Since images are large, they bring the following challenges:
- keeping images in the main Git repository with text content makes the repository huge and slow to clone, and should not be done
- storing and serving images could cost us, which we want to avoid
To solve those problems, the following alternatives appear to be stable enough and should be used decreasing preference:
- for all images, use the separate GitHub repository: github.com/cirosantilli/mediaThis way, the entire website is relies on a single third party: GitHub, so we have a simple single point of failure.We are at the mercy of GitHub's 1GB size policy: help.github.com/en/articles/what-is-my-disk-quota, but it will take a while to hit that.GitLab however has a 10Gb maximum size: about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/gitlab-dot-com-storage-limit-raised-to-10gb-per-repo/ so we could move there is we ever blow up 1Gb on GitHub.Both GitLab and GitHub allow uploading files through the web UI, so downloading a large repo is never needed to contribute.GitHub does not serve videos like it does images however as of 2019.
- Wikimedia Commons for videos if the following conditions are met:
- in scope: "educational material in a broad sense", but not e.g. "Private image collections, e.g. private party photos, photos of yourself and your friends, your collection of holiday snaps and so on.". I don't think they will be too picky even with low quality photos.
- allowed format, e.g. images or videos, but not ZIPs
- allowed license: CC BY SA, but no fair use
Since Wikimedia Commons has a higher level of curation and is an educational not-for-profit, it is the method most likely to remain available for the longest time.For this reason, we highly recommend uploading any acceptable files there as well as an additional backup.The downside is that its tooling is not as good, e.g. there are a bunch of messy unofficial tools for batch operations, and upload takes more effort.Another downside of Wikimedia Commons is that while we can choose the basename of files, it also adds some extra SHA crap to the beginning of URLs, making them harder to predict.Another serious downside is that they randomly rename images without redirects... e.g. they renamed upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/03/STJ_SVG_file.svg to upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Superconducting_tunnel_junction.svgAnother "downside" is that they are extremely strict about copyright compliance. This is good because you can be pretty sure that they are correct in general, but it also means that they are very conservative, and delete things where fair use would be OK. And if those fair uses have no Wikipedia page, they won't show up anywhere. - archive.org for anything else, e.g. videos that Wikimedia commons does not accept.All content will be tracked under the
cirosantillicollection: archive.org/details/cirosantilliarchive.org has a very convenient upload and lax requirements. The generated URLs are predictable (single SHA prefix for the entire collection).Never trust a website that is not on GitHub Pages, for-profit companies will take down everything immediately as soon as it stops making them money.Every external link to non-GitHub pages must be archived. And GitHub links must be forked.We should also backup images that Wikimedia Commons does not accept here in addition to the github.com/cirosantilli/media repository.
The following alternatives seem impossible because Ciro could not find if they expose direct links to the images:
The following do have direct links:
- www.flickr.com e.g. live.staticflickr.com/7437/27402357162_7d91b73cd5_z.jpg documented at help.flickr.com/en_us/get-the-url-of-a-flickr-photo-S1Hnnmjym Also does automatic image size conversion. But only provides ugly autogenerated URLs.
- Instagram does not support upload from computer? Lol?
For videos, YouTube does not allow download, even of Creative Commons videos so uploading only there is not acceptable as it prevents reuse:
It is not a practical fighting style. But it is an awesome game/exercise.
First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You, Then They Attack You, Then You Win
Creator of Basic English.
The most popular programming news sharing forum of the 2010's by far. If your content gets shared there, and it stays on top for a day, the traffic peak will be incredible. Reddit posts are sure to follow.
Basically a programming-only Reddit-lite.
Ciro Santilli had a few of his content shared there as mentioned at the best articles by Ciro Santillis.
By writing in English you reach more people.
Writing in any other language is a waste of time.
The reason is simple: English speakers control a huge proportion of the world's GDP.
English is the de-facto Lingua Franca of the second half of the 20th Century, it is the new lingua franca, the new Latin, and there is no escaping it.
Students who don't know English will never do anything truly useful in science and technology. So it is pointless to teach them anything (besides English itself).
Explain how to make money with the lesson by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.
Useful 99% of the time means you can make money with it.
Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.
Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.
This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.
Exams and homework are useless, only projects matter by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01See: Section "Exam".
The only thing that matters is that students aim towards the goals described at explain how to make money with the lesson.
Any "homework for which the student cannot use existing resources available online" is a waste of time.
The ideal way to go about it is to reach some intermediate milestone, and then document it. You don't have to do the hole thing! Just go until your patience with it runs out. But while you are doing it, go as deep and wide as you possibly can, without mercy.
This is actually how Ciro Santilli learns new subjects he is curious about, even as an adult! Some examples:
The Moonshots in Education project also has a fantastic related quote:
Real World Work. Students must produce learning projects with real world applications and an authentic audience.
A Ring can be seen as a generalization of a field where:
- multiplication is not necessarily commutative. If this is satisfied, we can call it a commutative ring.
- multiplication may not have inverse elements. If this is satisfied, we can call it a division ring.
Addition however has to be commutative and have inverses, i.e. it is an Abelian group.
The simplest example of a ring which is not a full fledged field and with commutative multiplication are the integers. Notably, no inverses exist except for the identity itself and -1. E.g. the inverse of 2 would be 1/2 which is not in the set. More specifically, the integers are a commutative ring.
A polynomial ring is another example with the same properties as the integers.
The simplest non-commutative, non-division is is the set of all 2x2 matrices of real numbers:Note that is not a ring because you can by addition reach the zero matrix.
- we know that 2x2 matrix multiplication is non-commutative in general
- some 2x2 matrices have a multiplicative inverse, but others don't
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.