In your normal 2020 broken educational system, it is the first time at which students get an official chance to learn something advanced, and possibly prepare to go venture into the PhD desert.
Not going to lie, this is some cool shit, robot simulation and 3D visualization in the browser.
Some examples by Ciro Santilli follow.
Of the tutorial-subjectivity type:
- This edit perfectly summarizes how Ciro feels about Wikipedia (no particular hate towards that user, he was a teacher at the prestigious Pierre and Marie Curie University and actually as a wiki page about him):which removed the only diagram that was actually understandable to non-Mathematicians, which Ciro Santilli had created, and received many upvotes at: math.stackexchange.com/questions/776039/intuition-behind-normal-subgroups/3732426#3732426. The removal does not generate any notifications to you unless you follow the page which would lead to infinite noise, and is extremely difficult to find out how to contact the other person. The removal justification is even somewhat ad hominem: how does he know Ciro Santilli is also not a professional Mathematician? :-) Maybe it is obvious because Ciro explains in a way that is understandable. Also removal makes no effort to contact original author. Of course, this is caused by the fact that there must also have been a bunch of useless edits not done by Ciro, and there is no reputation system to see if you should ignore a person or not immediately, so removal author has no patience anymore. This is what makes it impossible to contribute to Wikipedia: your stuff gets deleted at any time, and you don't know how to appeal it. Ciro is going to regret having written this rant after Daniel replies and shows the diagram is crap. But that would be better than not getting a reply and not learning that the diagram is crap.
rm a cryptic diagram (not understandable by a professional mathematician, without further explanations
- en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Finite_field&type=revision&diff=1044934168&oldid=1044905041 on finite fields with edit comment "Obviously: X ≡ α". Discussion at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Finite_field#Concrete_simple_worked_out_example Some people simply don't know how to explain things to beginners, or don't think Wikipedia is where it should be done. One simply can't waste time fighting off those people, writing good tutorials is hard enough in itself without that fight.
- en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete_Fourier_transform&diff=1193622235&oldid=1193529573 by user Bob K. removed Ciro Santilli's awesome simple image of the Discrete Fourier transform as seen at en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete_Fourier_transform&oldid=1176616763:with message:
Hello. I am a retired electrical engineer, living near Washington,DC. Most of my contributions are in the area of DSP, where I have about 40 years of experience in applications on many different processors and architectures.
Thank you so much!!remove non-helpful image
Maybe it is a common thread that these old "experts" keep removing anything that is actually intelligible by beginners? Section "There is value in tutorials written by beginners"Also ranted at: x.com/cirosantilli/status/1808862417566290252
Figure 1. Source at: numpy/fft_plot.py. - when Ciro Santilli created Scott Hassan's page, he originally included mentions of his saucy divorce: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scott_Hassan&oldid=1091706391 These were reverted by Scott's puppets three times, and Ciro and two other editors fought back. Finally, Ciro understood that Hassan's puppets were likely right about the removal because you can't talk about private matters of someone who is low profile:even if it is published in well known and reliable publications like the bloody New York Times. In this case, it is clear that most people wanted to see this information summarized on Wikipedia since others fought back Hassan's puppet. This is therefore a failure of Wikipedia to show what the people actually want to read about.This case is similar to the PsiQuantum one. Something is extremely well known in an important niche, and many people want to read about it. But because the average person does not know about this important subject, and you are limited about what you can write about it or not, thus hurting the people who want to know about it.
Notability constraints, which are are way too strict:There are even a Wikis that were created to remove notability constraints: Wiki without notability requirements.
- even information about important companies can be disputed. E.g. once Ciro Santilli tried to create a page for PsiQuantum, a startup with $650m in funding, and there was a deletion proposal because it did not contain verifiable sources not linked directly to information provided by the company itself: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/PsiQuantum Although this argument is correct, it is also true about 90% of everything that is on Wikipedia about any company. Where else can you get any information about a B2B company? Their clients are not going to say anything. Lawsuits and scandals are kind of the only possible source... In that case, the page was deleted with 2 votes against vs 3 votes for deletion.is very similar to Stack Exchange's own Stack Overflow content deletion issues. Ain't Nobody Got Time For That. "Ain't Nobody Got Time for That" actually has a Wiki page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain%27t_Nobody_Got_Time_for_That. That's notable. Unlike a $600M+ company of course.
should we delete this extremely likely useful/correct content or not according to this extremely complex system of guidelines"
In December 2023 the page was re-created, and seemed to stick: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:PsiQuantum#Secondary_sources It's just a random going back and forth. Author Ctjk has an interesting background:I am a legal official at a major government antitrust agency. The only plausible connection is we regulate tech firms
For these reasons reason why Ciro basically only contributes images to Wikipedia: because they are either all in or all out, and you can determine which one of them it is. And this allows images to be more attributable, so people can actually see that it was Ciro that created a given amazing image, thus overcoming Wikipedia's lack of reputation system a little bit as well.
Wikipedia is perfect for things like biographies, geography, or history, which have a much more defined and subjective expository order. But when it comes to "tutorials of how to actually do stuff", which is what mathematics and physics are basically about, Wikipedia has a very hard time to go beyond dry definitions which are only useful for people who already half know the stuff. But to learn from zero, newbies need tutorials with intuition and examples.
Bibliography:
- gwern.net/inclusionism from gwern.net:
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
- Quote "Golden wiki vs Deletionism on Wikipedia"
The key takeaway is that setting an explicit value function to an AGI entity is a good way to destroy the world due to poor AI alignment. We are more likely to not destroy by creating an AI whose goals is to "do want humans what it to do", but in a way that it does not know before hand what it is that humans want, and it has to learn from them. This approach appears to be known as reward modeling.
Some other cool ideas:
- a big thing that is missing for AGI in the 2010's is some kind of more hierarchical representation of the continuous input data of the world, e.g.:
- game theory can be seen as part of artificial intelligence that deals with scenarios where multiple intelligent agents are involved
- probability plays a crucial role in our everyday living, even though we don't think too much about it every explicitly. He gives a very good example of the cost/risk tradeoffs of planning to the airport to catch a plane. E.g.:
- economy, and notably the study of the utility, is intrinsically linked to AI alignment
Some criticisms:
Ciro Santilli invented this term, derived from "hardware in the loop" to refer to simulations in which both the brain and the body and physical world of organism models are modelled.
E.g. just imagine running:
Likely implies whole brain emulation and therefore AGI.
It's like the bootloader stage of biology! It's weird and magic and important: Section "Molecular biology feels like systems programming".
CIA 2010 covert communication websites by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the late 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of the targeted countries circa 2010-2013.
This article uses publicly available information to publicly disclose for the first time a few hundred of what we feel are extremely likely candidate sites of the network. The starting point for this research was the September 2022 Reuters article "America’s Throwaway Spies" which for the first time gave nine example websites, and their analyst from Citizenlabs claims to have found 885 websites in total, but did not publicly disclose them. Starting from only the nine disclosed websites, we were then able to find a few hundred websites that share so many similarities with them, i.e. a common fingerprint, that we believe makes them beyond reasonable doubt part of the same network.
If you enjoy this article, consider dropping some Monero at: 4A1KK4uyLQX7EBgN7uFgUeGt6PPksi91e87xobNq7bT2j4V6LqZHKnkGJTUuCC7TjDNnKpxDd8b9DeNBpSxim8wpSczQvzf. Other sponsorship methods: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
The discovery of these websites by Iranian and Chinese counterintelligence led to the imprisonment and execution of several assets in those countries, and subsequent shutdown of the channel by the CIA when they noticed that things had gone wrong. This is likely a Wikipedia page that talks about the disastrous outcome of the websites being found out: 2010–2012 killing of CIA sources in China, although it contained no mention of websites before Ciro Santilli edited it in.
Of particular interest is that based on their language and content, certain of the websites seem to have targeted other democracies such as Germany, France, Spain and Brazil.
If anyone can find others websites, or has better techniques feel free to contact Ciro Santilli at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". Contributions will be clearly attributed if desired. Some of the techniques used so far have been very heuristic, and that added to the limited amount of data makes it almost certain that some websites have been missed. Broadly speaking, there are two types of contributions that would be possible:The fact that citizenlabs reported exactly 885 websites being found makes it feel like they might have found find a better fingerprint which we have not managed to find yet. We have not yet had to pay for our data.
- finding new IP ranges: harder and more exiting, and potentially requires more intelligence
- better IP to domain name databases to fill in known gaps in existing IP ranges
Disclaimers:
- the network fell in 2013, followed by fully public disclosures in 2018 and 2022, so we believe it is now more than safe for the public to know what can still be uncovered about the events that took place
- Ciro Santilli's political bias is strongly pro-democracy and anti-dictatorship, but with a good pinch of skepticism about the morality US foreign policy in the last century
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.