun reactions to Ciro's Stack Overflow activity:
- Eric B comments[ref] on Ciro's answer to the question "What does multicore assembly language look like?":
Holy shit, Ciro made it his masters degree to write OP an answer. What a long and detailed answer, thanks!
Centerpiece: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship
Fully rendered at: github.com/china-dictatorship
The campaign has centered around publishing censored keywords on his Stack Overflow username, thus using his considerable Stack Overflow presence to sabotage the website in China. Here is an early web archive.
Chrysanthemum Xi Jinping with 六四 spice added by Ciro Santilli
. This was one of the profile pictures that Ciro Santilli used as part of his campaign.
Ciro later went on to prefer the "unmodified" Xi Jinping photo cover of some edition Xi Jinping Though, which also reminds Ciro very much of religious devotional pictures, e.g. those of Li Hongzhi.
Ciro understood that the best propaganda against a dictatorial enemy is recontextualized unmodified propaganda produced by the enemy itself. Their propaganda speaks for itself
Like most people in the West, Ciro has always been for political freedom of speech, and therefore against the Chinese government's policies.
However, the seriousness of the matter only fully dawned on him in 2015 when, his mother-in-law, a then a 63-year-old lady, was put into jail for 15 days for doing Falun Gong.
And all of this was made 100 times worse because Ciro deeply loves several aspects of China, such as food, language, art and culture, and saw it all being destroyed by the Communists: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/does-ciro-santilli-hate-china
The rationale of this is to force the Chinese government to either:
- leave things as they are, and let censored keywords appear on Stack Overflow (most likely scenario)
- block Stack Overflow, and lose billions of dollars with worse IT technology
- disable the Great Firewall
In the beginning, this generated some commotion, but activity reduced as novelty wore off, and as he collected the reply to all possible comments at: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship.
This campaign has led him to have an insane profile view/reputation ratio, since many people pause to look at his profile. He is point "A" at the top right corner of Figure 2. "Scatter plot of Stack Overflow user reputation vs profile views in March 2019 with Ciro Santilli marked as A":
Ciro feels that the view count started increasing more slowly since 2020 compared to his reputation, likely every single Chinese user has already viewed the profile.
Further analysis has been done at: stats.stackexchange.com/questions/376361/how-to-find-the-sample-points-that-have-statistically-meaningful-large-outlier-r
Ciro Santilli with a stone carved Budai in the Feilai Feng caves near the Lingyin Temple in Hangzhou taken during his legendary 2012 touristic trip to China
. Will he ever be able to go to China again to re-experience such marvelous locations?Water Margin tribute to Chinese dissidents by Ciro Santilli (2022)
Source. More information: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/water-marginMajor 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)
Top one: OurBigBook.com.
Actual section at: Section "OurBigBook.com"
Ciro Santilli is very happy to meet people with related interests, he really loves his like-minded online friends. Even if you don't have something a specific goal in mind for the contact, please just say hi.
To contact Ciro publicly about any general subject that is not covered in a more specific GitHub repository, including saying hi or suggestions about his website either:
- create a GitHub issue at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/new or Giscus thread
- at mention Ciro's main Twitter account
For comments about China, first read:
and then create a GitHub issue at: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/new
Publicly viewable contact is preferred if possible to more effectively share Ciro's wisdom with the world.
But if you feel more comfortable with private contact, no problem, either:
- email: username
cirosantilliwith provider ProtonMail which has domain nameproton.me. Note that Ciro also controls the Gmail address with that same username, and keep in mind that dots are ignored in Gmail addresses. But ProtonMail preferred because why should we give our private minds to the CIA by default? Push notifications disabled. - Signal: username
cirosantilli.89signal.me/#eu/BuJjV0enXYTOnFFc1FZV5LFcWodL1a2Oy9VZ5uyQU7xrYxqw+npIcaHBqghWudrI. 89 is a reference to Ciro Santilli's birth year 1989. Push notifications enabled, but treat like email unless we are actively chatting back and forth.
For other less good methods that will also likely work, use direct messages of the following profiles from under Section "Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli":Ciro's Twitter DMs are also open, but note that Ciro receives endless Chinese language SPAM there which Twitter is doing nothing to combat, so it's not as reliable.
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli
- Reddit: www.reddit.com/user/cirosantilli
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/cirosantilli
- Telegram: telegram.me/cirosantilli. Note that end-to-end encryption is present on secret chats only, which don't have device sync. Ridiculous.
If you are a privacy freak or are going to tell Ciro state secrets Ciro has this GNU Privacy Guard public key: pubkey.gpg, but it's not something that he has ever really used.
Disqus comments were removed from his website in 2019-05-04, a manual dump is available here, removal rationale at: why Ciro Santilli removed Disqus comments from his website in 2019-05-04.
Prototype: github.com/cirosantilli/Urho3D-cheat
Top Down 2D Continuous Game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)
Source. Source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/Urho3D-cheat.
Screenshot of the basketball stage of Ciro's 2D continuous game
. Source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/rl-game-2d-grid. Big kudos to game-icons.net for the sprites.Less good discrete prototype: github.com/cirosantilli/rl-game-2d-grid YouTube demo: Video 1. "Top Down 2D Continuous Game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)".
Top Down 2D Discrete Tile Based Game with C++ SDL and Boost R-Tree for Reinforcement Learning by Ciro Santilli (2017)
Source. The goal of this project is to reach artificial general intelligence.
A few initiatives have created reasonable sets of robotics-like games for the purposes of AI development, most notably: OpenAI and DeepMind.
However, all projects so far have only created sets of unrelated games, or worse: focused on closed games designed for humans!
What is really needed is to create a single cohesive game world, designed specifically for this purpose, and with a very large number of game mechanics.
Notably, by "game mechanic" is meant "a magic aspect of the game world, which cannot be explained by object's location and inertia alone" in order to test the the missing link between continuous and discrete AI.
The question then becomes: do we have enough computational power to simulation a game worlds that is analogous enough to the real world, so that our AI algorithms will also apply to the real world?
To reduce computation requirements, it is better to focus on a 2D world at first. Such world with the right mechanics can break any AI, while still being faster to simulate than a 3D world.
The initial prototype uses the Urho3D open source game engine, and that is a reasonable project, but a raw Simple DirectMedia Layer + Box2D + OpenGL solution from scratch would be faster to develop for this use case, since Urho3D has a lot of human-gaming features that are not needed, and because 2019 Urho3D lead developers disagree with the China censored keyword attack.
Simulations such as these can be viewed as a form of synthetic data generation procedure, where the goal is to use computer worlds to reduce the costs of experiments and to improve reproducibility.
Ciro has always had a feeling that AI research in the 2020's is too unambitious. How many teams are actually aiming for AGI? When he then read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) it said the same. AGI research has become a taboo in the early 21st century.
Related projects:
- github.com/deepmind/lab2d: 2D gridworld games, C++ with Lua bindings
Related ideas:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHFrhIAj0ME?t=4183 Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021) Part 1: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain :)
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUjc1WuyPT8 AI alignment: Why It's Hard, and Where to Start by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2016)
Bibliograpy:
- agents.inf.ed.ac.uk/blog/multiagent-learning-environments/ Multi-Agent Learning Environments (2021) by Lukas Schäfer from the Autonomous agents research group of the University of Edinburgh. One of their games actually uses apples as visual represntation of rewards, exactly like Ciro's game. So funny. They also have a 2d continuous game: agents.inf.ed.ac.uk/blog/multiagent-learning-environments/#mpe
- humanoid robot simulation
- Section "AI training game"
- Section "Software-based artificial life"
OpenAI Plays Hide and Seek... and Breaks The Game! by Two Minute Papers (2019)
Source. Commentary of OpenAi's 2019 hide and seek paper. OpenAI does some similar simulations to what Ciro wants, but TODO do they publish source code for all of them? If not Ciro calls bullshit on non-reproducible research, and even worse due to the fake "Open" in the name. Does this repo contain everything?Much bigger simulation, AIs learn Phalanx by Pezzza's Work (2022)
Source. 2d agents with vision. Simple prey/predator scenario.It is unbelievable that you can't find easily on YouTube recreations of many of the key physics/chemistry experiments and of common laboratory techniques.
Experiments, the techniques required to to them, and the history of how they were first achieved, are the heart of the natural sciences. Without them, there is no motivation, no beauty, no nothing.
School gives too much emphasis on the formulas. This is bad. Much more important is to understand how the experiments are done in greater detail.
The videos must be completely reproducible, indicating the exact model of every experimental element used, and how the experiment is setup.
A bit like what Ciro Santilli does in his Stack Overflow contributions but with computers, by indicating precise versions of his operating system, software stack, and hardware whenever they may matter.
It is understandable that some experiments are just to complex and expensive to re-create. As an extreme example, say, a precise description of the Large Hadron Collider anyone? But experiments up to the mid-20th century before "big science"? We should have all of those nailed down.
We should strive to achieve the cheapest most reproducible setup possible with currently available materials: recreating the original historic setup is cute, but not a priority.
Furthermore, it is also desirable to reproduce the original setups whenever possible in addition to having the most convenient modern setup.
Someone with enough access to labs has to step up and make a name for themselves through the huge effort of creating a baseline of amazing content without yet being famous.
Until it reaches a point that this person is actively sought to create new material for others, and things snowball out of control. Maybe, if the Gods allow it, that person could be Ciro.
Tutorials with a gazillion photos and short videos are also equally good or even better than videos, see for example Ciro's How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in bacteria for an example that goes toward that level of perfection.
The Applied Science does well in that direction.
This project is one step that could be taken towards improving the replication crisis of science. It's a bit what Hackster.io wants to do really. But that website is useless, just use OurBigBook.com and create videos instead :-)
We're maintaining a list of experiments for which we could not find decent videos at: Section "Physics experiment without a decent modern video".
Ciro Santilli visited the teaching labs of a large European university in the early 2020's. They had a few large rooms filled with mostly ready to run versions of several key experiments, many/most from "modern physics", e.g. Stern-Gerlach experiment, Quantum Hall effect, etc.. These included booklets with detailed descriptions of how to operate the apparatus, what you'd expect to see, and the theory behind them. With a fat copyright notice at the bottom. If only such universities aimed to actually serve the public for free rather than hoarding resources to get more tuition fees, university level education would already have been solved a long time ago!
One thing we can more or less easily do is to search for existing freely licensed videos and add them to the corresponding Wikipedia page where missing. This requires knowing how to search for freely licensed videos:
- Wikimedia Commons video search, e.g.: commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=spectophotometry&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=video
- YouTube creative commons video search
Related:
- relevant University YouTube channels:
- K-12 demo projects:
- books:
- Practical approach series by Oxford University Press: global.oup.com/academic/content/series/p/practical-approach-series-pas
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