Incoming links: OurBigBook.com
Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality Updated 2025-05-23 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli fantasizes that he is more compassionate than average.
He feels that this manifests itself notably through his desire/ability to create amazing documentation content and notably for free.
Also related is Ciro's worry about social inequality and how to reduce it.
In school, especially before university, Ciro felt that he always treated "the ugly/unpopular" (it is horrifying that such perception of a person exists! but true) girls really well, which led some of them to like him romantically. In part this was de to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality and enter through the narrow gate approach to life. But was also partly Ciro's fault, he should have been clearer that he was not truly interested, but he was also lonely, curious about how it was like having girlfriend, and it feels good to have someone like you. This was a sin.
He also feels like he treated working class employees (and don't forget, this is Brazil, e.g. his building janitors in São Paulo lived in the nearby favela!) with extreme equality, sometimes even better, than other richer people.
One thing Ciro does not do however is give money to beggars on the street. Those beggars do make Ciro feel extremely bad for not giving, but he feels that they must be drug addicts to be out on the street like that, and that this money would be better invested in OurBigBook.com. But maybe this is just wrong. How fucked up the world is, how far away are we from unconditional basic income???
Once Ciro was hanging out with one of his father's on a group tourist, and she was a lesbian borderline/actually activist social reform person, and she promptly gave to a beggar without batting an eye, and that made a big impression on Ciro, making him feel even worse about himself.
It must be said that at times this compassion can be a weakness see Ciro's trip to the Municipal Market of São Paulo.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats
. Data compiled for the plot: ciro-santilli-stack-overflow-stats.csv
- top obtained manually from pages such s=as: stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2023-01-01
- answer count obtained with this Stack Exchange Data Explorer data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/433214/count-of-answers-by-user-over-time and then manually pasting it in.
- total questions obtained with: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1882511/questions-asked-per-year-on-stack-overflow#resultSets
Plot generated with gnuplot with ciro-santilli-stack-overflow-stats.gnuplot
Related announcements:
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions have, unsurprisingly, centered around the subjects he has worked with: systems programming and web development, and necessary tooling to get those done, such as Git, Python, Bash and Ubuntu.
His best answers are listed at: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Stack Overflow has been the initial centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, until Ciro noticed that GitHub might be potentially even more effective for it.
In Stack Overflow Ciro likes to:
- answer important questions found through Google which he needs to solve an actual problem he has right now, and for which none of the existing answers satisfied him, and close duplicates.
- monitor less known tags which very few people know a lot about and where the knowledge sharing desperately lacking, but in which Ciro specializes and therefore has some uncommon knowledge to share
In practice it also happens that Ciro:
- Googles for his own answers to remember some detail he wrote down but with slightly different terms that were closer to mind at the time, and find other similar questions for which he has the perfect answer.
- learns something new by chance, e.g. some new flashy feature of a new version of the C++ standard, thinks "this is awesome, there must be a Stack Overflow question for it", and then there is a question and he answers it
When he gets an upvote on one of his more obscure answers, Ciro often re-reads it, and often finds improvements to be made and makes them.
He doesn't like to refresh the homepage looking for easy reputation on widely known subjects. See also: online forums that lock threads after some time are evil.
The result is that Ciro ends up getting relatively a lot of reputation without much work! The term passive income, much beloved by fake investment gurus, comes to mind. But now it's "passive reputation"! And it is useless! Yay!
For this reason, Necromancer is Ciro's favorite badge (get 5 upvotes on a question older than 60 days), and as of July 2019, he became the #1 user with the most of this badge. Announcement on Twitter.
The number two at the time was VonC (see also: Section "Epic Stack Overflow users"), who had about 16 times more answers than Ciro in total! From this query: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1072396?&Date=2019-07-01&UserId=895245 it can be seen that as of July 2019, 1216 out of his 1329 answers were answered 60 days after the questions and constitute potential necromancers! Compare that to VonC's 1643 potential necromancers out of 21767 answers!
VonC eventually took back the lead in 2022, dude's a machine!!! twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1546389532014247936
Someone at Ciro's work once said something along:and this does ring true in Stack Overflow as well. When you are answering stuff, it means that you either didn't know, or that the information wasn't well available, and so your specific application is progressing slowly because of that. Once the generic prerequisites are well solved and answered, you will spend much more time on your business specific things rather than anything else that can be factored out across projects, and so you will get more "directly useful work" done, and less Stack Overflow answers. Of course, without the prior research in place, you can't get the final product done either.
In terms of per year reputation ranks, Ciro was in the top 100 in of the 2018 ranking with 38,710 reputation gained in that year: stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2018-01-01?sort=reputationchange&page=4 (archive). He reached top 50 in 2022. Note that daily reputation is mostly capped to 200 per day, leading to a maximum 73000 per year. It is possible to overcome this limit either with bounties or accepts, and Ciro finds it amazing that some people actually break the 73k limit by far with accepts, e.g. Gordon Linoff reached 135k in 2018 (archive)! However, this is something that Ciro will never do, because it implies answering thousands and thousands of useless semi duplicate questions as fast as possible to get the accept. Ciro's reputation comes purely from upvotes on important question, and is therefore sustainable without any extra effort once achieved. Interestingly, Ciro appeared on top of the quarter SE rankings around 2019-11: web.archive.org/web/20191112100606/https://stackexchange.com/leagues but it was just a bug ;-)
There is no joy like answering an old question, and watching your better answer go up little by little until it dominates all others.
Stack Overflow reputation is of course, in itself, meaningless. People who contribute to popular subjects like web development will always have infinitely more reputation than those that contribute to low level subjects.
What happens on the specialized topics though is that you end up getting to know all the 5 users who contribute 95% of the content pretty soon as you study those subjects.
Like everything that man does, the majority of Ciro's answers are more or less superficial subjects that many people know but few have the patience to explain well, or they are updates to important questions reflecting upstream developments. But as long as they save 15 minutes from someone's life, that's fine.
There is great beauty when you are involved in a programming problem, and you suddenly remember: wait, I answered something related a few years ago! And especially so when you can go back and improve your old answer with new insight. This has great value, because when you were more newbie, you would have typed different words into Google Search than you would now. So by updating posts from when you were a newbie, you are helping other newbies more, as they are more likely to be also searching for those keywords. It is also very nice to have some head start on the answer's upvote count and not have to bootstrap yet another answer from 0 upvotes and have to go through all the competition!
For example, Ciro's most upvoted answer as of July 2019 is stackoverflow.com/questions/18875674/whats-the-difference-between-dependencies-devdependencies-and-peerdependencies/22004559#22004559 was written when he spent his first week playing with NodeJS (he was having a look at Overleaf, later merged into Overleaf, for education), which he didn't touch again for several years, and still hasn't "mastered" as of 2019! This did teach a concrete life lesson to Ciro however: it is impossible to know what is the most useful thing you can do right now very precisely. The best bet is to follow your instincts and do as much awesome stuff as you can, and then, with some luck, some of those attempts will cover an use case.
Ciro tends to take most pride on his systems programming answers, which is a subject that truly relatively few people know about. He likes it when he goes insanely deep into a subject, way beyond what OP had in mind, exposing full root causes and broader causes, see e.g.:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/1778538/how-many-gcc-optimization-levels-are-there/30308151#30308151
- stackoverflow.com/questions/34519521/why-does-gcc-create-a-shared-object-instead-of-an-executable-binary-according-to/55704865#55704865
- stackoverflow.com/questions/8352535/how-does-kernel-get-an-executable-binary-file-running-under-linux/31394861#31394861
Ciro also derives great joy from his "media related answers" (3D graphics, audio, video), which are immensely fun to write, and sometimes borderline art, see answers such as those under "OpenGL" and "Media" under the best articles by Ciro Articles or even simpler answers such as:
Figure 3. Ciro knows how to convert videos to GIFs.- Stereo "tone-generator" for linux?, related: FFmpeg sound synthesis
There is something of greater value in perfectly presented technical knowledge, that goes beyond than simply getting something done. The pleasure of understanding and mastering something, and perhaps of the explanation itself. Sometimes when answering, Ciro feels like a tailor, where ASCII is his cloth. See also: Section "The art of programming", Section "Physics and the illusion of life".
Ciro's deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: OurBigBook.com. So it is a bit funny to think that after all time Ciro spent on the website, he actually wants to destroy it and replace it with something better. There can be no innovation without some damage. It also led to Ciro's creation of Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script.
After answering so many questions, he ended up converging to a more or less consistent style, which he formalized at:Like any other style guide, this answer style guide, once fully incorporated and memorized, allows Ciro to write answers faster, without thinking about formatting issues.
- meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18614/style-guide-for-questions-and-answers/326746#326746. Key self-quote:
- meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903. Question title style only. After a few years later more people agreeing with that post which now had -12 votes: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422082/should-we-add-option-use-complete-sentences-to-first-answers-queue
Ciro also made a question title style guide: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903 but for some reason the Stack Overflow community prefers their semi-defined title meta-language to proper English. Go figure.
Ciro started contributing to Stack Overflow in 2012 when he was at École Polytechnique.
Like all things that end up shaping the course of one's life, Ciro started contributing without thinking too much about it.
His first answer was to the LaTeX question: Standalone diagrams with TikZ?, which reflects the fact that this happened while Ciro was reaching his Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment.
Ciro's first upvote was for his 2012 question: How to run a Python script portably without specifying its full path?
When he started contributing, Ciro was still a newbie. One early event he will never forget was when someone mentioned a "man page", and Ciro commented saying that there was a typo!
When Ciro reached 15 points and gained the ability to upvote, it felt like a major milestone, he even took a screenshot of the browser! 1k, 10k and 100k were also particularly exciting. When the 100k cup (archive) arrived in 2018, Ciro made a show-off Facebook post (archive). At some point though, your brain stops caring, and automatically filters out any upvotes you get except on the answers that you are really proud of and which don't yet have lots of upvotes. The last remaining useless gamed achievement that Ciro looked forward to was legendary (archive), and which he achieved on 2021-02-16.
Ciro Santilli with his Stack Overflow 100k reputation cup
. From the start, Ciro's motivations for contributing to Stack Overflow have been a virtuous circle of:
- save the world through free education
- It feels especially amazing when people in the real world start taking note of you, and either close friends tell you straight out that you're a Stack Overflow God, or as you slowly and indirectly find out that less close know or came to you due to your amazing contributions.
It is also amazing when you start having a repertoire of answers, and as you are writing a new answer, you remember: "hey, the knowledge of that answer would be so welcome here", and so you link to the other answer as well at the perfect point. This somewhat achieves does what OurBigBook.com aims to do: for each small section of a tutorial, gather the best answers by multiple people.
Another one is Aaron Hall, who is also very high on the necromancer list, answers in Python which is a topic Ciro cares about, and states on his profile:so another necromancer.
Follow me on Twitter and tell me what canonical questions you would like me to respond to!
Way to go.
Ciro also asks some questions on a ratio of about 1 question per 10 answers. But Ciro's questions tend to be about extremely niche that no one knows/cares about, and a high percentage of them ends up getting self answered either at asking time or after later research.
Some fun reactions to Ciro's Stack Overflow activity:
- Eric B comments[ref] on Ciro's answer to the question "What does multicore assembly language look like?":
Holy shit, Ciro made it his masters degree to write OP an answer. What a long and detailed answer, thanks!
You are nothing but useless leeches in the Internet age.
You must go bankrupt all of you, ASAP.
Researchers and reviewers all work for peanuts, while academic publishers get money for doing the work that an algorithm could do. OurBigBook.com.
When Ciro learned URLs such as www.nature.com/articles/181662a0 log you in automatically by IP, his mind blew! The level of institutionalization of this theft is off the charts! The institutionalization of theft is also clear from article prices, e.g. 32 dollars for a 5 page article.
Long live the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto by Aaron Swartz (2008).
Key physics papers from the 50's are still copyright encumbered as of 2020, see e.g. Lamb-Retherford experiment. Authors and reviewers got nothing for it. Something is wrong.
Infinite list of other people:
- blog.machinezoo.com/public-domain-theft by Robert Važan:
Scientific journals are perhaps one of the most damaging IP rackets. Scientists are funded by governments to do research and publish papers. Reviews of these papers are done by other publicly funded scientists. Even paper selection and formatting for publication is done by scientists. So what do journals actually do? Nearly nothing.
Academic Publishing by Dr. Glaucomflecken (2022)
Source. Ciro Santilli wants to rule this with OurBigBook.com.
This appears to be the direct precursor project of the Common Crawl web graph official PageRank
This section is about: wwwranking.webdatacommons.org/
Based on Common Crawl 2012, and they don't seem to be updating it regularly...
Created by the Università degli Studi di Milano.
Dan, if you ever Google yourself here, please contact Ciro Santilli: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to do something with OurBigBook.com. Cheers.
Started at Google Quantum AI in 2014.
Has his LaTeX notes at: github.com/DanielSank/theory. One day he will convert to OurBigBook.com. Interesting to see that he is able to continue his notes despite being at Google.
Covers some specific hardcore subjects, notably quantum electrodynamics, in full mathematical detail, e.g.: "Quantum Field Theory Lecture Series" playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSpklniGdSfSsk7BSZjONcfhRGKNa2uou
As of 2020 Dietterich was a condensed matter PhD candidate or post-doc at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and he lives in Minnesota, sources:
Unfortunately the channel is too obsessed with mathematical detail (which it does amazingly), and does not give enough examples/application/intuition, which is what would be useful to most people, thus falling too much on the hardcore side of the missing link between basic and advanced.
This channel does have on merit however: compared to other university courses, it is much more direct, which might mean that you get to something interesting before you got bored to death, Section "You can learn more from older students than from faculty" comes to mind.
Videos generally involves short talks + a detailed read-through of a pre-prepared PDF. Dietterich has refused however giving the PDF or LaTeX source as of 2020 on comments unfortunately... what a wasted opportunity for society. TODO find the comment. Sam, if you ever Google yourself to this page, let's make a collab on OurBigBook.com and fucking change education forever man.
The Ultimate Goal Of My YouTube Channel by Dietterich Labs (2020)
Source. In this video Dietterich gives his ideal for the channel. Notably, he describes how the few experimental videos he has managed to make were done in a opportunistic way from experiments that were happening around him. This resonated with Ciro Santilli's ideas from videos of all key physics experiments.Sam Dietterich interview by Dietterich Labs (2022)
Source. TODO find patience to watch and summarize key points.The Sting Of Soft Corruption: My College Experience by Dietterich Labs
. Source. Academia is broken video.!!! Survivorship bias alert !!!
quoteinvestigator.com/2018/05/07/overcome/
If you want to do something, but you are afraid to do it, then that is likely what you should do.
www.goodreads.com/quotes/50458-whatever-you-re-meant-to-do-do-it-now-the-conditions Doris Lessing:
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
For example, when Ciro Santilli was deciding what to do in university, he wanted mostly to do pure physics.
But because he was afraid he was going to die poor and unemployed because of that, he picked engineering instead.
That was a mistake.
His family was not even poor. He was young and did not have a family to support. His father even told him: "do whatever the fuck you want, we support your decision".
But he was a coward.
It was also in part because a physicist uncle which he respected suggested that as an engineer Ciro might be able to make useful contributions to tooling required by physics. When Roberto Salmeron died in 2020, Ciro's friends shared this 2013 video interview with the late professor, where he explains he first went to the University of São Paulo to study engineering (like Ciro), but then fell for his passion for physics (like Ciro?), his first task being to build a Geiger counter, thus explaining the likely origin of the uncle's theory. But who knows, maybe he was right. Maybe Ciro's OurBigBook.com will become huge and help a lot of people, and it might not have had Ciro not done engineering and learnt programming. Destiny operates in weird ways sometimes.
Furthermore, while in University, Ciro learnt about the molecular Sciences Course of the University of São Paulo, a fantastic sounding full time course that any student could transfer to called that teaches various natural sciences topics which Ciro loves (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology) and which students from the entire university can apply to transfer to only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they didn't adapt to the new course.
But did Ciro do it? Nope, he remained an even larger coward.
Had he studied more sciences, he might have been happier, and might have had greater achievements later in life, in particular when he went to École Polytechnique.
Similar thoughts crossed his mind when he started his campaign for freedom of speech in China, but this time he had learnt the lesson, and went for it, and it felt very good.
If you have a day job, but also have a dream, and want to keep the day job for a reason, try to reserve the time of the day that your brain works best before or after work for your dream: do one cool thing every day.
Companies can help you grow because you see real problems from within them, but their end goal is to consume you as much as possible. Don't let that happen. Invest part of what you gain, in yourself. www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/paradox-going-outside/ The Paradox of Going Outside by James Somers (2012) puts it incredibly well:
I work, for instance, as a Web developer. It's a very good job. Our office is a block south of Union Square, a 12-minute commute from my apartment. We're served breakfast every morning. Our kitchen is stocked with "provisions" of organic beef jerky, coconut water, craft beers, chips, and two restaurant-class espresso machines. We have two ping pong tables and buckets of 3-star ping pong balls. (A new office manager bought "1-stars" once and some of the guys protested by crushing them.) We work on 4-cored Apple Mac computers with dual monitors. We have an unmolested hour for lunch, 10-minute breaks in the morning and afternoon, and a "do not disturb" policy past the working hours. We even have a specific email address where employees can ask for free things: genuine maple syrup, hot chocolate, a $900 chair, a new keyboard. Most of the programmers make six figures, and many of those have only three or four years of experience.It's impossible to say so without sounding like the spokesperson for Entitlement itself but working there is still sort of soul-crushing. It's soul-crushing in the way that any job that doesn't command your full passionate attention must be. What happens is that I will be in my chair in the early afternoon and I will accidentally step out of myself and all I'll see is time passing, nine-hour parcels of healthy consciousness forever being packed away as the user experience of clerical workers or consumers or whoever gets marginally better; and I'll end up thinking that this enterprise of mine is not so much creative but bureaucratic, that what I've gotten good at is reading the instruction manuals of other people, finding my way around their insignificant warrens. And in those moments the whole business will seem to me like kind of a tragic waste.
Other quotes:
- is a phrase Sergey Brin uses. The Google Story claims he picked that up from academia, and quotes this from a september 2003 talk in an Israeli elite high school.
Healthy Disregard For The Impossible
- quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/29/find-love/
Find What You Love and Let It Kill You
- Cute boy things by Caroline Ellison:
if you are a boy with the confidence to advocate for unconventional ideas and take actions based on them you are valid
- How can I be as great by Justine Musk:
rock the boat
- From the 1922 poem Portuguese Sea by famous Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, which gets drilled into the head of every Brazilian high school student:He who wants to pass beyond the Bojador
Must go beyond pain.Quem quer passar além do Bojador
Tem que passar além da dor. - Translation of a poem by Muhammad Iqbal TODO date:One is reminded of As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
- "NPC life" as a way to refer to a soul crushing job
- twitter.com/0xTenkito/status/1775167216641548732, a cryptocurrency investor says:However there is one thing to lose, if you do safer investments and don't lose everything, then you might be able to retire earlier.
- archive.ph/mlaLK
- twitter.com/0xTenkito/status/1775167216641548732, a cryptocurrency investor says:
Dilbert "A small brain irrationally puts more weight on a small loss than on a huge opportunity" cartoon (2000)
Source. 
Jake Likes Onions "Slowly" cartoon
. Source. This is what trying to reach a dream part time feels like. The cartoon reads: "The tiger pursues its prey. Slowly. The human pursues its life goals. Slowly. Very slowly.".Excerpt from the documentary film "Steve Jobs: Secrets of Life" (1994)
Source. When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it... Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.
Of course, survivorship bias alert!
What Would You Do If Money Were No Object by Alan Watts
. Source. Sample transcription: genius.com/Alan-watts-what-if-money-was-no-object-annotated:What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?Let's suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students, they come to me and say, well, "we're getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to do". So I always ask the question, "what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?"Well, it's so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets, we'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can't earn any money that way. Or another person says well, I'd like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses. I said you want to teach in a riding school?Let's go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually turn it - you could eventually become a master of it. It's the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry too much. That's everybody is - somebody is interested in everything, anything you can be interested in, you will find others will.But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like, in order to go on spending things you don't like, doing things you don't like and to teach our children to follow in the same track. See what we are doing, is we're bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lives we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it's all retch and no vomit. It never gets there. And so, therefore, it's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?
Keep Chargin' from a Show of Hands by Victor Wooten (1996)
Source. That's the way I live my life, I give it my all. I think that a person should really make up his mind what he wants to do, and when did made up, he cannot fail at it. The basic rule to sucess I think, is when the going gets tough, that is a positive signal to keep chargin'.
Charles Bukowski is one of the most hardcore don't be a pussy people ever. It's almost scary. Far beyond Ciro level.
thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2008/11/the-laughing-he.html
your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the Gods wait to delight
in you.
www.goodreads.com/quotes/39207-if-you-re-going-to-try-go-all-the-way-otherwise
If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the Gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.
I have one of two choices - stay in the post office and go crazy... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.
Bukowski kissing his typewriter.
Like Ciro Santilli and his computer!All adults are bored scene from an Edward Teller, An Early Time
. Source. Up to the time that I met Klug ([a mathematiciam]), I was sure that all grown ups were people to be pitied. They had to work, they were tired, they were bored with what they were doing. I heard both my parents often complain. Klug was the first man whom I met who most obviously enoyed what he was doing.
One of the causes Ciro Santilli care the most about: motivation.
How to improve education? Simple:
- tax the fuck out of the rich people and companies: wealth tax and invest it in education
- invest intelligently as mentioned at what poor countries have to do to get richer:
- focus on fewer higher excellence schools that select the most promising poor students, rather than giving crappy average to everyone
- use OurBigBook.com
E-learning websites must allow students to create learning content Updated 2025-05-23 +Created 1970-01-01
E-learning websites must keep content free, only charge for certification Updated 2025-05-23 +Created 1970-01-01
Another thing that is fine charging for is dedicated 1-to-1 tutor time. This is something Udacity is doing as of 2022.
www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042815/how-coursera-works-makes-money.asp has a good mention:and it links to: www.freecodecamp.org/news/massive-open-online-courses-started-out-completely-free-but-where-are-they-now-1dd1020f59/, very good article!
MOOCs were first created by people with utopian visions for the internet. This means the idea for platforms like Coursera was likely conceived without a business plan in mind. Nonetheless, Coursera has managed to monetize its platform. It is worth noting, however, that monetization has lead to the effective elimination of the original MOOC idea, which is predicated on ideals like free and open access, as well as the building of online communities.
That is a fundamental guiding principle of OurBigBook.com. The educational content must be licensed CC BY-SA!
Perhaps the most reliable way of reaching this state is E-learning websites must allow students to create learning content.
Bibliography:
- academia.stackexchange.com/questions/86179/is-it-financially-worth-it-to-teach-a-mooc-e-g-coursera Is it financially worth it to teach a MOOC (e.g. Coursera)?
- www.classcentral.com/about amazing, they can make money just from ads! I wouldn't expect that they could scale like TripAdvisor, because travelling means very local knowledge, I would expect there to be much fewer MOOCs and for them to be more easily findable on Google. Good thing though, this website.
Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) mentions several times how Richard Feynman was a reader of the encyclopedia. E.g. in youtu.be/ivxkd98mDvc?t=50 Richard's sister also talks about it.
Then the Internet came along and killed it.
The motivation model for collaborators was simple: to get famous. To be able to be selected contribute an article meant that you knew something or two! There was some physicist Ciro read the biography of who was really glad to be able to write an article on the encyclopedia after having worshiped it for so long, TODO find the reference.
While this is somewhat a part of Wikipedia motivation, it is much less so because there is no single article authorship. This is something OurBigBook.com aims to improve.
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!
Force public university teachers to publish their teaching material with an open license Updated 2025-05-23 +Created 2024-09-03
Public university and also universities with charity status, e.g. since Section "Most British universities are registered as charities".
Any lectures must be recorded. But of course, text is cheaper than video.
Just fucking pay teachers a decent salary comparable to industry instead of basically requiring them to try and sell their knowledge to complement their income. They must get paid, and their knowledge must
We don't need that many teachers teaching the same subjects over and over. We just need a few good men and women who can truly teach the masses. And we must pay those men and women a decent wage.
The perfect platform for this will of course be OurBigBook.com ;-)
This term was invented by Ciro Santilli, and similar ideas certainly already exists with different names by other people. As the name suggests, it basically involves combining free education and gifted education, but with other more specific aspects crammed in that would make a precise name too long to read, as descried below.
Government must create selective, K-12 and university-level teaching institutions that are completely free.
As mentioned at pick few good bets and invest enough on bets, these do not need to be given to all students: what we have to do is to ensure that the top N-percent of the best students will get in, and that none of them will pay. Where N is as large as the budget society decides to put into this project, the larger the better. Therefore, perhaps "gifted education" is not the ideal name for this idea, as it generally implies very small N (1%?), while this project hopes for larger N, maybe 10%. But a minimal level of quality must be attained, it is pointless to dissolve the resources too much, if we only have enough for 1%, then so be it, start with 1%.
These institutions must start from the very first school year, and go all the way up through K-12 to the end of university. It is useless to start at university-level only otherwise only the rich students will have a chance of getting in, like Ciro Santilli saw in Brazil at the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo in the late 2000's: one day all students were gathered in the amphitheater, and they asked the students who had only gone through free government K-12 schools to raise their hands. Those were notably worse than the corresponding private schools, and the situation is inverted in university, where the best schools are the government ones. Out of about 500 people, at most 10 raised their hands!
These institutions should not have affirmative action entry quotas, including most importantly at the university level. Both rich and poor should be able to apply. Passing the selection criteria is all that matters. We just must ensure that the schools are widely advertised amongst disadvantaged communities, so that they will at least get their children to try to apply from an early age. This way, even if the rich always have an advantage due to better overall conditions, the poor are so much more numerous that the majority of students accepted will still be poor.
The school should follow the basic principles of how to teach, notably:
- students must have a flexible choice of what to learn. There will be no classes, all learning will happen either OurBigBook.com or on 1-to-1 meeting with tutors, or in discussions with fellow students.The term "gifted education" might suggest elitism, but Ciro Santilli strongly believes that different people have different skills, and that if everyone could focus on whatever it is that they want to do in life, be it engineering or the arts, rather than just pass a bunch of useless exam, then having the 10% "best" of each interest group would already cover a huge percentage of the population.
- Through it, students will be helped to directly achieve their greater life goals.There will be no teachers: each student will be assigned senior advisors, and together they will come with an individualized research proposal or business plan.There will be no useless mandatory institutional exams. Exams only need to be taken if a given advisor requires it to filter candidate students. But if you manage to impress them through other means, they can just accept you without the exam.A fundamental part of this is to fill the the missing link between basic and advanced. We want to help students to reach the state of the art of their field of interest as fast as possile.
- group students by interest, not by age
These schools must pay mentors as much as the average good non-free schools so you actually get comparably good teachers. Mentor selection would also be highly competitive, just as that of the students.
Once admitted, students will have guaranteed access to the school resources for a few years. This way, they won't need to worry about passing useless exams every three months.
All that matters is that they are progressing in their development plan. Rather than exams, students will do regular progress report sessions with their advisors, and will get periodic reviews from other advisors with similar interests.
Such projects could be funded by much needed wealth tax or other measures to tax the rich, which the people should claim through Referendum, that would be come more common with the adoption of electronic voting. Because the politicians are simply not being able to do it.
This is good, and very close competitor to OurBigBook.com.
But they killed local build, so they are going to die.
I need this for OurBigBook.com!! webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/104241/can-google-analytics-track-url-fragment-in-url
They removed referrer path completely in GA4... OMG WTF are they doing!