Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

A moonshot classroom is a fundamental shift to give students more autonomy and agency in the classroom and entrusts them with greater ownership of their learning outcomes.

So basically strong focus on self-directed learning.

Also:

Real World Work. Students must produce learning projects with real world applications and an authentic audience.

so along the lines of project-based learning. Ciro Santilli specifically likes the "authentic audience" part, related: Section "Projects must aim for novelty"

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Formal proof of the prime number theorem by

Ciro Santilli 37  Updated 2025-07-14  +Created 2025-03-08

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Bibliography:

mathoverflow.net/questions/488721/formal-proofs-of-the-prime-number-theorem

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Max Planck Society by

Ciro Santilli 37  Updated 2025-07-14  +Created 2025-03-08

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A massive group of research institutes scattered across Germany. The constituent institutes are known as "Max Planck Institutes (for|of) X". They are primarily known for their incredible natural science research, but they also cover social sciences.

Figure 1.
Map of the Max Planck Institutes
. Source.

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Video games exist to fulfill unmet psychological needs of industrialized society by

Ciro Santilli 37  Updated 2025-07-14  +Created 2025-03-08

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Comparison of proof assistants by

Ciro Santilli 37  Updated 2025-07-14  +Created 2025-03-08

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ntietz.com/blog/first-impressions-of-lean-and-coq/ My first impressions from a few weeks with Lean and Coq

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Updates / Conclusion and feelings by

Ciro Santilli 37  Updated 2025-07-14  +Created 2025-03-08

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It is a bit sad to work on a project that no one cares about. You're not sure if you're crazy or a visionary. And it is kind of lonely.

I sometimes wonder if I would be happy doing this for the rest of my life if I could. And if it would have any impact at all no matter for how long I do it. My feelings in that area go from slightly depressed to slightly excited about the potential a few times every week.

As we all know, living and making life choices means sacrificing other things that could have been. When I was in France in 2015, I started a masters course in AI/robotics with the idea of doing a PhD and AGI research later on but quit half way because I felt university was such a waste of time.

But come now the AI boom, and although I still believe Education is broken, I might have been much better off financially/reputationally if I had withstood the bullshit followed that path. Instead I sacrificed that for nerding about low level programming and open educational content.

It is hard to get such ideas off one's mind. But the fact is, for better or worse, I've started walking the path of educational reform and sacrificed others along the way, and this is the path that I'm further ahead than other people, and perhaps I should pursue it further to a possible conclusion. Also this path has the advantage that it is not fully exclusive from other academic endeavors as we will always need content about the new flashy things that keep coming up.

So yeah, it's hard, but here I am, and I'll go as far as I can without going into Charles Bukowski levels of personal sacrifice.

Announcements:

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Updates / What might be next by

Ciro Santilli 37  Updated 2025-07-14  +Created 2025-03-08

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OK, I need to do content. I know :-) At the university I'm at, the only department that is open is the mathematics one. Both:

physically, I'm sitting next to some students right now, though they don't yet know that their saviour is just next to them.
in terms of publishing the course materials online. Many of them even have solution

All other courses extremely closed, notably Physics, which is the other course I'd consider. There are upsides and downsides for going for Mathematics:

upside:
- maths doesn't change with time
- maths doesn't require experiments
downside: most of it is useless compared to Physics

If I were free to choose, I might go for Physics instead. But maths isn't hard, and I think I'll just go with the hand I'm dealt this time to start with.

Tech wise, the big things are the following ones to which I have given different levels of architectural consideration (i.e. read: I'm afraid they'll be fucking hard and that I'll spend a month on yet another useless feature that won't help get a single user). I don't think I'll do those before at least a little bit of content, we'll see:

WYSIWYG: this is not a question of if, but when and how. Even I miss it when dealing with images. I was particularly impressed by Trillium Notes, and might consider forking it or reusing some of its components
perfect two way sync from web to local: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/326
Currently, after much effort, publishing from local to web is extremely good.
But pulling back changes that you make on web UI locally is not really possible. A basic version can be made easily, but a great version requires some thought.
In particular, preventing accidental rewrite on simultaneous local + web edits require edit history to be in place.
The rationale here is that users would start editing on Web with a low entry barrier. And as they become more committed to the project, they would eventually transition to having editing most of their content locally from a desktop, with the exception of a few minor edits on the go when they are on a cell phone, and which we want to very easily and automatically be pulled back to local as soon as they open an editor on their laptop.
I.e. we want to add a downwards arrow to the following diagram:

Smaller cute tech that I might do before content "real quick" include:

move more into community tagging rather than just community topic-ing:
- github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/359
- github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/360
automatic topic rendering for plaintext! github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/356. In particular this could open the doors for AI generated content.

Another thing I really want to do before time is up is to create a video summarizing my philosophy of education. I want it to be as fun and funny and sad as possible, with silly moving animated images and slides, not just me talking to the camera. Although all of the points I intend to talk about have undoubtedly been covered by others, it is something that I feel so strongly about that I would like to tell others about it more personally. If I start it it will likely take a few days to get done, and I'm not sure wha the final quality would be. It is a bit sad to not do "project work", but I think I'll end up doing it regardless. Class it under "fundraising" if you will, as it may help to find other like minded but rich people.

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Updates / How the tech improved by

Ciro Santilli 37  Updated 2025-07-14  +Created 2025-03-08

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In any case, the outcome of that is that the tech has improved. And I have done a relatively good job of clearly publishing any "more user visible" improvements to docs.ourbigbook.com/news and social media such as

though it is important to note that there have been more than one "fix a hard bug" weeks that were not published because they would just bore readers.

During this period the main focus has been on improving OurBigBook Web, i.e. the dynamic website that powers OurBigBook.com. There are two reasons for that:

Web is what has the OurBigBook topics feature for mind-melding, which is the killer feature of OurBigBook compared to other note taking apps and therefore deserves the highest levels of priority
Static website generation is an indispensable escape valve that ensures that your content can be published forever even if OurBigBook.com goes down one day, which it won't as long as I live. But the innovation is Web.
static website generation was closer to good enough, but web was much further and is fundamentally harder.
I'm extremely satisfied with OurBigBook static website generation and haven't touched it as much. It wasn't easy to reach this state, but I'm there.
But Web is a different and much more complex beast.
Making CLI software that will run on a person's local computer under full trust and building a bunch of HTML from lightweight markup in bulk is one thing.
But making a public dynamic website that has to continuously maintain a coherent database state on granular updates, while giving users some trust but not enough for them to blow everything up is on a totally different level. See e.g. the recent SPAM attack we've had to fend off.
Figure 1.
Screenshot showing voting manipulated SPAM as the most highly upvoted article on OurBigBook.com
. Source.
And then there's also the issue of front-end being mega-hard to get right.

As a result, Web is now way less buggy and much more usable.

If you look through the list of Web updates, there is nothing specifically mind blowing. The core ideas have largely crystallized, and we are just trying to making them click. I have a few more punches up my sleeve, but the core is decided.

Figure 2.
OurBigBook Web search
. Source. This is one of the many basic quality of life improvements that have been done on OurBigBook Web.

Figure 3.
OurBigBook Web article announcement
. Source. Another cute new feature, you can send an email to your followers about a new amazing article you created.

Web process has been somewhat slower than what I'd like. Of course, it is the case of any project that things are easily said than done. But there are two other main structural factors that have played into it:

I have my first baby now, and we're learning how to deal with that on the fly.
For example, we could have put him on childcare a bit earlier, but due to inexperience we've kept him a bit longer than we maybe should have.
Things are well sorted out now, but not matter how good your support system is, at the end of the day, and more often night, it is you the parents that have to deal with a lot of inevitable baby issues. Unless you want them to turn into psychopaths and drug addicts that is, which I don't. I've reached the point of semi failure middle age that the baby feels like my best moonshot.
All of this sets a fundamental limit on how many hours you can work per week.
But at least with the donations I was able to work on OurBigBook at all. Because if it weren't for that, I would have to focus entirely on the generic job instead and OurBigBook would have been put on hold.
the choice of Web stack. I was allured by Next.js. I can see the beauty and usefulness of a Node.js render front-end that also runs on backend and hydration. That is awesome.
But:
- React is insanely hard to learn and understand. Furthermore, it is also hard to understand the performance problem that it solves, and actually have a benchmark where this problem is solved faster than just delivering some HTML files with ad-hoc Js on top.
- the lack (or perhaps excess of shitty) actual web framework like Ruby on Rails and Django means that I have to rediscover the wheel many times over for all the essential support activities like testing, login and so one
At this point a rewrite is out of the question. I've managed to master things well enough to get a decent result, and given up on the few things that I couldn't for the life of me achieve, after documenting them very well for posterity of course.

Aside from Web, there was only one thing that received a significant improvement, and that was the OurBigBook VS Code extension. The extension is not perfect, and it is not the "final UI", which has to be some WYSIWYG implementation, and there are some fundamental limitations that cannot be overcome without patching VS Code itself. However, the extension is already extremely usable, and I'm writing this on it right now. Basics like syntax highlighting, jump to definition and autocomplete are very useful and usable.

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Updates / I ended up doing tech rather than content as usual by

Ciro Santilli 37  Updated 2025-07-14  +Created 2025-03-08

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At first I had intended to create a lot more content for the world class university located where I lived, but I ended up not doing that and just improving the project tech instead.

There are a few reasons for this, good or bad:

as a tech nerd, my natural tendency is to first sit down by myself and code to solve big general problems rather than go out and try to solve specific people's specific problems to obtain money and users
at one point I got the feeling that helping students with a bunch of small courses might be useful, and that instead I might get more impact by instead by focusing on creating content for a next big thing area such as:
- quantum computing
- AGI research
because many of the courses are fundamentally useless by design due to misalignment between university and reality.
I'm still not sure what to do about that, but I do think I'll try to do a bit of course solving at least and see how it goes.
One thing I've learned first hand through Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions and Linux Kernel Module Cheat is that the barrier to make money from a useful open source learning project that benefits a large number of people a little bit is huge, perhaps infinite, and that it might be better to instead focus more intensely on fewer users. This insight pushes me more towards going for solving local courses.
Another consideration that supports going for courses is that being close to students is perhaps my only unfair advantage. There is likely no one else in the world in the same position that I'm at, with some "free time" to chill with undergrads and help them with 100% of my undivided attention and passion.
A point that pulls me towards the big tutorials however is that my time is almost up, and focusing on them would increase the chances that I will be work in those fields afterwards. This feeling may go against the best interests of the project, but it is perhaps an inevitable self preservation consideration unless someone decides to free me from that forever with the 2M :-)
the entry barrier to help students of a top university is rather high. The students are already extremely busy and pressured (this is pe), and if it is in the slightest hard to explain their problems to you because you are not fluent enough in their subject, they will find a faster way to obtain the knowledge and never come to you.
I also did a bit of procrastinating with a few quick few exploration into cute programming projects. Nothing too crazy long however, just the usual. It's in my nature to have broad interests, and perhaps only such a person can make a OurBigBook.com. I'm not a fast worker. But I never stop. Once something is in my "this must be done or learnt list", I just keep coming back to it again and again until it happens.

The downsides of going for tech first are severe:

you risk being misaligned with what users want and spend enormous amounts of time on useless features
it is also rather demotivating that you are working hard on a really cool feature but you know that there are no users yet so no one will benefit from it, and that this feature alone is not enough to attract the users anyways

There are however counterpoints to these as for anything else:

I'm a user and I'm always improving it for myself. If there are other people like me out there, they will love it. If there aren't, perhaps I'll never be able to do anything that caters for them well enough anyways.
as the two users made me understand, once someone touches your thing, they expect it to be perfect, and their standards are extremely high. This is understandable in part given the large number of note taking apps in existence, and notably WYSIWYG ones. As such, there is some rationale for improving tech.

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