Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

So that he can work full time on OurBigBook.com and revolutionize advanced university-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics eduction for all ages.

Donating to Ciro is the most effective donation per dollar that you can make to:

Ciro's goal in life is to help kids as young as possible to reach, and the push, the frontiers of natural sciences human knowledge, linking it to applications that might be the the next big thing as early as possible. Because nothing is more motivating to students than that feeling of:rather than repeating the same crap that everyone is already learning.

To do this, Ciro wants to work in parallel both on:

Ciro believes that this rare combination of both:produces a virtuous circle, because Ciro:

As explained at OurBigBook.com and high flying bird scientist, Ciro is most excited to make contributions at the "missing middle level of specialization" that lies around later undergrad and lower grad education:But on that middle sweet spot, Ciro believes that something can be done, in such as way that delivers:in a way that is:

Ciro believes that today's society just keep saying over and over: "STEM is good", "STEM is good", "STEM is good" as a religious mantra, but fails miserably at providing free learning material and interaction opportunities for people to actually learn it at a deep enough level to truly appreciate why "STEM is good". This is what he wants to fix.

The following quote is ripped from Gwern Branwen's Patreon page, and it perfectly synthesizes how Ciro feels as well:

In addition to all of this, financial support also helps Ciro continue his general community support activities:

The best place to get answers to programming questions as of 2019. Google into Stack Overflow is always the best bet.

An overview of Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contribution can be found at: Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.

Stack Overflow does have an super naive reputation and moderation system and overly restrictive subject matter, which Ciro Santilli wants to improve upon with OurBigBook.com.

However, it is the best that we have now, and if you use it like Ciro, you won't get tired:What else would you expect from a naive algorithm system that has 10 million newbies asking stuff?

The key problem of Stack Overflow is closurism. The answer close feature is just not made for purpose. The sole purpose of "closing" should be to prevent easy reputation farming. What it should do instead, is remove points gained from duplicates and off topic questions. But it should not prevent new answers. The disk space costs nothing, and Google doesn't care about the closed status of a question.

As of 2024, the only competitor of Stack Overflow is Reddit (besides LLMs, which do nothing but extract data from those two and other sites). Reddit removed the mandatory thread locking after 6 months, but still lacks the Q&A focus required for greatness. Its community however is much more chill and doesn't close and downvote the fuck out of everything.

Related posts:

How do you think Ciro got his rep? Just kidding.

Stack Overflow later forbade Ciro from advertising this project as described at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019". Those newbs know nothing about security through obscurity.

A quote by Ciro's Teacher R.:

If the goals are not ambitious enough, you risk not even having useful side effects so show in the end!

By doing the prerequisites of the impossible goal you desire, maybe the next generation will be able to achieve it.

This is basically why Ciro Santilli has contributed to Stack Overflow, which has happened while was doing his overly ambitious projects and notice that all kinds of basic pre-requisites were not well explained anywhere.

This is especially effective when you use backward design, because then you will go "down the dependency graph of prerequisites" and smoothen out any particularly inefficient points that you come across.

Going into such productive procrastination is also known informally as yak shaving.

There are of course countless examples of such events:

The danger of this approach is of course spending too much time on stuff that will not be done enough times to be worth it, as highlighted by several xkcds:

At first I had intended to create a lot more content for the world class university located where I lived, but I ended up not doing that and just improving the project tech instead.

There are a few reasons for this, good or bad:

The downsides of going for tech first are severe:There are however counterpoints to these as for anything else:

In 2024 I was user #25 with the most reputation gained on Stack Overflow.

This is up from #38 in 2023 is even though I have answered less questions than before.

This is likely because LLMs have killed users that just answered lots of easy new questions, and favored those like me who only answer more important questions found through Google.

I was #13 on the last quarter, so this is likely to go even higher in 2025. More details at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions"

Announcements:

It is unbelievable that you can't find easily on YouTube recreations of many of the key physics/chemistry experiments and of common laboratory techniques.

Experiments, the techniques required to to them, and the history of how they were first achieved, are the heart of the natural sciences. Without them, there is no motivation, no beauty, no nothing.

School gives too much emphasis on the formulas. This is bad. Much more important is to understand how the experiments are done in greater detail.

The videos must be completely reproducible, indicating the exact model of every experimental element used, and how the experiment is setup.

A bit like what Ciro Santilli does in his Stack Overflow contributions but with computers, by indicating precise versions of his operating system, software stack, and hardware whenever they may matter.

It is understandable that some experiments are just to complex and expensive to re-create. As an extreme example, say, a precise description of the Large Hadron Collider anyone? But experiments up to the mid-20th century before "big science"? We should have all of those nailed down.

We should strive to achieve the cheapest most reproducible setup possible with currently available materials: recreating the original historic setup is cute, but not a priority.

Furthermore, it is also desirable to reproduce the original setups whenever possible in addition to having the most convenient modern setup.

Lists of good experiments to cover be found at: the most important physics experiments.

This project is to a large extent a political endeavour.

Someone with enough access to labs has to step up and make a name for themselves through the huge effort of creating a baseline of amazing content without yet being famous.

Until it reaches a point that this person is actively sought to create new material for others, and things snowball out of control. Maybe, if the Gods allow it, that person could be Ciro.

Tutorials with a gazillion photos and short videos are also equally good or even better than videos, see for example Ciro's How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in its for an example that goes toward that level of perfection.

The Applied Science does well in that direction.

This project is one step that could be taken towards improving the replication crisis of science. It's a bit what Hackster.io wants to do really. But that website is useless, just use OurBigBook.com and create videos instead :-)

We're maintaining a list of experiments for which we could not find decent videos at: Section "Physics experiment without a decent modern video".

Ciro Santilli visited the teaching labs of a large European university in the early 2020's. They had a few large rooms filled with mostly ready to run versions of several key experiments, many/most from "modern physics", e.g. Stern-Gerlach experiment, Quantum Hall effect, etc.. These included booklets with detailed descriptions of how to operate the apparatus, what you'd expect to see, and the theory behind them. With a fat copyright notice at the bottom. If only such universities aimed to actually serve the public for free rather than hoarding resources to get more tuition fees, university level education would already have been solved a long time ago!

One thing we can more or less easily do is to search for existing freely licensed videos and add them to the corresponding Wikipedia page where missing. This requires knowing how to search for freely licensed videos:

Related:

This was one of the only bad experience Ciro had at Polytechnique, besides the inevitable fear of not graduating.

Ciro wanted to do a robotics internship in Germany, linked to his interests in artificial general intelligence, see also: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games".

But the head of the applied mathematics department Polytechnique prevented him from going because Ciro didn't have the necessary grades, even though the Germans had already agreed to it: he had a C, but he needed a B. As mentioned at École Polytechnique, most Brazilians had crappy grades due to their Polytechnique-incompatible background.

This was done because in the past students with bad grades had abandoned their internships halfway and given foreigners a bad impression of Polytechnique.

It is impossible to say if the head of department really agreed with this bullshit policy, or if it was something beyond his powers and he hid his true opinion, but it felt like the agreed.

What an extremely limited view!!!

To leave the worse, the worse. To assume that grades mean anything!

And thus Ciro had to choose a last moment internship that he hated, rather than becoming the greatest roboticist that ever lived, and did terribly at it.

At least on the other hand Ciro learnt Python instead of working at the internship, and became the greatest programming tutorial writer that ever lived. Maybe.