Open source development model in which developers develop in private, and only release code to the public during releases.
Notable example project: Android Open Source Project.
Well known popular science character. He just looks futuristic and wraps stuff in exciting empty words. When he shows up, you won't be learning much.
Some blogs:
- blog.codinghorror.com/the-best-code-is-no-code-at-all/ The Best Code is No Code At All (2007)
- www.skrenta.com/2007/05/code_is_our_enemy.html Code is our enemy (2007)
Also resonates with backward design.
One of Ciro Santilli's strongest feeling in education is that material often falls in either of the two categories:
- hundreds of too basic popular science, e.g.:
- a 5 minute popular science video trying to explain quantum electrodynamics (an advanced subject) for someone who doesn't know what a Riemann integral is (a basic subject)
- a few full university courses that takes 20 hours to deliver the first punchline of the course
Ciro believes that there is often an important missing link between them, e.g.:
If we as a society are unable to provide this sweet Middle Way sweet-spot, it is unreasonable to expect that learners will ever have the motivation to advance, because it is just too boring! They are just more likely to go play video games instead.
It is Ciro's hope that OurBigBook.com will help to fill exactly that gap.
In Ciro's view, as of the 2020's this critical gap generally lies somewhere between the end of undergraduate studies, and at the start of postgraduate studies.
Let's take the gloves off more often, and give the full thing to interested students! Let students learn what they want to learn, and do that as soon as possible! Life is too short!
This problem is basically the knowledge version of the last mile problem. When we reach the end of graduate, there are enough directions of knowledge to go off into, that the probability that a great free tutorial exists is relatively low. Of course, as one approaches the realm of novel research, the branching is so wide that having perfect tutorials becomes impossible. Ciro's goal in life go push the last mile marker a bit further out.
Related:
- universityphysicstutorials.com/ by Adam Beatty mentions:
There are myriad resources for physics and maths. The Kahn Academy and Patrick JMT were the best for me. They really helped me out. The question is, what resources are there for the advanced undergraduate courses?
In this video, the noted chemist mentions how he managed to get into a chemistry research development before he even joined university, due to a somewhat exceptional situation. Section "The only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories" also comes to mind. This is exactly the type of thing that Ciro Santilli wants to make much more widespread.
Stories of Ainan Celeste Cawley fighting to advance his kids education beyond school, and being forbidden to do so by a stupid educational system, also come to mind.
Bibliography:
Large but ephemeral storage for EC2 instances. Predetermined by the EC2 instance type. Stays in the local server disk. Not automatically mounted.
- docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceStorage.html (archive) notably highlights what it persists, which is basically nothing
- serverfault.com/questions/433703/how-to-use-instance-store-volumes-storage-in-amazon-ec2 mentions that you have to mount it
Ciro's Edict #4 Further improvements to the website's base technology Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
github.com/cirosantilli/node-express-sequelize-nextjs-realworld-example-app contains the same baseline tech as OurBigBook, and I have been use to quickly test/benchmark new concepts for the website base.
I'm almost proud about that project, as a reasonable template for a Next.js project. It is not perfect, notably see issues on the issue tracker, but it it quite reasonable.
The side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved once again? I to actually make the project be more important thatn the side effects this time, but we'll see.
Since the last update, I've made some major improvements to the baseline tech of the website, which I'll move little by little into OurBigBook. Some of the improvements actually started in OurBigBook.com. The improvements were:
- got a satisfactorily comprehensive linting working at: this commit. Nothing is easy, not even that! Part of the wisdom extracted to: stackoverflow.com/questions/58233482/next-js-setting-up-eslint-for-nextjs/70519682#70519682.
- fully rationalized directory structure to avoid nasty errors that show up in Next.js when accidentally requiring backend stuff on the client. Commit. A detailed explanation of this was extracted to: stackoverflow.com/questions/64926174/module-not-found-cant-resolve-fs-in-next-js-application/70363153#70363153.
- create an extremely clean and rationalized way to do API tests from a simple
npm test. These now actually start a clean server, and make full HTTP requests to that server. Commit. Wisdom extracted to: stackoverflow.com/questions/63762896/whats-the-best-way-to-test-express-js-api/70479940#70479940. - greatly reduce the number of SQL queries, fully understood every problem
- more intelligently using JOINs where I have managed to get Sequelize to do what I fucking want. This also led to several sequelize Stack Overflow answers as usual: stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=user%3a895245%20%5bsequelize%5dEverything that I didn't manage to do because of crappy sequelize is documented at: github.com/cirosantilli/node-express-sequelize-nextjs-realworld-example-app/issues/5
- better understanding Next.js/React/useSWR do avoid doing double API queries
Creator of QEMU and FFmpeg, both of which Ciro Santilli deeply respects. And a bunch other random stuff.
What is shocking about Fabrice this is that both are insanely important software that Ciro Santilli really likes, and both seem to be completely unrelated subjects!
Google made billions on top of this dude:
- FFmpeg is the backend of YouTube
- QEMU is the default emulator for Android Studio as of 2019, which Android developers use by default under the hood to develop Android Apps on their desktop without the need for a real device.
At last but not least, Fabrice also studied in the same school that Ciro Santilli studied in France, École Polytechnique.
It is a shame that he keeps such a low profile, there are no videos of him on the web, and he declines interviews.
Another surprising fact is that Fabrice has not worked for the "Big Tech Companies" as far as can be publicly seen, but rather mostly on smaller companies that he co-founded: www.quora.com/Computer-Programmers/Computer-Programmers-Where-is-Fabrice-Bellard-employed
And he's also into some completely random projcts unsurprisingly:
- www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/ Computer Scientist Fabrice Bellard Announces Computing Pi to Record Number of Digits
Bibliography:
- smartbear.com/de/blog/2011/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/ contains a list of his projects as of 2011
Fabrice Bellard in 2007
. Source. At a restaurant with the author apparently. Plus Miguel De Icaza who was in Paris for some conference, which they all presumably attended.
Fabrice Bellard with light
. There are no in-focus images of Fabrice on the Internet.Ciro Santilli has a bad memory for events that happened a medium time ago, for example in order of months/years. Especially if they are one-off things that have no relation to anything else.
For example, Ciro never remembers which places he travelled to just once, and who was in each trip! He has images of several places he travelled to in his head, and would recognize them, but he just doesn't know where they were!
Another example, Ciro was looking at the carpet at their house, and asked where it came from. His wife replied immeidately: from Bercy shopping quarter in Paris about 10 years ago, and you took it on your back for a long walk until we could find the bus back home because we were concerned it wouldn't fit in the train!
The same goes for scenes from movies and passages from music, which explains why Ciro's art consumption focuses on innovative discrete "what happened" and "general gist" ideas, rather than, analog details such as colors and shapes.
Going back even further in time, Ciro starts to forget the less close friends he had, because the events start to fade away.
Paradoxically however, Ciro believes that this bad memory is one of his greatest strengths and key defining characteristics, because it leads Ciro to want to write down every interesting thing he learns, which motivated OurBigBook.com and his Stack Overflow contributions and his related Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers.
It also somewhat leads Ciro to like physics and mathematics, because in these fields you "can deduce everything" from very few base principles, so if you forget them, it does not matter that much as you can re-deduce stuff over and over. Which is somewhat where the high flying bird attitude comes from. It is hard to go deep when you have to re-prove everything every time. But the upside is that anything that sticks, does so because it has a broad net to stick to, and therefore allows Ciro to make unusual and unexpected connections that others might not.
Ciro believes that there are two types of people, and most notably software engineers, which are basically data wranglers: those with bad memory and those with good memory.
Those with bad memory, tend to focus on automating and improving their processes a lot. They take much longer to do one-off specific deep knowledge tasks however.
The downside of the good memory ones is that sooner or later they will find tasks that no matter how much memory they have, they cannot solve without automation, and they will fail at those.
This dichotomy also explains why Ciro sucks at code reviews, but is rather the person who runs the interesting patches by himself and finds some critical problems that the more theoretical code reviewers missed.
If Ciro had become a scientist, he would without doubt be an experimentalist, just like in this reality he is a GDB/runtime person rather than a "static source analysis" person. Those who have bad memory prefer to just run experiments over and over and observe system state at runtime.
Other effects of having a bad memory include:
- code duplication, or a constant fear of it at least, because Ciro forgets that some functionality exists already
- meeting aversion, because everything that is not recorded will fade away
- passion for backward design, because by the time a piece of knowledge learnt in school might be useful (and 99.99% won't), it will have been long forgotten
Related: jakobschwichtenberg.com/about/ from Jakob Schwichtenberg:
In some sense, one of the biggest benefits I have over other people in physics is that I'm certainly not the smartest guy! I usually can't grasp complex issues very easily. So I have to break down complex ideas into smaller chunks to understand it myself. This means, whenever I describe something to others, everyone understands, because it's broken down into such simple terms.
On C2 wiki, therefore it cannot be wrong wiki.c2.com/?QuasiGreatTeacher:
Fabry Perot Interferometer by JFC UCL (2016)
Source. Description only, reasonable animations. Considers the case of two nearby beam splitters.Fabry-Perot Introduction by Williams College Physics (2020)
Source. Shows a working device. Confocal optical cavity, one of the mirrors scans back and forward moved by a piezoelectric motor, this is called a "scanning Fabry-Perot interferometer".
Does not produce an interference pattern, only an on/off blob, which is then fed into an oscilloscope for analysis. The oscilloscope shows both the mirror displacement (which is given by a voltage) and the light detector output.
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.