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Quantum computing could be the next big thing by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01He's a bit lazy to explain why here, but Googling will be more than enough.
There is a risk it will fizzle and the bubble pop, like any revolution.
But recent developments are making it too exciting to ignore.
Brain-computer interfaces could be the next big thing by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01Main article: Section "Brain-computer interface".
This is one of the deep tech bets that Ciro Santilli would put his money in as of 2020.
How hard could it be? You just have to learn the encoding of the neural spine/eyes/ear, add an invasive device that multiplexes it, and then the benefits could be mind blowing.
Interestingly and obviously, the initial advances in the area are happening for people that have hearing or vision difficulties. Since they already have a deficient sense, you don't lose that much by a failed attempt.
Hearing is likely to be the first since it feels the simplest. Ciro heard there are even already clinical applications there. TODO source.
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:
cirosantilliwith provider ProtonMail which has domain nameproton.me. All lowercase and removing the placeholder characters<and>. 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 work, use direct messages of the following profiles from under Section "Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli":
- 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.
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.
These are people which Ciro never met personally, and who might not know that Ciro exists, or might never had any direct 1-2-1 online contact with Ciro, but Ciro is convinced are his brothers in some other dimension due to how many opinions or behaviours he feels they share:
- Dan Dascalescu due to articles such as:
- English as a universal language by Dan Dascalescu (2008)
- www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/9oujwf/why_archiving_old_threads_is_a_bigger_problem/ see also online forums that lock threads after some time are evil
- web.archive.org/web/20130922192354/http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/reviews/online_services/web_page_archiving see also web archiving
- random posts on OpenStreetMap, and about China: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/29300/legality-status-of-mapping-activity-in-china?page=1&focusedAnswerId=42167#42167
- kenorb see also Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions
- Gwern Branwen
Some other idealists that are a bit further out but with some similarities:
- Sylvain Poirier
- Gabriel Staples
- gabrielstaples.com/#gsc.tab=0
- github.com/ElectricRCAircraftGuy
- stackoverflow.com/users/4561887/gabriel-staplesYes, sir.
Working hard to make the Internet more complete.
At github.com/sponsors/ElectricRCAircraftGuy:I'd really like to work on open source projects more, but the need for a full-time job makes that difficult. If you can sponsor me, you help me get one step closer to my dream of not having to work a traditional "day job" anymore, so I can contribute more to the open source community, do more to educate, and do more to confront new and challenging ideas.
Ciro Santilli also things of those people as being part of his 108 Stars of Destiny troupe.
Ciro sometimes ponders why is it so hard to find people online that you truly love and admire. Maybe it is for similar reasons why it is also hard in the real world: the great variety of human interest, and the great limitation of our attention spans. But online, where we have access to "everyone", shouldn't it should be easier? Not naturally finding such people is perhaps one of the greatest failings of our education system.
Non-technical skills were moved to: Ciro Santilli's skills.
This has not been updated since 2016 after Ciro got a job, because it is too hard to put a number on any skill.
What really matters are the most important projects done by Ciro Santilli.
If Achilles' had his heel, Ciro had his knee.
First during University in Brazil while trying a kick up during the development of Cirodance his knee went a bit weird for a few weeks.
Then, just after arriving in France for École Polytechnique, the boys were playing indoor soccer, and to impress the girls Ciro was playing really hard, even took off his shirt, and suddenly when he was running by himself his knee snapped, he fell and it hurt like hell.
Ciro was on crutches for a few weeks, but the inflammation went away, but then he tried to play more soccer, but the knee was not as stable as before, and once he tried to run full speed, it slipped and hurt him a bit more (less severely) and so he gave up. For some reason it was not visible on the tomography made at the hospital.
Maybe Ciro should have investigated more though, certainly an experienced doctor could have done a hand pressure exam to determine which joint was damaged manually even. That was a medical failure.
So from this day on Ciro gave up on all interesting sports, and confined himself to more repetitive stuff like gym weights and cycling: Section "Ciro Santilli's sport practice". At Polytechnique he was forced to take up swimming as his mandatory sport, that was unbearably boring.
This defect is likely genetic since a close relative had similar problems.
But oh well, his then not-even girlfriend was impressed enough by the soccer or sorry enough for the sucker to marry him, so it worked out.
What if I fail? What if one month in I discover that the project is undoable for some reason? Etc.
Nothing can scare a man as much as allowing him to pursue his dream! Because then he may find his dream was purely an empty illusion.
But still, we must try.
DNS configuration of Ciro Santilli's website by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01AKA how this GitHub page gets served under the domain: cirosantilli.com
Ciro only touches this very rarely, and always forgets and go into great pain whenever a change needs to done, so it is important to document it.
The last change was of 2019-07-07, when Ciro moved from the www subdomain www.cirosantilli.com to the APEX cirosantilli.com. A redirect is setup from the www subdomain to APEX.
GoDaddy DNS entries:
Type Name Value TTL
A @ 185.199.108.153 1 Hour
A @ 185.199.109.153 1 Hour
A @ 185.199.110.153 1 Hour
A @ 185.199.111.153 1 Hour
CNAME www cirosantilli.github.io 1 HourMoved cirosantilli.com to Porkbun 2022-02, unfortunatly records were not automatically updated and domain went down for a bit, upadded to new entries for IPv6 as well which are not documented by GitHub:
TYPE HOST ANSWER TTL PRIORITY OPTIONS
A cirosantilli.com 185.199.108.153 600
A cirosantilli.com 185.199.109.153 600
A cirosantilli.com 185.199.110.153 600
A cirosantilli.com 185.199.111.153 600
AAAA cirosantilli.com 2606:50c0:8000::153 600
AAAA cirosantilli.com 2606:50c0:8001::153 600
AAAA cirosantilli.com 2606:50c0:8002::153 600
AAAA cirosantilli.com 2606:50c0:8003::153 600
CNAME www.cirosantilli.com cirosantilli.github.io 600where the IPs are obtained from: help.github.com/en/articles/setting-up-an-apex-domain#configuring-a-records-with-your-dns-provider (archive).
- Custom domain:
cirosantilli.com - Enforce HTTPS: checked
And the CNAME file is tracked in this repository: CNAME.
However it won't remain like that for long, because it will be migrated to OurBigBook.com, and therefore become a brain dump of society itself.
Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01Ciro Santilli has the power to document stuff in a way that makes using them awesome, as evidenced by his his Stack Overflow contributions (notably those in the best articles by Ciro Santillis), and other online contributions.
If your project does something awesome, hiring Ciro means that more people will be able to notice that it is actually awesome, and use it.
He likes to do this in parallel to contributing new features, quickly switching between his "developer" and "technical documentor" hats.
This means of course that he will develop new features a bit slower than others, but he feel it is more valuable if end users can actually use your project in the first place.
His technique is to provide upfront extremely interactive and reproducible getting started setups that immediately show the key value of the project to users.
He backs those setups with:A prime example of kind of setup is Ciro's Linux Kernel Module Cheat.
- scripts that automate the setup much as possible to make things enjoyable and reproducible
- a detailed description of the environment in which he tested: which OS, version of key software, etc.
- a detailed description of what is expected to happen when you take an action, including known bugs with links to bug reports
- theory and rationale on the sections after the initial getting started, but always finely interspersed with concrete examples
- all docs contained in a Git-tracked repo, with the ability to render to a single HTML with one TOC
- short sentences and paragraphs, interspersed with many headers, lists and code blocks
While he create this setup, he inevitably start to notice and fix:
- bugs
- annoyances on the public interface of the project
- the devs were using 50 different local scripts to do similar things, all of them semi-broken and limited. Every new hire was copying one of those local scripts, and hacking it up further.
- your crappy build / test / version control setup
Exploiting this skill, however, requires you to trust him.
When he tells to managers that he's good at documenting, they always say: great, we need better documentation! But then, one of the following may happen:
- managers forget that they wanted good documentation and just tell him to code new features as fast as possible
- they don't let him own the getting started page, but rather and expect him to try and fix the existing crappy unfixable existing getting started, without stepping on anyone's pride in the process >:-)This makes him tired, and less likely to do a good job.Good documentation requires a large number of small iterative reviews, and detailed review of every line is not always feasible.Too many cooks.
Ciro's passion for documentation and tooling has the effect that if you have crappy documentation and tooling and don't want them to be fixed, Ciro will end up trying to fix those tools instead of doing what you tell him to do anyways, which might lead to him quitting because he can't stand the tools, or you firing him because he's not doing the job you think I should be doing. So please, don't bother hiring Ciro if you have crappy documentation and tooling.
Psychological analysis of why Ciro has this gift: How Ciro Santilli manages to write so much.
Ciro often has the following metaphor in his mind:
New discoveries are like very rough trails where you have to cut through heavy bushes (an original research paper).After a brave explorer goes through this rough path for the first time and charts it, it does become much easier for others to follow it later on, but it still requires a lot of effort to go through them, because there are still a lot of rough bushes and some parts of the map are not very clear (reading and reproducing the research paper to further advance the state of the art).As enough people start going through, the probability that someone with a bad memory ends up walking it increases, and that person ends up pounding the earth into a beaten track and increasing the trail clearance of the beginning of the trail at least (review paper).There finally comes a point when even the local government starts to notice this trail is important, and pays someone to add some stone pavement and rails on the most exposed parts of the trail (post and undergrad education).And at last, Ciro Santilli comes with a bulldozer and creates an autoroute that thousands of people can cruise at high speed without any effort (Q&A, open knowledge HTML websites).
Ciro's documenation obsession is partly part of his braindumping effort of dumping his brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
The markup language of OurBigBook.com.
The one markup language to rule them all?
Documentation at: docs.ourbigbook.com.
The CSS of Ciro Santilli's website looks broken by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01That which does not exist, cannot be broken.
And of course:
Videos of all key physics experiments by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01It 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.
Lists of good experiments to cover be found at: the most important physics experiments.
This project is to a large extent a political endeavour.
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 its 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
Ciro Santilli's full birth name is "Ciro Duran Santilli", with mother's last name "Duran" in the middle as per Brazilian tradition.
But Ciro's usage of "Duran" got gradually dropped to "Ciro Santilli", Ciro's official Italian name, as Ciro moved more and more definitively to Europe.
It can still however be seen in certain online places where Ciro didn't have the patience or power to change it e.g. some old École Polytechnique stuff: gitlab.binets.fr/ciro.duran-santilli/china-dictatorship
Also, don't have multiple names if you can avoid it, it is confusing!
At first, Ciro Santilli was just cycling to work with an extremely shitty bike he bought on a second hand shop. He knew nothing about bicycles, and the seat was way, way too low, the seller should be prosecuted for selling that to him. Ciro later understood that this was even a woman's bicycle with a low top tube! That's what you get for being so cheap.
But then at some point he bought another slightly less cheap touring bicycle, but this time from a much more trustworthy source: a colleague who was leaving the company and moving out, and this one was actually reasonable. It was the right size to start with!!! And so at some point, out of boredom, Ciro started to adventure out of town on weekends to neighbouring villages, and it just felt so good.
Ciro had started by taking his laptop-computer on his backpack, and stopping at a cafe on some nearby town where he would do some coding over the weekends. Especially during winter, drinking tea with a cake as a break during bicycle ride was the best thing ever. In one place, there was even an electric heater that you could sit in front of. But at some point, those rides start being too short, and you start doing longer real rides without your computer. And since those take more time, you generally don't feel like staying on a far place for a very long time. So you end up creating the "real ride" category and "a small ride to get somewhere nice to code" category clearly split.
He had had the "cyclists high" version of "runner's high". A light euphoria in your head, or a pulsating feeling of pleasure in your legs and lower torso. This reminded Ciro of:except that it is not as intense, and does not destroy your life.
- a video where a ex-heroin addict describes taking heroin as having an orgasm in your entire body, also known as "body high"[ref][ref]. In cycling it is mostly a legasm though.
- Trainspotting (1996)'s orgasm scene www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUaXbM_lZj0
Like other drugs:
- it is addictive
- you will have some bad trips, e.g. went the wrong way on a highway and are afraid you are going to die crushed by fast cars, got flat tire on 1 hour ride and have no repair kit, destination cafe is closed and you are hungry, wind got so strong you can barely ride, half an hour in you find out that it is way colder than what you expected.But for every such experience you survive, you learn something to reduce the chances it will happen, and it later feels great to completely master a situation you had suffered previously with.Ciro has also come to crave the need to go back to every bad trip spot, with better planning and circumstances, and make it feel amazing, to get the feeling that he has mastered the spot.
- you will have hangover after a long amazing ride
- the high become less intense the more you ride, and turns into something you have to do to just to feel normal. And that keeps you fit forever :)
Cycling just gives you an amazing sense of freedom! Ciro likes to imagine himself as a migratory duck when he is riding his bike on cold or wet days.
The prospect of being able to reach nice new places keeps the experience fresh for a very long time.
Ciro likes to decide location on a whim on the day prior. He checks the wind to try and ride parallel to it, and then let's his mind wonder, until an image comes up, some some nice place Ciro was to once. And so the next day, he goes in that general direction again.
Each time you try to find a new cool location, and sometimes you just stumble into amazing stuff without knowing about it. Ciro likes to keep open to new experiences. Keep your eyes open, and if something looks curious, just check it out! Talking to locals for tips is also a great way to find new stuff.
One thing that Ciro often feels is rather excited on the way out, and lightly afraid of going futher at each step because of the return. And during the return, there is a greater feeling of worry and resignation, as you are more tired, you've seen what you wanted to, and you just have to get yourself homehow, often going back through paths that you know better. This reminds Ciro of the ending of the film In the Realm of the Senses (1976), in which the sex obsessed couple plays a strangling sex game, and the man says that it hurts too much when she stops strangling him, and so she strangles him to death. She also cut his penis and carried it around in a bag afterwards, but that not relevant to the cycling analogy.
It is funny, but sometimes this gives Ciro the same feeling that he had as a child playing 2D exploration RPGs such Pokemon and Final Fantasy VI as you explore the wild: Ciro can often hear the FF VI overworld soundtrack, or imagine that a Charmeleon is hidden just around the corner of this new towns he's never been to before. Because in the places you live and have walked a million times, you know there is no magic. But in a new place that you're visiting for the first time? Anything is possible there.
The main difference from video games is that the real world is much much more detailed and diverse, and the freedom is much more real. Also you can't just walk into any house or field like in the games, and there are more empty or repetitive areas that can sometimes get boring since they weren't hand designed. And if you die on a car crash there are no continues.
Another type of game that comes to mind are survival games and roguelikes, where it feels amazing to learn things that actually mean the difference between life and death, and conquering the environment. But also permadeath.
It also gives Ciro the magic feeling of awe that he had as a child when walking around his beloved hometown of Santos, São Paulo, Brazil in the sunshine. And sometimes the feeling of excitement that he had as a child before getting gifts for Christmas. Ciro then once watched a YouTube video where ex-heroin addicts describe the feeling of taking heroin (orally, TODO can't find the video anymore, I think it was this guy) exactly like that: the anticipation of getting Christmas gifts, and he instantly understood.
Ciro also likes to pick random gravel from time to time. He believes that his style of route choice reflects Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality: Ciro likes to go where few other people go. And he only needs to go there once to be satisfied, not master and speedrun it afterwards.
Ciro avoids riding at night of course. But when it happens and you are prepared with the safety lights and the route knowledge, it makes for some of the most memorable rides of your life.
As you start cycling, you can feel the endorphins levels rise little by little, and your mind go deeper and deeper into slumber, getting close and closer to the ground, until you reach a point where you feel like you are part of the road. Trainspotting (1996)'s overdose scene comes to mind: www.youtube.com/watch?t=66&v=_IDJpB9de3E
It is amazing how you feel much less cold and hunger when cycling, to the point of being dangerous: always carry some chocolate bars in case you hit the wall! This is especially true at the beginning of the addiction, but with increased drug tolerance and knowledge/awareness/preparation, this starts to feel more normal.
As a friend of Ciro once said: you start to become like a wolf, who knows every cyclable little road in a 30km radius around your home.
As of 2020, Ciro is at that "should I buy a more reasonable road bike" moment. Let's see how it goes. If he does, cycling trips with the bike on a plane are likely.
As a software engineer, trying to repair a mechanical system like his bike reminds Ciro very strongly of how the physical engineering is brutal. Millimetric changes can make huge differences, it is mind blowing! Good lesson to have in mind.
Another thought that often comes to Ciro's mind is that bicycles are not regular possessions because they break a lot. Rather, they must be seen as a kind of transportation tax that you have to pay to feel amazing riding them rather than feel crappy riding a bus or train.
One interesting feeling that Ciro gets from cycling is that it is an intermediate between walking and riding a car. Ciro felt this especially strongly when he lived near work, at a distance that you could either walk or cycle. When you walk, you can just see so much more of the surroundings, it is astonishing. When you cycle, you just go much faster, and you attention is much more towards the front, so you feel surroundings much less. On the other side, cycling allows you to feel different things. E.g. in wider open areas, there isn't much detail to see anyway, so you can better feel those areas on the faster speed of the bike. A similar feeling applies to how pedestrians feel like flies when you are on a bike, just like you must feel like a fly to car drivers. Ciro later learnt that a person of similar literary ability to his, Ernest Hemingway, had a famous related similar quote:
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them.... Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
Although Ciro does not run because of his itchy legs issue, he finds it interest to contrast cycling with running, notably:So maybe the ultimate sport would be to cycle to a good cross-country running location and then run over there?
- cycling has a much higher setup time or wearing appropriate clothes, unlocking your bike, and of course, bike maintenance
- running allows you to go into many more small paths that are not accessible by bike, thus offering a different sense of freedom. You can't go as far however.
Ciro's natural work-time rhythm as of 2020 in his shitty Kross bicycle (2017) was a 60/70km ride every 3 days. Or a 35/40km ride every 2 days. Or one longer 100/120km ride every 4 days. Less than 35km does not count as a ride. His average speed on anything above 70km and relatively flat is always 20km. Always. Ciro once read that that one hunt every three days was a common Paleolithic practice. Cycling is obviously a substitute for hunting. Perhaps the imminent danger of being crashed by a car at all times also has the positive side of playing the "danger" part of the hunt: Video "Why football is the most popular sport in the world by Desmond Morris"
Apocryphally attributed to H. G. Wells as per Quote Investigator quoteinvestigator.com/2022/12/10/bicycle-hope/:
Every Time I See an Adult on a Bicycle, I No Longer Despair for the Future of the Human Race
Running Vs. Cycling | Who Is Faster - GCN Or GTN? by GCN (2017)
Source. Talks about the interesting Bingley Harriers & AC "harriers vs cyclists" race held annually in the UK, in which you can either run or cycle! The course attempts to balance rough uphill terrain where runners get an advantage, with less rough downhill where cyclists have an advantage.Final Fantasy VI (SNES) Overworld theme
. Source. This is what cycling feels like!!! The song is known in the West as "Terra's Theme" and it was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, who composed the entire game, and other entries of the Final Fantasy series.
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!
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/derivative - 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 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
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.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. - Internal cross file references done right:
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
Figure 6. Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents.Live URL: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordateDescendant 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