Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
These are websites that offer somewhat overlapping services, many of which served inspirations, and why we think something different is needed to achieve our goals.
Notably, OurBigBook is the result of Ciro Santilli's experiences with:OurBigBook could be seen as a cross between those three websites.
- Wikipedia
- GitHub
- Stack Exchange (or as non techies might point out, Urban Dictionary, or Quora before it was such an incomprehensible shitshow)
Quick mentions:
- handwiki.org/wiki/HandWiki:About: technically the same as Wikipedia, but with more aligned moderation policies
- ecotext.co/ similar goals. Their website seems quite broken now though as of 2021, can't see text properly. Crunchbase entry: www.crunchbase.com/organization/ecotext says they are from Durham, New Hampshire, United States. Cannot see how to publish, curated material only? Twitter: twitter.com/ecotextinc?lang=en One of the founders: twitter.com/BigNel_21 | www.linkedin.com/in/ecotextnelsonthomas/. Their LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ecotext/people/
- fiveable.me/ bad: separates students and teachers, as a student I don't see where to create my content. Good: focus on teaching university level stuff to people outside of university via Advanced Placement. Bad: Lots of video content. Bad: Can't see the issue tracker attached to each page.
- LessWrong: their website system does have some similar feature sets to what we want. Reputation, Q&A sections, links between articles most likely, sort by upvote everywhere.
- crowdpub.org collaborative writing website, somehow goes to paragraph level, TODO how they reconcile different authors? Closed beta as of writing, so hard to be sure. From quick presentation on beta website, appears to attempt to share revenue to authors proportionally to the size of their contribution. Some blockchain-based reputation. Meh.
- TODO migrate all from: github.com/booktree/booktree/blob/master/alternatives.md
- studynotes.ie/. Admin approval on everything. No ToC. Fixed tag list for university entry exams topics.
- mindstone.com: there appears to be no sharing focus? File upload basesd? Not sure.
- EverybodyWiki
- looking for open source Confluence-alternatives is an interesting way to go:
- lists:
- BookStack:
- fixed 3-level page hierarchy
- writen in PHP
- Markdown support: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/markdown-editor/
- no source-level import-export apparently: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/backup-restore/, youtu.be/WUvtzJfCAKE?t=904
- WYSIWYG: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/wysiwyg-editor/ via TinyMCE
- page content repeating: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/reusing-page-content/ (will be useful for course modelling)
- github.com/shuding/nextra converts Markdown links to Next.js links. We should look into how it works.
- zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ "The Archive" from zettelkasten.de/. Closed source. By German software engineer Christian Tietze twitter.com/ctietze?lang=en
- LLM generated wiki e.g.:
- docs.tigyog.app/cli beautiful website, but doesn't achieve much. Has a Markdown upload mechanism. Ah, those newbs who think the average user will care about markup upload to DB... Oh, wait...
- www.stuvia.com/en-gb/school/uk/oxford-university/physics. PDF uploads. In theory you have to own copyright: www.stuvia.com/en-gb/copyright/guidelines but it feels unlikely that most material was uploaded by the copyright owners. If those people are up, then why can't we? Maybe... Registred in the UK. People: some Dutch dudes:
- Project Xanadu: crazy overlaps, though that project is vaporware apparently?
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
Static website-only alternatives:
- quarto.org/
- vitepress.dev. vitepress.dev/guide/markdown unmanaged internal links. Sample website: wiki.nikiv.dev/.
Conceptual:
- The Final Encyclopedia: science fiction concept, but the name was reused by Paul Allen in a research project
- second brain
- collective intelligence
If Ciro Santilli were to write a book about quantum mechanics as of 2020 (before OurBigBook.com went live), he would upload an OurBigBook Markup website to GitHub Pages.
But there is one major problem with that: the entry barrier for new contributors is very large.
If they submit a pull request, Ciro has to review it, otherwise, no one will ever see it.
Our amazing website would allow the reader to add his own example of, say, The uncertainty principle, whenever they wants, under the appropriate section.
Many subjects have changed very little in the last hundred years, and so it is mind-blowing that people have to pay for books that teach them!
Since Ciro Santilli was young, he has been bewildered by the natural sciences and mathematics due to his bad memory.
The beauty of those subjects has always felt like intense sunlight in a fresh morning to Ciro. Sometimes it gets covered by clouds and obscured by less important things, but it always comes back again and again, weaker or stronger with its warmth, guiding Ciro's life path.
As a result, he has always suffered a lot at school: his grades were good, but he wasn't really learning those beautiful things that he wanted to learn!
First, before university, school organization had only one goal: put you into the best universities, to make a poster out of you and get publicity, so that more parents will be willing to pay them money to put their kids into good university.
Ciro once asked a chemistry teacher some "deeper question" after course was over, related to the superficial vision of the topic they were learning to get grades in university entry exams. The teacher replied something like:Ciro feels that this was one of the greatest compliments he has ever received in his life. This teacher, understood him. Funny how some things stick, while all the rest fades.
You remind me of a friend of mine. He always wanted to understand the deeper reason for things. He now works at NASA.
Another interesting anecdote is how Ciro Santilli's mother recalls that she always found out about exams in the same way: when the phone started ringing as Ciro's friends started asking for help with the subjects just before the exam. Sometimes it was already too hopelessly late, but Ciro almost always tried. Nothing shows how much better you are than someone than teaching them.
Then, after entering university, although things got way better because were are able to learn things that are borderline useful.
Ciro still felt a strong emotion of nostalgia when after university his mother asked if she could throw away his high school books, and Ciro started tearing them all down for recycling. Such is life.
University teachers were still to a large extent researchers who didn't want to, know how to and above all have enough time and institutional freedom to teach things properly and make you see their beauty, some good relate articles:
The very fact that you had very little choice of what to learn so that a large group can get a "Diploma", makes it impossible for people to deeply learn what the really want.
This is especially true because Ciro was in Brazil, a third world country, where the opportunities are comparatively extremely limited to the first world.
Also extremely frustrating is how you might have to wait for years to get to the subject you really want. For example, on a physics course, quantum mechanics is normally only taught on the third year! While there is value to knowing the pre-requisites, holding people back for years is just too sad, and Ciro much prefers backward design. And just like the university entry exams, this creates an entry barrier situation where you might in the end find that "hey, that's not what I wanted to learn after all", see also: students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.
We've created a system where people just wait, and wait, and wait, never really doing what they really want. They wait through school to get into university. They wait through university to get to masters. They wait through masters to get to PhD. They wait through PhD to become a PI. And for the minuscule fraction of those that make it, they become fund proposal writers. And if you make any wrong choice along the, it's all over, you can't continue anymore, the cost would be too great. So you just become software engineer or a consultant. Is this the society that we really want?
And all of this is considering that he was very lucky to not be in a poor family, and was already in some of the best educational institutions locally available already, and had comparatively awesome teachers, without which he wouldn't be where he is today if he hadn't had such advantages in the first place.
But no matter how awesome one teacher is, no single person can overcome a system so large and broken. Without technological innovation that is.
The key problem all along the way is the Society's/Government's belief that everyone has to learn the same things, and that grades in exams mean anything.
Even if you wanted to really learn natural sciences and had the time available, it is just too hard to find good resources to properly learn it. Even attending university courses are hit and miss between amazing and mediocre teachers.
If you go into a large book shop, the science section is tiny, and useless popular science books dominate it without precise experiment descriptions. And then, the only few "serious" books are a huge list of formulas without any experimental motivation.
And if you are lucky to have access to an university library that has open doors, most books are likely to be old and boring as well. Googling for PDFs from university courses is the best bet.
Around 2012 however, he finally saw the light, and started his path to Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment. University was not needed anymore. He could learn whatever he wanted. A vision was born.
To make things worse, for a long time he was tired of seeing poor people begging on the streets every day and not doing anything about it. He thought:which like everything else is likely derived subconsciously from something else, here Schindler's list possibly adapted quote from the Talmud:
He who teaches one thousand, saves one million.
So, by the time he left University, instead of pursuing a PhD in theoretical Mathematics or Physics just for the beauty of it as he had once considered, he had new plans.
We needed a new educational system. One that would allow people to fulfill their potential and desires, and truly improve society as a result, both in rich and poor countries.
And he found out that programming and applied mathematics could also be fun, so he might as well have some fun while doing this! ;-)
So he started Booktree in 2014, a GitLab fork, worked on it for an year, noticed the approach was dumb, and a few years later started building this new version. The repo github.com/booktree/booktree is a small snapshot of Ciro's 2014 brain on the area, there were quite a few similar projects at the time, and most have died.
Ciro is basically a librarian at heart, and wants to be the next:
- Jimmy Wales
- Brewster Kahle
- Tim Berners Lee
- Tim O'Reilly, who once brilliantly described O'Reilly Media as "a lifestyle business that got out of control" [ref]
- Aaron Swartz. Minus suicide hopefully.
"Jimmy Wales: How a ragtag band created Wikipedia" 2005 TED talk
. Source. Original source: www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_wales_the_birth_of_wikipedia.Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free books that anyone can write to get famous.
Live website: ourbigbook.com
Further information and rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
The project's mission is one of, or perhaps the most important, life objective of Ciro Santilli. Reproductive goals aside. These two types of goal are incommensurable. This is one of the great challenges of life.
This is ongoing project.
Ciro's goals in advertising this half done project are is partly to obtain some feedback, and partly to give the idea to someone else who might help push it further, be it in this stack or not.
But besides that, it is already in broad strokes the best approach Ciro Santilli can come up with to try and reach the mission statement only with technical advances, i.e. without large amounts of money or political influence which Ciro Santilli does not have.
Maybe that website isn't enough of a technical advance to reach its mission. Maybe there is some further not yet imagined technical insight that would push it into viability. Maybe not. But one must try. Only God can know the answer to these questions.
As of 2022, Ciro has spent about 2.5 years full time working on this project. First he spent about 1 year in 2014 on the first iteration: github.com/booktree/booktree, a GitLab fork, but then decided it was not the way to go.
Then around 2021 he put in some more 1.5 year of full time work, now with a possibly overly complicated (or perhaps just insane/immature) Next.js/Sequelize from scratch website stack.
It makes Ciro a bit ashamed to see that "so little user visible stuff was achieved in so much time". It is partly because he and many people underestimate the difficulty of web development. Perhaps there were some bad stack/useless feature choices issues. And a good dose of indulging in studying the natural sciences to bootstrap content and have fun. But really trying is the only way to learn.
OurBigBook.com Why it is hard to make money from this website Updated 2025-06-02 +Created 1970-01-01
There is basically only one scalable business model in education as of the 2020's: helping teenagers pass university entry exams. And nothing else. Everything else is a "waste" of time.
Perhaps there is a little bit of publicity incentive to helping them win knowledge olympiads as well, but it is tiny in comparison, and almost certainly not a scalable investment. This may also depend on whether universities consider anything but exams, which varies by country.
That marked is completely saturated, and Ciro Santilli refuses to participate in it for moral reasons.
Beyond that, there is no scalable investment. Other non-scalable investments that could allow one to make a lifestyle business are:
- extra-curricular initiatives to get younger children interested in science. These may have some money stream coming from the parents of the children. This happens because for young children, the parents are more in control, and the parents, unlike the students, have some money to spend. An example: www.littlehouseofscience.com/This business model is possible because experiments for young children may be cheap to realize, unlike any experiment that would matter to a teenager or adult.
- creating a private university, for profit or not. Of course, at this point, you would be either:
- competing against the reputation and funding of century old universities
- or be offering more boring, lower tech or techless courses, to (God forbid the phrasing) "worse students", i.e. at a "worse university"
Teenagers and young adults:
- don't have money to give you if you want to "help them learn for real"
- are somewhat forced to obtain their "reputable university" reputation to kickstart their careers
It is this perfect storm that places this specific section of education in such a bad shape that it is today.
This project is likely to fail. It could become the TempleOS of wikis. The project' autism score is quite high. It might be an impossible attempt at a lifestyle business. But Ciro is beyond caring now. It must be done. Other things that come to mind:
- www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLibNZv5Zd0dzvoxXrjA9xNHLpdgLhTkZz "Obsessed" playlist by Wired. Helps Ciro feel better about himself.
- Don Quixote
- pipe dream
- Video "Don't Try - The Philosophy of Charles Bukowski by Pursuit of Wonder (2019)"
Dangerous combination:and for any crazy person who might wish to join: Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey.
In some ways, Ciro was reminded of OurBigBook.com by this documentary. Ken built his ultimate audio system without regard to money and time, to enjoy until he dies. Ciro is doing something similar. There is one fundamental difference however: everyone can enjoy a website all over the world.
A bit ominous though that the whole thing was eventually sold off for a fraction of the building cost: www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/ken-fritz-greatest-stereo-auction-cost/.
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Updated 2025-06-02 +Created 1970-01-01
This article gives an idea of how this kind of biological experiment feels like to a software engineer who has never done any biology like Ciro Santilli.
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it External links to this page Updated 2025-06-02 +Created 1970-01-01
- 2021-03-25: Oxford Nanopore Technologies retweeted this article, that's awesome!
- 2021: hackaday.com/author/wd5gnr1/ "SEQUENCING DNA FOR METAGENOMICS" by Al Williams (2021). This came after Ciro Santilli self promoted at: stackoverflow.blog/2021/02/03/sequencing-your-dna-with-a-usb-dongle-and-open-source-code/#comment-1411921
Watching www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SbZZPX-y9g in 2022, who was one of his inspirations, made Ciro miss his guitar so much... one day, maybe, one day.
For some reason, this is one of the things that makes Ciro Santilli want to puke the most. More than surgery or blood.
Ciro Santilli lived in Paris for a few years between 2013 and 2016, and he can confirm the uncontroversial fact that "Paris is Magic".
Not just one type of magic though. Every quarter in Paris has its own unique personality that sets it apart and gives it a different mood.
Ciro knows Paris not from its historical facts, but from the raw feeling of endless walks through its streets in different times of the year. Ciro is a walker.
Maybe one day Ciro will expand this section to try and convey into words his feelings of love for the city, but maybe the effort would be pointless. Maybe such feelings can only be felt by other free-roaming walker souls living in the city, and that is both beautiful and a shame.
Ciro had written the following in the past before he lived in smaller cities, started cycling and joined the Street reclamation movement he thought:Perhaps compared to São Paulo City, which is what he knew before that was true. But no, his standards have improved since. Paris has way too many cars. The noise of internal combustion engine vehicles is extremely annoying. And because there are too many personal vehicles, cars have to horn a lot to fight for space. Fuck cars. Paris has been making a big cycling push in the early 2020's, and that is great. But it is still far, far from good.
Paris is a friendly city to walkers, as it is not too large, and does not have too many extremely busy roads, you can basically cross all of it on foot.
There are two main ways to try and reach AGI:Which one of them to take is of of the most important technological questions of humanity according to Ciro Santilli
- AI training robot: expensive, slow, but realistic world
- AI training game: faster, less expensive, but possibly non-realistic-enough realistic
There is also an intermediate area of research/engineering where people try to first simulate the robot and its world realistically, use the simulation for training, and then transfer the simulated training to real robots, see e.g.: realistic robotics simulation.
Eccentric nerdy slow speaking physicist mostly based in University of Cambridge.
Created the Dirac equation, what else do you need to know?!
QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 1.3 "P.A.M. Dirac and the Birth of Quantum Electrodynamics" quotes Dirac saying how being at high school during World War I was an advantage, since all slightly older boys were being sent to war, and so the younger kids were made advance as fast as they could through subjects. Exactly the type of thing Ciro Santilli wants to achieve with OurBigBook.com, but without the need for a world war hopefully.
Dirac was a staunch atheist having said during the Fifth Solvay Conference (1927)[ref]:
If we are honest - and scientists have to be - we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards - in heaven if not on earth - all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.
Paul Dirac and the religion of mathematical beauty by Royal Society (2013)
Source. This guy just shows up in so many films Ciro Santilli loves. Little by little Ciro started to realize that he is amazing!
Physics (like all well done science) is the art of predicting the future by modelling the world with mathematics.
Ciro Santilli doesn't know physics. He writes about it partly to start playing with some scientific content for: OurBigBook.com, partly because this stuff is just amazingly beautiful.
Ciro's main intellectual physics fetishes are to learn quantum electrodynamics (understanding the point of Lie groups being a subpart of that) and condensed matter physics.
Every science is Physics in disguise, but the number of objects in the real world is so large that we can't solve the real equations in practice.
Luckily, due to emergence, we can use uglier higher level approximations of the world to solve many problems, with the complex limits of applicability of those approximations.
Therefore, such higher level approximations are highly specialized, and given different names such as:
Unifying those two into the theory of everything one of the major goals of modern physics.
xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity
. Source. Reductionism comes to mind.
Physically accurate genie by Psychomic
. Source. This sane square composition from: www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/u08dw3/nice_guy_genie/.The natural sciences are not just a tool to predict the future.
They are a reminder that the lives that we live daily are mere illusions, religious concepts such as Maya and Samsara come to mind.
We as individuals perceive nothing about the materials that we touch every day really work, nor more importantly how our brain and cell work.
Everything is magic out of our control.
The natural sciences allow us peek, with huge concentrated effort, into tiny little bits a little of those unknowns, and blow our minds as we notice that we don't know anything.
For all practical purposes in life, there is a huge macro micro gap. We are only able to directly perceive and influence the macro events. And through those we try to affect micro events. Because for good or bad, micro events reflect in the macro world.
It is as if we live in a different plane of existence above molecules, and below galaxies. The hierarchy of Figure "xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity" puts that nicely into perspective, shame it only starts at the economical level, not going up to astronomy.
The great beauty of science is that it allows us to puncture through some of the layers of reality, either up or down, away from our daily experience.
And the great beauty of artificial intelligence research is that it allows to peer deeper into exactly our layer of existence.
Every one or two weeks Ciro Santilli remembers that he and everything he touches are just a bunch of atoms, and that is an amazing feeling. This is Ciro's preferred source of Great doubt. Another concept that comes to mind is when you see it, you'll shit bricks.
Perhaps, the feeling of physics and the illusion of life reaches its peak in molecular biology.
Just look at your fucking hand right now.
Do you have any idea of each of the cells in it work? Isn't is at least 100 times more complex than the materials of the table you hand is currently resting on?
This is the non-science fiction version of the lotus-Eater Machine.
Alan Watts's "Philosopher" talk mentions related ideas:
The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
The toddler of a friend of Ciro Santilli's wife asked her mum:Our perception of the macroscopic world is so magic that children have to learn the difference between living and non-living things.
James Somers put it very well as well in his article I should have loved biology by James Somers, this quote was brought to Ciro's attention by Bert Hubert's website[ref].The same applies to other natural sciences.
I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail:For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.
Alan Watts' "Philosopher" talk (1973)
Source. Lecture given at UCLA on 1973-02-21. Some key quotes from the talk:The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.