grep Updated +Created
If you are a programmer, grep becomes a verb: "to grep" means "to search text files", much like "to Google" means "to search random stuff online".
Advertise your material Updated +Created
Once you have crated something awesome, you have to advertise it, otherwise no one will ever find it.
This means:
  • whenever you walk into a classroom, give students a link to the material
    Then ask them if they want to talk about anything.
    Then leave the classroom and go produce more good material instead of wasting your time there :-)
  • 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.
  • after you've done something awesome, Google possible relevant keywords that should hit it.
    This will lead you to other websites that talk about the same content.
    Then, leave comments on those pages linking to your stuff, or email the authors of those pages.
    It is borderline spam, but if the subject is closely related, it is a win for everyone.
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 +Created
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:
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".
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:
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 +Created
Found through Google with no direct relation known to Ciro Santilli:
Possibly related variants:
Julian Kelly Updated +Created
Meme Updated +Created
The best way to learn about them as of 2020 is to Google into Know Your Meme.
Nerds 2.0.1 Updated +Created
Very very good. Those nice pre-Dot-com bubble vibes.
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 +Created
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.
So you are just better off with password logins and a decent password manager.
Open Images dataset Updated +Created
TODO vs COCO dataset.
As of v7:
The images and annotations are both under CC BY, with Google as the copyright holder.
OpenStreetMap Updated +Created
It is rare to find a project with such a ridiculously high importance over funding ratio.
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:
All of this is a shame, because they do have some incredible data that you cannot find easily on other maps because people just edited it up.
Oracle Database Updated +Created
Often known simply as SQL Server, a terrible thing that makes it impossible to find portable SQL answers on Google! You just have to Google by specific SQL implementation unfortunately to find anything about the open source ones.
Other projects Updated +Created
  • 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 developers
    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.
    You 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.
    This project won't make a lot of money. Open source and not-for-profit seems like the way to go.
    The website was called stubhub.com/, as of 2021 the domain had been sold to an unrelated website.
    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:
    Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.
  • leanpub: similar goals, markdown-based, but the usual "you own your book copyright and you are trying to sell your book" approach
  • nature Scitable
Stack Exchange Updated +Created
Stack Exchange solves to a good extent the use cases:
  • I have a very specific question, type it on Google, find top answers
  • I have an answer, and I put it here because it has a much greater chance of being found due to the larger PageRank than my personal web page will ever have
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:
User acquisition Updated +Created
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 +Created
Cool tool that allows you to graphically visualize page viewc counts of specific pages. It offers somewhat similar insights to Google Trends.
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.
Peter Todd's hash collision puzzles Updated +Created
As mentioned at the prize was claimed at 8d31992805518fd62daa3bdd2a5c4fd2cd3054c9b3dca1d78055e9528cff6adc (2017-02-23) which spends several inputs with the same unlock script that presents two different constantants that have the same SHA-1:
printf 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 | xxd -r -p | sha1sum
printf 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 | xxd -r -p | sha1sum
both giving
f92d74e3874587aaf443d1db961d4e26dde13e9c
It was claimed on the same day that Google disclosed the collision: security.googleblog.com/2017/02/announcing-first-sha1-collision.html
Both of these are PDF prefixes, so they start with the PDF file signature, but are not fully viewable PDFs on their own.
Quantum computer physical implementation Updated +Created
Video 1.
How To Build A Quantum Computer by Lukas's Lab (2023)
Source.
Super quick overview of the main types of quantum computer physical implementations, so doesn't any much to a quick Google.
He says he's going to make a series about it, so then something useful might actually come out. The first one was: Video "How to Turn Superconductors Into A Quantum Computer by Lukas's Lab (2023)", but it is still too basic.
The author's full name is Lukas Baker, www.linkedin.com/in/lukasbaker1331/, found with Google reverse image search, even though the LinkedIn image is very slightly different from the YouTube one.
As of 2023 he was a PhD student at NYU.
Quantum electrodynamics Updated +Created
Theory that describes electrons and photons really well, and as Feynman puts it "accounts very precisely for all physical phenomena we have ever observed, except for gravity and nuclear physics" ("including the laughter of the crowd" ;-)).
Learning it is one of Ciro Santilli's main intellectual fetishes.
While Ciro acknowledges that QED is intrinsically challenging due to the wide range or requirements (quantum mechanics, special relativity and electromagnetism), Ciro feels that there is a glaring gap in this moneyless market for a learning material that follows the Middle Way as mentioned at: the missing link between basic and advanced. Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979) is one of the best attempts so far, but it falls a bit too close to the superficial side of things, if only Feynman hadn't assumed that the audience doesn't know any mathematics...
The funny thing is that when Ciro Santilli's mother retired, learning it (or as she put it: "how photons and electrons interact") was also one of her retirement plans. She is a pharmacist by training, and doesn't know much mathematics, and her English was somewhat limited. Oh, she also wanted to learn how photosynthesis works (possibly not fully understood by science as that time, 2020). Ambitious old lady!!!
Combines special relativity with more classical quantum mechanics, but further generalizing the Dirac equation, which also does that: Dirac equation vs quantum electrodynamics. The name "relativistic" likely doesn't need to appear on the title of QED because Maxwell's equations require special relativity, so just having "electro-" in the title is enough.
Before QED, the most advanced theory was that of the Dirac equation, which was already relativistic but TODO what was missing there exactly?
As summarized at: youtube.com/watch?v=_AZdvtf6hPU?t=305 Quantum Field Theory lecture at the African Summer Theory Institute 1 of 4 by Anthony Zee (2004):
  • classical mechanics describes large and slow objects
  • special relativity describes large and fast objects (they are getting close to the speed of light, so we have to consider relativity)
  • classical quantum mechanics describes small and slow objects.
  • QED describes objects that are both small and fast
That video also mentions the interesting idea that:
Therefore, for small timescales, energy can vary a lot. But mass is equivalent to energy. Therefore, for small time scale, particles can appear and disappear wildly.
QED is the first quantum field theory fully developed. That framework was later extended to also include the weak interaction and strong interaction. As a result, it is perhaps easier to just Google for "Quantum Field Theory" if you want to learn QED, since QFT is more general and has more resources available generally.
Like in more general quantum field theory, there is on field for each particle type. In quantum field theory, there are only two fields to worry about:
Video 1.
Lecture 01 | Overview of Quantum Field Theory by Markus Luty (2013)
Source. This takes quite a direct approach, one cool thing he says is how we have to be careful with adding special relativity to the Schrödinger equation to avoid faster-than-light information.