Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Long story short, the project is so far a complete failure on the most important metric: number of regular users, which current sits at exactly one: myself.

There were notable users who found the project online and who actually tried to use the website for some content and provided extremely valuable feedback:Unfortunately after the period of a few weeks they stopped using it to follow their other priorities instead. Which is of course totally fine, however sad.

I still believe that the OurBigBook Web feature is a significant tech innovation that could make the website go big.

I also believe that the project gets many fundamentals of braindumping right, notably the infinitely deep table of contents without forced scoping, e.g.:does not make Calculus have an ID orr URL of mathematics/calculus, rather it's just calculus.

But there is a fundamental difficulty in reaching critical mass to that self-sustaining point, as people don't seem to be convinced by these logical "my system is better" argument alone, as opposed to having them Google into stuff they need now and then understand that the project is awesome.

A closely related critical mass issue is that existing big multiuser knowledge base websites such as Stack Overflow and Wikipedia have a tremendous advantage on PageRank. No matter how useless a Wikipedia article about something is, it will always be on top of Google within a week of creation for title hits. And since the main goal of publishing your stuff is to get it seen, it makes much more sense for writers to publish on such existing websites whenever possible, because anywhere else it is way way less likely to be seen by anybody.

Even I end up writing way more on Stack Overflow than on OurBigBook as a programmer. But I still believe that there is a value to OurBigBook, for the usual reasons of:

Perhaps what saddens me the most is that even on GitHub stars/Twitter/Hacker news terms there is almost no interest in the project despite the fact that I consider that it has innovations, while many other note taking apps as well in the thousands of stars. Maybe I'm just delusional and all the tech that I'm doing is completely useless?

Part of the issue is probably linked to the fact that most other note taking apps focus on "help me organize my ideas so I can make more money" and often completely ignore "I want to publish my knowledge", and stuff that helps you make money is always easier to sell and promote.

OurBigBook on the other hand a huge focus on "I want to publish me knowledge". It aims almost single mindedly in being the best tool ever for that. However this doesn't make money for people, and therefore there are going to be way less potential users.

I do believe strongly that all it takes is a few users for the project to snowball. For some people, once you start braindumping, it is very addictive, and you never want to stop basically. So with only a few of those we can open large parts of undergrad knowledge to the world. But these people are few, and so far I haven't been able to find even a single one like me, and on top of that convince them that I have created the ultimate system for their knowledge publishing desires.

Another general lesson is that I should perhaps aimed for greater compatibility with existing systems such as Obsidian. Taking something that many people already know and use can have a huge impact on acceptance. E.g. anything that touches Obsidian can reach thousands of stars: github.com/KosmosisDire/obsidian-webpage-export. Note taking apps that aim for "markdown" compatibility also tend to fare better, even if in the end you inevitably have to extend the Markdown for some of your features. And WYSIWYG, which I want but don't have, is perhaps the ultimate familiarity.

Another issue compared to other platforms is that OurBigBook just came out late. Obsidian launched in 2020. Roam Research and Trillium Notes also came earlier. And it is hard to fight the advantage already gained by those on the "I'm going to take some personal notes" area. I do believe however that there a strong separation between "these are my personal notes" and "I want to publish these". Once you decide to publish your knowledge, you immediately start to write in a different way, and it is very hard to convert pre-existing "private" notes into ones suitable for public consumption.

github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/198. Previously at: stackoverflow.com/questions/31321009/best-more-standard-graph-representation-file-format-graphson-gexf-graphml/79467334#79467334 but Stack Overflow fucking deleted the question.

I wanted to do a quick exploration of open PageRank implementation and data.

My general motivation for this is that a PageRank-like algorithm could be useful for more accurate user and article ranking on OurBigBook, see: Section "PageRank-like ranking"

But it could also be just generally cool to apply it to other graph datasets, e.g. for computing an Wikipedia internal PageRank.

A quick Google reveals only Open PageRank, but their methods are apparently closed source.

Then I had a look at the Common Crawl web graph data to see if I could easily calculate it myself, and... they already have it! See: Section "Common Crawl web graph official PageRank"

Their graph dumps are in BVGraph graph file format, which is the native format of the WebGraph framework, which implements the format and algorithms such as PageRank.

The only thing I miss is a command line interface to calculate the PageRank. That would be so awesome.

The more I look at it the more I love Common Crawl.

Announcements:

In cc-main-2024-25-dec-jan-feb-domain-ranks.txt:

What you Google-into when trying to understand English slangs as of 2020.

Ciro Santilli does the same via Google searches and Twitter/Reddit searches for himself, you can't invent anything new nowadays:

TODO who bought the Bitcoins? Is anyone else besides Jeremy Sturdivant

The original forum thread bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.msg1195 suggests multiple purchases were made, until he had to withdrawl the offer. Perhaps an easier question is how many pizzas he got in the first place.

www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/13on6px/comment/jl55025/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 mentions without source:One source is: bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-man-behind-bitcoin-pizza-day-is-more-than-a-meme-hes-a-mining-pioneer

Related thread from May 2023: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5453728.msg62286606#msg62286606 "Did Laszlo Hanyecz exchange 40000 BTC for 8 pizzas, not 10000 BTC for 2 pizzas?" but their Googling is so bad no one had found the 100,000 quote before Ciro.

As per bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/113831/searching-the-blockchain-based-on-transaction-amount-and-or-date at blockchair.com/bitcoin/outputs?s=time(asc)&q=value(1000000000000),time(2010-05-18..2010-08-05) we can list all the transactions made between the offer and withdrawal dates for value exactly 10k. There are only about 20 of them, and including someone the 22nd of May, so it is extremely likely that this will contain the hits. No repeated recipients however, so it is hard to progress with more advanced analytics tools

Some of the transactions are:8 d1a429c05868f9be6cf312498b77f4e81c2d4db3268b007b6b80716fb56a35ad (29 May) is a common looking transaction with a single input from 1Bc7T7ygkKKvcburmEg14hJKBrLD7BXCkX and two outputs, one likely being the change to 1GH4dRUAagj67XVjr4TV6J9RFNmGYsLe7c and the other the actual value to 138eoqfNcEdeU9EG9CKfAxnYYz62uHRNrA.

The input chain is complex, but it does contain one block reward on the third level: 17PBFeDzks3LzBTyt6bAMATNhowrvx5kBw + 79 rewards 4th level at 045795627ca29ec72a94c23a65ee775ea1949d60b6fba0938b75e1cfe1e6643e.

Intel is known to have created customized chips for very large clients.

This is mentioned e.g. at: www.theregister.com/2021/03/23/google_to_build_server_socs/Those chips are then used only in large scale server deployments of those very large clients. Google is one of them most likely, given their penchant for Google custom hardware.

TODO better sources.

Ciro Santilli publishes videos of this not-so-common visual programming experiments on his YouTube channel occasionally: www.youtube.com/c/CiroSantilli. Ciro should however not be lazy and also upload each video produced to Wikimedia Commons, since YouTube does not offer a download option even for videos marked with a Creative Commons license: www.quora.com/Can-I-download-Creative-Commons-licensed-YouTube-videos-to-edit-them-and-use-them/answer/Tarmo-Toikkanen!

This is also where Ciro's downtime converged to in his early 30's, since he long lost patience for stupid video games and television series.

Ciro developed one interesting technique: while scrolling through YouTube's useless recommendations, when he understands what a channel is about, he either immediately:This helps to keep this feed clean of boring stuff he already knows about. There is unfortunately an infinite amount of useless videos out there however on the topics of:and no matter how much you say you don't want to hear about them, YouTube juts keeps on sending more.

Things Ciro hates about YouTube:

Likely FFmpeg is the backend of YouTube.

Bought by Google in 2006.