Incoming links: How to contact Ciro Santilli
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 200k 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 / 200k USD. At 2M 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 200k USD to give me more peace of mind. So the total donation so far is 144k, and if I reach a total of 300k USD, then I'll work on the project for a second year. A second year greatly improve chances of success: year one I improved my tech, year two I come guns blazing to solve courses 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.
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
Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
. Source. 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.
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| 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. .
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
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.
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.
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".
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> Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects Updated 2025-05-09 +Created 2024-08-27
This talk was presented on 24 September 2024 as part of the 2024 Aratu Week, a small online conference by Brazilian hacker interest group Boitatech.
How to contact me: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli"
Links to this talk:
Self-recorded presentation VOD
. Source. Presentation upload by the organizers
. Source. Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects I'm not a professional hacker, I did some very occasional OSINT just for fun Updated 2025-05-09 +Created 2024-09-06
This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the late 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of the targeted countries circa 2010-2013.
This article uses publicly available information to publicly disclose for the first time a few hundred of what we feel are extremely likely candidate sites of the network. The starting point for this research was the September 2022 Reuters article "America’s Throwaway Spies" for the first time gave nine example websites, and their analyst from Citizenlabs claims to have found 885 websites in total, but did not publicly disclose them. Starting from only the nine disclosed websites, we were then able to find a few hundred websites that share os many similarities with them, i.e. a common fingerprint, that we believe makes them beyond reasonable doubt part of the same network.
The discovery of these websites by Iranian and Chinese counterintelligence led to the imprisonment and execution of several assets in those countries, and subsequent shutdown of the channel by the CIA when they noticed that things had gone wrong. This is likely a Wikipedia page that talks about the disastrous outcome of the websites being found out: 2010–2012 killing of CIA sources in China, although it contained no mention of websites before Ciro Santilli edited it in.
Of particular interest is that based on their language and content, certain of the websites seem to have targeted other democracies such as Germany, France, Spain and Brazil.
If anyone can find others websites, or has better techniques feel free to contact Ciro Santilli at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". Contributions will be clearly attributed if desired. Some of the techniques used so far have been very heuristic, and that added to the limited amount of data makes it almost certain that some websites have been missed. Broadly speaking, there are two types of contributions that would be possible:The fact that citizenlabs reported exactly 885 websites being found makes it feel like they might have found find a better fingerprint which we have not managed to find yet. We have not yet had to pay for our data.
- finding new IP ranges: harder and more exiting, and potentially requires more intelligence
- better IP to domain name databases to fill in known gaps in existing IP ranges
Disclaimers:
- the network fell in 2013, followed by fully public disclosures in 2018 and 2022, so we believe it is now more than safe for the public to know what can still be uncovered about the events that took place
- Ciro Santilli's political bias is strongly pro-democracy and anti-dictatorship, but with a good pinch of skepticism about the morality US foreign policy in the last century
Dan, if you ever Google yourself here, please contact Ciro Santilli: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to do something with OurBigBook.com. Cheers.
You gotta be born after the year 2000 to understand it.
This is becoming more and more popular as a group chat with channels and threads possibility as of 2020.
Very similar to Slack.
They force your username to have 4 random digits? www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/43kjdl/whats_the_number_next_to_the_username/
Not possible to anonymously join just one server without creating a new account? What's the point of servers then! www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6gmjl7/changing_nick_before_joining_a_new_server/ Oh, also nicks don't hide your username from the server in any way, you can get the original username by just clicking on the person's username.
No proper threaded discussion without creating new channels? As of 2022 there is kind of a way, but it was a bit obtuse.
As of 2022 they also have a school hub: support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-Discord-Student-Hubs-FAQ which auto creates groups by university email access. Good idea, and shows popularity amongst that user group.
Servers don't have an ID to join them? www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/b9zdt6/join_discord_server_from_id/
Can only make public servers if you have 1000 members?? support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023968311 Why so much bullshit?? www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6jouf8/how_do_i_make_my_server_public/
Ciro Santilli is actively looking for donations and contracts so he can continue to work full time on OurBigBook.com sustainably, and develop free hardcore university-level STEM education for all ages!
For 200k 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 / 200k USD. At 2M USD I retire 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 200k USD to give me more peace of mind. So the total donation so far is 144k, and if I reach a total of 300k USD, then I'll work on the project for a second year. A second year greatly improve chances of success: year one I improved my tech, year two I come guns blazing to solve courses and expand further.
At 2M USD I retire and work on open STEM projects forever. At these timelines, I can't guarantee it will be specifically on education technology specifically all the way, but I guarantee that whatever it is it will be open and extremely well explained as usual.
It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant - James Watson
Total donations to date ~144k USD. Donation breakdown:More details: Section "Accounting method"
- 2024-03-18: $126,352 (!!!): anonymous 1000 Monero donation to self-custody wallet. Further comments: Section "1000 Monero donation"
- 2024-03-13: $1,375: anonymous 10 Monero donation to self-custody wallet
- 2023-11-20: $14.563: anonymous 100 Monero donation to Binance wallet
- 2023-09: $810: anonymous 0.032 Bitcoin donation to Coinbase wallet
- subscriptions up to 2024-01: $143,795
How to give:And if you have a different preferred payment mechanism not listed above, please contact Ciro, and he will set it up.
- one time donations:
- cryptocurrency: note that Ciro is not a regular crypto user, so you might want to make a smaller test donation and confirm that it worked by contacting Ciro before going for colossal amounts (one can dream):
- Monero address: 4A1KK4uyLQX7EBgN7uFgUeGt6PPksi91e87xobNq7bT2j4V6LqZHKnkGJTUuCC7TjDNnKpxDd8b9DeNBpSxim8wpSczQvzf. Secret view key: 7ccaf885ff5540b0ff18927e6ac5da30130afb1eaee09ad95d3c4536a6337e0f. This is a self-custody wallet on a "clean" dedicated Monero laptop connected the Internet. I check for incoming transactions from my dirty main laptop via a view-only wallet each weekend. The cash out method used is latest simplest thing that wasn't yet blocked in my country on a given week, the last time that was centralized swappers[ref]. The fact that the cash out method changes weekly confirms that Monero privacy hadn't yet been broken by countries and that Monero is still one of the most useful cryptocurrencies: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?". For transparency, I announce all non-trivial transactions on social media, and the full list of transactions can be seen by anyone with the secret view key provided. I previously had different addresses, so pre-existing donations on older addresses will not be visible there.
- Bitcoin address: 3KRk7f2JgekF6x7QBqPHdZ3pPDuMdY3eWR. This is a Coinbase wallet, off-chain transactions with no transaction fees accepted from other Coinbase users. This method has been tested, I have been able to receive funds from this address in 2023. Fees: non-fixed trading fees[ref] + 0% withdrawal fee on top of any Bitcoin network for on-chain transactions[ref]
- Ethereum address: 0x44cF8C9C015F46d3b2Df730b6492823FD7A91044. Test transaction recommended.
- Solana address: DjdaGawoVFdqxJEqpBGsSWuR4G4MVFNiNkAEu89HuKcE. Test transaction recommended.
- TransferWise tag: wise.com/pay/me/cirod3. It shows as "Ciro Duran Santilli" and that's correct. No fees apparently? Love it!
- PayPal: paypal.me/cirosantilli. Note that dots in Gmail address are ignored, and it is perfectly normal if the email you see has some extra dots in it. Fees: 2.9% + 0.30 GBP[ref].
- cryptocurrency: note that Ciro is not a regular crypto user, so you might want to make a smaller test donation and confirm that it worked by contacting Ciro before going for colossal amounts (one can dream):
- monthly subscriptions of 1$/month or more on either:Symbolic 1 dollar/month donation are extremely welcome to signal your interest! This way if a certain critical mass of sponsors is ever reached (~100?), Ciro can start to more actively asking slightly higher amounts to really try to achieve full time self sufficiency.
- GitHub Sponsors: github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli. Fees: 0% for individuals, up to 6% for organizations[ref]
- Patreon: www.patreon.com/cirosantilli. Fees: 8% pro plan + 1% PayPal withdrawal capped at 20 USD[ref]. We are waiting to reach the cap to withdraw!
- larger grants/contracts from filthy rich individuals or organizations: contact Ciro as mentioned at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to discuss.Ciro is interested in contracts/voluntary work that would be compatible/synergic with the OurBigBook.com project. Some possibilities include:
- interacting directly with classes of university students to help them learn the class subject, while at the same time spreading the university knowledge outside of the university walls
- one-to-one mentoring of individuals of any age that are looking to make an impact in the world, and not just pass their exams
- fixing specific bugs in related projects Ciro has experience in. These could be either via one-off contracts, or on platforms such as:
Ciro's current ambitions require him to remain in developed countries, because Ciro wants to document advanced science and technology by liaising with top universities, and there is not nearly as much high technology in poor countries. Remaining in developed countries is also a required due to family reasons.
Note to potential anonymous crypto donors: anonymous donations incur a regulatory risk. I cash out most of such donations and announce it very clearly to the government and banks. For example, at one point Barclays even froze my UK account. But things seem manageable for now. On one hand, such donations serve as a fun test of the financial system. But on the other, if all banks reject my money or if the government decides to take it, I will write off the anonymous donation at zero.
If you would like public acknowledgement for your support, Ciro will very gladly give it, just let Ciro know how you'd prefer it. Due to Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, many supporters have chosen to be anonymous, and that is totally fine, not everyone is interested in politics, or has a situation where going public is acceptable, so we don't have a standard setup yet, let's build it together. A acknowledgement section at the bottom of this page would be a minimum, but I for larger donations we could add a your advertisement in a locations such as:
- near the top of of the accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli, e.g. one of Ciro Santilli's Twitter accounts, github.com/cirosantilli or stackoverflow.com/users/895245
- near the top of cirosantilli.com
100k USD/year is a semi arbitrary amount that sounds nice. My last day job total compensation as of 2024 was about 150k USD/year.
Intro to the OurBigBook Project
. Source. 
Maybe if he ever gets enough credibility, such opportunities would actually materialize. It could be a bit like Periodic Videos, but for molecular biology and physics, and backed by OurBigBook text/tree with minimal openly licensed videos. The fact that such opportunities are essentially impossible outside of the boredom of the university system is something we should really change about education.