Allocortex Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
The part of the cerebral cortex that is not the neocortex.
Cerebral cortex Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
Olaf Carlson-Wee Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Living, Breathing, & Betting on Bitcoin by Vice News
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Numenta Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
Quantum optics Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
Coinbase employee Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
Notion co-founder Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
Max Planck Institute Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
How Germany's elite research institution fails young scientists by Deutsche Welle
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Employment Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
Moonshots in Education Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
By Esther Wojcicki, Sergey Brin's ex-mother-in-law:
A moonshot classroom is a fundamental shift to give students more autonomy and agency in the classroom and entrusts them with greater ownership of their learning outcomes.
So basically strong focus on self-directed learning.
Also:
Real World Work. Students must produce learning projects with real world applications and an authentic audience.
so along the lines of project-based learning. Ciro Santilli specifically likes the "authentic audience" part, related: Section "Projects must aim for novelty"
Max Planck Society Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
A massive group of research institutes scattered across Germany. The constituent institutes are known as "Max Planck Institutes (for|of) X". They are primarily known for their incredible natural science research, but they also cover social sciences.
Figure 1.
Map of the Max Planck Institutes
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Updates / Conclusion and feelings Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
It is a bit sad to work on a project that no one cares about. You're not sure if you're crazy or a visionary. And it is kind of lonely.
I sometimes wonder if I would be happy doing this for the rest of my life if I could. And if it would have any impact at all no matter for how long I do it. My feelings in that area go from slightly depressed to slightly excited about the potential a few times every week.
As we all know, living and making life choices means sacrificing other things that could have been. When I was in France in 2015, I started a masters course in AI/robotics with the idea of doing a PhD and AGI research later on but quit half way because I felt university was such a waste of time.
But come now the AI boom, and although I still believe Education is broken, I might have been much better off financially/reputationally if I had withstood the bullshit followed that path. Instead I sacrificed that for nerding about low level programming and open educational content.
It is hard to get such ideas off one's mind. But the fact is, for better or worse, I've started walking the path of educational reform and sacrificed others along the way, and this is the path that I'm further ahead than other people, and perhaps I should pursue it further to a possible conclusion. Also this path has the advantage that it is not fully exclusive from other academic endeavors as we will always need content about the new flashy things that keep coming up.
So yeah, it's hard, but here I am, and I'll go as far as I can without going into Charles Bukowski levels of personal sacrifice.
Updates / What might be next Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
OK, I need to do content. I know :-) At the university I'm at, the only department that is open is the mathematics one. Both:
  • physically, I'm sitting next to some students right now, though they don't yet know that their saviour is just next to them.
  • in terms of publishing the course materials online. Many of them even have solution
All other courses extremely closed, notably Physics, which is the other course I'd consider. There are upsides and downsides for going for Mathematics:
  • upside:
  • downside: most of it is useless compared to Physics
If I were free to choose, I might go for Physics instead. But maths isn't hard, and I think I'll just go with the hand I'm dealt this time to start with.
Tech wise, the big things are the following ones to which I have given different levels of architectural consideration (i.e. read: I'm afraid they'll be fucking hard and that I'll spend a month on yet another useless feature that won't help get a single user). I don't think I'll do those before at least a little bit of content, we'll see:
  • WYSIWYG: this is not a question of if, but when and how. Even I miss it when dealing with images. I was particularly impressed by Trillium Notes, and might consider forking it or reusing some of its components
  • perfect two way sync from web to local: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/326
    Currently, after much effort, publishing from local to web is extremely good.
    But pulling back changes that you make on web UI locally is not really possible. A basic version can be made easily, but a great version requires some thought.
    In particular, preventing accidental rewrite on simultaneous local + web edits require edit history to be in place.
    The rationale here is that users would start editing on Web with a low entry barrier. And as they become more committed to the project, they would eventually transition to having editing most of their content locally from a desktop, with the exception of a few minor edits on the go when they are on a cell phone, and which we want to very easily and automatically be pulled back to local as soon as they open an editor on their laptop.
    I.e. we want to add a downwards arrow to the following diagram:
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/local-editing/bigb-publish-to-web-or-static-editor-logos.svg
Smaller cute tech that I might do before content "real quick" include:
Another thing I really want to do before time is up is to create a video summarizing my philosophy of education. I want it to be as fun and funny and sad as possible, with silly moving animated images and slides, not just me talking to the camera. Although all of the points I intend to talk about have undoubtedly been covered by others, it is something that I feel so strongly about that I would like to tell others about it more personally. If I start it it will likely take a few days to get done, and I'm not sure wha the final quality would be. It is a bit sad to not do "project work", but I think I'll end up doing it regardless. Class it under "fundraising" if you will, as it may help to find other like minded but rich people.
Updates / How the tech improved Created 2025-03-08 Updated 2025-07-16
In any case, the outcome of that is that the tech has improved. And I have done a relatively good job of clearly publishing any "more user visible" improvements to docs.ourbigbook.com/news and social media such as though it is important to note that there have been more than one "fix a hard bug" weeks that were not published because they would just bore readers.
During this period the main focus has been on improving OurBigBook Web, i.e. the dynamic website that powers OurBigBook.com. There are two reasons for that:
As a result, Web is now way less buggy and much more usable.
If you look through the list of Web updates, there is nothing specifically mind blowing. The core ideas have largely crystallized, and we are just trying to making them click. I have a few more punches up my sleeve, but the core is decided.
Figure 3.
OurBigBook Web article announcement
. Source. Another cute new feature, you can send an email to your followers about a new amazing article you created.
Web process has been somewhat slower than what I'd like. Of course, it is the case of any project that things are easily said than done. But there are two other main structural factors that have played into it:
  • I have my first baby now, and we're learning how to deal with that on the fly.
    For example, we could have put him on childcare a bit earlier, but due to inexperience we've kept him a bit longer than we maybe should have.
    Things are well sorted out now, but not matter how good your support system is, at the end of the day, and more often night, it is you the parents that have to deal with a lot of inevitable baby issues. Unless you want them to turn into psychopaths and drug addicts that is, which I don't. I've reached the point of semi failure middle age that the baby feels like my best moonshot.
    All of this sets a fundamental limit on how many hours you can work per week.
    But at least with the donations I was able to work on OurBigBook at all. Because if it weren't for that, I would have to focus entirely on the generic job instead and OurBigBook would have been put on hold.
  • the choice of Web stack. I was allured by Next.js. I can see the beauty and usefulness of a Node.js render front-end that also runs on backend and hydration. That is awesome.
    But:
    • React is insanely hard to learn and understand. Furthermore, it is also hard to understand the performance problem that it solves, and actually have a benchmark where this problem is solved faster than just delivering some HTML files with ad-hoc Js on top.
    • the lack (or perhaps excess of shitty) actual web framework like Ruby on Rails and Django means that I have to rediscover the wheel many times over for all the essential support activities like testing, login and so one
    At this point a rewrite is out of the question. I've managed to master things well enough to get a decent result, and given up on the few things that I couldn't for the life of me achieve, after documenting them very well for posterity of course.
Aside from Web, there was only one thing that received a significant improvement, and that was the OurBigBook VS Code extension. The extension is not perfect, and it is not the "final UI", which has to be some WYSIWYG implementation, and there are some fundamental limitations that cannot be overcome without patching VS Code itself. However, the extension is already extremely usable, and I'm writing this on it right now. Basics like syntax highlighting, jump to definition and autocomplete are very useful and usable.
Figure 4.
Tree navigation in the OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension
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