As of 2023 the most important ones economicaly were:
The main application is magnetic resonance imaging. Both of these are have to be Liquid helium, i.e. they are not "high-temperature superconductor" which is a pain. One big strength they have is that they are metallic, and therefore can made into wires, which is crucial to be able to make electromagnetic coils out of them.
Moving magnet and conductor problem Updated 2025-07-16
This is a well known though experiment, which Richard Feynman used to emphasize
In the above experiment:
  • from the wire frame, the charge feels electromagnetic force, because it is moving and there is a magnetic field
  • from the single charge frame, there is still magnetic field (positive charges are moving), but the body itself is not moving, so there is no force!
The solution to this problem is length contraction: the positive charges are length contracted and the moving electrons aren't, and therefore they are denser and therefore there is an effective charge from that frame.
Video 1.
How Special Relativity Fixed Electromagnetism by The Science Asylum (2019)
Source.
Municipal Market of São Paulo Updated 2025-07-16
Once upon a time, this must have been a nice covered market.
But as of 2020, it is completely surrounded by extremely poor people, to the point that it makes you scared if you stand out in any way by showing any kind of middle/upper class wealth, or being a foreigner.
The market is basically a touristic spot that no person in Sao Paulo will ever go to (unless they are young, single, and can just walk in there by themselves) in the middle of this surreal environment.
In 2020 Ciro was there with his wife on a touristic visit. Living in Europe at the time, he felt even more privileged. So they went to a fruit stand, and the man started giving his wife amazing free samples of very exotic fruit, some of which Ciro had never tasted himself, without saying the price. It did feel like he was giving out too much for free. Then Ciro decided of course to buy some more fruits to pay for the show, which was a nice show. Then while buying, it came out a bit more expensive than would have been reasonable, but Ciro was too dazzled by the speed and noises, and he paid for it. Later on, he told his wife about it, and how he felt that they had added some ultra-expensive bulk fruits that were of a clearly lower level than the gold nuggets of the free samples (especially for Brazil's cost standards). The presenter was an extremely crafty con artist, and Ciro felt like they had specifically preyed on Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality, because it was apparent that those men were underprivileged and fighting for their living day by day with those over-expensive fruits. This was an extremely valuable lesson, Ciro was glad that it was learnt at a relatively low cost on that occasion.
Lower teens, before discovering more hardcore stuff that is more genial and adult-venerable:So a base mix of what you migth expect from a regular male teenager born in 1989 Brazil.
OK, Ciro still comes back to those from time to time, he confesses. Nostalgia, nostalgia.
The following are also adult venerable though :-)
Video 1.
Killing In the Name by Rage Against The Machine (1992)
Source.
As mentioned on Wikipedia, it has only 8 lines of lyrics.
And the most satisfying "Ugh"s ever recorded on tape. Rap rock perfectly describes the genre.
MySQL Updated 2025-07-16
Create user for further logins without sudo askubuntu.com/questions/915585/how-to-login-mysql-shell-when-mysql-have-no-password/1325689#1325689:
sudo mysql -e "CREATE USER $USER"
Create test user with password:
sudo mysql -e 'CREATE USER user0 IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY "a"'
sudo mysql -e 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON database_name.* TO "user0"'
and login as that user:
mysql -u user0 -p
Login with password given on the command line:
mysql -u user0 -pmypassword
The IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password part is to overcome "Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server" when connecting from Node.js.
List users:
sudo mysql -e 'SELECT * FROM mysql.user'
View permissions for each user on each DB: serverfault.com/questions/263868/how-to-know-all-the-users-that-can-access-a-database-mysql
sudo mysql -e 'SELECT * FROM mysql.db'
List databases:
sudo mysql -e 'SHOW DATABASES'
Create database:
sudo mysql -e 'CREATE DATABASE mydb0'
Destroy database:
sudo mysql -e 'DROP DATABASE mydb0'
Show tables in database:
sudo mysql -e 'SHOW TABLES' mydb0
or:
sudo mysql -e 'SHOW TABLES FROM mydb0'
Neil Fernandez Updated 2025-07-16
“Especially my father. He was doing most of it and he is a savoury, strong character. He has strong beliefs about the world and in himself, and he was helping me a lot, even when I was at university as an undergraduate.”
An only child, Arran was born in 1995 in Glasgow, where his parents were studying at the time. His father has Spanish lineage, having a great grandfather who was a sailor who moved from Spain to St Vincent in the Carribean. A son later left the islands for the UK where he married an English woman. Arran’s mother is Norwegian.
“My father was writing and my mother is an economist. They both worked from home which also made things easier,” Arran says.
A bit like what Ciro Santilli feels about himself!
One of the articles says his father has a PhD. TODO where did he work? What's his PhD on? Photo: www.topfoto.co.uk/asset/1357880/
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-everyday-genius-pxsq5c50kt9:
Neil, a political economist, attended state and private schools in Hampshire but was also taught for a period at home by his mother.
It’s strange because for most people maths is a real turn-off, yet maths is all about patterns and children of two or three love patterns. It just shows that schools are doing something seriously wrong.”
Nested set model Updated 2025-07-16
This is particularly important in SQL: Nested set model in SQL, as it is an efficient way to transverse trees there, since querying parents every time would require multiple disk accesses.
As a tree:
As the sets:
 __________________________________________________________________________
|  Root 1                                                                  |
|   ________________________________    ________________________________   |
|  |  Child 1.1                     |  |  Child 1.2                     |  |
|  |   ___________    ___________   |  |   ___________    ___________   |  |
|  |  |  C 1.1.1  |  |  C 1.1.2  |  |  |  |  C 1.2.1  |  |  C 1.2.2  |  |  |
1  2  3___________4  5___________6  7  8  9___________10 11__________12 13 14
|  |________________________________|  |________________________________|  |
|__________________________________________________________________________|
Consider the following nested set:
0, 8, root
  1, 7, mathematics
    2, 3, geometry
      3, 6, calculus
        4, 5, derivative
        5, 6, integral
      6, 7, algebra
  7, 8, physics
When we want to insert one element, e.g. limit, normally under calculus, we have to specify:
  • parent
  • index within parent
so we have a method:
insert(parent, previousSibling)
Network switch Updated 2025-07-16
A switch is a box with a bunch of Ethernet wires coming into it:
+--------------------+
| +-+  +-+  +-+  +-+ |
| |1|  |2|  |3|  |4| |
| +-+  +-+  +-+  +-+ |
+--------------------+
Except that it doesn't have to be Ethernet, e.g. it would also be a Wi-Fi.
What the switch does is:
  • an Ethernet request came in from wire 1
  • decide which wire to send it out on, e.g. wire 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. You likely don't want to send it back through 1 where it came from.
After the destination is found, a confirmation is somehow sent back to the switch, which then learns which wire to send each MAC address to.
A switch is a bit like a router but it is a bit dumber/operates at a lower level: it basically operates only on MAC addresses, not on IP addresses.
The Internet service provider boxes most people have at home combines a switch for the local network and a router for the ISP communication.
Not the usual bullshit you were expecting from the philosophy of Science, right?
Some notable quoters:
Next.js example Updated 2025-07-16
Our examples are located under nodejs/next:
Solved ones:
One page to rule them all Updated 2025-07-16
It is true that one image is worth a thousand words, but unfortunately it is also true that one image takes up at least as much bytes as a thousand words!
Having one single page to rule them all is of course the ideal setup for a website, as you can Ctrl + F one ToC and quickly find what you want.
And, with Linux Kernel Module Cheat Ciro noticed that it is very hard to write so much intelligent prose that becomes larger than reasonable to load on a single webpage.
He then started using this technique for everything he writes, including this page and Chinese government.
However, if there are too many images on the page, the loading of the last images would take forever in case users want to view the last sections.
There are two solutions to that:
Ciro is still deciding between those two. The traditional approach works for sure but loses the one page to rule them all benefits.
The innovative approach will work for interactive viewing, but archive.org will fail to load the images for example, and there may be other unforseen consequences.
Wikimedia Commons is awesome and automatically converts and serves smaller versions of images, so always choose the smallest images size needed by the output document. Readers can then find the higher resolution versions by following the page source.
This also comes to mind: motherfuckingwebsite.com
zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ from zettelkasten:
How many Zettelkästen should I have? The answer is, most likely, only one for the duration of your life. But there are exceptions to this rule.
Onion service Updated 2025-07-16
This is a way to host a server that actually hide the IP of the server from the client, just like Tor hides the IP of the client from the server. Amazing tecnology!
This is why it enables hosting illegal things like the Silk Road: law enforcement is not able find where the server is hosted, and take it down or identify the owner.
And of course, 4chan just takes that to a whole new level, usually closing on the same day, and then getting deleted within a week. Why would anyone contribute non-illegal content to that king of system?!
Ridiculous, so when new information comes out, we just duplicate all the old comments on a new thread again?
Remember, Ciro Santilli is the Necromancer God.
Open Images dataset Updated 2025-07-16
As of v7:
The images and annotations are both under CC BY, with Google as the copyright holder.
Open source software Updated 2025-07-16
What happens when the underdogs get together and try to factor out their efforts to beat some evil dominant power, sometimes victoriously.
Or when startups use the cheapest stuff available and randomly become the next big thing, and decide to keep maintaining the open stuff to get features for free from other companies, or because they are forced by the Holy GPL.
Open source frees employees. When you change jobs, a large part of the specific knowledge you acquired about closed source a project with your blood and tears goes to the trash. When companies get bought, projects get shut down, and closed source code goes to the trash. What sane non desperate person would sell their life energy into such closed source projects that could die at any moment? Working on open source is the single most important non money perk a company can have to attract the best employees.
Open source is worth more than the mere pragmatic financial value of not having to pay for software or the ability to freely add new features.
Its greatest value is perhaps the fact that it allows people study it, to appreciate the beauty of the code, and feel empowered by being able to add the features that they want.
That is why Ciro Santilli thought:
Life is too short for closed source.
But quoting Ciro's colleague S.:
Every software is open source when you read assembly code.
While software is the most developed open source technology available in the 2010's, due to the "zero cost" of copying it over the Internet, Ciro also believes that the world would benefit enormously from open source knowledge in all areas on science and engineering, for the same reasons as open source.
OpenStax Updated 2025-07-16
These people have good intentions.
The problem is that they don't manage to go critical because there's to way for students to create content, everything is manually curated.
You can't even publicly comment on the textbooks. Or at least Ciro Santilli hasn't found a way to do so. There is just a "submit suggestion" box.
This massive lost opportunity is even shown graphically at: cnx.org/about (archive) where there is a clear separation between:
  • "authors", who can create content
  • "students", who can consume content
Maybe this wasn't the case in their legacy website, legacy.cnx.org/content?legacy=true, but not sure, and they are retiring that now.
Thus, OurBigBook.com. License: CC BY! So we could re-use their stuff!
TODO what are the books written in?
Video 1.
Richard Baraniuk on open-source learning by TED (2006)
Source.
OpenStreetMap Updated 2025-07-16
It is rare to find a project with such a ridiculously high importance over funding ratio.
E.g., as of 2020, their help login help.openstreetmap.org/ shows MyOpenID as an option, which was discontinued in 2014, and not Google OAuth.
They do still seem to have a bit more activity than gis.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/openstreetmap on Stack Exchange.
Complaints:
All of this is a shame, because they do have some incredible data that you cannot find easily on other maps because people just edited it up.
Open University Updated 2025-07-16
Not really dedicated to open source course material, nor to free courses...
The "Open" in its name only made sense in the 60's, when it was founded, nowadays, there isn't much about this institution that is very different compared to traditional Oxbridge. "Cheap more online university" would be a more adequate name for it.
A system that would truly live up to the name "Open" in the year 2020 is the one described at the ideal university by Ciro Santilli.
Wikipedia even says that the initial focus was on broadcasting learning material on television and radio, so what happened to that now that we have an even more powerful on-demand tool called Internet!
They even created their own MOOC website, FutureLearn. But www.freecodecamp.org/news/massive-open-online-courses-started-out-completely-free-but-where-are-they-now-1dd1020f59/ mentions:
The course content is still free to access, but it’s only available for the duration of the course, and for two weeks after it ends.
OMG. God why.
A few open sources at: www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses. The 5-hour course on particle physics says it all. Stated as of 2023 at www.open.ac.uk/about/open-educational-resources/openlearn/free-learning:
The OU provides around 5% of its formal course materials as free open educational content every year on OpenLearn
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj0rbafFBak What's an Open University Degree Like? by Luke Cutforth (2021) mentions that it is more autodidactic/online, and it encourages part time learning.
youtu.be/rsWwffX-u0A?t=99 Open University - How does it work? by Matt Greg Vlogs (2017) shows that they do have their own custom institutional material. And it is not open???? Please. youtu.be/rsWwffX-u0A?t=222 mentions that there is no entry exam, and you can change your courses at any time, that is good at least.
Israel apparently also created their own version in the 70's inspired by the British one: Open University of Israel. Same story it seems.

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