Theory of everything by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
As of 2019, the Standard Model and general relativity are incompatible. Once those are unified, we will have one equation to describe the entirety of physics.
There are also however also unsolved problems in electroweak interaction + strong interaction, which if achieved is referred to as a Grand Unified Theory. Reaching a GUT is considered a sensible intermediate step before TOE.
The current state of Physics has been the result of several previous unifications as shown at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything#Conventional_sequence_of_theories so it is expected that this last missing unification is likely to happen one day, potentially conditional on humanity having enough energy to observe new phenomena.
Stack Exchange by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Waste of time sub-sites that should instead be merged into Stack Overflow as different tags.
Nowhere is this waste more visible than at: cs50.stackexchange.com/. A website just for some specific course that is completely covered by other sites of the network? What a humongous waste!!!
Added this basic but fundamental protection layer to the website.
The email setup will of course be reused when notifications are eventually implemented.
Currently using SendGrid as the email provider. Very easy to setup, and has a free plan.
Adding reCAPTCHA immediately after email is a must otherwise an attacker could send infinitely many emails to random addresses, which would lead to the domain being marked as spam. I was pleasantly surprised about how easy the integration ended up being.
Made the website navbar and article lists more mobile friendly. Main motivation: improvised demos to people I meet IRL!
After breaking production and sweating for a bit hotfixing (not that anyone uses the website yet), I decided to be smart and created a staging server: ourbigbook-staging.herokuapp.com. Now I can blow that server up as I wish without afecting users. Documented at: cirosantilli.com/ourbigbook/staging-deployment
E.g.:
README.ciro
= My website

== h2

\Include[not-readme]
not-readme.ciro
= Not readme

== Not readme h2
the table of contents for index.html also contains the headers for not-readme.ciro producing:
This feature means that you can split large input files if rendering starts to slow you down, and things will still render exactly the same, with the larger table of contents.
This will be especially important for the website because initially I want users to be able to edit one header at a time, and join all headers with \Include. But I still want the ToC to show those children.
This was a bit hard because it required doing RECURSIVE SQL queries, something I hadn't done before: stackoverflow.com/questions/192220/what-is-the-most-efficient-elegant-way-to-parse-a-flat-table-into-a-tree/192462#192462 + of course the usual refactor a bunch of stuff and fix tests until you go mad.
Computer security by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
As mentioned at Section "Computer security researcher", Ciro Santilli really tends to like people from this area.
Also, the type of programming Ciro used to do, systems programming, is particularly useful to security researchers, e.g. Linux Kernel Module Cheat.
The reason he does not go into this is that Ciro would rather fight against the more eternal laws of physics rather than with some typo some dude at Apple did last week and which will be patched in a month.
Neil Fernandez by Ciro Santilli 37 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.”
Step busy beaver by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The step busy beaver is a variant of the busy beaver game counts the number of steps before halt, instead of the number of 1's written to the tape.
As of 2023, it appears that BB(5) the same machine, , will win both for 5 states. But this is not always necessarily the case.
Early Google employee by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
ChatGPT produces:
  • Heather Cairns (Employee #4) - Joined in 1998. She handled HR and was one of the earliest administrative hires.
  • Harry Cheung (Employee #5) - Joined in 1999. An early engineer.
  • Gerald Aigner (Employee #6) - Hired in 1999. Worked as a software engineer.
  • Susan Wojcicki (Employee #16) - Joined in 1999. She rented her garage to Larry and Sergey in 1998 and later became an integral part of Google's business and advertising teams.
  • Marissa Mayer (Employee #20) - Hired in 1999. Played a major role in Google Search and design.
Omid Kordestani - Joined in 1999 as Google’s first business hire, focusing on sales and revenue generation.
User mode emulation by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
User mode emulation refers to the ability of certain emulators to emulate userland code running on top of a specific operating system, usually Linux.
For example, QEMU allows you to run a variety of userland ELF programs directly on it, without an underlying Linux kernel running.
User mode emulation is achieved by implementing system calls and special filesystems such as /dev manually on the emulator one by one.
The general tradeoff is that simulation is less acurate as it may lack certain highly advanced kernel functionality you haven't implemented yet. But it is much easier to run executables with it, and you don't have to wait for boot to finish before running, you just run executables directly from the command line.

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