Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
Home Updated 2025-12-02
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. For 400k USD I will quit my job or not get a new job and work on OurBigBook full time for a second year to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. Status: ~44k / 400k USD. At 4M USD I retire/tenure and work on open STEM forever. How to donate: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
I first quit my job 1st June 2024 to work on the project for 1 year after I reached my initial 100k goal mostly via a 1000 Monero donation. For a second follow up year, I increased my requirement to 400k USD to give me more peace of mind as I'm destroying my career in the process. A second year greatly improve chances of success: on year one I improved my tech, on year two I want to come guns blazing to solve courses and get users.
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.
GitHub | Stack Overflow | LinkedIn | YouTube | Twitter | Wikipedia | Zhihu 知乎 | Weibo 微博 | Other accounts
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.
Let's create an educational system with:
- no distinction between university and high school, students just go as fast as they can to what they really want without stupid university entry exams
- fully open source learning material
- on-demand examinations that anyone can easily take without prerequisites
- granular entry selection only for space in specific laboratories or participation in specific novel research projects
I offer:
- online private tutoring for:
- any STEM university course
- passionate younger STEM students (any age) who want to learn university level material and beyond. Can your kid be the next Fields Medalist or Nobel Prize winner? I'm here to help, especially if you are filthy rich! I focus moving students forward as fast as they want on and on producing useful novel tutorials and results
Let your child be my Emile, and me be their Adolfo Amidei, and let's see how far they can go! I will help take your child:and achieve their ambitious STEM goals!- into the best universities
- into the best PhD programs
- educational consulting for institutions looking to improve their STEM courses
- do you know that course or teacher that consistently gets bad reviews every year? I'll work with the teacher to turn the problem around!
- are you looking to create a consistent open educational resources offering to increase your institutions internationally visibility? I can help with that too.
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.
- propose interesting research projects. The starting point is always deciding the end goal: Section "Backward design"
- learn what is needed to do the project together with the student(s)
- publish any novel results or tutorials/tools produced freely licensed online, and encourage the student to do the same (Section "Let students learn by teaching", digital garden)
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:
- quantum computing
- AGI research, in particular AI code generation, automated theorem proving and robotics
- assorted molecular biology technologies
- 20th century physics, notably AMO and condensed matter
- the history of science, and in particular trying to look at seminal papers of a field
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".
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats
. Further methodology details at: Figure "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats".The problem with education by Ciro Santilli
. Source. In this video Ciro Santilli exposes his fundamental philosophy regarding why Education is broken. This philosophy was the key motivation behind the failed OurBigBook Project.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.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.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.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.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.
Lenovo ThinkPad T430 running a BIOS hello world
. This uses Ciro Santilli's project x86 bare metal examples with source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/x86-bare-metal-examplesLinux Kernel Module Cheat presentation
. Source. This project, with source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat, aims to be the perfect emulation setup to study and develop the Linux kernel, kernel modules, QEMU, gem5 as well as x86_64, ARM userland and baremetal assembly and more.My Bitcoin inscription museum by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Introductory video to Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain". -------------------------------------
| 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?".
YellowRobot.jpgJPG 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: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.
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
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.
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.
This investigative report by Ciro Santilli was featured on the Daily Mail after 404 Media reported on it in 2025.
Diagram of the fundamental theorem on homomorphisms by Ciro Santilli (2020)
Shows the relationship between group homomorphisms and normal subgroups.
Used in the Stack Exchange answer to What is the intuition behind normal subgroups? One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Spacetime diagram illustrating how faster-than-light travel implies time travel by Ciro Santilli (2021)
Used in the Stack Exchange answer to Does faster than light travel imply travelling back in time?. One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
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".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.
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> 108 Stars of Destiny Updated 2025-07-16
The very first chapter opens with Grand Commander Hou disrespecting spirits by opening up a sealed tomb and unintentionally releasing 108 demons who presumably reincarnate as humans, a backstory to the events that follow years later.
This is well shown in the Japanese The Water Margin, but is skipped in the Chinese The Water Margin unfortunately.
Actually, now that Ciro Santilli thinks about it, these were already likely meant as a "collectible" element by the author of the original book, as is strongly suggested by all the little illustrations of each character present on the Wikipedia page. Just like e.g. Catholic saints. It's Pokemon, but 2000 years earlier.
Ciro would notably feel many years later, that as he met random people online who were interested in improving eduction, or was otherwise networking to reach his goals, as if he were actually building up his 108 stars of destiny.
A central part, and perhaps the most interesting part of the novel, is how each character has been motivated by injustice to join the rebellion. This reminds Ciro of Final Fantasy VI
2025 impression from Qatar Created 2025-01-10 Updated 2025-07-16
The lady at the border crossing that checked the passports was terrible. She and all her colleagues had their hijabed colleagues had cell phones on social media right on the job, and a terrible attitude. But one of them had an Apple Watch, they are not poor. They must be the disliked third wives of the cousin of the king of something. During exit the ladies were much better. Perhaps is also because they had the late shift. The facial recognition system was terrible and took several tries to work for some people. Quite funnily, all the border crossing male officers look like Saddam Hussein. Interestingly, Chinese nationals need to take more fingerprint than Europeans. Also there's a company that has a service to collect your bags for you, they have an infinitely long line of Indian valets waiting to pick up other people's bags.
Signal is blocked at my hotel 1 but not hotel 2, and also works on Vodaphone SIM. pornhub.com is blocked everywhere: www.reddit.com/r/qatar/comments/uyhwdz/comment/m6d5980/. WhatsApp voice calling was blocked on hotel 1 and 4G, but not on hotel 2. The National Museum of Qatar blocks YouTube comments with: "Restricted mode has hidden comments for this video".
The place looks a lot like Singapore. Both have an infinite money glitch, and they import cheap NPC foreign labor like there is no tomorrow. At the end of the day you can see a bunch of Indian dudes sitting on the grass in the park as is their custom, exactly like Singapore. But is is way more extreme, with 85%-90% of the population being immigrants.
Paintings of the dictator and his father are visible everywhere. The father is important to suggest that he willingly chose this son to power and give smooth transition. Sometimes the mother is also together, presumably in part to identify which of the wives is the mother!
Aaron Swartz Updated 2025-07-16
Aaron, Ciro Santilli will complete your quest to make eduction free. Just legally this time, with the and with the Creative Commons license you helped to create.
Ciro likes how The Internet's Own Boy (2014) explains how Aaron felt like high school was bullshit, and that he could learn whatever he wanted from books, which is one of Ciro's key feelings.
Abing Updated 2025-07-16
Once Ciro Santilli played Suwu herding sheep while his mother in law was around, and she quickly pointed out:He's very popular!
Suwu by Abing!
Abortion Updated 2025-07-16
But it's not something that he would do himself, unless under extreme cases.
Academia is broken Updated 2025-07-16
Sometimes Ciro Santilli regrets not having done a PhD. But this section makes him feel better about himself. To be fair, part of the merit is on him, part of the reason he didn't move on was the strong odour of bullshit oozing down to Masters level. A good PhH might have opened interesting job opportunities however, given that you don't really learn anything useful before that point in your education.
Profzi scheme by PhD Comics
. A Ponzi scheme that trains people in new skills is not necessarily a terrible thing. It is a somewhat more useful version than standard exam based education.
Perhaps the problem is "forcing" 35 year olds to go down that path when they might also want to have boring stuff like families and security.
If people could get to the PhD level much, much sooner, it wouldn't be as obscene: Section "Students must be allowed to progress as fast as they want".
Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli Updated 2025-11-06
Ciro Santilli controls the following accounts.
With non-trivial activity:
- github.com/cirosantilli on GitHub
- stackoverflow.com/users/895245 on Stack Overflow
- www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli on LinkedIn
- www.youtube.com/c/CiroSantilli on YouTube
- Twitter: see Section "Ciro Santilli's Twitter accounts"
- archive.org/details/@cirosantilli2 on the Internet Archive. Was archive.org/details/@cirosantilli but got deleted due to an "admin error" and the old username cannot be restored![ref]
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cirosantilli2 and commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cirosantilli2: Ciro tries to upload all educational CC content he creates to Wikimedia Commons as an extra backup and sometimes to use in Wikipedia pages
- www.facebook.com/cirosantilli/ Ciro accepts all friend requests there, but expect a few non-technical posts. Unless you look like a massive honeypot account, please send context in advance in that case.
- www.quora.com/profile/Ciro-Santilli
- www.reddit.com/user/cirosantilli/ is Ciro's Reddit account, mostly computer and China topics
- maps.app.goo.gl/npV35XTppSBTmNqC8: Google Maps. Ciro Santilli likes to make additions to certain niche topics that are missing, having reached Local Guide Level 6 as of 2024. He can't do as much as he'd like so as to not reveal his current city however.
Trivial or no activity:
- seqanswers.com/forums/member.php?u=90053
- answers.gazebosim.org/users/2289/cirosantilli/
- 4programmers.net/Profile/86786
- 500px.com/p/cirosantilli
- 9gag.com/u/cirosantilli
- addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/cirosantilli/
- agoradesk.com/user/cirosantilli
- anaconda.org/cirosantilli
- androidforums.com/members/ciro-santilli.1918307
- app.element.io/#/user/@cirosantilli:matrix.org. Proof: matrix.to/#/!OisxJPszSYdWdwXrrL:matrix.org/$YbrChbGFvlgYiDM5E2OgWXSp0vy7ayLfGkCXftAUyTI?via=matrix.org
- archive.org/details/@ciro_santilli_ourbigbook created during the account deletion mess.
- ask.libreoffice.org/en/users/2352/cirosantilli/
- bbs.archlinux.org/profile.php?id=116270
- bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile
- brilliant.org/profile/ciro-il1uxz/
- bsky.app/profile/cirosantilli.bsky.social
- bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=describeuser.html&login=ciro.santilli@gmail.com
- cirosantilli.blogspot.com/
- cirosantilli.itch.io
- cirosantilli.livejournal.com/profile
- cirosantilli.medium.com/ on Medium
- cirosantilli.substack.com/ and substack.com/@cirosantilli
- cirosantilli.wordpress.com/ on WordPress
- codeforces.com/profile/cirosantilli reverse proof codeforces.com/blog/entry/98393
- coderwall.com/Ciro%20Santilli Note that space on the username. Beauty.
- community.arm.com/people/cirosantilli
- community.atlassian.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/680821
- community.fandom.com/wiki/User:Cirosantilli
- community.openai.com/u/cirosantilli
- community.plos.org/people/cirosantilli
- community.skype.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2646858
- community.zimbra.com/members/cirosantilli
- connect.mozilla.org/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/46889
- del.icio.us/cirosantilli
- dev.to/cirosantilli
- developer.mbed.org/users/cirosantilli/
- devtalk.nvidia.com/member/2118846/
- droit-finances.commentcamarche.net/profile/user/cirosantilli
- en.gravatar.com/cirosantilli
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ciro.santilli also belongs to Ciro, but he lost the password
- eternagame.org/web/player/260828/
- exercism.org/profiles/cirosantilli
- figshare.com/authors/Ciro_Santilli/656781
- forums.developer.nvidia.com/u/cirosantilli
- forum.osdev.org/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=16372
- forum.pine64.org/member.php?action=profile&uid=17386
- forum.videolan.org/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=173503
- forum.xda-developers.com/member.php?u=7116837
- forums.androidcentral.com/members/cirosantilli-2734491
- forums.lenovo.com/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1561639
- forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/members/cirosantilli.875544/
- framasphere.org/people/78a975c0b6c40133a3032a0000053625 framasphere.org/posts/1519871
- freesound.org/people/cirosantilli
- gitlab.com/u/cirosantilli
- hackaday.io/cirosantilli
- hinative.com/en-US/profiles/5276462
- home.gamer.com.tw/homeindex.php?owner=cirosantilli but can't post anything publicly because cannot verify phone in many countries
- huggingface.co/cirosantilli
- identity.kde.org/index.php?r=people/view&uid=cirosantilli
- imgur.com/user/cirosantilli/about: Proof: imgur.com/gallery/mexv1Bk/comment/1734086983
- jsfiddle.net/user/cirosantilli/
- kiwifarms.net/members/cirosantilli.82011/
- knockout.chat/user/22882
- launchpad.net/~cirosantilli
- leanpub.com/u/cirosantilli
- leetcode.com/cirosantilli/
- makandracards.com/ciro-santilli
- mastodon.social/@cirosantilli
- nanohub.org/members/146301/
- next-episode.net/user/cirosantilli/
- openclipart.org/artist/cirosantilli. TODO but not yet able to login after the "first upload". But it did get uploaded: openclipart.org/artist/cirosantilli.
- opencollective.com/ciro-santilli
- open.spotify.com/user/cirosantilli
- orcid.org/0000-0003-2895-7763
- parler.com/profile/cirosantilli/posts
- paypal.me/cirosantilli. United Kingdom account.
- peerj.com/cirosantilli/
- profile.edx.org/u/ciro_santilli
- profiles.3dgames.com.ar/profiles/1002278
- protonmail.uservoice.com/users/6491333990-ciro-santilli
- pypi.org/user/cirosantilli/
- raidforums.com/User-cirosantilli
- rubygems.org/profiles/cirosantilli
- software.intel.com/en-us/user/1090688
- soundcloud.com/cirosantilli
- sourceforge.net/u/cirosantilli/profile/
- stackshare.io/cirosantilli
- steamcommunity.com/id/cirosantilli/
- subreply.com/cirosantilli
- support.discord.com/hc/en-us/profiles/427813342894 on the Discord forum
- support.mozilla.org/en-US/user/cirosantilli
- tabmixplus.org/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=59846
- talk.commonmark.org/users/cirosantilli
- talk.jekyllrb.com/users/cirosantilli
- talks.cam.ac.uk/user/show/81142
- tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/cirosantilli
- telegram.me/cirosantilli on Telegram
- trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Waveform?action=history username
cirosantilli - tuleap.net/users/cirosantilli
- tuleap.ring.cx/users/cirosantilli
- twittercommunity.com/users/cirosantilli/activity
- wefunder.com/cirosantilli
- wise.com/pay/me/cirod3. The name shows as "Ciro Duran Santilli" and that's correct.
- wiki.qemu.org/User:Cirosantilli
- www.airbnb.com/users/show/45794827
- www.behance.net/cirosantilli
- www.bibsonomy.org/user/cirosantilli
- www.biostars.org/u/50170/
- www.bountysource.com/people/25676-ciro-santilli
- www.bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=11704
- www.codewars.com/users/cirosantilli
- www.codingame.com/profile/cddd0a711c22d97e8264361f7c8205567563841
- www.coursera.org/user/f65b08c191d792eb809fe2808d771ee7
- www.dailymotion.com/cirosantilli
- www.deviantart.com/cirosantilli
- www.digitalocean.com/community/users/cirosantilli
- www.ebay.com/usr/cirosantilli
- www.edaboard.com/member587087.html
- www.flickr.com/people/cirosantilli/. Account auto deleted tested as of 2025. Created: flickr.com/photos/202496646@N08/. Was something nicer, tried to change username to
cirosantilli2but got hat instead. Alsocirosantilliwas marked taken. What a bullshit website! Poor Canadians, sold off to Yahoo and let their baby be mutilated. - www.freecodecamp.org/fcc8f660b91-167c-4b04-a8da-5d50cdb46def
- www.f6s.com/cirosantilli
- www.f6s.com/cirosantilli1
- www.gitbook.com/@cirosantilli
- www.hackerrank.com/cirosantilli
- www.hackster.io/cirosantilli
- www.html5gamedevs.com/profile/30103-cirosantilli/
- www.imdb.com/user/ur59802249 on IMDb
- www.instagram.com/cirosantilli/ Impossible to disable their notifications without removing your email. So all their notifications go to trash.
- www.kaggle.com/cirosantilli
- www.lesswrong.com/users/ciro-santilli on LessWrong
- www.linux.org/members/ciro-santilli.62540/
- www.linuxquestions.org/questions/user/cirosantilli-688439/
- www.meetup.com/members/252568305/
- www.mentebinaria.com.br/profile/1987-ciro-santilli/
- www.metacritic.com/user/cirosantilli
- www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/163587/
- www.mohu.rocks/people/cirosantilli
- www.mudhut.com/user/1995000
- www.myopportunity.com/en/profile/ciro-santilli
- www.npmjs.com/~cirosantilli
- www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/member.php/40269-cirosantilli
- www.openstreetmap.org/user/Ciro%20Santilli
- www.patreon.com/cirosantilli
- www.physicsforums.com/members/cirosantilli.422056/
- www.pixiv.net/en/users/64347194
- www.plurk.com/cirosantilli
- www.raspberrypi.org/forums/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=273389
- www.shadertoy.com/user/cirosantilli
- www.strava.com/athletes/47913768
- www.tastekid.com/ciro.santilli
- www.ted.com/profiles/5822760
- www.threads.com/@cirosantilli
- www.thestudentroom.co.uk/member.php?u=5930160
- www.tiktok.com/@cirosantilli2
- www.transifex.com/user/profile/cirosantilli
- www.tripadvisor.com/members/cirosantilli
- www.twitch.tv/cirosantilli
- www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/ciro_santilli/profile "Banned for spamming" as of 2024. One of those idiotic websites where you can't add a link to your homepage to your own profile page.
Lost or deleted:
- projecteuler.net/profile/cirosantilli.png Blocked 2025-10-01 due to their stupid policy that you can't give away answers within 12 hours of: github.com/lucky-bai/projecteuler-solutions/pull/94
Accounts in Chinese websites. These accounts might be banned or altered or offer other limitations, so Ciro only communicates briefly through them. All communication through those channels should obviously be assumed to be compromised:
- bbs.nibaedu.com/index.php?m=space&uid=70
- www.renren.com/338003848/profile
- www.tianya.cn/109285544 (can't post, no cell phone)
- hacpai.com/member/cirosantilli unable to login as of 2019-10-12, reason unclear, either ban or website too crappy.
- pincong.rocks/people/cirosantilli Lost account tested as of 2022-11 and likely much earlier. Last existing password not working, and there doesn't seem to be a reset password button. Creating cirosantilli2
- pincong.rocks/people/cirosantilli2
- tieba.baidu.com/home/main?id=5cd56369726f73616e74696c6c69c944
- v2ex.com/member/cirosantilli: Ciro was blocked and or account deleted on 2020-07-23: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/v2ex
- v2ex.com/member/cirosantilli2: was created by someone else most likely and cannot be re-registered. Also blocked.
- v2ex.com/member/cirosantilli3: Ciro created this new account November 2023, let's see how long it lasts.
- www.zhihu.com/people/cirosantilli. Ciro was prevented from posting in 2018-06-25, and the account and all content mentioning him were taken down in 2019-11-03.
- www.weibo.com/p/1005055601627311: started requiring a cell phone to login in 2020, and Ciro didn't want to give his cell phone number to the CCP and didn't have the patience to manage a secondary phone number, so he is not logging in for now. The account was blocked in 2021: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/ciro-santillis-weibo-block
Dead websites:
- www.citeulike.org/user/cirosantilli (2019-05)
activatedgeek/LeNet-5 Updated 2025-07-16
It trains the LeNet-5 neural network on the MNIST dataset from scratch, and afterwards you can give it newly hand-written digits 0 to 9 and it will hopefully recognize the digit for you.
Ciro Santilli created a small fork of this repo at lenet adding better automation for:
- extracting MNIST images as PNG
- ONNX CLI inference taking any image files as input
- a Python
tkinterGUI that lets you draw and see inference live - running on GPU
Install on Ubuntu 24.10 with:We use our own
sudo apt install protobuf-compiler
git clone https://github.com/activatedgeek/LeNet-5
cd LeNet-5
git checkout 95b55a838f9d90536fd3b303cede12cf8b5da47f
virtualenv -p python3 .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install \
Pillow==6.2.0 \
numpy==1.24.2 \
onnx==1.13.1 \
torch==2.0.0 \
torchvision==0.15.1 \
visdom==0.2.4 \
;pip install because their requirements.txt uses >= instead of == making it random if things will work or not.On Ubuntu 22.10 it was instead:
pip install
Pillow==6.2.0 \
numpy==1.26.4 \
onnx==1.17.0 torch==2.6.0 \
torchvision==0.21.0 \
visdom==0.2.4 \
;Then run with:This script:
python run.pyIt throws a billion exceptions because we didn't start the Visdom server, but everything works nevertheless, we just don't get a visualization of the training.
The terminal outputs lines such as:
Train - Epoch 1, Batch: 0, Loss: 2.311587
Train - Epoch 1, Batch: 10, Loss: 2.067062
Train - Epoch 1, Batch: 20, Loss: 0.959845
...
Train - Epoch 1, Batch: 230, Loss: 0.071796
Test Avg. Loss: 0.000112, Accuracy: 0.967500
...
Train - Epoch 15, Batch: 230, Loss: 0.010040
Test Avg. Loss: 0.000038, Accuracy: 0.989300One of the benefits of the ONNX output is that we can nicely visualize the neural network on Netron:
Netron visualization of the activatedgeek/LeNet-5 ONNX output
. From this we can see the bifurcation on the computational graph as done in the code at:output = self.c1(img)
x = self.c2_1(output)
output = self.c2_2(output)
output += x
output = self.c3(output) activatedgeek/LeNet-5 use ONNX for inference Updated 2025-07-16
Note that:
- the images must be drawn with white on black. If you use black on white, it the accuracy becomes terrible. This is a good very example of brittleness in AI systems!
- images must be converted to 32x32 for
lenet.onnx, as that is what training was done on. The training step converted the 28x28 images to 32x32 as the first thing it does before training even starts
We can try the code adapted from thenewstack.io/tutorial-using-a-pre-trained-onnx-model-for-inferencing/ at lenet/infer.py:and it works pretty well! The program outputs:as desired.
cd lenet
cp ~/git/LeNet-5/lenet.onnx .
wget -O 9.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Digit_9_hand_drawn_by_Ciro_Santilli_on_GIMP_with_mouse_white_on_black.png
./infer.py 9.png9We can also try with images directly from Extract MNIST images.and the accuracy is great as expected.
infer_mnist.py lenet.onnx mnist_png/out/testing/1/*.png Adam Curtis Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli really loved his documentary called Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021), and then proceeded to basically watch all of this films.
Adolfo Amidei Updated 2025-07-16
This dude mentored Enrico Fermi in high school. Ciro Santilli added some info to Fermi's Wikipedia page at: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Enrico_Fermi&type=revision&diff=1050919447&oldid=1049187703 from Enrico Fermi: physicist by Emilio Segrè (1970):
In 1914, Fermi, who used to often meet with his father in front of the office after work, met a colleague of his father called Adolfo Amidei, who would walk part of the way home with Alberto [Enrico's father]. Enrico had learned that Adolfo was interested in mathematics and physics and took the opportunity to ask Adolfo a question about geometry. Adolfo understood that the young Fermi was referring to projective geometry and then proceeded to give him a book on the subject written by Theodor Reye. Two months later, Fermi returned the book, having solved all the problems proposed at the end of the book, some of which Adolfo considered difficult. Upon verifying this, Adolfo felt that Fermi was "a prodigy, at least with respect to geometry", and further mentored the boy, providing him with more books on physics and mathematics. Adolfo noted that Fermi had a very good memory and thus could return the books after having read them because he could remember their content very well.
Ciro Santilli really likes guys like this. Given that he does not have the right genetics, conditions and temperance for scientific greatness in this lifetime, he dreams of one day finding his own Fermi instead.
Affirmative action Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli is against all affirmative action, except for one: giving amazing free eduction to the poor.
Notably, Ciro is against university entry quotas.
AGI blues Updated 2025-07-16
Term invented by Ciro Santilli, similar to "nuclear blues", and used to describe the feeling that every little shitty job you are doing (that does not considerably help achieving AGI) is completely pointless given that we are likely close to AGI as of 2023.
AGI-complete Updated 2025-07-16
AI game Updated 2025-07-16
Our Final Invention - Artificial General Intelligence by Sciencephile the AI (2023)
. Source. AGI via simulation section.Ciro Santilli defines an "AI game" as:
a game that is used to train AI, in particular one that was designed with this use case in mind, and usually with the intent of achieving AGI, i.e. the game has to somehow represent a digital world with enough analogy to the real world so that the AGI algorithms developed there could also work on the real world
Most games played by AI historically so far as of 2020 have been AI for games designed for humans: Human game used for AI training.
Ciro Santilli took a stab at an AI game: Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, but he didn't sink too much/enough into that project.
Bibliography:
AI game with natural language Updated 2025-07-16
We define this category as AI games in which agents are able to produce or consume natural language.
It dawned on Ciro Santilli that it would be very difficult to classify an agent as an AGI if tthat agent can't speak to take orders, read existing human generated documentation, explain what it is doing, or ask for clarification.