Nervous system by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Dwarf Fortress by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Made by a single dude. As SsethTzeentach puts it, this is the greatest autism project ever made.
Cooper pair by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
BCS Theory by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Main theory to explain Type I superconductors very successfully.
TODO can someone please just give the final predictions of BCS, and how they compare to experiments, first of all? Then derive them.
High level concepts:
  • the wave functions of pairs of electrons (fermions) get together to form bosons. This is a phase transition effect, thus the specific sudden transition temperature.
  • the pairs form a Bose-Einstein condensate
  • once this new state is reached, all pairs are somehow entangled into one big wave function, and you so individual lattice imperfections can't move just one single electron off trajectory and make it lose energy
Real-time strategy by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Double star by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Parameters of the Standard Model by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
The growing number of parameters of the Standard Model is one big source of worry for early 21st century physics, much like the growing number of particles was a worry in the beginning of the 20th (but that one was solved by 2020).
Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
How do you think Ciro got his rep? Just kidding.
Stack Overflow later forbade Ciro from advertising this project as described at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019". Those newbs know nothing about security through obscurity.
Article metadata shown next to every header by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
This is a major feature: we have now started to inject the following buttons next to every single pre-rendered header:
  • "Like"
  • "By Other On The Same Topic"
  • "Discussions", i.e. the issue tracker for the header
  • "Create my own version" or "View my version of the page" or "Edit" button depending on wether the user can edit or already has a version of the article or not
This crucial feature makes it clear to every new user that every single header has its own separate metadata, which is a crucial idea of the website.
Figure 1.
Screenshot showing metadata next to each header
. The page is: ourbigbook.com/donald-trump/chemistry. Note how even the subheaders "Chemical element" and "Hydrogen" show the metadata.
--format-source by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Added ourbigbook --format-source automatic code formatting. I implemented it for the following reasons:
  • I want to do certain automatic modifications to source code on web, e.g.:
    • allow users to select the parent article of a new article on the web UI, but that is currently doable only with \Include macros
    • allow users to edit the source only for a specific header
  • later on, much later, this will allow WYSIWYG export to plaintext
This also ended up having one unexpected benefit: whenever a new feature is added that deprecates an old feature, by converting the large corpus from github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io to the new feature I can test the new preferred feature very well.
For example, converting \x[blue cat] en masse to the new insane syntax <blue cat> found several bugs with the new insane syntax.
This seemed somewhat easy at first, so I started it as a way of procrastinating more urgent Web features (web scares me, you know), but it ended being insanely hard to implement, because there are many edge cases. Also, most bugs are not acceptable, as they would corrupt your precious source code and potentially output.
But well, it is done!
Completely rebrand Cirodown to OurBigBook by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
The name cirodown should not appear anywhere now, except with very few exceptions, e.g.:
I have also squatted OurBigBook on all major social media handles for near future usage, e.g.: twitter.com/ourbigbook and so on.
I was going to do this sooner or later, it was inevitable, but the timing was partly triggered due to noticing that English speakers (and likely many other nationalities) are not able to easily read/hear/pronounce "Ciro".
Group all SQL queries together by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
And do 5 big queries instead of hundreds of smaller ones.
For example, a README.ciro document that references another document saying:
The \x[speed-of-light] is fast.
needs to fetch "speed-of-light" from the ID database (previously populated e.g. by preparsing light.ciro:
= Light

== Speed of light
to decide that it should display as "Speed of light" (the title rather than the ID).
Previously, I was doing a separate fetch for each \x[] as they were needed, leading to hundreds of them at different times.
Now I refactored things so that I do very few database queries, but large ones that fetch everything during parsing. And then at render time they are all ready in cache.
This will be fundamental for the live preview on the browser, where the roundtrip to server would make it impossible
Arkarya by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Name of the clade of archaea plus eukarya proposed at: www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2015.00717/full. Much better term than prokaryote as that is not a clade. Let's hope it catches on!
Fifth Solvay Conference (1927) by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Computer graphics by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Database by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Integrated development environment by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
IDEs are absolutely essential for developing complex software.
The funny thing is that you don't notice this until someone shows it to you. But once you see it, there is not turning back, just like Steve Jobs customers don't know what they want quote.
Unfortunately, after the Fall of Eclipse (archive), the IDE landscape in 2019 is horrible and split between:
  • highly buggy but still feature rich Eclipse
  • many may many other feature lacking options using possibly more trendy and forward lasting implementations like Electron
  • awesome cross-platform proprietary JetBrains IDEs
  • the God-like Windows-only proprietary language-lacking Visual Studio
Programmers of the world: unite! Focus on one IDE, and make it work for all languages and all build systems. Give it all the features that Eclipse has, but none of the bugginess. Work with top project to make sure the IDE works for all top projects.
Projects of the world: support one IDE, with in-tree configuration. Complex integration is often required between the IDE and the build system, and successful projects must to that once for all developers. Either do this, or watch you complex project wither away.
Build tool maintainers: make it possible for IDEs to support your tool! E.g., implement JSON Compilation Database output so that IDEs can read the exact compiler commands from that, in order to automatically determine how files should be parsed! Or better, just use libllvm in your IDE itself as the main parser.
Ciro is evaluating some IDEs at: github.com/cirosantilli/ide-test-projects
Multimedia software by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Programming language by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
A language that allows you to talk to and command a computer.
There is only space for two languages at most in the world: the compiled one, and the interpreted one.
For 2020 now, when you have a choice, you must go for:
  • Python as the interpreted one
  • C++ for compiled
Those two are languages not by any means perfect from a language design point of view, and there are likely already better alternatives, they are only chosen due to a pragmatic tradeoff between ecosystem and familiarity.
Ciro predicts that Python will become like Fortran in the future: a legacy hated by most who have moved to JavaScript long ago (which is slightly inferior, but too similar, and with too much web dominance to be replaced), but with too much dominance in certain applications like machine learning to be worth replacing, like Fortran dominates certain HPC applications. We'll see. Maybe non performance critical scripting languages are easier to replace.
C++ however is decent, and is evolving in very good directions in the 2010's, and will remain relevant in the foreseeable future.
Bash can also be used when you're lazy. But if the project goes on, you will sooner or later regret that choice.
The language syntax in itself does not matter. All that matters is how many useful libraries and tooling it has.
This is how other languages compare:
  • C: but cannot make a large codebase DRY without insanity
  • Ruby: the exact same as Python, and only strong in one domain: web development, while Python rules everything else, and is not bad on web either. So just kill Ruby, please.
  • JavaScript: it is totally fine if Node.js destroys Python and becomes the ONE scripting language to rule them all since Python and JavaScript are almost equally crappy (although JavaScript is a bit more of course).
    One thing must be said tough: someobject.not_defined_property silently returning undefined rather than blowing up is bullshit.
  • Go: likely a good replacement for Python. If the ecosystem gets there, will gladly use it more.
  • Java: good language, but has an ugly enterprisey ecosystem, Oracle has made/kept the development process too closed, and API patenting madness on Android just kills if off completely
  • Haskell: many have tried to learn some functional stuff, but too hard. Sounds really cool though.
  • Rust: sounds cool, you will gladly replace C and C++ with it if the ecosystem ramps up.
  • C: Microsoft is evil
  • Tcl, Perl: Python killed them way back and is less insane
  • R, GNU Octave and any other "numerical computing language": all of this is a waste of society's time as explained at: Section "Numerical computing language"
  • Swift: Ciro would rather stay away from Apple dominated projects if possible since they sell a closed source operating system
Software bug by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created

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