grep
Updated 2025-07-16 How to teach Advertise your material Updated 2025-07-16
Once you have crated something awesome, you have to advertise it, otherwise no one will ever find it.
This means:
- Then ask them if they want to talk about anything.
- whenever someone asks as question on an online forum, answer it, and link to the section of your material that also answers that question.The material will answer many of their future questions.
Eventually, people will find you on the front page of Google searches, and then you will know that you've truly made something useful.
Ilana Wisby Updated 2025-07-16
Founding CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits.
As mentioned at www.investmentmonitor.ai/tech/innovation/in-conversation-with-oxford-quantum-circuits-ilana-wisby she is not the original tech person:Did they mean Oxford Sciences Enterprises? There's nothing called "Oxford Science and Innovation" on Google. Yes, it is just a typo oxfordscienceenterprises.com/news/meet-the-founder-ilana-wisby-ceo-of-oxford-quantum-circuits/ says it clearly:
she was finally headhunted by Oxford Science and Innovation to become the founding CEO of OQC. The company was spun out of Oxford University's physics department in 2017, at which point Wisby was handed "a laptop and a patent".
I was headhunted by Oxford Sciences Enterprises to be the founding CEO of OQC.
oxfordquantumcircuits.com/story mentions that the core patent was by Dr. Peter Leek: www.linkedin.com/in/peter-leek-00954b62/
Interesting members of the Santilli family Updated 2025-07-16
Found through Google with no direct relation known to Ciro Santilli:
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santilli: Wikipedia page of the glorious family, Santillis with their own Wikipedia page:
- Ruggero Santilli: "fringe science guy", by far dominates Google as of 2019. Created the respectable R.M. Santilli Foundation
- Ray Santilli made a fake 1995 alien autopsy movie, YouTube sample: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVcaT2QnoDs
- Ivana Santilli: Canadian singer, pop-electric-chill: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQRuVN0H8dM
- accounts on important websites
- github.com/santilli anonymous GitHub as of 2019
- santilli.com/ for rent by realnames.com/ (wiki page) as of 2019
- Also Brazilian and tech related like Ciro Santilli.
- www.youtube.com/user/TheOverthrowShow thepetesantillishow.com/ Pete Santilli, American Conservative news commentator show, makes Ciro cringe of boredom. At least he has a passion.
Possibly related variants:
- Santillo:
- Will Santillo who makes somewhat artistic porn photos. His website with several free demos: santillophotography.com/
- www.linkedin.com/in/ciro-santillo-2025a6ba/ a "Ciro Santillo", github.com/Ciruxx, also a programmer
- Santilly, a town in Saône-et-Loire department, France
- santilly.com/ redirects to www.pompes-funebres-santilly.com/fr/, a French funerary service
Job application by Ciro Santilli Created 2025-04-18 Updated 2025-09-11
2025 round one during week of April 21st, not toning down online profiles:Keywords:
- Paris quantum computing
- Alice&Bob:
- jobs.lever.co/alice-bob/2acf8f0c-6947-41ad-b30f-9779a1b49681 Senior Software Engineer, Framework team
I'm looking to do a meaningful job in a deeptech field, and quantum computing seems like it could become huge. I've learnt a few basics, and would like to go further with job experience in the area.
Salary: 90k.Rejected after first interview with the hiring manager. They said they wanted someone with more experience setting up CI/CD. - 2025-07-03 jobs.lever.co/alice-bob/b4632e27-cf56-4570-84bb-d56a169d1c43 Senior Software Engineer - Cloud. Webdev. I don't really want to do this, but it's a way in. Asking salary: 70k. Rejected 2025-07-11.
- 2025-09-02 jobs.lever.co/alice-bob/b7386caa-70dd-4670-bb69-a5c97322332f Senior Software Engineer - Firmware Calibration
- Pasqal:
- careers.pasqal.com/jobs/5817098-software-development-engineer-integration Software Development Engineer IntegrationApplication auto-reply also points to:which is cool.I'm looking to do a meaningful job in a deeptech field, and quantum computing seems like it could become huge. I've learnt a few basics, and would like to go further with job experience in the area.Rejected 1 week later without interview even though my CV seemed like a perfect match for this job. Sent an email to the contributors of Pulser.After the application they keep sending you relevant new job openings, which was really good, applying to another one:I applied for this job careers.pasqal.com/jobs/5817098-software-development-engineer-integration but got rejected by HR lady without interview.Pinging you guys here just in case because sometimes my profiles scare the HR people and then when I ping the programmers they like me. I grabbed your emails from GitHub.
- 2025-06-20 careers.pasqal.com/jobs/6075845-embedded-software-engineer-w-m Embedded Software engineerRejected 2025-07-03.Why Pasqal?I want to get into quantum computing in France, and there are only 5 major hardware companies and I'm applying to each of them when there's a job that seems that I can do. I don't know enough to pick the one with the tech that is most promising to win, though it seems no one can at this point. Being in Massy, a little further from central Paris, is a plus, I like quieter areas.
- 2025-09-04 careers.pasqal.com/fr/jobs/6379846-mid-senior-software-engineer-h-f Mid-Senior Software Engineer - H/F. Cloud.
J'ai une forte envie de faire ce job. Le quantum computing a l'air trop cool, l'impact pourrait être énorme, et les techs de base (high performance computing) du job m'amusent aussi. Mes études basiques jusqu'à présent : cirosantilli.com/quantum-computing. Ma femme est employée par une entreprise française et je cherche à déménager dans la région parisienne.
- C12 Quantum Electronics
- 2025-06-20 Senior Measurement Software Engineer jobs.lever.co/c12qe/0b27ff8c-a094-4da4-ba32-2ecd55ae6233
I am interested in getting into quantum computing because the this field seems like it could be promising. My wife is French and working for a French company in Paris and we are looking to relocate to the greater Paris region. I've heard good things from the company. I have only done basic undergrad physics in university but I'm very interested in learning more from a more concrete point of view, AMO seems really cool. I can handle low level programming well.
- Quandela:
- 2025-09-05 apply.workable.com/quandela/j/546CECA897/ Support QPU Engineer - Technical Account Manager. Was stated as software engineer on LinkedIn I think. Rejected 2025-09-09.
- Welinq: none yet but add to loop
- Alice&Bob:
- UK quantum computing:
- Oxford Ionics
2025-07-15 Senior Software Engineer apply.workable.com/oxford-ionics/j/F82EC50A7A/Rejected 2025-07-29. - Riverlane
- 2026-08-17
- apply.workable.com/riverlane/j/5B86BF380A/ System Software Engineer. Rejected 2025-08-29.
- apply.workable.com/riverlane/j/42D4AB487A/ Software Engineer - Modelling. Rejected 2025-09-09.
I've been watching quantum computing lightly from a distance, and I would be very excited to get involved and try to help, it seems like something really worth trying for humanity, my notes: cirosantilli.com/quantum-computing I'm very curious about learning more about the physics of quantum computers and error correction.
- Quantinuum
- 2025-08-26 jobs.eu.lever.co/quantinuum/0535d099-4f84-4ef3-a3fa-a182dde4362a Backend Software Engineer. Rejected 2025-08-29.
- Oxford Ionics
- DeepMind:
- Turned down two days later before anything.As evidenced by my Stack Exchange contributions, I love trying out new software to see if it works and how well. I love benchmarking it. And I love documenting what I observed in great detail to help others to choose the best software for them. I also love meeting various new people and understanding what they are up to and how I can help.
- job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/jobs/6576118 Software Engineer, Hardware Design
At ARM and AMD I've worked on various different parts of the hardware cycle, notably C++ emulation and low level software. I just get this strong feeling that hardware and low level software design should be the easiest thing for machines to automate, as it is the area that requires the least amount of "common sense" information about the world.
- Paris machine learning:
- H Company:Fastest initial job application steps ever! Name, email, CV, over.
- jobs.ashbyhq.com/hcompany/e6793ce6-918b-48a6-bf56-205c477cc1c0 Member of technical staff (Evaluations). Declined 12th June.
- jobs.ashbyhq.com/hcompany/89d867e7-2bd3-4918-aebc-cabbac526b6f Senior Back-end Engineer
- Mistral AI:
- jobs.lever.co/mistral/db67d7a2-bcec-4151-9b3a-8212ddabf419 Senior Software Engineer, Data Engineering - Paris. Declined May 7th without interview, at least they said they have lots of applicants and some have more closely related qualifications.
- 2025-07-03
- jobs.lever.co/mistral/c1e1e2c0-03f4-4434-938a-a5df3080baf2 Software Engineer, IDE (Typescript), (Contractor). VS Code browser extension.
Available from September. I made this extension as a small part of my personal project over a month full time: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ourbigbook.ourbigbook-vscode It has no installs because the personal project is a failure, but the extension works. I can do other stuff besides the vscode extension itself as well. But I need at least 1 year contract.
- jobs.lever.co/mistral/e76d2957-2bf6-4d8f-90a2-29bf9a927823 Software Engineer, Product (Python)Got an interview.I have 3 years full time on my failed website: ourbigbook.com/ My frontend is meh but backend is OK. Never done huge volumes though since the project was a failure. But Heroku + my basic PostgreSQL DB fu held up to 3k visits / day when I got some coverage for cirosantilli.com/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites from www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14752155/CIA-fake-websites-Star-Wars-communicate-spies.htmlI've also did some automatic population of the database to 100k rows and my indices seem to be right that the website is still usable: docs.ourbigbook.com/news/llm-generated-wikibot-abstracts
- jobs.lever.co/mistral/c1e1e2c0-03f4-4434-938a-a5df3080baf2 Software Engineer, IDE (Typescript), (Contractor). VS Code browser extension.
- Poolside AI:> Of all the applications of deep learning, code generation is one of those that interest me the most as they seem one of the most pertinent in order to one day achieve AGI (the others being theorem proving and robotics), and I'd like to try and get some work experience in the area, which is why I'm applying to your company.
- poolside.ai/careers/member-of-engineering-evaluations--ba11fe78-f6f6-4165-b76b-020a46ad8fee Member of Engineering (Evaluations)
Of all the applications of deep learning, code generation is one of those that interest me the most as they seem one of the most pertinent in order to one day achieve AGI (the others being theorem proving and robotics), and I'd like to try and get some work experience in the area.
- poolside.ai/careers/member-of-engineering-data-platform--13d32f62-d530-4372-b458-0687d99eea04 Member of Engineering (Data Platform)
This job seemed like a possibility as I've done some personal "data intensive" projects in the past (not distributed unfortunately, ~500 GB so it fit on my local disk), and I kind of enjoyed it and would be interested in trying out a more "data heavy" job like this for a change.
Rejected May 6th without interview. - poolside.ai/careers/member-of-engineering-evaluations--ba11fe78-f6f6-4165-b76b-020a46ad8fee Member of Engineering (Evaluations)
- Nabla jobs.ashbyhq.com/nabla/85543350-f2e4-4328-95c2-7716ce143279 Back-End Engineer. There was also a Senior but I didn't have the 5 years experience lol. Rejected 2025-07-21.
- Cohere
- 2026-08-04 jobs.ashbyhq.com/cohere/138b7442-1e5f-439e-97a3-bb9e41673c81 Senior/Staff Software Engineer, EMEA, Agentic Platform. Considered but didn't apply, they asked for too much experience.
- H Company:
- Big tech:
- Google. Many jobs in London, nothing in Paris. www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results
- www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/91141790538572486-senior-software-engineer-google-pixel-graphics Senior Software Engineer, Google Pixel Graphics. Went through entire interview process but LeetCode not good enough. Non-Leetcode went great.
- www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/96937277808091846-senior-software-engineer-pixel-graphics-gpu-software Senior Software Engineer, Pixel Graphics, GPU Software
- 2025-07-22 www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/113249786332619462-senior-software-engineer Senior Software Engineer, TPU Performance, Hardware/Software Co-Design. Hopeless but one must try.
- Amazon, focusing on AWS of course. Lots of jobs in London, nothing in Paris: www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/
- 2025-06-20
- www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2915117/software-development-engineer-aws-uk Software Development Engineer, AWS Utility Computing
- www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/jobs/2884321/systems-development-engineer-database-services Systems Development Engineer, Database Services. Rejected two days later on a Sunday, nice.
- www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/jobs/2530616/senior-systems-development-engineer Senior Systems Development Engineer
- www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/jobs/2902679/senior-systems-engineer Senior Systems Engineer
- 2025-06-20
- Apple Inc., focusing on low level and or embedded bullshit just to see if they give interviews:
- jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200523081/swe-kernel-engineer-coreos
- jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200577840/gpu-driver-engineer-kernel-firmware first received an email saying I would get an interview. But then they 180'ed a few hours later with some excuse. But the job announcement was still up. So it feels like something fishy happened, e.g. I failed some security check.
- jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200604360/virtualisation-engineer
- 2025-09-10 jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200520511-2114/gpu-modeling-engineer GPU modeling
- Microsoft: a few jobs in London, very few in Paris
- Facebook: several boring jobs in London, a few research jobs in Paris
- Google. Many jobs in London, nothing in Paris. www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results
- London machine learning:
- InstaDeep:
- www.instadeep.com/job-offer/fea583b3-d333-447e-8811-8ce58367c003/ Software Engineer (Simulation) asking 85k
I really like the idea of using simulations to speed up development of ideas or AI. I've done this in my past jobs in the semiconductor industry, and a bit on side time tinkering with simple simulation games that might be useful to train AI. I'm curious to what you will be simulating! The general areas that your company operates in, biotech and PCB design are also in my interest.lI really like the idea of using simulations to speed up development of ideas or AI. I've done this in my past jobs in the semiconductor industry, and a bit on side time tinkering with simple simulation games that might be useful to train AI. I'm curious to what you will be simulating!
- www.instadeep.com/job-offer/fea583b3-d333-447e-8811-8ce58367c003/ Software Engineer (Simulation) asking 85k
- Anthropic
- 2025-06-18
- job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4632138008 Software Engineer, Infrastructure. Declined first thing next Monday.
- job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4753256008 Software Engineer, Inference Scalability and Capability. This one suggested JAX, Rust and multi-GPU experience would be good. Haha it's hopeless.
- job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4632830008 Software Engineer, ML Performance and Scaling
I just want to help achieve AGI so I don't need to work anymore. I can do non-glamorous things to achieve that goal, but eventually I'd inevitably get into research itself. I haven't done deep learning except basic examples, but I can handle low level stuff, and I want to learn.
Why Anthropic?I'm applying to any LLM companies, and the ones with more funding are more likely to have dumb coding jobs that I can do without a PhD in ML, and more likely to have the resources to reach some critical point if scaling continues. The small labs have the advantage of nimbleness to try new architectures, but they only employ PhDs.I think I got the first stage technical thing for this one. But it was the most weird exercise ever, 2 hours to finish, they had a compiler in Python with a simplified GPU-like architecture and you're supposed to optimize a algorithm written in their custom assembly (writen in plain Python to make things even worse) and I was not able to do anything besides understand the problem somewhat. Then the reject came immediately.In one paragraph, provide an example of something meaningful that you have done in line with your values. Examples could include past work, volunteering, civic engagement, community organizing, donations, family support, etc.*Endless open source knowledge sharing e.g.:- stackoverflow.com/users/895245 Stack Overflow
- github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat Linux kernel emulation tutorial
- ourbigbook.com/ my failed knowledge sharing website that only I use
- www.matta.ai/careers/backend-engineer Backend EngineerHi, I'm applying to this job because I get a feeling that using machine learning to improve industry is cool and useful.My backend experience is 3 years full time on my failed open source elearning project: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook / ourbigbook.com/ the last of which I did after receiving a 100k pound grant. The website is written in Node.js + PostgreSQL, but I also like Python (went with Node.js for Next.js in this case) and have used Python professionally on my jobs and also for personal project, see CV or e.g. github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat I also did a bit of Django previously.I've never handled huge traffic on that site because it failed to gain interest, but on rare occasions where a post got traction it survived 3k requests / day just fine. I've done some amount of SQL optimization and performance verification, and I've added 100k AI generated posts to it and it survived, meaning my indexes were OK.
- InstaDeep:
- Semiconductor:
- AMD:
* careers.amd.com/careers-home/jobs/57882 Senior Software Development Engineer on ROCm. Rejected a few days later without interview.
* careers.amd.com/careers-home/jobs/65271 Virtual Software Modeling Engineer - Qualcomm: very few client jobs in France, a decent amount in UK, but nothing too good fitting at first glance
- Arm, all with referrals from old colleagues:
- 2025-06-30:
- GPU
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/staff-principal-software-engineer/33099/77726588832 Staff Software Engineer - System Performance Analysis GPU driver. Got screening interview. Rejected 2025-07-18.
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/staff-software-engineer-system-performance-analysis/33099/77284796288 Staff/Principal Software Engineer. Linux kernel driver. Rejected after final technical interview 2025-08-15.
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/principal-software-engineer-machine-learning/33099/82468207936 Principal Software Engineer - Machine Learning. Seems ambitions but friend recommended me so I just clicked. Rejected 2025-07-03.
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/staff-gpu-software-applications-engineer/33099/82643339264 Staff GPU software applications engineer. Got screening interview with hiring manager. Got 80k GBP offer 2025-09-04.
- Non-GPU
- carers.arm.com/job/cambridge/staff-software-engineer/33099/74848341808 Staff Software EngineerSounds cool.
This diverse role will largely focus on providing software enablement for our next generation CPU and accelerator based technologies on target use-cases.
- careers.arm.com/job/manchester/staff-application-performance-engineer/33099/80144718528 Staff Application Performance EngineerReally cool. I don't have the perf pre-requisites, but it would be cool to do this. Rejected 2025-07-03.
performance workflows on Arm Neoverse platforms
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/senior-software-engineer-machine-learning-tools/33099/74848310720 Senior Software Engineer - Machine Learning Tools. Got screening interview. Rejected 2025-07-16 by hiring manager before interview.
- experienced-arm.icims.com/jobs/14442/senior-linux-kernel-engineer-%e2%80%93-hardware-enablement Senior Linux Kernel Engineer – Hardware Enablement. Rejected 2025-07-05.
- experienced-arm.icims.com/jobs/12987/staff-software-engineer/job?mode=submit_apply Staff Software Engineer
Accelerating algorithms with hand-optimized Arm assembly using the latest Arm technologies such as SVE
- 2025-08-21
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/senior-performance-tools-engineer/33099/75816396960 rejected 2025-08-26
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/senior-software-performance-analysis-engineer/33099/74720022336 rejected 2025-08-25
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/senior-software-engineer-networking-for-ai/33099/81797177488
- careers.arm.com/job/cambridge/senior-software-engineer-cpython-runtime/33099/84058266624 I was not particularly qualified for this but a friend referred so I clicked. Got first technical interview, but rejected because as I told them from the start, I don't know much about interpreters.
- carers.arm.com/job/cambridge/staff-software-engineer/33099/74848341808 Staff Software Engineer
- GPU
- 2025-06-30:
- Intel: no jobs in UK/France
- Nvidia: a few high end jobs in UK/France, some of them are EMEA remote
- 2025-06-30 Senior Software and System Architect nvidia.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/NVIDIAExternalCareerSite/job/Spain-Remote/Senior-Software-and-System-Architect_JR1997578?locationHierarchy1=2fcb99c455831013ea52aa2df70e324e Read wrong, seems to require senior networking skills that I don't have, but by then had already asked for a referral from an ex colleague and so just applied anyways. Lol! rejected 2025-07-16
- 2025-06-04 nvidia.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/NVIDIAExternalCareerSite/job/UK-Remote/Senior-System-Software-Engineer--Base-OS-Kernel_JR1999799 Senior System Software Engineer, Base OS Kernel
- Codasip: no SW jobs in UK, only HW
- SiFive: only 10 jobs globally, 1 sales in UK
- Graphcore:
- 2025-07-02 job-boards.greenhouse.io/graphcore/jobs/7743036002 Staff System Software Engineer. Automation and testing stuff. Got first interview with technical person. Rejected 2025-08-22.
- Undo:
2027-08: client support, through recruiter, did first light technical and went well, did second with manager and not so well then reject. Asked me where I see myself in 5 years and replied no fucking idea whoever pays the most in semiconductors.
- AMD:
- EDA:
- Open source
- Canonical
- Linux kernel engineering: failed after take home exercise
- Common Crawl: commoncrawl.org/jobs Software Engineer/Data Scientist, Python, Spark
- Canonical
- Random compute
- Atos, now mostly Eviden: all jobs require 10 years of experience lol
- Random french tech
- Random deeptech:
- Oxford:
- Oxford Instruments 2025-07-21 jobs.oxinst.com/job/Oxford-Senior-Software-Engineer/819253802/ 70k salary. Cover: I just want to do something sciency. Rejected one day later.
- Proxima Fusion 2025-07-15 Research Software Engineer jobs.lever.co/proximafusion/23aab9a8-34ec-40d2-bb14-440f1130021c Got screening interview, but rejected afterwards on 2025-08-08 before technical.
- Salience Labs 2025-09-10 careers.saliencelabs.ai/jobs/6208031-embedded-software-engineer
- Oxford:
- biotech maybe
- optical compute
- NcodiN: no jobs
- Flux Computing:
- Robotics
- HPC
- Formal proof:
This application is hopeless, but here's the pitch. One thing that would be really really awesome for formal mathematics would be a website where anyone (including bots) can go and prove whatever theorem they want on the web UI or API, and then it gets formally verified, and the proven results shows up on the web UI, and other people can use it for their own further proofs. So it's a bit like Lean's mathlib, but the advantage over a centralized standard library is that you don't need to review people's pull requests. And you can do stuff like "watch if a results is proven". More babling at: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/website-front-end-for-a-mathematical-formal-proof-system Cheers.
- GPU
- C++
- Linux
- systems software
- numerical software
- robotics
John M. Martinis Created 2024-12-23 Updated 2025-07-16
Julian Kelly Created 2024-12-13 Updated 2025-07-16
Timeline:He went pretty much in a straight line into the quantum computing boom! Well done.
- 2015: joined Google as a Google Quantum AI employee
- 2010: UCSB Physics PhD. His thesis was "Fault-tolerant superconducting qubits" and the PDF can be downloaded from: alexandria.ucsb.edu/lib/ark:/48907/f3b56gwb.
- 2006: UCSB Physics undergrad. In 2008 he joined John Martinis' lab during his undergrad itself.
Largey Brage Updated 2025-07-16
Both of them attended Montessori education at some point. Interesting! Mentioned in a talk by Sergey and highlighted at The Google Story.
They stepped down from leading Google roles in 2019: www.npr.org/2019/12/03/784570156/google-founders-brin-page-step-down-pichai-takes-over-as-alphabet-ceo
As The Google Story puts it about Largey:Ciro Santilli likes that.
Scholarship was not just emphasized in their homes; it was treasured.
Machine learning company Updated 2025-07-16
This section is about companies that primarily specialize in machine learning.
The term "machine learning company" is perhaps not great as it could be argued that any of the Big tech are leaders and sometimes, especially in the case of Google, has a main product that is arguably a form of machine learning.
Meme Updated 2025-07-16
Nerds 2.0.1 Updated 2025-07-16
Very very good. Those nice pre-Dot-com bubble vibes.
Might be freely watchable? Wikipedia links to:
But they do start with an FBI warning about copyright. So... erm.
Part 1 - Networking The Nerds talks about the TCP/IP and early machines implementing it:
- 21:00: shows inside The Pentagon. The way the dude who works there opens a his locked office door with an electric switch is just amazing. Cringely also mentions that there's an actual official speed limit in the corridors as he rides a carrier bike slowly through them.
- 21:45: the universities weren't enthusiastic, because people from other locations would be able to use your precious computer time. But finally ARPA forced the universities' hands, and they joined.
- 24:24 mentions that some of the guys who created ARPANET were actually previously counting cards at Casinos in Las Vegas, just like in the 21 (2008) film
- one of the centerpieces of development was at UCLA. The other was the BBN company. 33:55 shows the first router, then called them Interface Message Processor
- the first message was from UCLA to Stanford University. He was trying to write "Login", and it crashed at the 'g'. Epic. They later debugged it.
- towards the end talks about ALOHAnet, the first wireless computer communication done
Part 2 - Serving the Suits
- Robert Metcalfe. He's nice. Xerox PARC. Ethernet.
- Explains what is a "Workstation", notably showing one by Sun Microsystems. This is now an obscure "passé" thing in 2020 that young people like Ciro Santilli have only heard of in legend (or in outdated university computer labs!). Funny to think that so many people have had this idea before, including e.g. the Chromebook
- 10:46 mentions that all of Cisco, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems and where founded at Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460, at Stanford University.
- he then talks a lot about Sun. Sun became dominant in Wall Street.
- 19:05: Novell, from Utah. How they almost went bust, but were saved at the last moment by Ray Noorda, who refocused them to their NetWare product which was under recent development. It allowed file and printer sharing in IBM PCs. 22:55 shows how they had a live radio host for people waiting on customer support calls!
- 33:56 mentions how The Grateful Dead had in impact on the Internet, as people wanted computers to be able to access The WELL online forum. They still own the domain as of 2022: www.well.com/. It is interesting how Larry Page also liked The Grateful Dead as mentioned at The Google Story, his dad would take him to shows. Larry is a bit younger of course than the people in this documentary.
- 37 show McAfee
- 43:56: fantastic portrait of Cisco
Part 3 - Wiring the World:
- Berners-Lee at CERN and the invention of the URL.
- 1992: US Government allow commerce on the Internet
- Web browser history, Mosaic and Marc Andresseeen.
- 20:45: America Online
- 23:29: search engines and Excite. Google was a bit too small to be on his radar!
- 25:50: porn
- 27: The Motley Fool and advertising
- 30: Planet U grocery shopping
- 31:50: Amazon
- 33:00: immigrant workers, Indians playing cricket, outsourcing, Wipro Systems
- 41:25: Java
- 46:30: Microsoft joins the Internet. The Internet Tidal Wave Internet memo. Pearl Harbour day talk.
- 56:40: Excite Tour. If they had survived, they would have been Google with their quirky offices.
OAuth Updated 2025-07-16
The fatal flaw of OAuth is that websites have to enable specific providers, they can't just automatically select the correct OAuth for a given email domain. This means that the vast majority of websites will only provide the most widely popular providers such as Google, and the like, which means people won't have decent privacy.
Open Images dataset Updated 2025-07-16
As of v7:
- ~9M images
- 600 object classes
- bounding boxes
- visual relatoinships are really hard: storage.googleapis.com/openimages/web/factsfigures_v7.html#visual-relationships e.g. "person kicking ball": storage.googleapis.com/openimages/web/visualizer/index.html?type=relationships&set=train&c=kick
- google.github.io/localized-narratives/ localized narratives is ludicrous, you can actually hear the (Indian women mostly) annotators describing the image while hovering their mouses to point what they are talking about). They are clearly bored out of their minds the poor people!
OpenStreetMap Updated 2025-07-16
E.g., as of 2020, their help login help.openstreetmap.org/ shows MyOpenID as an option, which was discontinued in 2014, and not Google OAuth.
They do still seem to have a bit more activity than gis.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/openstreetmap on Stack Exchange.
Complaints:
- Transliteration is off by default!...... wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Translation You just have to learn all scripts ever. Good luck with the Chinese characters. Genius.
- In order to see information about places, you have to click "Query features" on the toolbar first. Who made such a terrible UI? Direct click is a much, and so easy to implement?
- It is impossible to discern different types of paths and other walking path symbols, the symbols are too small, and just scale down to a line no matter how much you zoom in.
- Power lines are way too visible. While that is kind of cool, it is useless and distracting to most people most of the time.
- No street-level imagery...: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/1178/adding-photos
- No aerial imagery: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/6849/how-can-i-see-the-aerial-imagery-without-editing-the-map But that is kind of understandable, as that one might not be free.
- No restaurant ratings: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/64852/ratings-for-pois because it is "Subjective". OMG those people, such a huge value powerhouse wasted.
Oracle Database Updated 2025-07-16
OurBigBook.com Other projects Updated 2025-07-16
- HyperCard: we are kind of a "multiuser" version of HyperCard, trying to tie up cards made by different users. It is worth noting that HyperCard was one of the inspirations for WikiWikiWeb, which then inspired Wikipedia
- Semantic Web
- NLab
- physicstravelguide.com/ Nice manifesto: physicstravelguide.com/about by Jakob Schwichtenberg.
- OpenStax
- www.ft.com/content/5515ec3e-0040-4d90-85a9-df19d6e3ebd2 (archive) Twilio’s Jeff Lawson: an evangelist for software developersYou can never be first. But you can have the correct business model. That company's website must have gone into IP Purgatory, and could never be released as an open source website.As a student at the University of Michigan, he started a company that made lecture notes available free online, drawing a large audience of Midwestern college students and, soon enough, advertisers. At the height of the dotcom bubble, he dropped out of college, raised $10m from the venture firm Venrock and moved the company to Silicon Valley.His start-up drew interest from an acquirer that was planning to go public early in 2000. They closed the acquisition but missed their IPO window as the market plunged, and by August the company had filed for bankruptcy. Stock that Lawson and investors in his start-up received from the sale became worthless.He might actually be interested in donating to OurBigBook.com if it move forward now that he's a billionaire.
- Knol: basically the exact same thing by Google but 14 years earlier and declared a failure. Quite ominous:
- leanpub: similar goals, markdown-based, but the usual "you own your book copyright and you are trying to sell your book" approach
- nature Scitable
OK, just going random now:
OurBigBook.com Stack Exchange Updated 2025-07-16
Stack Exchange solves to a good extent the use cases:
points of view. It is a big open question if we can actually substantially improve it.
Major shortcoming are mentioned at idiotic Stack Overflow policies:
- Scope restrictions can lead to a lot of content deletion: closing questions as off-topicThis greatly discourages new users, who might still have added value to the project.On our website, anyone can post anything that is legal in a given country. No one can ever delete your content if it is legal, no matter their reputation.
- Although you can answer your own question, there's no way to write an organized multi-page book with Stack Exchange due to shortcomings such as no table of contents, 30k max chars on answer, huge risk of deletion due to "too broad"
- Absolutely no algorithmic attempt to overcome the fastest gun in the West problem (early answers have huge advantage over newer ones): meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535/closing-an-old-upvoted-question-as-duplicate-of-new-unvoted-questions/404567#404567
- Native reputation system:
- if the living ultimate God of
C++
upvotes you, you get10
reputation - if the first-day newb of
Java
upvotes you, you also get10
reputation
- if the living ultimate God of
- Randomly split between sites like Stack Overflow vs Super User, with separate user reputations, but huge overlaps, and many questions that appears as dupes on both and never get merged.
- Possible edit wars, just like Wikipedia, but these are much less common since content ownership is much clearer than in Wikipedia however
OurBigBook.com User acquisition Updated 2025-07-16
The general and ideal user acquisition is of course organic Googling:
- user does not understand his teacher's explanation of a subject
- user Googles into rare specific subject
- looks around, then login/create account with OAuth to leaves a comment or upvote
- notice that you can fork anything
- mind = KABOOM
However, before that point, it is very likely that Ciro will have to physically do some very hard and specific user acquisition work at some University. Maybe there is a more virtual way of achieving this.
This work will involve going through some open set of university lecture notes, and creating a superior version of them on OurBigBook.com, and somehow getting students to notice it and use it as a superior alternative to their crappy lecture notes.
Another very promising route is publishing the answers to old examination questions on the website. It is likely that we will be able to overcome any copyright issues by uploading only the answers to numbered questions. There is a minor risk that these would be considered derivative works of the copyrighted questions. But universities would have to be very anal to enforce a DMCA for that!!!
Getting in contact with students is an epic challenge, as an incredibly deep chasm separates us:
- it is basically impossible to try and approach teachers: how to convince teachers to use CC BY-SA
- and on the other hand, how will you get university students to trust you are not a pedophile and that you actually want to help them?The missing aspect is how to join their main "class communication group", e.g. a WhatsApp or Discord chat they have. That would be the perfect entry point to communicate with the end users. But that entry point is also generally closed exclusively for students, and sometimes lecturers, and will not accept anyone external.Perhaps Ciro would be able to do something with one of the two Universities he attended in the past: École Polytechnique or University of São Paulo. But there was no clear channel in those institutions for that. There is either an "infinitely noisy Facebook with everyone that bothered" or silence, deathly silence and isolation of no contact. The key hard part is getting a per-course granularity chat. Discord Student Hubs are a fantastic initiative in that area. Shame that Discord is an unusable mess with zero ways to select which notifications you care about: Section "Discord email notifications"!One approach method that shows some promise is to follow the Student societies, which often host open events of interest outside of work hours.
Walking with advertisement t-shirts mentioning specific course names in some university location is something Ciro seriously considers, that's how desperate things are. Watch out: docs.ourbigbook.com/#public-relations for T-shirt news!
Pageviews Analysis Updated 2025-07-16
Cool tool that allows you to graphically visualize page view counts of specific pages. It offers somewhat similar insights to Google Trends.
Homepage: pageviews.wmcloud.org/
Documentation: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pageviews_Analysis#Massviews
The homepage shows views of selected pages, e.g. when Google had their 25th birthday: pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2023-09-11&end=2023-10-01&pages=Cat|Dog|Larry_Page Larry Page briefly beat "Cat" and "Dog".
/topviews
shows the most viewed pages for a given month: pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&date=2023-08&excludes= It is extremelly epic that XXX: Return of Xander Cage, a 2017 film, is on the top ten of the August 2023 month. The page was around 8th place on a Google search for "xxx": archive.ph/wip/giRY8 at the time. XXXX (beer) was also on the top 20, followed by Sex on 21.