OurBigBook.com Updated 2025-10-27
The website is the reference instance of OurBigBook Web, which is part of the OurBigBook Project, the other main part of the project are software that users can run locally to publish their content such as the OurBigBook CLI.
The project documentation is present at: docs.ourbigbook.com#ourbigbook-web-user-manual
The topics feature allows you to find the best version of a subject written by other users user
. Live demo: derivative.
OurBigBook's weird specialization towards the weird overly niche interests of its creator Ciro Santilli, notably "I want to create the perfect documentation for every atom in the universe, is undoubtedly partly to blame for the project's failure to gain even a single user outside of its own creator.
However, Ciro does also believe that innovation requires to some degree specializing weirdly in some niche direction. Success comes perhaps from both going into a novel and valuable direction, while still being anatomic enough for enough people.
Asian fetish Updated 2025-10-27
Whenever Ciro's wife starts with "the Asian fetish talk", Ciro reminds her of her own claimed "tall person fetish", and they call it quits.
Asian fetish is much more than sex. It is about the culture, the history, the language. It is the same fetish that makes great mathematicians an Artists do what they do.
When Ciro Santilli was at École Polytechnique, he had to do a presentation for his stupid English courses that all students were forced to take, no matter how good their English was.
The topic was likely something like "pick a country", and Ciro was delighted when he managed to pick "China", after it had gone around a table with many many people before him.
The PowerPoint presentation Ciro made over the weekend was so amazing (and making it was actually fun to make, Ciro actually remembers it a bit!), drawing partly from stuff his wife then girlfriend showed him, that at the end the one of the other students asked him if he had lived in China.
It is a shame Ciro couldn't find the presentation when he wrote this line many many years later. Anything that is not in a BLOB-free monorepo, will disappear, heed my words. But he's certain about two things which it contained:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#History_of_originssubservient, passive, mysterious are understandable. But Hyper-sexual and villainous? OMG have these people never seen real Asians?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#Pornography:
In the United States, women of East and Southeast Asian descent are sometimes stereotyped as subservient, passive, mysterious, villainous in nature, and hyper-sexual.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#Pornography:
Ciro Santilli's sinophily Updated 2025-10-27
Two things come to mind when Ciro Santilli thinks about his sinohpilia.
There is a strong "Ciro Santilli's knowledge hoarding" side to it. Ciro has decided that he has to know EVERYTHING about China. It's culture. It's people. It's art. And so once that has been decided, it becomes inevitable.
But of course, there is also the "which part of Ciro's inner being led to that hoarding decision" part of things. Mishima's quote often comes to mind:
Exoticism is undoubtedly part of it.
Maybe it has something to do with growing up observing 5th+ generation Japanese Brazilians immigrants, well, being Asians and crushing it academically. But also being quiet people, and sometimes misfits. I.e., nerds.
Maybe there is also something to do with the influence Japanese anime, highly popular during Ciro's childhood in Brazil. Ciro, unlike many of his friends, left that relatively early, as he got into the deeper pleasures of natural sciences and then more traditional Asian culture. But still.
And finally perhaps the correlation between sofware engineers and Asian fetish and the correlation between software engineers and Buddhism.
Fluid mechanics Updated 2025-10-27
Boooooring. Except for Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness. That's OK.
The eye in Ciro Santilli's website banner Updated 2025-11-18
Ciro was trying to make his face fit on the banner. But it is hard because faces are square and text is long.
At this moment, Ciro knew what to do.
Finally, by adding another eye to the footer of the page, this also added a symbolic dimension to things: the pages contain what is in between Ciro's eyes: his brain: Section "Braindumping".
The concept, like any other, is not in itself new and has been used by others, Ciro just independently rediscovered it again:
Synthetic virus Updated 2025-11-18
Man-made virus!
TODO: if we had cheap de novo DNA synthesis, how hard would it be to bootstrap a virus culture from that? github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/60
Is it easy to transfect a cell with the synthesized DNA, and get it to generate full infectious viral particles?
If so, then de novo DNA synthesis would be very similar to 3D printed guns: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printed_firearms.
It might already be possible to order dissimulated sequences online:
List of subtitle file formats Updated 2025-11-18
Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness Updated 2025-12-25
A report on the Navier-Stokes Problem by Vladimir Šverak
. Source. 2025. Ciro Santilli's hardware Internet speed Updated 2025-11-18
Home 2017 TalkTalk 38Mbps nominal, Google M-lab speed test:
- 36.4 Mbps download
- 9.15 Mbps up
- 58 ms latency over 80km of first world
Home 2025 Giffgaff
Home 2025 Sky Broadband WiFi Max Hub SR213 (SR213-02-UK-wht) 1GBPS:Admin at 192.168.0.1/ username admin password same as wifi password.
- Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen4 amd
- wired to fiber box:
- wireless sitting next to router:
- Google Pixel 7a
- wireless sitting next to router: 414 down 107 up. Receiver bound which is funny.
Inscription (blockchain) Updated 2025-11-18
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.
Uncanny valley Updated 2025-11-05
Side project time Updated 2025-11-05
Rotate object around a point in Inkscape Updated 2025-11-05
Set SVG background color in Inkscape Updated 2025-11-05
This is related to the underlying SVG pain point of SVG background color:
Silk Road (marketplace) Updated 2025-11-05
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:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-connect-to-a-tor-hidden-service-using-curl-in-php (archive) which was originally asked under the real name, and then the username was changed to "Frosty", which matches one of the server's logins after the laptop was captured
- altoid early Silk Road mention: bitcointalk.org/?topic=175.70;wap2 (archive)
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).
[i]n 2011," [I believe I will be] "creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before,Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator."
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:
Everyone knows I am working on a bitcoin exchange. I always thought honesty was the best policy and now I didn't know what to do. I should have just told everyone I am a freelance programmer or something, but I had to tell half truths. It felt wrong to lie completely so I tried to tell the truth without revealing the bad part, but now I am in a jam. Everyone knows too much. Dammit.
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:
- "just do it" strategy effectively going to a minimal viable product (manual transaction management!), while making many mistakes along the way, including hiring mistakes and successes when scaling is needed
- the hardship of self bootstrapping your own social network (here with some kilos of mushrooms)
- the variety of periods, from relatively calm, to hair pulling stress during big changes
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.
Inkscape Updated 2025-11-05
Personality type Updated 2025-11-05
How to mine Monero Updated 2025-11-05
Ubuntu 20.10 as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/build/ubuntu:At minexmr.com/#getting_started we see that all you then need is a single CLI command:Seems simple, well done devs!
sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
mkdir xmrig/build && cd xmrig/build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)xmrig -o pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u <your-monero-address>Benchmark on Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/benchmark:gives:which according to the minexmr.com mining pool would generate 0.0005 XMR/day, which at the February 2021 rate of 140 USD/XMR is 0.07 USD/day. The minimum payout in that pool is 0.004 XMR so it would take 8 days to reach that.
./xmrig --bench=1M948.1 h/sSo clearly, application-specific integrated circuit mining is the only viable way of doing this.
www.makeuseof.com/cryptos-you-can-mine-at-home/ is a completely full of bullshit article that says otherwise. How can someone publish that!
Gridworld Updated 2025-12-13
A discrete 2D game on a rectangular grid: towardsdatascience.com/reinforcement-learning-implement-grid-world-from-scratch-c5963765ebff
This is analogous to many traditional board games such as chess, the concept is very natural and maps well into computer.
The downsides of gridworld games are:
- it is hard to model speed in discrete worlds. When you 10x faster, when do you collide with something else that is also crossing your path?
- they tend to not use vector representations of objects. So to have an object be 10x longer than another one, the naive implementation has to add 10 smaller objects. This becomes untenable as the number of objects increases.
Automatic programming Updated 2025-11-30
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.
automatic programming has always been a euphemism for programming in a higher-level language than was then available to the programmer
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.