Home Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
View more
Check out: OurBigBook.com, the best way to publish your scientific knowledge. It's an open source note taking system that can publish from lightweight markup files in your computer both to a multi-user mind melding dynamic website, or as a static website. It's like Wikipedia + GitHub + Stack Overflow + Obsidian mashed up. Source code: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook.
Sponsor me to work on this project: 100k USD = I quit me job and work on it one year full time. Status: ~144k / 200k USD reached: 1st year locked-in, 2nd year stretch goal open at 200k USD. 1M USD = I retire and do it forever. How to donate: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
I reached 100k USD after a 1000 Monero donation, so I quit my job for 1 year starting 1st June 2024 to solve as many STEM courses as I can from a world leading university to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. If I reach 200k USD, then I'll do it for two years instead. A second year greatly improve chances of success: year one I solve a bunch of courses, year two I come guns blazing with the content and expand further.
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous. More rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
Explaining things is my superpower, e.g. I was top user #39 on Stack Overflow in 2023[ref][ref] and I have a few 1k+ star educational GitHub repositories[ref][ref][ref][ref]. Now I want to bring that level of awesomeness to masters level Mathematics and Physics. But I can't do it alone! So I created OurBigBook.com to allow everyone to work together towards the perfect book of everything.
My life's goal is to bring hardcore university-level STEM open educational content to all ages. Sponsor me at github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli starting from 1$/month so I can work full time on it. Further information: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". Achieving what I call "free gifted education" is my Nirvana.
This website is written in OurBigBook Markup, and it is published on both cirosantilli.com (static website) and outbigbook.om/cirosantilli (multi-user OurBigBook Web instance). Its source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io and also at cirosantilli.com/_dir and it is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted.
To contact Ciro, see: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". He likes to talk with random people of the Internet.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/ID_photo_of_Ciro_Santilli_taken_in_2013.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Ciro_Santilli's_learn_teach_apply_logo.png
Besides that, I'm also a freedom of speech slacktivist and recreational cyclist. I like Chinese traditional music and classic Brazilian pop. Opinions are my own, but they could be yours too. Tax the rich.
I offer:
My approach is to:
For minors, parents are welcome to join video calls, and all interactions with the student will be recorded and made available to parents.
I have a proven track of explaining complex concepts in an interesting and useful way. I work for the learner. Teaching statement at: Section "How to teach". Pricing to be discussed. Contact details at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli".
I am particularly excited about pointing people to the potential next big things, my top picks these days are:
I am also generally interested in:
Figure 1.
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
. Ciro contributes almost exclusively by answering question he Googles into out of his own need, and never by refreshing the newest question of big tags for low hanging fruit! More information at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions".
Video 1.
Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
. Source.
Video 2.
OurBigBook Web topics demo
. Source. The OurBigBook topic feature allows users to "merge their minds" in a "sort by upvote"-stack overflow-like manner for each subject. This is the killer feature of OurBigBook Web. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-topics.
Video 3.
OurBigBook dynamic article tree demo
. Source. The OurBigBook dynamic tree feature allows any of your headers to be the toplevel h1 header of a page, while still displaying its descendants. SEO loves this, and it also allows users to always get their content on the correct granularity. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-dynamic-article-tree.
Video 4.
OurBigBook local editing and publishing demo
. Source. With OurBigBook you can store your content as plaintext files in a Lightweight markup, and then publish that to either OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features, or as a static website where you are in full control. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/publish-your-content.
Video 5.
Top Down 2D continuous game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)
Source. More information: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games". This is Ciro's underwhelming stab at the fundamental question: Can AGI be trained in simulations?. This project could be taken much further.
Video 6.
Water Margin tribute to Chinese dissidents by Ciro Santilli (2022)
Source. Part of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, see also: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/water-margin.
Figure 2.
Lenovo ThinkPad T430 running a BIOS hello world
. Source code: github.com/cirosantilli/x86-bare-metal-examples. Ciro's Linux Kernel Module Cheat is a closely related and much more important project that covers the Linux kernel and assembly language.
 -------------------------------------
|  Force of Will               3 U U  |
|  ---------------------------------  |
| |                  ////////////   | |
| |                ////() ()\////\  | |
| |               ///_\ (--) \///\  | |
| |        )      ////  \_____///\\ | |
| |       ) \      /   /   /    /   | |
| |    ) /   \     |   |  /   _/    | |
| |   ) \  (  (   /   / /   / \     | |
| |  / ) ( )  / (    )/(    )  \    | |
| |  \(_)/(_)/  /UUUU \  \\\/   |   | |
| .---------------------------------. |
| Interrupt                           |
| ,---------------------------------, |
| | You may pay 1 life and remove a | |
| | blue card in your hand from the | |
| | game instead of paying Force of | |
| | Will's casting cost.  Effects   | |
| | that prevent or redirect damage | |
| | cannot be used to counter this  | |
| | loss of life.                   | |
| | Counter target spell.           | |
| `---------------------------------` |
|                                     l
| Illus.  Terese Nelsen               |
 -------------------------------------
Code 1.
ASCII art of a Force of Will Magic: The Gathering card inscribed in the Bitcoin blockchain
.
Artist unknown, uploaded December 2014. Part of Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" where Ciro Santilli maintains a curated list of such interesting inscriptions.
This was a small project done by Ciro for artistic purposes that received some attention due to the incredible hype surrounding cryptocurrencies at the time. Ciro Santilli's views on cryptocurrencies are summarized at: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?".
Figure 3.
YellowRobot.jpg
. Source.
JPG image fully embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain depicting some kind of cut material art depicting a yellow robot, inscribed on January 29, 2017.
Ciro Santilli found this image and others during his research for Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" by searching for image fingerprints on every transaction payload of the blockchain with a script.
The image was uploaded by EMBII, co-creator of the AtomSea & EMBII upload mechanism, which was responsible for a large part of the image inscriptions in the Bitcoin blockchain.
The associated message reads:
Chiharu [EMBII's Japanese wife] and I found this little yellow robot while exploring Chicago. It will be covered by tar or eventually removed but this tribute will remain. N 41.880778 E -87.629210
This is one of Ciro Santilli's favorite AtomSea & EMBII uploads, as it perfectly encapsules the "medium as an art form" approach to blockchain art, where even non-novel works can be recontextualized into something interesting, here depicting an opposition between the ephemeral and the immutable.
At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1615389973343268871 EMBII announced that he would be giving off shares of that image on Sup!?, a Bitcoin-backed NFT system he was; making. In December 2023, he gave some shares of the robot to Ciro Santilli.
Figure 4.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
.
This website was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites, a covert system the CIA used to communicate with its assets. More details at: Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites".
Ciro Santilli had some naughty OSINT fun finding some of the websites of this defunct network in 2023 after he heard about the 2022 Reuters report on the matter, which for the first time gave away 7 concrete websites out of a claimed 885 total found. As of November 2023, Ciro had found about 350 of them.
Figure 5.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of noticiasmusica.net
.
This is another website that was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites. This website is written in Brazilian Portuguese, and therefore suggests that the CIA had assets in Brazil at the time, and thus was spying on a "fellow democracy".
Although Snowden's revelations made it extremely obvious to the world that the USA spies upon everyone outside of the Five Eyes, including fellow democracies, it is rare to have such a direct a concrete proof of it visible live right on the Wayback Machine. Other targeted democracies include France, Germany, Italy and Spain. More details at: USA spying on its own allies.
Video 7.
How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Slightly edited VOD of the talk Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects about the CIA 2010 covert communication websites.
Figure 6.
Diagram of the fundamental theorem on homomorphisms by Ciro Santilli (2020)
Shows the relationship between group homomorphisms and normal subgroups.
Figure 7.
Spacetime diagram illustrating how faster-than-light travel implies time travel by Ciro Santilli (2021)
Used in the Stack Exchange ansewr to Does faster than light travel imply travelling back in time?. One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Figure 8.
Average insertion time into heaps, binary search tree and hash maps of the C++ standard library by Ciro Santilli (2015)
Source. Used in the Stack Overflow answer to Heap vs Binary Search Tree (BST). One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Video 8.
Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture in two minutes by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Quick and direct explanation of the statement of the BSD conjecture for people who know basic university mathematics. This is one of the Millennium Prize Problems, and you will get a million dollars if you can solve it! This therefore falls in the Simple to state but hard to prove of Ciro Santilli's the beauty of mathematics aesthetics.
Figure 9.
Top view of an open Oxford Nanopore MinION
. Source. This is Ciro Santilli's hand on the Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Nanopore_Technologies. He put it there after working a bit on Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it" :-) And he would love to document more experiments like that one Section "Videos of all key physics experiments", but opportunities are extremely rare.
A quick 2D continuous AI game prototype for reinforcement learning written in Matter.js, you can view it on a separate page at cirosantilli.com/_raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport. This is a for-fun-only prototype for Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, C++ or maybe Python (for the deep learning ecosystem) seems inevitable for a serious version of such a project. But it is cute how much you can do with a few lines of Matter.js!
HTML snippet:
<iframe src="_raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport" width="1000" height="850"></iframe>
Read the full article
The best articles by Ciro Santilli Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
View more
These are the best articles ever authored by Ciro Santilli, most of them in the format of Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro posts update about new articles on his Twitter accounts.
A chronological list of all articles is also kept at: Section "Updates".
Some random generally less technical in-tree essays will be present at: Section "Essays by Ciro Santilli".
Read the full article
Boitatech Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
View more
Some people from them contacted Ciro Santilli after Ciro's initial publishing of CIA 2010 covert communication websites.
After a quick Discord chat with them, it was apparent that these people were really cool and knowledgeable.
Also many of them seem to think university is broken and just go hack straigh away.
A perfect example of a dojo learning model.
Also they don't seem to need sleep. Go figure!
With pepole like this, there's hope for Brazil: Section "What poor countries have to do to get richer".
Read the full article
CIA usage of Domains by Proxy Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
View more
The CIA really likes this registrar, e.g.:
Read the full article
Reactions to cirosantilli.com Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
View more
Deep psychological analyses:
Read the full article
Reactions to cirosantilli.com's design Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
View more
People love green on black mostly.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38492304 about Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites":
  • user thewildginger:
    Nothing like finding a webpage you can read from Lynx.
  • user socketcluster:
    Based on the choice of fonts and colors, you know this is a serious hacker website ;p
At www.reddit.com/r/numberstations/comments/14dexiu/comment/jordtjc Reddit user Short_Ad_7853:
Jesus that is an interesting choice of colors
www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1brryao/ciro_santilli_received_a_1000_xmr_donation_to/ from 1000 Monero donation:
  • user -TrustyDwarf-:
    Anyone mind to explain wtf this ugly piece of webpage reminding me of geocities from the 90s is about? I'd read it myself but I can't because it already gave me eye cancer.
  • user rbrunner7:
    It's all quite strange. Never mind the 90s design, people built good websites already back then with the tools at hand, but even their "About" isn't very clear. If you need 5 minutes to be reasonably sure what it is all about they are still doing it wrong.
  • automobi1e
    I'd rather take a look at the welding
Read the full article
Anonymity of the donation Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
View more
The anonymity of the donation is mind blowing.
The first sensation Ciro Santilli got was as if God himself had come down from heaven to toy with an unsuspecting human being. God running an experiment. Or perhaps an AGI that had already secretly taken over. Not very different.
Like with God, this was the answer to Ciro's prayers on Twitter. A one way conversation that leaves you uncertain of the details.
Whichever the case, Ciro is going to put on the best show he possibly can for your money, documenting every step along the way in usual fashion!
Besides the awesomeness however, anonymity is a risk.
Ciro ran this over and over in his head, and the only big risk of anonymity is that if this money is ever proven to be from the proceeds of crime, he would have to give it back to the government and "lose one year's salary he would have otherwise gained".
However, that worst case scenario is not bad enough. If anything, it was a great excuse to quit his job for his family and wife is already worth it. Ciro could do it and survive, though situation would deteriorate slowly. But he was a coward previously.
Ciro does however feel that there is good chance that it is legitimate.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions are exceptional, he's amazing right! He deserves this! Of course, there is danger in this rationale which scammers could exploit. But bro, if scammers are going to send 100k USD to me, then please continue to do so!
Also which criminal would be stupid enough to donate proceeds of crime to a highly public person who is going to clearly announce it?
Just be warned, if you come with a baseball bat trying to get the money back by force, I will call the police immediately and by God you will not get it!!
Given this, Ciro just keeps thinking about the likely profile of the donor:
  • 10m+ net worth
  • either got rich with Monero, or thought Monero was interesting and wanted to test it out while doing something cool. Also perhaps he has a personal stake in Monero and is trying to advertise it?
But the "why anonymous if not criminal" question remains. Generally rich people want recognition both for:
  • reputation washing
  • to make their donation mechanisms higher profile which allows raising more and attracting better candidates and reach greater impact
Two options that come to mind:
Read the full article
CIA 2010 websites video Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 2024-10-26
View more
Video 1.
How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA by Ciro Santilli
. Source.
Read the full article
Getting a list of all currencies from Wikidata with SPARQL Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 2024-11-18
View more
I've had a bit more fun with SPARQL and Wikidata.
This one was way harder than my previous fun with "find the oldest people who won a given prize" (Nobel Prize/Oscar) mastodon.social/@cirosantilli/112689376315990248 because unlike those prizes where all the decisions are centralized, countries are much more complicated beasts, with changing currencies and international recognition.
This was a good experience to see a few ways in which Wikidata is inconsistent, with the same concept being expressed in multiple different ways, e.g. "end time" property of the current vs the superior "end time" qualifier.
Particularly bad is the notion of a "deprecated rank", that should really not exist.
This is exactly the type of semi interactive data munching that I like to do, a bit in the same vein as CIA 2010 covert communication websites and Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain.
As you might imagine, the secret services use exactly this type of knowledge modelling to do their dirty business, e.g. Gaffer by the GCHQ.
If only I weren't such a rebel, I'd be a perfect fit for the intelligence agencies.
This is the best monstrosity I had the patience to come up with:
SELECT
  ?currency
  (GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT ?currencyIsoCode; SEPARATOR=", ") AS ?currencyIsoCodes)
  ?currencyLabel
  (GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT ?countryLabel; SEPARATOR=", ") AS ?countries)
WHERE {
  ?country wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q6256. # is country
  ?country p:P38 ?countryHasCurrency.
  ?countryHasCurrency ps:P38 ?currency.
  ?countryHasCurrency wikibase:rank ?countryHasCurrencyRank.
  OPTIONAL {
    ?currency p:P498 ?currencyHasIsoCode.
    ?currencyHasIsoCode ps:P498 ?currencyIsoCode.
  }
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?country wdt:P576 ?countryAbolished}
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?currency wdt:P576 ?currencyAbolished}
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?currency wdt:P582 ?currencyEndTime}
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?countryHasCurrency pq:P582 ?countryHasCurrencyEndtime}
  FILTER (?countryHasCurrencyRank != wikibase:DeprecatedRank)
  FILTER (!bound(?currencyHasIsoCode) || ?currencyHasIsoCode != wikibase:DeprecatedRank)
  # TODO makes query take timeout? Why? Needed to exclude PLZ.
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?currencyHasIsoCode pq:P582 ?currencyHasIsoCodeEndtime}
  SERVICE wikibase:label {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en".
    ?currency rdfs:label ?currencyLabel .
    ?country rdfs:label ?countryLabel .
  }
}
GROUP BY ?currency ?currencyLabel
ORDER BY ?currencyIsoCodes ?currencyLabel
It got quite close to the ISO 4217 list.
I was drawn into this waste of time after I noticed that someone had managed to create the Wikipedia of PsiQuantum which I had tried earlier but got deleted: mastodon.social/@cirosantilli/113488891292906243, and then I made the mistake of having a look at the Wikidata page of PsiQuantum.
Figure 1.
500,000 Transnistrian ruble banknote 1997 series
. This is one of the most widely used currencies which does not have an ISO 4217 code.
Another highlight was 1913 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate Alfred Werner who born either in Mulhouse in Alsace, France, or in "Yo no sé qué me pasó" ("I don't know what happened to me" in Spanish), a 1986 song by Mexican singer Juan Gabriel.
Figure 2. Source.
Read the full article