Special-purpose acquisition company by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-25 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-25 +Created 1970-01-01This is some fishy, fishy business.
Once upon a time, this must have been a nice covered market.
But as of 2020, it is completely surrounded by extremely poor people, to the point that it makes you scared if you stand out in any way by showing any kind of middle/upper class wealth, or being a foreigner.
The market is basically a touristic spot that no person in Sao Paulo will ever go to (unless they are young, single, and can just walk in there by themselves) in the middle of this surreal environment.
In 2020 Ciro was there with his wife on a touristic visit. Living in Europe at the time, he felt even more privileged. So they went to a fruit stand, and the man started giving his wife amazing free samples of very exotic fruit, some of which Ciro had never tasted himself, without saying the price. It did feel like he was giving out too much for free. Then Ciro decided of course to buy some more fruits to pay for the show, which was a nice show. Then while buying, it came out a bit more expensive than would have been reasonable, but Ciro was too dazzled by the speed and noises, and he paid for it. Later on, he told his wife about it, and how he felt that they had added some ultra-expensive bulk fruits that were of a clearly lower level than the gold nuggets of the free samples (especially for Brazil's cost standards). The presenter was an extremely crafty con artist, and Ciro felt like they had specifically preyed on Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality, because it was apparent that those men were underprivileged and fighting for their living day by day with those over-expensive fruits. This was an extremely valuable lesson, Ciro was glad that it was learnt at a relatively low cost on that occasion.
One of the simplest known seems to be: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax
www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/articles/a_00220.html "The simplest multicellular organism unveiled" from 2013 mentions Tetrabaena socialis.
Then of course: Caenorhabditis elegans is a relatively simple and widely studied model organism.
Nicole King (UC Berkeley, HHMI) 1: The origin of animal multicellularity by iBiology (2015)
Source. - youtu.be/1v6cgSkiHik?t=513 multicellularity is polyphyletic, e.g. evolved separately on plants, fungi and animals.
- youtu.be/1v6cgSkiHik?t=668 describes how unicellular organism choanoflagellates form colony, and how animals are characterized by certain key types of cellular interaction: adhesion, communication, regulation (cell differentiation) and extra cellular matrix production
It ain't perfect, but it's decent enough.
From a technical point of view, it can do anything that Microsoft Windows can. Except being forcefully installed on every non-MacOS 2019 computer you can buy.
Ciro Santilli's conversion to Linux happened around 2012, and was a central part of Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment, since it fundamentally enables the discovery and contribution to open source software. Because what awesome open source person would waste time porting their amazing projects to closed source OSes?
Ciro's modest nature can be seen as he likes to compare this event Buddha's Great Renunciation.
Linux should track glibc and POSIX command line utilities in-tree like BSD Operating System, otherwise people have no way to get the thing running in the first place without blobs or large out-of-tree scripts! Another enlightened soul who agrees.
Particularly interesting in the history of Linux is how it won out over the open competitors that were coming up in the time: MINIX (see the chat) and BSD Operating System that got legally bogged down at the critical growth moment.
You must watch this: truth Happens advertisement by Red Hat.
xkcd 619: Supported Features
. Source. This perfectly illustrates Linux development. First features that matter. Then useless features.Section type:
sh_type == SHT_SYMTAB.Common name: "symbol table".
First the we note that:
sh_link=5sh_info=6
For
SHT_SYMTAB sections, those numbers mean that:- strings that give symbol names are in section 5,
.strtab - the relocation data is in section 6,
.rela.text
A good high level tool to disassemble that section is:which gives:
nm hello_world.o0000000000000000 T _start
0000000000000000 d hello_world
000000000000000d a hello_world_lenThis is however a high level view that omits some types of symbols and in which the symbol types . A more detailed disassembly can be obtained with:which gives:
readelf -s hello_world.oSymbol table '.symtab' contains 7 entries:
Num: Value Size Type Bind Vis Ndx Name
0: 0000000000000000 0 NOTYPE LOCAL DEFAULT UND
1: 0000000000000000 0 FILE LOCAL DEFAULT ABS hello_world.asm
2: 0000000000000000 0 SECTION LOCAL DEFAULT 1
3: 0000000000000000 0 SECTION LOCAL DEFAULT 2
4: 0000000000000000 0 NOTYPE LOCAL DEFAULT 1 hello_world
5: 000000000000000d 0 NOTYPE LOCAL DEFAULT ABS hello_world_len
6: 0000000000000000 0 NOTYPE GLOBAL DEFAULT 2 _startThe binary format of the table is documented at www.sco.com/developers/gabi/2003-12-17/ch4.symtab.html
The data is:which gives:
readelf -x .symtab hello_world.oHex dump of section '.symtab':
0x00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 ................
0x00000010 00000000 00000000 01000000 0400f1ff ................
0x00000020 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 ................
0x00000030 00000000 03000100 00000000 00000000 ................
0x00000040 00000000 00000000 00000000 03000200 ................
0x00000050 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 ................
0x00000060 11000000 00000100 00000000 00000000 ................
0x00000070 00000000 00000000 1d000000 0000f1ff ................
0x00000080 0d000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 ................
0x00000090 2d000000 10000200 00000000 00000000 -...............
0x000000a0 00000000 00000000 ........The entries are of type:
typedef struct {
Elf64_Word st_name;
unsigned char st_info;
unsigned char st_other;
Elf64_Half st_shndx;
Elf64_Addr st_value;
Elf64_Xword st_size;
} Elf64_Sym;Like in the section table, the first entry is magical and set to a fixed meaningless values.
The Israeli occupation is obscene.
The only reason the UN doesn't do anything is that other countries can't be bothered to send people to fight Israel and die there.
And the outcome of this is fundamentalism and indirect deaths elsewhere.
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