These are some users Ciro Santilli particularly respects, mostly due to their contributions to systems programming subjects:
- unix.stackexchange.com/users/885/gilles-so-stop-being-evil
- stackoverflow.com/users/379897/r-github-stop-helping-icea
- stackoverflow.com/users/196561/osgx
- stackoverflow.com/users/50617/employed-russian Employed Russian. Binutils, ELF, GDB, claims to work at Google. The only Russian sounding name on GDB and Binutils git log is that of Paul Pluzhnikov: www.linkedin.com/in/paul-pluzhnikov-61b9676/ and Employed Russian mentions one of his commits at: stackoverflow.com/questions/3718072/gdb-takes-too-long-and-ctrl-c-has-no-effect Ex physicist: www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Pluzhnikov
Ciro also really likes the following users, a bit less like Gods, and bit more like friends:
- partly because they were close by on the yearly reputation charts for a long time circa 2020, so it feels like they also focus on replying to important questions rather than answering new duplicates immediately:
- stackoverflow.com/users/642706/basil-bourque: GCC dev, but started replying lots of Java questions as of 2021 it seems for some reason
- stackoverflow.com/users/541136/aaron-hall: Python, NixOS and Haskell more and more it seems. Also pro freedom of speech, gotta love those religious liberal Republicans. Reminds Ciro of Ron Maimon very slightly, maybe it's just the New Yorkedneess. Ciro once met another intelligent dude who liked both Haskell and NixOS, there must be some correlation.
- VonC: Git God, VonC is just Super nice, gives clear credit to others, always positive interactions. Love this dude. He was the one that held the Necromancer record in 2019 before Ciro took it.
- Peter Cordes. An assembly maniac this one. And a really nice one too. Sometimes pedantic, but always nice, and always correct. He's been going into God level more and more it must be said:In 2024 VonC was found to have been used LLMs to generate part of his answers, and later publicly apologized: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072/a-commitment-to-amend-and-move-forward It is not clear why he had used them though. He remained user #1 in 2025 however, even despite not using them anymore as far as it is known.
Other interesting people:
- stackoverflow.com/users/560648/lightness-races-in-orbit Lightness Races in Orbit. C++ God. Interesting aesthetics. Real name: Tom Lachecki, British, as per:As of 2023 marked "retired" from Stack Overflow, rep graph suggests since 2020.
- stackoverflow.com/users/3681880/suragch the number 3 necromancer dude. But then in 2022 he found God and mostly quit: suragch.medium.com/programming-was-my-god-89b625164a69
- www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1ealv82/the_fall_of_stack_overflow/ The Fall of Stack Overflow
Ciro's Edict #5 Link to an image or video in another file that has an 
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
\x on title from another file by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16Issue report at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/198 Suppose you had:
programming-language.ciro
= Programming language
\Image[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/python-logo.jpg]
{title=The \x[python-programming-language] logo}
== Python
{c}
{disambiguate=programming-language}= Logos I like
\x[image-the-python-logo]Now, when rendering
\x[image-the-python-logo], we would need to fetch two IDs:image-the-python-logofor theTheandlogopartpython-programming-languageitself, to know that\x[python-programming-language]should render asPython
But after group all SQL queries together was done, there was no way to know that rendering
image-the-python-logo would imply also fetching python-programming-language.This was solved by adding a new database entry type,
REFS_TABLE_X_TITLE_TITLE to the existing References table, which tracks dependencies between IDs.XML predecessor.
You need those because it is hard to do the following:
This is hard to do notably because when the update happens, several things might need to change on the webpage at the same time.
Notably, new elements might need to be added to the webpage, which in turn means that new bindings such as button clicks have to be added to those, in a way that keeps the page working.
The only way to do this basically is to have a functional dependency graph that keeps everything in the page in working state as updates come.
In conventional speech of the early 2000's, is basically a synonym for dynamic random-access memory.
One of the things Ciro Santilli really likes, see: Linux Kernel Module Cheat.
Ubuntu 20.10 crash...:
exceptions:ERROR Unhandled Exception
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/openshot-qt", line 11, in <module>
load_entry_point('openshot-qt==2.5.1', 'gui_scripts', 'openshot-qt')()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/openshot_qt/launch.py", line 97, in main
app = OpenShotApp(argv)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/openshot_qt/classes/app.py", line 218, in __init__
from windows.main_window import MainWindow
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/openshot_qt/windows/main_window.py", line 45, in <module>
from windows.views.timeline_webview import TimelineWebView
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/openshot_qt/windows/views/timeline_webview.py", line 42, in <module>
from PyQt5.QtWebKitWidgets import QWebView
ImportError: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Quick.so.5: undefined symbol: _ZN4QRhi10newSamplerEN11QRhiSampler6FilterES1_S1_NS0_11AddressModeES2_, version Qt_5_PRIVATE_APIweb.archive.org/web/20181119214326/https://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/CGPM-2018/26th-CGPM-Resolutions.pdf gives it in raw:The breakdown is:
- the unperturbed ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom is 9 192 631 770 Hz
- the speed of light in vacuum c is 299 792 458 m/s
- the Planck constant h is 6.626 070 15 × J s
- the elementary charge e is 1.602 176 634 × C
- the Boltzmann constant k is 1.380 649 × J/K
- the Avogadro constant NA is 6.022 140 76 × mol
- the luminous efficacy of monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 × 1012 Hz, Kcd, is 683 lm/W,
- actually use some physical constant:
the unperturbed ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom is 9 192 631 770 Hz
Defines the second in terms of caesium-133 experiments. The beauty of this definition is that we only have to count an integer number of discrete events, which is what allows us to make things precise.the speed of light in vacuum c is 299 792 458 m/s
Defines the meter in terms of speed of light experiments. We already had the second from the previous definition.the Planck constant h is 6.626 070 15 × J s
the elementary charge e is 1.602 176 634 × C
- arbitrary definitions based on the above just to match historical values as well as possible:
the Boltzmann constant k is 1.380 649 × J/K
the Avogadro constant NA is 6.022 140 76 × mol
the luminous efficacy of monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 × 1012 Hz, Kcd, is 683 lm/W
Their energy is very high compared example to more common radiation such as visible spectrum, and there is a neat reason for that: it's because the strong force that binds nuclei is strong so transitions lead to large energy changes.
A decay scheme such as Figure "caesium-137 decay scheme" illustrates well how gamma radiation happens as a byproduct of radioactive decay due to the existence of nuclear isomer.
Gamma rays are pretty cool as they give us insight into the energy levels/different configurations of the nucleus.
They have also been used as early sources of high energy particles for particle physics experiments before the development of particle accelerators, serving a similar purpose to cosmic rays in those early days.
But gamma rays they were more convenient in some cases because you could more easily manage them inside a laboratory rather than have to go climb some bloody mountain or a balloon.
The positron for example was first observed on cosmic rays, but better confirmed in gamma ray experiments by Carl David Anderson.
The orthogonal group has 2 connected components:
- one with determinant +1, which is itself a subgroup known as the special orthogonal group. These are pure rotations without a reflection.
- the other with determinant -1. This is not a subgroup as it does not contain the origin. It represents rotations with a reflection.
It is instructive to visualize how the looks like in :
- you take the first basis vector and move it to any other. You have therefore two angular parameters.
- you take the second one, and move it to be orthogonal to the first new vector. (you can choose a circle around the first new vector, and so you have another angular parameter.
- at last, for the last one, there are only two choices that are orthogonal to both previous ones, one in each direction. It is this directio, relative to the others, that determines the "has a reflection or not" thing
As a result it is isomorphic to the direct product of the special orthogonal group by the cyclic group of order 2:
A low dimensional example:because you can only do two things: to flip or not to flip the line around zero.
Note that having the determinant plus or minus 1 is not a definition: there are non-orthogonal groups with determinant plus or minus 1. This is just a property. E.g.:has determinant 1, but:so is not orthogonal.
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