Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

 Incoming links: LessWrong

Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Ciro Santilli controls the following accounts.

With non-trivial activity:

github.com/cirosantilli on GitHub
stackoverflow.com/users/895245 on Stack Overflow
www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli on LinkedIn
www.youtube.com/c/CiroSantilli on YouTube
Twitter: see Section "Ciro Santilli's Twitter accounts"
archive.org/details/@cirosantilli2 on the Internet Archive. Was archive.org/details/@cirosantilli but got deleted due to an "admin error" and the old username cannot be restored!^[ref]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cirosantilli2 and commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cirosantilli2: Ciro tries to upload all educational CC content he creates to Wikimedia Commons as an extra backup and sometimes to use in Wikipedia pages
www.facebook.com/cirosantilli/ Ciro accepts all friend requests there, but expect a few non-technical posts. Unless you look like a massive honeypot account, please send context in advance in that case.
www.quora.com/profile/Ciro-Santilli
www.reddit.com/user/cirosantilli/ is Ciro's Reddit account, mostly computer and China topics
maps.app.goo.gl/npV35XTppSBTmNqC8: Google Maps. Ciro Santilli likes to make additions to certain niche topics that are missing, having reached Local Guide Level 6 as of 2024. He can't do as much as he'd like so as to not reveal his current city however.

Trivial activity only:

Profiles without URLs (OMG...):

Discord: username cirosantilli, previously cirosantilli#8921

Accounts in Chinese websites. These accounts might be banned or altered or offer other limitations, so Ciro only communicates briefly through them. All communication through those channels should obviously be assumed to be compromised:

bbs.nibaedu.com/index.php?m=space&uid=70
www.renren.com/338003848/profile
www.tianya.cn/109285544 (can't post, no cell phone)
hacpai.com/member/cirosantilli unable to login as of 2019-10-12, reason unclear, either ban or website too crappy.
pincong.rocks/people/cirosantilli Lost account tested as of 2022-11 and likely much earlier. Last existing password not working, and there doesn't seem to be a reset password button. Creating cirosantilli2
pincong.rocks/people/cirosantilli2
tieba.baidu.com/home/main?id=5cd56369726f73616e74696c6c69c944
v2ex.com/member/cirosantilli: Ciro was blocked and or account deleted on 2020-07-23: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/v2ex
- v2ex.com/member/cirosantilli2: was created by someone else most likely and cannot be re-registered. Also blocked.
- v2ex.com/member/cirosantilli3: Ciro created this new account November 2023, let's see how long it lasts.
www.zhihu.com/people/cirosantilli. Ciro was prevented from posting in 2018-06-25, and the account and all content mentioning him were taken down in 2019-11-03.
www.weibo.com/p/1005055601627311: started requiring a cell phone to login in 2020, and Ciro didn't want to give his cell phone number to the CCP and didn't have the patience to manage a secondary phone number, so he is not logging in for now. The account was blocked in 2021: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/ciro-santillis-weibo-block

Accounts in Russian websites:

vk.com/id595305194

Dead websites:

www.citeulike.org/user/cirosantilli (2019-05)

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Gwern Branwen  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Author of gwern.net.

Accounts:

news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern
www.lesswrong.com/users/gwern LessWrong
twitter.com/gwern locked 2021: www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kp2fek/does_anybody_know_what_happened_to_gwern/
www.reddit.com/user/gwern/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gwern on Wikipedia. Self summary: gwern.net/wikipedia-resume. Also he is a critic of deletionism on Wikipedia like Ciro Santilli

He posts insanely much on these websites. It's a bit like Ciro Santilli on Stack Overflow.

Ciro Santilli envies this guy a bit. He dumps his brain more or less full time on his highly customized static website partly due to early Bitcoin investments gwern.net/me says:

I am a freelance American writer & researcher. (To make ends meet, I have a Patreon, benefit from Bitcoin appreciation thanks to some old coins, and live frugally.)

Also unsurprisingly he likes Haskell:

I mostly contribute to projects in Haskell, my favorite language

Ciro Santilli considers Gwern Ciro Santilli's e-soulmates due to his interest in "dark web things" like Bitcoin and Silk Road, his immense writing output in encyclopedic book-sized articles on a static website, and his desire to live frugally and just research and write all day. Ah, if only Ciro had some old coins!!!

This is likely a pseudonym, his real name not being publicly unknown, e.g. at news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5659278:

Why do you choose relative anonymity?
For the reasons I've said in the past. To which I can add personal safety: my Silk Road page is a bit questionable legally, and we all know that there are ways to exploit knowledge of one's True Name and address (even if, as far as I know, I have no enemies willing to resort to, say, 'swatting' me) - one group of stalkers called up a college they thought I worked at to see if they could get me fired or otherwise ruin my day.

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Alternatives  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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These are websites that offer somewhat overlapping services, many of which served inspirations, and why we think something different is needed to achieve our goals.

Notably, OurBigBook is the result of Ciro Santilli's experiences with:

Wikipedia
GitHub
Stack Exchange (or as non techies might point out, Urban Dictionary, or Quora before it was such an incomprehensible shitshow)

OurBigBook could be seen as a cross between those three websites.

Quick mentions:

handwiki.org/wiki/HandWiki:About: technically the same as Wikipedia, but with more aligned moderation policies
ecotext.co/ similar goals. Their website seems quite broken now though as of 2021, can't see text properly. Crunchbase entry: www.crunchbase.com/organization/ecotext says they are from Durham, New Hampshire, United States. Cannot see how to publish, curated material only? Twitter: twitter.com/ecotextinc?lang=en One of the founders: twitter.com/BigNel_21 | www.linkedin.com/in/ecotextnelsonthomas/. Their LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ecotext/people/
fiveable.me/ bad: separates students and teachers, as a student I don't see where to create my content. Good: focus on teaching university level stuff to people outside of university via Advanced Placement. Bad: Lots of video content. Bad: Can't see the issue tracker attached to each page.
LessWrong: their website system does have some similar feature sets to what we want. Reputation, Q&A sections, links between articles most likely, sort by upvote everywhere.
crowdpub.org collaborative writing website, somehow goes to paragraph level, TODO how they reconcile different authors? Closed beta as of writing, so hard to be sure. From quick presentation on beta website, appears to attempt to share revenue to authors proportionally to the size of their contribution. Some blockchain-based reputation. Meh.
TODO migrate all from: github.com/booktree/booktree/blob/master/alternatives.md
studynotes.ie/. Admin approval on everything. No ToC. Fixed tag list for university entry exams topics.
mindstone.com: there appears to be no sharing focus? File upload basesd? Not sure.
EverybodyWiki
looking for open source Confluence-alternatives is an interesting way to go:
- lists:
  - opensource.com/article/20/9/open-source-alternatives-confluence
  - www.nuclino.com/alternatives/confluence-alternative#ynaw
- BookStack:
  - fixed 3-level page hierarchy
  - writen in PHP
  - Markdown support: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/markdown-editor/
  - no source-level import-export apparently: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/backup-restore/, youtu.be/WUvtzJfCAKE?t=904
  - WYSIWYG: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/wysiwyg-editor/ via TinyMCE
  - page content repeating: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/reusing-page-content/ (will be useful for course modelling)
github.com/shuding/nextra converts Markdown links to Next.js links. We should look into how it works.
zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ "The Archive" from zettelkasten.de/. Closed source. By German software engineer Christian Tietze twitter.com/ctietze?lang=en
LLM generated wiki e.g.:
- Kinnu
docs.tigyog.app/cli beautiful website, but doesn't achieve much. Has a Markdown upload mechanism. Ah, those newbs who think the average user will care about markup upload to DB... Oh, wait...
www.stuvia.com/en-gb/school/uk/oxford-university/physics. PDF uploads. In theory you have to own copyright: www.stuvia.com/en-gb/copyright/guidelines but it feels unlikely that most material was uploaded by the copyright owners. If those people are up, then why can't we? Maybe... Registred in the UK. People: some Dutch dudes:
- www.linkedin.com/in/jaapvannes
- www.linkedin.com/in/hugo-kuijzer-bb81a625
Project Xanadu: crazy overlaps, though that project is vaporware apparently?
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.

Static website-only alternatives:

quarto.org/
- Links have forced file scope:^[ref]
  [about](about.qmd) [about](about.qmd#section)
- WYSIWYG via RStudio
vitepress.dev. vitepress.dev/guide/markdown unmanaged internal links. Sample website: wiki.nikiv.dev/.

Conceptual:

The Final Encyclopedia: science fiction concept, but the name was reused by Paul Allen in a research project
second brain
collective intelligence

TODO:

pressbooks.directory/

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Existing data sources  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Some possible/not possible sources that could be used to manually bootstrap content:

LibreTexts. Good project. "Teacher-only-content" unfortunately as usual. But besides that fundamental flaw, they do exactly what we want to do in a sense.
OpenStax: CC BY. This could be a great entry point, as they already have some university integration going on, and might be interested in this project.
physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6157/list-of-freely-available-physics-books "List of freely available physics books" explicitly asks for:
a list of physics books with open-source licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL
but the thread was locked, and basically none of the sources in the answers have free licenses, nor do they note it. It just seems that the physicists don't know what a free license is.
MIT OpenCourseWare: CC BY-NC-SA, so not really usable
github.com/certik/theoretical-physics: MIT License. Workable but wonky.
subwiki.org/: wiki with some upper graduate math subjects presumably by this Indian dude: www.linkedin.com/in/vipul-naik-0ab1898/. Description on his homepage: vipulnaik.com/subwiki/. He's also got other interesting but not so relevant projects:
- pro freer immigration laws: vipulnaik.com/openborders/
- vipulnaik.com/cognito-mentoring/ free mentoring project for interested students
He's also into Stack Overflow, Quora and Wikipedia editing. That's a cool dude. He's into in LessWrong it seems.
massive mathematics books
- Infinite Napkin.CC BY-SA mathematics infinite book: github.com/vEnhance/napkin/issues/77. Very similar type of content to what we want in this project!
- Stacks Project

Existing lecture notes by students:

github.com/mb2g17/NotesNetworkArchive Google Docs-based: docs.google.com/document/d/1OIcQ8dJ_FAhdkirU94M29-ZbNZ4oQs1LbWF3Nz-mq_U/edit#heading=h.vehxib58w1iw. An actual student uploading tons of lecture notes in one coherent system. CC BY-NC-SA unfortunately.
academia.stackexchange.com/questions/148261/do-you-keep-your-study-notes-publicly-available mentions:
- Cambridge Mathematics Lecture Notes by Dexter Chua (2014-2018)
  - dec41.user.srcf.net/notes/
  - github.com/dalcde/cam-notes
  Comments:
  - on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/98wsoa/undergraduate_maths_lecture_notes_uni_of_cambridge/
Related: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/40381/how-common-is-it-that-professors-have-their-students-write-textbooks

Lecture note upload website:

nexusnotes.com likely illegal reuploads of PDFs from teachers
www.studocu.com/en-gb Paywall. PDF uploads. Unclear if simple teacher reuploads or actual novel notes.
www.studydrive.net/
Chinese GitHub repos. Some of these are very advanced in terms of content quantity and organizational quality! The Chinese are miles ahead in this area:
- github.com/PKUanonym/REKCARC-TSC-UHT Guidance for courses in Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. Chinese. Appears to try and store all past exams.
- github.com/lib-pku/libpku
- github.com/openwhu/OpenWHU: Wuhan University
- github.com/USTC-Resource/USTC-Course: USTC
- github.com/Zeal-L/UNSW: UNSW from Australia, but by a Chinese dude
- github.com/apachecn/mit-18.06-linalg-notes: translation of MIT course to Chinese
- github.com/chenyang1999/MyComputerCollegeCourses: TODO which univeresity
- github.com/elder-frog/OpenCourseCatalog: nothing to do with this project, but since I'm making a list, this dude is copying YouTube videos to Bilibili. And he's edgy anti-CCP on Twitter, what a legend.
- github.com/TheBloodthirster/BUAA_Course_Sharing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beihang_University
- github.com/1051727403/SHU-CS-Source-Share: ShangHai University CS course source code
- github.com/Willie169/tw-gifted-k12-notes: Taiwanese high school notes

Exams uploads:

questions.tripos.org/part-ib/all/ University of Cambridge Mathematics past examinations

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