People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.
Useful 99% of the time means you can make money with it.
Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.
Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.
This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.
The only thing that matters is that students aim towards the goals described at explain how to make money with the lesson.
Any "homework for which the student cannot use existing resources available online" is a waste of time.
The ideal way to go about it is to reach some intermediate milestone, and then document it. You don't have to do the hole thing! Just go until your patience with it runs out. But while you are doing it, go as deep and wide as you possibly can, without mercy.
The Moonshots in Education project also has a fantastic related quote:
Real World Work. Students must produce learning projects with real world applications and an authentic audience.
The ideal university Updated 2025-07-16
This is a version of free gifted education but more focused on university.
This is Ciro Santilli's ideal university system. It is a system that actually lives up to the name "Open University":
Related:
So far as of the early 2020's, the university that comes closest to some but not all of these principles is the University of the People. It's sad that it's such a crappy unknown thing, but it is what it is.
Speed of light experiment Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Replicating the Fizeau Apparatus by AlphaPhoenix (2018)
Source. Modern reconstruction with a laser and digital camera.
Video 2.
Visualizing video at the speed of light - one trillion frames per second by MIT (2011)
Source. Fast cameras. OK, this takes it to the next level.
When you Google most of the hit domains, many of them show up on "expired domain trackers", and above all Chinese expired domain trackers for some reason, notably e.g.:
This suggests that scraping these lists might be a good starting point to obtaining "all expired domains ever".
Data comparison:
We've made the following pipelines for hupo.com + webmasterhome.cn merging:
./hupo.sh &
./webmastercn.sh &
./justdropped.sh &
wait
./justdropped-post.sh
./hupo-merge.sh
# Export as small Google indexable files in a Git repository.
./hupo-repo.sh
# Export as per year zips for Internet Archive.
./hupo-zip.sh
# Obtain count statistics:
./hupo-wc.sh
Count unique domains in the repos:
( echo */*/*/* | xargs cat ) | sort -u | wc
The extracted data is present at:Soon after uploading, these repos started getting some interesting traffic, presumably started by security trackers going "bling bling" on certain malicious domain names in their databases:
  • GitHub trackers:
    • admin-monitor.shiyue.com
    • anquan.didichuxing.com
    • app.cloudsek.com
    • app.flare.io
    • app.rainforest.tech
    • app.shadowmap.com
    • bo.serenety.xmco.fr 8 1
    • bts.linecorp.com
    • burn2give.vercel.app
    • cbs.ctm360.com 17 2
    • code6.d1m.cn
    • code6-ops.juzifenqi.com
    • codefend.devops.cndatacom.com
    • dlp-code.airudder.com
    • easm.atrust.sangfor.com
    • ec2-34-248-93-242.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
    • ecall.beygoo.me 2 1
    • eos.vip.vip.com 1 1
    • foradar.baimaohui.net 2 1
    • fty.beygoo.me
    • hive.telefonica.com.br 2 1
    • hulrud.tistory.com
    • kartos.enthec.com
    • soc.futuoa.com
    • lullar-com-3.appspot.com
    • penetration.houtai.io 2 1
    • platform.sec.corp.qihoo.net
    • plus.k8s.onemt.co 4 1
    • pmp.beygoo.me 2 1
    • portal.protectorg.com
    • qa-boss.amh-group.com
    • saicmotor.saas.cubesec.cn
    • scan.huoban.com
    • sec.welab-inc.com
    • security.ctrip.com 10 3
    • siem-gs.int.black-unique.com 2 1
    • soc-github.daojia-inc.com
    • spigotmc.org 2 1
    • tcallzgroup.blueliv.com
    • tcthreatcompass05.blueliv.com 4 1
    • tix.testsite.woa.com 2 1
    • toucan.belcy.com 1 1
    • turbo.gwmdevops.com 18 2
    • urlscan.watcherlab.com
    • zelenka.guru. Looks like a Russian hacker forum.
  • LinkedIn profile views:
Check for overlap of the merge:
grep -Fx -f <( jq -r '.[].host' ../media/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hits.json ) cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/tmp/merge/*
Next, we can start searching by keyword with Wayback Machine CDX scanning with Tor parallelization with out helper ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hupo-cdx-tor.sh, e.g. to check domains that contain the term "news":
./hupo-cdx-tor.sh mydir 'news|global' 2011 2019
produces per-year results for the regex term news|global between the years under:
tmp/hupo-cdx-tor/mydir/2011
tmp/hupo-cdx-tor/mydir/2012
OK lets:
./hupo-cdx-tor.sh out 'news|headline|internationali|mondo|mundo|mondi|iran|today'
Other searches that are not dense enough for our patience:
world|global|[^.]info
OMG news search might be producing some golden, golden new hits!!! Going full into this. Hits:
  • thepyramidnews.com
  • echessnews.com
  • tickettonews.com
  • airuafricanews.com
  • vuvuzelanews.com
  • dayenews.com
  • newsupdatesite.com
  • arabicnewsonline.com
  • arabicnewsunfiltered.com
  • newsandsportscentral.com
  • networkofnews.com
  • trekkingtoday.com
  • financial-crisis-news.com
and a few more. It's amazing.
The IT Crowd Updated 2025-07-19
Video 1.
Anti-Piracy Ad by The IT Crowd (2007)
Source.
Video 2.
Bomb disposal robot scene from The IT Crowd
. Source.
Video 3.
Fire scene from The IT Crowd
. Source.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Updated 2025-07-16
This game was mind blowing to Ciro Santilli and all kids. It felt so real. The perfect contrast between peaceful town work and saving the world. OMG.
Breakthrough Prize Updated 2025-07-16
By Zuckerberg. The selection seems decent. And natural sciences only, which is good. A bit more application oriented than the Nobel Prize it seems, e.g. 2022 separates physics and fundamental physics.
Appears to explain award reasoning even worse than the Nobel Foundation.
Video 1.
The World Of Enrico Fermi by Harvard Project Physics (1970)
Source.
torchvision ResNet Updated 2025-07-16
That example uses a ResNet pre-trained on the COCO dataset to do some inference, tested on Ubuntu 22.10:
cd python/pytorch
wget -O resnet_demo_in.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Rooster_portrait2.jpg/400px-Rooster_portrait2.jpg
./resnet_demo.py resnet_demo_in.jpg resnet_demo_out.jpg
This first downloads the model, which is currently 167 MB.
We know it is COCO because of the docs: pytorch.org/vision/0.13/models/generated/torchvision.models.detection.fasterrcnn_resnet50_fpn_v2.html which explains that
FasterRCNN_ResNet50_FPN_V2_Weights.DEFAULT
is an alias for:
FasterRCNN_ResNet50_FPN_V2_Weights.COCO_V1
The runtime is relatively slow on P51, about 4.7s.
After it finishes, the program prints the recognized classes:
['bird', 'banana']
so we get the expected bird, but also the more intriguing banana.
By looking at the output image with bounding boxes, we understand where the banana came from!
Figure 1.
python/pytorch/resnet_demo_in.jpg
. Source.
Figure 2.
python/pytorch/resnet_demo_out.jpg
. The beak was of course a banana, not a beak!
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film) Updated 2025-07-16
This is not bad, but some divergences to the better BBC miniseries, which presumably sticks more closely to the novel:
  • in the film Jim Prideaux is captured in a cafe in Prague, in the series it's in the woods. It is therefore much more plausible that he would have been shot.
  • in the film Peter Guillam is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who feels a bit young to be Ricki Tarr's boss. Not impossible, but still.
  • the series is much less chronological, and more flashback based, as new information becomes available. The film is more chronological, which makes it easier to understand, but less interesting at the same time.
  • in the film they shoot the Russian girl Irina in front of Jim, in the series the fact that she was shot is only known through other sources. The film has more eye candy, which weakens it.
  • Toby Esterhase is not threatened in an airfield, only in a safe ;house in London.

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