Google Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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One of the least evil of the big tech companies of the early 21st century, partly because Sergey Brin's parents fled from the Soviet Union and so he is anti censorship, although they have been tempted by it.
Google only succeeds at highly algorithmic tasks or at giving infinite storage to users to then mine their data.
It is incapable however of adding any obvious useful end user features to most of its products, most of which get terminated and cannot be relied on:
This also seems to extend to business-to-business: twitter.com/MohapatraHemant/status/1343969802080030720 ex-Googler tells how they lost the cloud to Amazon.
More mentions of that:
Too many genius engineers. They need some dumber people like Ciro Santilli who need to write documentation to learn stuff.
Ciro Santilli actually attempted two interviews to work at Google in the early 2010's but very quickly failed both on the first phase, because you have to be a fast well trained coding machine to pass that interview.
Ciro later felt better about himself by fantasizing how he would actually do more important things outside of Google and that they would beg to buy him instead.
He was also happy that he wouldn't have to use Google crazy internal tools: someone once said that Google's tools make easy tasks middle hard, and they also make impossible tasks middle hard. TODO source.
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Google Foobar Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Video 1.
Attempting Google's hidden coding challenge by codemastercpp (2022)
Source.
Video 2.
Google's Secret Programming Challenge by srcmake (2018)
Source.
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Hans Petter Langtangen Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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It should be mentioned that when you start Googling for PDE stuff, you will reach Han's writings a lot under his GitHub Pages: hplgit.github.io/, and he is one of the main authors of the FEniCS Project.
Unfortunately he died of cancer in 2016, shame, he seemed like a good educator.
He also published to GitHub pages with his own crazy markdown-like multi-output markup language: github.com/hplgit/doconce.
Rest in peace, Hans.
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Version your material Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Whenever you make a change to your material, people should still be able to access the previous version.
Maybe there was something in the previous version that they needed, and you just removed.
Git + GitHub is the perfect way to do versioning.
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Hugging Face Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Interesting website, hosts mostly:
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Infinite Napkin Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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By Evan Chen (陳誼廷)
800+ page PDF with source on GitHub claiming to try and teach the beauty of modern maths for high schoolers. Fantastic project!!!
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Interesting members of the Santilli family Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Found through Google with no direct relation known to Ciro Santilli:
Possibly related variants:
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Knowledge olympiad Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 2024-07-12
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Events that trick young kids into thinking that they are making progress, but only serve to distract them from what really matters, which is to dominate a state of the art as fast as possible, contact researches in the area, and publish truly novel results.
Financially backed by high schools trying to make ads showing how they will turn your kids into geniuses (but also passionate teachers who fell into this hellish system), or companies who hire machines rather than entrepreneurs.
The most triggering thing possible is when programming competitions don't release their benchmarks as open source software afterwards: at least like that they might help someone to solve their real world problems. Maybe.
On a related note, hackathons are also mostly useless. Instead of announcing a hackathon, just announce a web forum where people with similar interests can talk to one another instead, and let them code it out on GitHub if they want to. Restricting intensive development to a few days tends to produce crappy code and not reach real goals.
Some irrelevant people highlight that knowledge Olympiads can have good effects, because they are "an opportunity to meet university teachers and their research organizations". Ciro's argument is just that there are much more efficient ways to achieve those goals.
As an alternative way to get into university, this is not 100% horrible however, e.g. the University of São Paulo accepted students from olympiads in 2019 and then again 2023: jornal.usp.br/institucional/usp-oferece-200-vagas-em-mais-de-100-cursos-de-graduacao-para-alunos-participantes-de-olimpiadas-do-conhecimento/?a
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Mailing list Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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It boggles Ciro Santilli's mind that people use mailing list to collaborate on projects!
The only explanation is that the dinosaurs who created the projects are unable to adapt to new superior technologies.
Yes, Ciro is talking to you, big fundamental projects from last century: Linux kernel, GNU Compiler Collection (gcc.gnu.org/lists.html), Binutils (sourceware.org/binutils/), etc.
Some of you are already using Bugzilla for the bugs, so kudos. But if you've seen their benefit, why you still use the mailing list for patches?
Advantages of mailing lists:
Disadvantages: everything else:
  • cannot subscribed to a single thread. Which forces you to create an email filter for each one of them you subscribe to.
  • no metadata, notably the notion of closing / merging, but also upvotes
    You have to read thirty messages before you can know if the bug was solved or not.
  • it is insanely hard to reply to messages from before you were subscribed: webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/23197/reply-to-mailman-archived-message/115088#115088
    This forces everyone to subscribe to all lists, and then set up email filters to not be flooded with emails.
  • Unless they use Patchwork, which adds one more website on top of the mess.
    And then Gmail corrupts your patches, and you are forced to use git send-email, which does not work on some network configurations: stackoverflow.com/questions/28038662/how-to-solve-unable-to-initialize-smtp-properly-when-using-using-git-send-ema or setup ThunderBird.
  • often have to subscribe to post at all, thus cluttering your inbox further
  • you can edit posts to make them clearer.
    Yes, people could vandalize their answers when they get mad, and threads might stop making sense after edits. But this can be solved with an undeletable post history like Stack Overflow has (but not any other tracker does).
    Or archive.org :-)
    In any case, what do you think will happen more often and have greater impact:
    • people vandalize their posts
    • people fix their silly typos and improve content
  • searchable by author, keyword, etc. without Google. Yes, mailing list trackers could have decent implementations to overcome that. But no, GNU Mailman which everyone uses does not have it. Google barely indexes it.
    And I don't think Google properly indexes many of the mailing list archives for some reason: I never get hits for my own posts a week later, while I often do on GitHub issues.
  • people have to learn about top posting vs inline posting, and this requires infinite education of new users
  • Line comments in code reviews like GitHub and GitLab.
    On mailing lists: either put a comment in the middle of a huge patch and let other people find it, or (more likely) copy paste the part of the patch that you are talking about.
  • most mail web UIs suck.
    OK, this is not an unsolvable or intrinsic problem, but still a problem.
    E.g.: ezmlm it is not possible to see the entire content in a single page: gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2015-07/threads.html.
    Unless you like reading threads backwards and with 4 levels of > quotations.
    The alternative: do like LLVM and send attachments. Yes, I we all love opening up attachments on our browsers.
    The real solution: everyone can create branches and pull requests. Also has the benefit of running CI on the pull requests.
Not sure:
  • you can have infinitely many trackers to replicate data in case apocalypse happens in some part of the world.
    Although I'm not sure this is an advantage, as you don't know anymore which one is the canonical trackers an advantage, as you don't know anymore which one is the canonical tracker.
    And all web interfaces already have an API to export messages, and someone has already scripted it to import from any web UI to any web UI for you.
    And GitHub offers infinite precise history transparently on its API.
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PlanetMath Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Based on GitHub pull requests: github.com/planetmath
Joe Corneli, of of the contributors, mentions this in a cool-sounding "Peeragogy" context at metameso.org/~joe/:
I earned my doctorate at The Open University in Milton Keynes, with a thesis focused on peer produced support for peer learning in the mathematics domain. The main case study was planetmath.org; the ideas also informed the development of “Peeragogy”.
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Quantum Algorithm Zoo Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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The most comprehensive list is the amazing curated and commented list of quantum algorithms as of 2020.
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Quantum computing player in Brazil Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Saylor Academy Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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This is an interesting initiative which has some similarities to Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook project.
The fatal flaw of the initiative in Ciro Santilli's opinion is the lack of user-generated content. We will never get there without UGC and algorithms, never.
Also as of 2021, it mostly useless business courses: learn.saylor.org unfortunately.
But it has several redeeming factors which Ciro Santilli aproves of:
The founder Michael J. Saylor looks a bit crooked, Rich people who create charitable prizes are often crooked comes to mind. But maybe he's just weird.
Video 1.
Michael Saylor interview by Lex Fridman (2022)
Source.
At the timestamp:
When I go, all my assets will flow into a foundation, and the foundation's mission is to make education free for everybody forever.
What statement... maybe he's actually not crooked, maybe it was just an accounting mistake... God, why.
If only Ciro Santilli knew how to contact him and convince him that his current approach is innefective and that Ciro has something better! Michael, please Google into this page some day, Ciro Santilli needs funding for OurBigBook.com. A hopeless Tweet at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1548350114623660035. Also tried to hit his saylor@strategy.com.
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SuperCollider Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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domain-specific language unfortunately, but at least it's on GitHub, looks promising.
How to play scores and save them to files is discussed at: doc.sccode.org/Guides/Non-Realtime-Synthesis.html
They have a nice looking IDE, but running anything from the command-line interface is super hard, much unlike Csound. How to get a decent hello world: stackoverflow.com/questions/65360414/how-to-play-a-supercollider-file-non-interactively-from-the-terminal-command-lin
Sample composition with custom synths + notes: sccode.org/1-5cl
leanpub.com/ScoringSound looks like a decent tutorial, it is basically the Csound FLOSS manual for SuperCollider.
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The Machiavellian Stack Overflow contributor Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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  • always upvote questions you care about, to increase the probability that they will get answered
  • never upvote other people's answers unless you might gain from it somehow, otherwise you are just giving other high reputation users more reputation relative to you
  • only mark something to close or as a duplicate if it will bring you some advantage, because closing things creates enemies, especially if the OP has a high profile
    One example advantage is if you have already answered the question (and the duplicate as well in case of duplicates), because this will prevent competitors from adding new better answers to overtake you.
  • protect questions you've answered whenever someone with less than 10 reputation answers it with a bad answer, to prevent other good contributors from coming along and beating you
  • when you find a duplicate pool answer every question with similar answers.
    Alter each answer slightly to avoid the idiotic duplicate answer detector.
    If one of the question closes, it is not too bad, as it continues netting you to upvotes, and prevents new answers from coming in.
  • follow on Twitter/RSS someone who comments on the top features of new software releases. E.g. for Git, follow GitHub on Twitter, C++ on Reddit. Then run back to any question which has a new answer.
  • always upvote the question when you answer it:
    • the more upvotes, more likely people are to click it.
    • the OP is more likely to see your answer and feel good and upvote you
  • if a niche question only has few answers and you come with a good one, upvote the existing ones by other high profile users.
    This may lead to them upvoting or liking you.
    Even if they don't, other people will still see your answer anyway, and this will lead to people to upvoting you more just to make your great answer surpass the current ones, especially if the accepted one has less upvotes than yours. Being second is often an asset.
  • always upvote comments that favor you:
    • "I like this answer!" on your answers
    • "also look at that question" when you have answered that question
  • don't invest a lot in edits. They don't give you rep, and they can get reverted and waste your time.
    Why are you trying to help other people's answers to get rep anyways? Just make a separate answer instead! :-)
  • if you answer a question by newbie without 15 reputation, find their other questions if any and upvote them, so that the OP can upvote your answer in addition to just accepting
  • If you haven't answered a question, link to related questions you've answered on question comments, so more people will come to your answers.
    If you have answered the question, only link to other questions at the bottom of your answer, so that people won't go away before they reach your answer, and so as to strengthen your answer.
  • if a question has 50 million answers and you answer it (often due to a new feature), make a comment on the question pointing to your answer
  • if you get a downvote, always leave a comment asking why. It is not because you care about their useless opinion, but because other readers might see the comment, feel sorry for you, and upvote.
  • ask any questions under a separate anonymous accounts. Because:
    • intelligent people are born knowing, and don't ever ask any questions, so that would hurt your reputation
    • downvoting questions does not take 1 reputation away from the downvoter, and so it greatly opens the door for your opponents to downvote you without any cost.
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Theoretical Physics Reference by Ondrej Certík Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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The only one on GitHub. In RST and renders to HTML with image formulas.
Too "direct formula overload" at first look.
By the creator of SymPy, who works at Los Alamos National Laboratory and has a PhD in chemical physics: swww.linkedin.com/in/ondřej-čertík-064b355b/ Man, big kudos to this dude.
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Topology in condensed matter Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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But then they regained their sanity and put the source code on GitHub: github.com/topocm/topocm_content and is CC BY-SA.
Uses an ungodly combination of Jupyter notebooks and Pelican.
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GitHub blocked the China Dictatorship bot Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 2024-10-26
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GitHub forbade our China Dictatorship auto-reply bot, the reason given is because they forbid comment reply bots in general. Though it was cool to see a junior support staff person giving out what obviously triggered the action:
We've received a large volume of complaints from other users indicating that the comments and issues are unrelated to the projects they were working on.
before a more senior one took over.
Ciro was slightly saddened but not totally surprized by the bloodbath against him on the Reddit the threads he created:
So we observe once again the stupidity of deletionism towards anything that is considered controversial. The West is discussion fatigued, and would rather delete discussion than have it.
We also se people against you having freedom to moderate your own repositories as you like it, with bots or otherwise. Giving up freedoms for nothing, because "bot is evil".
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Website front-end for a mathematical formal proof system Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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When Ciro Santilli first learnt the old Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory and the idea of formal proofs, his teenager mind was completely blown.
Finally, there it was: a proper and precise definition of mathematics, including a definition of integers, reals and limits!
Theorems are strings, proofs are string manipulations, and axioms are the initial strings that you can use.
Once proved, press a button on your computer, and the proof is automatically verified. No messy complicated "group of savants" reading it for 4 years and looking for flaws!
There are a few proof assistant systems with several theorems in their Git tracked standard library. The hottest ones circa 2020 are:
And here are some more interesting links:
However, as expressed by the QED manifesto, is unbelievable that there isn't one awesome and dominating website, that hosts all those proofs, possibly an on the browser editor, and which all mathematicians in the world use as the one golden reference of mathematics to rule them all!
Just imagine the impact.
Standard library maintainers don't have to deal with the impossible question of what is "beautiful" or "useful" enough mathematics to deserve merged: users just push content to the online database, and star what they like!
We then just use GitHub-like namespaces for each person's theorem, e.g. "cirosantilli/fundmaental-theorem-of-calculus" or "johndoe/fundmaental-theorem-of-calculus" so that each person owns their own preferred definition IDs, which others can reuse.
No more endless bikeshedding over what insane level of generality do your analysis theorems need to be (Ciro Santilli attended at talk about Lean where the speaker mentioned this was a problem)!
This would move things more out of the "pull request and Git tracked code" approach, into a more "database with entries" version of things.
Furthermore, it is just a matter of time until the "single standard library" approach starts to break down, as the git clone becomes impossibly large. At this point, people have to start publishing separate packages. And when this happens, you would need to retest every package that you add to your project. This is why a centralized database is just inevitable at some point, it just scales better.
Interested in a conjecture? No problem: just subscribe to its formal statement + all known equivalents, and get an email on your inbox when it gets proved!
Are you a garage mathematician and have managed to prove a hard theorem, but no "real" mathematician will read your proof because your unknown? Fuck that, just publish it on the system and let it get auto verified. Overnight fame awaits.
Notation incompatibility hell? A thing of the past, just automatically convert to your preferred representation.
Such a system would be the perfect companion to OurBigBook.com. Just like computer code offers the backbone of Linux Kernel Module Cheat Linux kernel tutorials, a formal proof system website would be the backbone of mathematics tutorials! You know what, if OurBigBook.com becomes insanely successful, Ciro is going to add this to it later on.
Furthermore, it would not be too hard to achieve this system!
All we would need would be something analogous to a package registry like PyPI or NodeJS' registry.
Then, each person can publish packages containing proofs.
Packages can rely on other packages that contain pre-requisites definition or theorem.
Packages are just regular git repos, with some metadata. One notable metadata would be a human readable description of the theorems the package provides.
The package registry would then in addition to most package registries have a CI server in it, that checks the correctness of all proofs, generates a web-page showing each theorem.
All proofs can be conditional: the package registry simply shows clearly what axiom set a theorem is based on.
This is a close as we can get to Erdős' book.
Maybe Ciro will just stuff this into OurBigBook.com once that takes over the world.
This project could be seen as a more automated/less moderated version of ProofWiki.
Bibliography:
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