Circle Updated 2025-07-16
Isaac Asimov Updated 2025-07-16
Special relativity Updated 2025-07-16
This was first best observed by the Michelson-Morley experiment, which uses the movement of the Earth at different times of the year to try and detect differences in the speed of light.
This leads leads to the following conclusions:
All of this goes of course completely against our daily Physics intuition.
The "special" in the name refers to the fact that it is a superset of general relativity, which also explains gravity in a single framework.
Since time and space get all messed up together, you have to be very careful to understand what it means to say "I observed this to happen over there at that time", otherwise you will go crazy. A good way to think about is this:
  • use Einstein synchronization to setup a bunch of clocks for every position in your frame of reference
  • on every point of space, you put a little detector which records events and the time of the event
  • each detector can only detect events locally, i.e. events that happen very close to the detector
  • then, after the event, the detectors can send a signal to you, who is sitting at the origin, telling you what they detected
Species bootstrapping from DNA Updated 2025-07-16
Synthesizing the DNA itself is not the only problem however.
You then have to get that DNA into a working living form state so that normal cell processes can continue:
Ciro's Edict #4 / China front Updated 2025-07-16
At github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/738 a user made a comment about gang raping my mother (more like country-raping).
As mentioned at github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/739, ally Martin then reported the issue, and GitHub took down the wumao's account for a while using their undocumented shadowban feature, until the wumao edited the issue.
Based on the discussion with Martin, I then recommended at github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/blob/41b4741a4e6553f44f5f1ef85cf63c55eb7b8277/CONTRIBUTING.md that we do not report such issues, and that GitHub do not delete such accounts, with rationale explained on the CONTRIBUTING.
Thymine Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro's Edict #4 / ourbigbook.com Updated 2025-07-16
I had meant to make an update earlier, but I wanted to try and add some more "visible end-user changes" to OurBigBook.com.
Just noticed BTW that signup on the website is broken. Facepalm. Not that it matters much since it is not very useful in the current state, but still. Going to fix that soon. EDIT: nevermind, it wasn't broken, I just had JavaScript disabled on that website with an extension to test if pages are visible without JavaScript, and yes, they are perfectly visible, you can't tell the difference! But you can't login without JavaScript either!
I still haven't the user visible ones I wanted, but I've hit major milestones, and it feels like time for an update.
I have now finished all the OurBigBook CLI features that I wanted for 1.0, all of which will be automatically reused in ourbigbook.com.
A secondary but also important advance was: further improvements to the website's base technology.
I knew I was going to do them for several months now, and I knew they were going to hurt, and they did, but I did them.
These change caused two big bugs that I will solve next, one them infinite recursion in the database recursive query, but they shouldn't be too hard.
Favela Updated 2025-07-16
This was the major final step of fully integrating the OurBigBook CLI into the dynamic website (besides fixing some nasty bugs that escaped passed by me from the previous newsletter).
The implementation was done by "simply" reusing scopes, e.g.: cirosantilli's article about mathematics has scope cirosantilli and full ID cirosantilli/mathematics.
That on the website is equivalent to a local file structure of:
cirodown/mathematics.bigb
The problem is that a bunch of subdirectory scope operations were broken locally as well, as it simply wasn't a major use case. But now they became a major use case for , so I fixed them.
Light year Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro's Edict #5 / Next steps Updated 2025-07-16
  • upload all of cirosantilli.com to ourbigbook.com. I will do this by implementing an import from filesystem functionality based on the OurBigBook CLI. This will also require implementing slit headeres on the server to work well, I'll need to create one Article for every header on render.
  • get \x and \Include working on the live web preview editor. This will require creating a new simple API, currently the editor jus shows broken references, but final render works because it goes through the database backend
  • implement email verification signup. Finally! Maybe add some notifications too, e.g. on new comments or likes.
Now that we can reliably split files at will with \Include, I finally added this feature.
This means while developing a website locally with the OurBigBook CLI, if you have a bunch of files with an error in one of them, your first run will run slowly until the error:
extract_ids README.ciro
extract_ids README.ciro finished in 73.82836899906397 ms
extract_ids art.ciro
extract_ids art.ciro finished in 671.1738419979811 ms
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro finished in 1009.6256089992821 ms
extract_ids science.ciro
error: science.ciro:13686:1: named argument "parent" given multiple times
extract_ids science.ciro finished in 1649.6193730011582 ms
but further runs will blast through the files that worked, skipping all files that have sucessfully converted:
extract_ids README.ciro
extract_ids README.ciro skipped by timestamp
extract_ids art.ciro
extract_ids art.ciro skipped by timestamp
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro skipped by timestamp
extract_ids science.ciro
so you can fix file by file and move on quickly.
This was not fully trivial to implement because we had to rework how duplicate IDs are checked. Previously, we just nuked the DB every time on a directory conversion, and then repopulated everything. If a duplicated showed up on a file, it was a duplicate.
But now that we are not necessarily extracing IDs from every file, we can't just nuke the database anymore, otherwise we'd lose the information. Therefore, what we have to do is to convert every file, and only at the end check the duplicates.
Ciro's Edict #6 / Next steps Updated 2025-07-16
Make article editing more reasonable. Several bugs in the area.

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