Incoming links: OAuth
Things that are not nice such as:
- Taboola, Outbrain, and other chumbox
- BLOBs
- Europe cookie law
- adhesive inside mobile phones and more generally, planned obsolescence
- Jupyter Notebook
- typographical characters that look like ASCII ones, but are not the ASCII ones, e.g. typographical quotes, em-dash. The non-breaking hyphen is not even whitespace, and by def Why not stick to ASCII when ASCII is good enough?
- excessive encapsulation
- replacement of master and slave terminology from technology
- mailing lists. And to add insult to injury, HTML on mailing list messages instead of plaintext.
- blank lines in code added by people trying to increase clarity, especially when there is already indentation for that. Every blank line must be preceded by a line comment explaining what the following block is about, or removed.
- messaging software that force you to have a mobile phone
- advertisements by telephone/SMS
- "state" such as global variables and object members, long live functional programming?
- mosquitoes, the only intrinsically bad thing about tropical countries
- projects with slow compilation times
- Microsoft Windows
- the 2019 Chinese government
- e-learning websites that only allows verified teachers to write content. Cowards who can't handle ranking algorithms.
- domain-specific language
- a build system without an out-of-tree option
- non-linear Git history: stackoverflow.com/questions/20348629/what-are-advantages-of-keeping-linear-history-in-git
- visual programming languages like Scratch. Waste of time. Text programming languages are already equally as visual due to indentation:Just make good serious gamedev libraries and integrated development environments for those real languages instead.
if x == 0: x = 1 - software that prevents you from running as root. Let me fucking shoot myself in the foot if I want to. It is better than having to deal with your hand holding bullshit, which is done in a different way for every project. E.g.: stackoverflow.com/questions/17466017/how-to-solve-you-must-not-be-root-to-run-crosstool-ng-when-using-ct-ng/53099177#53099177
- Medium
- luxury goods
- euphemism
- closed access academic journals are evil
- websites without OAuth
- shower room without a window to the exterior (mould!!!)
- single programs with their interface split across multiple windows, e.g. GIMP, ZynAddSubFX
- graphical user interfaces
- logograms
- infinitesimals. Just use limit instead, please
- country
- knowledge olympiads
- programming languages without a decent dominating package system
- closed source offline software used by millions
- exams
- security through obscurities
- dots in Gmail address
- things in websites that look like links, and behave like links, but don't let you middle click to open them on a separate tab
- K-pop
- numerical computing language
- fiscal paradises
- when the front-end of an website changes an important permanent state, but the URL does not change
- splash screens: you should show boot messages so that people will know what to Google for when things fail. Do you think computer newbies will be afraid and have nightmares?
- milk chocolate: why would you eat that instead of dark chocolate if you are older than 10?
- to talk about something without giving the real name to not scare off the audience
- mathematical symbol that looks like a Greek letter but isn't. Or perhaps mathematical notation in general
- when more than two people gather to play a board game or video game, and two or more people start chatting on and on about random subjects rather than concentrating on the game
- watching television while eating. Same for reading, or doing basically anything else but eat. The only acceptable activity is talking relaxedly, not about work.
- noises coming out of your bicycle. It is so hard to find where they come to fix them!!!
- code drop
- private cars as opposed to public transport. As a cyclist, you can just see the effect that large roads have on nearby areas, it just destroys nature.
- closed standards
- double consonants that make no difference to sound. Dilema? Dilemma? Dillema? Dillemma? Please!
- social media websites that show stuff from people you don't follow when you don't explicitly want that, including things which are not ads, just random suggestions. Twitter starting being like that cirac a 2022. Facebook got worse around that time. It is a constant fight against those stupid websites.
- socks with short legs that don't protect your ankle/lower calf from cold/scratches/dirt, e.g. liner socks
- Presta valves. Why would such a flimsy tech have become so popular compared to the infinitely superior Schrader!
Looks interesting.
It seems to abstract the part about the client messaging the backend, which focuses on being able to easily plug in a number of Front-end web framework to manage client state.
Uses Socket.IO, which allows the client Javascript to register callbacks when data is updated to achieve Socket.IO, e.g. their default chat app does:so that message appear immediately as they are sent.
client.service('messages').on('created', addMessage);Their standard template from But it is in itself a completely boring app with a single splash page, and no database interaction, so not a good showcase. The actual showcase app is feathersjs/feathers-chat.
feathers generate app on @feathersjs/cli@4.5.0 includes:which looks promising! They don't have a default template for a Front-end web framework however unfortunately: docs.feathersjs.com/guides/frameworks.html#the-feathers-chat lists a few chat app versions, which is their hello world:
- Front-end web framework: not built-in on generator, but there are some sample repos pointed from the documentation, and they did work out-of-box:
And there is no official example of the chat app that is immediately deployable to Heroku: FeathersJS Heroku deployment, all setups require thinking.
- kimchi
- reverse debugging
- E Ink
- web archiving
- Buildroot
- integrated development environments
- degreaser
- UML: while it might seem like a over-thought thing and likely is, the basic idea that understanding "one to one vs one to many vs many to many" relationships between objects and which object can see which object, is a fantastic approach towards understanding complex object oriented code
- open source software, including open source scientific computing consultancies
- computer
- FOSDEM. Ciro Santilli attended in 2016, and felt extremely good together with all those amazingly smart open source hackers: www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-open-source-conferences/answer/Ciro-Santilli
- Sass
- vimium
- bisection
- vector graphics, notably scalable Vector Graphics
- ASCII art
- OAuth
- command-line interface
- virtualization
- Anusol
- autodidacticism and self-directed learning
- end-to-end encryption
- The Criterion Collection
- version control
- SQLite
- Guerrilla Mail
- POSIX
- static website
- Freeman Dyson
- open access academic publishers
- unconditional basic income
- transhumanism
- 2FA, and notably 2FA apps
- human-readable formats
- wealth tax
- Reproducible builds
- F-Droid
- Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021)
- drug liberalization
- Wiki-binge
- molecular Sciences Course of the University of São Paulo
- meal deal
- clade, as opposed to taxonomic ranks
- lingua franca, see also: having more than one natural language is bad for the world
- rsync
- zip hoodies
Governments should provide basic Internet infrastructure Updated 2025-05-23 +Created 1970-01-01
Taxes pay for the physical car roads, so why shouldn't they also pay for the "online roads" of today?
The following services are obvious picks because they are so simple:
Other less simple ones that might also be feasible:
- geographic information system. Notable anti-example: United Kingdom's Ordnance Survey's apparently non-free-data
- App stores
All of them should have strong privacy enabled by default: end-to-end encryption, logless, etc. Governments are not going to like this part.
And then if you ever forget a password or lose a multi-factor authentication token, you can just go to an ID center with your ID to recover it.
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.
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!