AlphaPhoenix by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiMR6yAFfyA He obtained PhD from UCSB in Materials, exploring, among other things, growth of a semiconductor called lead selenide.
Aweseome dude filmed a bit of the high end univeresity equipment while doing his thesis.
NileRed by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Great chemistry content. Well detailed setups, notably substance extraction from off-the-shelf products.
Some reviews:
  • the keyboard is kind of crap. Notably the key "a" is very hard to press!!
  • the lack of a sleep state indication LED and "I'm powering on LED" compared to Lenovo is really sad
  • it gets way too hot doing work (Monero bootstrap) with lid closed, likely brought system down
OPSEC: will run only cryptocurrency wallets and nothing else. Will connect to Internet, but never ever to a non clean USB flash drive.
The OPSEC for this machine supposes:
Bootstrap OPSEC:
It must have taken about one week running full time to sync the Monero blockchain which at the time was at about 3.1M blocks! I checked on system explorer, and CPU and internet usage was never maxed out, suggesting simply slow network. But the computer still overheated quite a bit and froze a few times.
Cody'sLab by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This dude is mind blowing. Big respect.
Some of the most impressive videos are the ones in which he goes and extracts metals from minerals himself all the way.
But God, the typography of the channel name is so insane! Why no space???
Shame the academic system wasn't compatible with him: www.reddit.com/r/codyslab/comments/f5531p/codys_qualifications/ Maybe there were safety issues involved though.
Video 1.
What's Been Going On With Cody'sLab? by Cody'sLab (2019)
Source. Cody opening up about some issues he's having life. Notably: being naughty and creative are correlated.
Art by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Stuff that is beautiful but useless because it does not make food or houses cheaper.
Or from Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts:
Without technology, one cannot survive. Without art, one cannot live.
But that sure enough has a Jesus semi-precursor, and likely many others: man shall not live by bread alone.
There is some art however that lives in the fine intersection between beauty and usefulness:
Useful by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Something is useful if it either:
Maybe those are genial. Maybe not. Nostalgia is just too strong to discern. Ciro still goes back to them for rest.
These did not stand the test of time however.
When Ciro was ten years old, he was addicted to 2 cartoons: Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z!
Pokemon had just launched in Brazil in 1999, 2 years after the Japanese launch: br.historyplay.tv/hoje-na-historia/comeca-exibicao-original-do-anime-pokemon (archive) And Dragon Ball, was first aired in 1989 in Japan! My God, those translations took forever back then!
And everyone was playing Pokemon on their Game Boy Color. Ciro was already cheap however, and didn't buy the console despite wanting it, and just played it through his friends handhelds. But maybe this is a good thing. Playing alone sucks.
Mostly video games of course.
First when he was really young, about 5, Ciro played a lot of NES, but he doesn't remember things from that era very well. Contra, Ninja Turtles, Battle Tanks, Duck Hunt, and some modern "real world jet" top to bottom rail shooter (TODO identify) are definitely some of the games he clearly remembers playing, see also: Figure "Five year old Ciro Santilli playing NES on a joystick". Nintendo hard was truly a thing back then.
As an honorable mention, Ciro remembers his teenage/young adult neighbours in Jundiaí playing some DOS games on their computer, notably there was a 3D racing one. This must have been around 1995/1997, so using some of the very earliest GPUs. Those games felt so incredibly advanced, including the required setup to play them, which required some command-line commands. It felt like some kind of black magic! But Ciro didn't really play them however.
Ciro then skipped the SNES and handhelds, which he played only through friends because he was cheap (but also because Brazil is a poor country remember, and imports are pretty expensive). He clearly remembers playing Super Mario World for the SNES and Pokemon on friends' Gameboys of course.
Ciro then went straight to 5th generation with the Nintendo 64 in 1994 which his parents bought for him during a trip to the United States. Once again, because he was cheap, the only game he bought was Super Mario 64, which likely came with the console? He played that game to death.
Then came Ocarina of Time, which blew everyone's minds, and Ciro would go to Blockbuster to rent it for the weekend, and again play to death with his friends. You had to arrive early at Blockbuster to rent it, otherwise other people would rent all copies!!!
The only time Ciro got robbed as of 2020 was when an older teenager stopped his bicycle in front of Ciro and took his rented Golden Eye 64 copy away from his hand, and run off. Poor drug addict.
Ciro always felt that the PS1 had a much uglier aesthetics than the N64, and didn't like the console. Playing a bit of Final Fantasy VI on his memory did stick deeply to his mind however. Ciro later played all good PS1 RPGs on emulation during University of São Paulo during amazing solitary nights.
And on the PC, Ciro was particularly touched by Age of Empires II and Diablo II.
As a young teenager Ciro would also play Counter-Strike with his friends at LAN houses. Playing that game would make Ciro extremely anxious, his hands got all cold, and it was a lot of fun.
After this Ciro grew up and notice that the only fun game is that of becoming become rich and famous in the real world.
This explains however Ciro's tool-assisted speedrun interests.
Outside of video games, Ciro got midly addicted to Magic: The Gathering in his early teens.
Bell circuit by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
A quantum circuit which when fed with input produces the Bell state.
Figure 1.
Quantum circuit that generates the Bell state
. Source.
The fundamental intuition for this circuit is as follows.
First the Hadamard gate makes the first qubit be in a 50/50 state.
Then, the CNOT gate gets controlled by that 50/50 value, and the controlled qubit also gets 50/50 chance as a result.
However, both qubits are now entangled: the result of the second qubit depends on the result of the first one. Because:
Exoticism by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Emmenez-moi by Charles Aznavour (1968)
Source. The ultimate ode to exoticism.
ASCII art by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
It should be a crime to automatically generate ASCII art from images.
For some ASCII art in the Bitcoin blockchain see: ASCII art.
        z

        ^
        |    *------*
        |   /|      /
        |  / |     /|
top -------*------* |
        |  | *----|-*
        |  |/     | /
        |  |      |/
bottom ----*------*
        |  |      |
        +--|------|-----> y
       /   |      |
      /    |      |
  x  /     |      |
    v
          left   right
Code 1.
3D cube plot ASCII art by Ciro Santilli (2021)
ASCII typeface by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Tis term was invented by Ciro Santilli, it refers to ASCII art of text, essentially creating a typeface. in that medium..
ASCII porn by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Collections and overviews:
You just couldn't resist Googling it and clicking this page, could you? You naughty, naughty bearded programmer nerd. Yes, I'm talking to you.
TODO it is quite hard to actually find non-automatically generated ASCII art of people fucking, most of them are just sexy/horny women drawn by bearded nerds, likely and based on sticky physical paper porn magazines from the 80's, good old days.
                                    |
                                    |
   Tank Man                         |
   by Ciro Santilli          00     |
   2021 CC-BY-SA 4.0          \\  +-|-+
                               \\/   /|-+o
                                \\--+ / /o
                               /|\\ |/ /oo
                        |     / ----- /oo
                        |    /       /oo
                        |   +-------+oo
                        |   oo+---+ooo
                 00     |   oo     oo
                  \\  +-|-+
                   \\/   /|-+o
                    \\--+ / /o
                   /|\\ |/ /oo
            |     / ----- /oo
            |    /       /oo
            |   +-------+oo
            |   oo+---+ooo
     00     |   oo     oo
      \\  +-|-+
       \\/   /|-+o
        \\--+ / /o
       /|\\ |/ /oo
      / ----- /oo
     /       /oo
    +-------+oo
    oo+---+ooo
    oo     oo
 xx
 --
/||\
|--|
o||0
 ||
 /\
Code 1.
Tank man ASCII art by Ciro Santilli (2021)
This image depicts the Chinese government fucking 1 million Chinese people in the ass during the Tiananmen Square Protests, which was undoubtedly one of the largest gang bangs of the late 20th century:
Video 1.
The IBM 1401 mainframe runs "Edith" by CuriousMarc
. Source. 1960's punched card ASCII porn. Vintage. EDITH is also mentioned e.g. at: www.threedee.com/jcm/aaa/index.html. No ASCII uploads found however: www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a2pser/the_ibm_1401_mainframe_runs_edith/.

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