Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

Old name for DARPA before 1972, and again for a short time between 1993 and 1996. That's why ARPANET is called "ARPANET" and not "DARPANET".

It is unbelievable that you can't find easily on YouTube recreations of many of the key physics/chemistry experiments and of common laboratory techniques.

Experiments, the techniques required to to them, and the history of how they were first achieved, are the heart of the natural sciences. Without them, there is no motivation, no beauty, no nothing.

School gives too much emphasis on the formulas. This is bad. Much more important is to understand how the experiments are done in greater detail.

The videos must be completely reproducible, indicating the exact model of every experimental element used, and how the experiment is setup.

A bit like what Ciro Santilli does in his Stack Overflow contributions but with computers, by indicating precise versions of his operating system, software stack, and hardware whenever they may matter.

It is understandable that some experiments are just to complex and expensive to re-create. As an extreme example, say, a precise description of the Large Hadron Collider anyone? But experiments up to the mid-20th century before "big science"? We should have all of those nailed down.

We should strive to achieve the cheapest most reproducible setup possible with currently available materials: recreating the original historic setup is cute, but not a priority.

Furthermore, it is also desirable to reproduce the original setups whenever possible in addition to having the most convenient modern setup.

Lists of good experiments to cover be found at: the most important physics experiments.

This project is to a large extent a political endeavour.

Someone with enough access to labs has to step up and make a name for themselves through the huge effort of creating a baseline of amazing content without yet being famous.

Until it reaches a point that this person is actively sought to create new material for others, and things snowball out of control. Maybe, if the Gods allow it, that person could be Ciro.

Tutorials with a gazillion photos and short videos are also equally good or even better than videos, see for example Ciro's How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in bacteria for an example that goes toward that level of perfection.

The Applied Science does well in that direction.

This project is one step that could be taken towards improving the replication crisis of science. It's a bit what Hackster.io wants to do really. But that website is useless, just use OurBigBook.com and create videos instead :-)

We're maintaining a list of experiments for which we could not find decent videos at: Section "Physics experiment without a decent modern video".

Ciro Santilli visited the teaching labs of a large European university in the early 2020's. They had a few large rooms filled with mostly ready to run versions of several key experiments, many/most from "modern physics", e.g. Stern-Gerlach experiment, Quantum Hall effect, etc.. These included booklets with detailed descriptions of how to operate the apparatus, what you'd expect to see, and the theory behind them. With a fat copyright notice at the bottom. If only such universities aimed to actually serve the public for free rather than hoarding resources to get more tuition fees, university level education would already have been solved a long time ago!

One thing we can more or less easily do is to search for existing freely licensed videos and add them to the corresponding Wikipedia page where missing. This requires knowing how to search for freely licensed videos:

Related:

We use the term "automatic programming" to mean "generating code from natural language".

The ultimate high level of which is of course to program with:which is basically the goal of artificial general intelligence, especially according to The Employment Test definition of AGI.

The term has not always had that sense:sums it up.

But in the current AI boom, this is the sense that matters, so that's what we will go with.

Bibliography:

Ciro had a small accident in 2021. It wasn't ultra serious, a few cuts, but could have been worse. Here's a post mortem.

Ciro was going to cycle 120 km between two locations he had never cycled before. Ciro had cycled this distance before many many times, so he thought he could do it.

What went wrong:

This was a perfect example of how many small things add up to an accident.

You have to know when you are tired and hungry and impatient. This is where huge danger lies.

Stop at a shop, eat, sit down. Darkness is not that dangerous if you have lights.

Take a train outside of large cities if needed. Crossing large cities is not something to be taken lightly. You need calm and time to do so safely.

Ubuntu 23.10:

~4.8K

Ubuntu 25.10 after fresh ISO install, defaults to Nouveau driver which gets enabled by default: 900 FPS. After moving back to NVIDIA drivers back to 4.6 kFPS. Wow, Nouveau sucks terribly bad.

Monero 0.18.3.1 hashrate: 2.6 KH/s

Ciro Santilli is very happy to meet people with related interests, he really loves his like-minded online friends. Even if you don't have something a specific goal in mind for the contact, please just say hi.

To contact Ciro publicly about any general subject that is not covered in a more specific GitHub repository, including saying hi or suggestions about his website either:

For comments about China, first read:and then create a GitHub issue at: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/new

Publicly viewable contact is preferred if possible to more effectively share Ciro's wisdom with the world.

But if you feel more comfortable with private contact, no problem, either:

For other less good methods that will also likely work, use direct messages of the following profiles from under Section "Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli":Ciro's Twitter DMs are also open, but note that Ciro receives endless Chinese language SPAM there which Twitter is doing nothing to combat, so it's not as reliable.

If you are a privacy freak or are going to tell Ciro state secrets Ciro has this GNU Privacy Guard public key: pubkey.gpg, but it's not something that he has ever really used.

Disqus comments were removed from his website in 2019-05-04, a manual dump is available here, removal rationale at: why Ciro Santilli removed Disqus comments from his website in 2019-05-04.

Ciro Santilli has become slightly obsessed with this story, and the main mastermind Ross Ulbricht.

The best article available so far is: www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/29/how_i_caught_silk_road_mastermind (archive) which summarizes what one of the investigators said in a 2019 French computer security conference.

The key living posts are:

The big question is of course how libertarian free market ideologically motivated the website was, and how purely criminal greed it was.

The magnitude of the early operational security mistakes does make Ciro think that Ross did it "because he could" and "for the lolz" in a real world Breaking Bad way.

The entry in Ross' diary does resonate a lot with Ciro and any entrepreneur, full diary at: www.wired.com/2015/01/heres-secret-silk-road-journal-laptop-ross-ulbricht/ (archive).

Having this kind of feeling, is the greatest thing any human can have, and what motivates all great things.

Capitalizing in illegal things though is a cheat, big things take longer than a few years to reach, but reaching them is that much more satisfying as well.

Other interesting quotes:which Ciro also feels, see don't be a pussy, and:

Also very worth reading is the San Francisco flat mate account: www.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3q8g/my-roommate-the-darknet-drug-lord (archive).

The murder for hire allegations are also interesting: mashable.com/2013/10/03/silk-road-hits, he paid 80k dollars to undercover DEA agents!

Except for the fact that Ross was an 80 million Dollar drug lord, those accounts sound exactly like what you would expect from any other nerdy startup founder! The:

It is also amusing to see very concretely the obvious fact that the FBI can get a subpoena for all accounts you ever had, e.g. they knew his laptop model from Amazon and brought a corresponding power cable to the arrest! If you are going to be a cyber criminal, don't use your real name, ever!

Should justice be blind? Maybe. But it does hurt for mere non-blind men to see it sometimes. Especially when drug liberalization is involved.

When Ciro Santilli first learnt the old Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory and the idea of formal proofs, his teenager mind was completely blown.

Finally, there it was: a proper and precise definition of mathematics, including a definition of integers, reals and limits!

Theorems are strings, proofs are string manipulations, and axioms are the initial strings that you can use.

Once proved, press a button on your computer, and the proof is automatically verified. No messy complicated "group of savants" reading it for 4 years and looking for flaws!

There are a few proof assistant systems with several theorems in their Git tracked standard library. The hottest ones circa 2020 are:

And here are some more interesting links:

However, as expressed by the QED manifesto, is unbelievable that there isn't one awesome and dominating website, that hosts all those proofs, possibly an on the browser editor, and which all mathematicians in the world use as the one golden reference of mathematics to rule them all!

Just imagine the impact.

Standard library maintainers don't have to deal with the impossible question of what is "beautiful" or "useful" enough mathematics to deserve merged: users just push content to the online database, and star what they like!

We then just use GitHub-like namespaces for each person's theorem, e.g. "cirosantilli/fundmaental-theorem-of-calculus" or "johndoe/fundmaental-theorem-of-calculus" so that each person owns their own preferred definition IDs, which others can reuse.

No more endless bikeshedding over what insane level of generality do your analysis theorems need to be (Ciro Santilli attended at talk about Lean where the speaker mentioned this was a problem)!

This would move things more out of the "pull request and Git tracked code" approach, into a more "database with entries" version of things.

Furthermore, it is just a matter of time until the "single standard library" approach starts to break down, as the git clone becomes impossibly large. At this point, people have to start publishing separate packages. And when this happens, you would need to retest every package that you add to your project. This is why a centralized database is just inevitable at some point, it just scales better.

Interested in a conjecture? No problem: just subscribe to its formal statement + all known equivalents, and get an email on your inbox when it gets proved!

Are you a garage mathematician and have managed to prove a hard theorem, but no "real" mathematician will read your proof because your unknown? Fuck that, just publish it on the system and let it get auto verified. Overnight fame awaits.

Notation incompatibility hell? A thing of the past, just automatically convert to your preferred representation.

Such a system would be the perfect companion to OurBigBook.com. Just like computer code offers the backbone of Linux Kernel Module Cheat Linux kernel tutorials, a formal proof system website would be the backbone of mathematics tutorials! You know what, if OurBigBook.com becomes insanely successful, Ciro is going to add this to it later on.

Furthermore, it would not be too hard to achieve this system!

All we would need would be something analogous to a package registry like PyPI or NodeJS' registry.

Then, each person can publish packages containing proofs.

Packages can rely on other packages that contain pre-requisites definition or theorem.

Packages are just regular git repos, with some metadata. One notable metadata would be a human readable description of the theorems the package provides.

The package registry would then in addition to most package registries have a CI server in it, that checks the correctness of all proofs, generates a web-page showing each theorem.

All proofs can be conditional: the package registry simply shows clearly what axiom set a theorem is based on.

This is a close as we can get to Erdős' book.

Maybe Ciro will just stuff this into OurBigBook.com once that takes over the world.

This project could be seen as a more automated/less moderated version of ProofWiki.

This would be a bit like erdosproblems.com, but with formal proofs. Note for example that Formal Conjectures has formalized these specific problems at: github.com/google-deepmind/formal-conjectures/tree/main/FormalConjectures/ErdosProblems

Bibliography:

Ciro Santilli pinging people:

This is related to the underlying SVG pain point of SVG background color:

For PNG export:

Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions have, unsurprisingly, centered around the subjects he has worked with: systems programming and web development, and necessary tooling to get those done, such as Git, Python, Bash and Ubuntu.

His best answers are listed at: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".

Stack Overflow has been the initial centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, until Ciro noticed that GitHub might be potentially even more effective for it.

In Stack Overflow Ciro likes to:

In practice it also happens that Ciro:

When he gets an upvote on one of his more obscure answers, Ciro often re-reads it, and often finds improvements to be made and makes them.

He doesn't like to refresh the homepage looking for easy reputation on widely known subjects. See also: online forums that lock threads after some time are evil.

The result is that Ciro ends up getting relatively a lot of reputation without much work! The term passive income, much beloved by fake investment gurus, comes to mind. But now it's "passive reputation"! And it is useless! Yay!

For this reason, Necromancer is Ciro's favorite badge (get 5 upvotes on a question older than 60 days), and as of July 2019, he became the #1 user with the most of this badge. Announcement on Twitter.

The number two at the time was VonC (see also: Section "Epic Stack Overflow users"), who had about 16 times more answers than Ciro in total! From this query: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1072396?&Date=2019-07-01&UserId=895245 it can be seen that as of July 2019, 1216 out of his 1329 answers were answered 60 days after the questions and constitute potential necromancers! Compare that to VonC's 1643 potential necromancers out of 21767 answers!

VonC eventually took back the lead in 2022, dude's a machine!!! twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1546389532014247936

Someone at Ciro's work once said something along:and this does ring true in Stack Overflow as well. When you are answering stuff, it means that you either didn't know, or that the information wasn't well available, and so your specific application is progressing slowly because of that. Once the generic prerequisites are well solved and answered, you will spend much more time on your business specific things rather than anything else that can be factored out across projects, and so you will get more "directly useful work" done, and less Stack Overflow answers. Of course, without the prior research in place, you can't get the final product done either.

In terms of per year reputation ranks, Ciro was in the top 100 in of the 2018 ranking with 38,710 reputation gained in that year: stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2018-01-01?sort=reputationchange&page=4 (archive). He reached top 50 in 2022. Note that daily reputation is mostly capped to 200 per day, leading to a maximum 73000 per year. It is possible to overcome this limit either with bounties or accepts, and Ciro finds it amazing that some people actually break the 73k limit by far with accepts, e.g. Gordon Linoff reached 135k in 2018 (archive)! However, this is something that Ciro will never do, because it implies answering thousands and thousands of useless semi duplicate questions as fast as possible to get the accept. Ciro's reputation comes purely from upvotes on important question, and is therefore sustainable without any extra effort once achieved. Interestingly, Ciro appeared on top of the quarter SE rankings around 2019-11: web.archive.org/web/20191112100606/https://stackexchange.com/leagues but it was just a bug ;-)

There is no joy like answering an old question, and watching your better answer go up little by little until it dominates all others.

Stack Overflow reputation is of course, in itself, meaningless. People who contribute to popular subjects like web development will always have infinitely more reputation than those that contribute to low level subjects.

What happens on the specialized topics though is that you end up getting to know all the 5 users who contribute 95% of the content pretty soon as you study those subjects.

Like everything that man does, the majority of Ciro's answers are more or less superficial subjects that many people know but few have the patience to explain well, or they are updates to important questions reflecting upstream developments. But as long as they save 15 minutes from someone's life, that's fine.

There is great beauty when you are involved in a programming problem, and you suddenly remember: wait, I answered something related a few years ago! And especially so when you can go back and improve your old answer with new insight. This has great value, because when you were more newbie, you would have typed different words into Google Search than you would now. So by updating posts from when you were a newbie, you are helping other newbies more, as they are more likely to be also searching for those keywords. It is also very nice to have some head start on the answer's upvote count and not have to bootstrap yet another answer from 0 upvotes and have to go through all the competition!

For example, Ciro's most upvoted answer as of July 2019 is stackoverflow.com/questions/18875674/whats-the-difference-between-dependencies-devdependencies-and-peerdependencies/22004559#22004559 was written when he spent his first week playing with NodeJS (he was having a look at Overleaf, later merged into Overleaf, for education), which he didn't touch again for several years, and still hasn't "mastered" as of 2019! This did teach a concrete life lesson to Ciro however: it is impossible to know what is the most useful thing you can do right now very precisely. The best bet is to follow your instincts and do as much awesome stuff as you can, and then, with some luck, some of those attempts will cover an use case.

Ciro tends to take most pride on his systems programming answers, which is a subject that truly relatively few people know about. He likes it when he goes insanely deep into a subject, way beyond what OP had in mind, exposing full root causes and broader causes, see e.g.:

Ciro also derives great joy from his "media related answers" (3D graphics, audio, video), which are immensely fun to write, and sometimes borderline art, see answers such as those under "OpenGL" and "Media" under the best articles by Ciro Articles or even simpler answers such as:

There is something of greater value in perfectly presented technical knowledge, that goes beyond than simply getting something done. The pleasure of understanding and mastering something, and perhaps of the explanation itself. Sometimes when answering, Ciro feels like a tailor, where ASCII is his cloth. See also: Section "The art of programming", Section "Physics and the illusion of life".

Ciro's deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: OurBigBook.com. So it is a bit funny to think that after all time Ciro spent on the website, he actually wants to destroy it and replace it with something better. There can be no innovation without some damage. It also led to Ciro's creation of Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script.

After answering so many questions, he ended up converging to a more or less consistent style, which he formalized at:Like any other style guide, this answer style guide, once fully incorporated and memorized, allows Ciro to write answers faster, without thinking about formatting issues.

Ciro also made a question title style guide: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903 but for some reason the Stack Overflow community prefers their semi-defined title meta-language to proper English. Go figure.

Ciro started contributing to Stack Overflow in 2012 when he was at École Polytechnique.

Like all things that end up shaping the course of one's life, Ciro started contributing without thinking too much about it.

His first answer was to the LaTeX question: Standalone diagrams with TikZ?, which reflects the fact that this happened while Ciro was reaching his Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment.

Ciro's first upvote was for his 2012 question: How to run a Python script portably without specifying its full path?

When he started contributing, Ciro was still a newbie. One early event he will never forget was when someone mentioned a "man page", and Ciro commented saying that there was a typo!

When Ciro reached 15 points and gained the ability to upvote, it felt like a major milestone, he even took a screenshot of the browser! 1k, 10k and 100k were also particularly exciting. When the 100k cup (archive) arrived in 2018, Ciro made a show-off Facebook post (archive). At some point though, your brain stops caring, and automatically filters out any upvotes you get except on the answers that you are really proud of and which don't yet have lots of upvotes. The last remaining useless gamed achievement that Ciro looked forward to was legendary (archive), and which he achieved on 2021-02-16.

From the start, Ciro's motivations for contributing to Stack Overflow have been a virtuous circle of:

It is also amazing when you start having a repertoire of answers, and as you are writing a new answer, you remember: "hey, the knowledge of that answer would be so welcome here", and so you link to the other answer as well at the perfect point. This somewhat achieves does what OurBigBook.com aims to do: for each small section of a tutorial, gather the best answers by multiple people.

Ciro feels that his Stack Overflow alter ego is kenorb.

Another one is Aaron Hall, who is also very high on the necromancer list, answers in Python which is a topic Ciro cares about, and states on his profile:so another necromancer.

Way to go.

Ciro also asks some questions on a ratio of about 1 question per 10 answers. But Ciro's questions tend to be about extremely niche that no one knows/cares about, and a high percentage of them ends up getting self answered either at asking time or after later research.

Some fun reactions to Ciro's Stack Overflow activity:

There's a tiny little crosshair that you can drag around to set the center of rotation.

And there's a button to make that crosshair snap: inkscape.org/forums/questions/can-a-pivotingtransfrom-crosshair-be-moved-and-made-to-snap-to-a-node-or-a-grid-point/#c14432

Data that is inscribed in a blockchain as a way to perpetuate the data, rather than to follow the main intended purpose of the given blockchain, e.g. ASCII art instead of financial transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

A catalogue for Bitcoin can be found at: Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain".

Home 2017 TalkTalk 38Mbps nominal, Google M-lab speed test:

Home 2025 Giffgaff

Home 2025 Sky Broadband WiFi Max Hub SR213 (SR213-02-UK-wht) 1GBPS:Admin at 192.168.0.1/:

See also: existence and uniqueness of solutions of partial differential equations.

On December 19, 2025 a bet was revealed between two DeepMind guys that one of them would have a Lean proof to the problem:

Boooooring. Except for Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness. That's OK.