Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Author of gwern.net.

Accounts: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:

Also unsurprisingly he likes Haskell:

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:

Ciro Santilli is actively looking for donations and contracts so he can continue to work full time on OurBigBook.com sustainably, and develop free hardcore university-level STEM education for all ages!

For 300k USD I will quit my job or not get a new job and work on OurBigBook full time for a second year to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. Status: ~44k / 300k USD. At 2M USD I retire and work on open STEM forever.

I first quit my job 1st June 2024 to work on the project for 1 year after I reached my initial 100k goal mostly via a 1000 Monero donation. In this first year I improved project tech, but didn't go and solve university courses to create super targeted content, and didn't obtain a single contributing user except myself, see a summary at Section "OurBigBook Project Update March 2024".

For a followup, it would be an interesting experiment to spend on year full time solving as many courses as I can from a world class university in the city where I live in the UK, and adding that as content to the platform to see if that would attract interest, and reaching out directly to course takers at their university environment to try and help them. I intended to do that in year one but my got distracted by tech. It is quite possible that no one has ever done that before in history: a highly motivated technical person with the time and opportunity to do one single thing: help top university students learn their STEM courses better and have more fun doing so. I have in particular identified one course where this would be particularly feasible: the mathematics course, given that much of their course materials, and also their building are quite open. I do sometimes wonder if doing this would be just a waste of my life. But part of me tells me it could generate big interest and is worth a try.

For a second follow up year, I increased my requirement to 300k USD to give me more peace of mind. So the total donation so far is 244k, and if I reach a total of 300k USD, then I'll work on the project for a second year.

At 2M USD I retire and work on open STEM projects forever. At these timelines, I can't guarantee it will be specifically on education technology specifically all the way, but I guarantee that whatever it is it will be open and extremely well explained as usual.

Total donations to date ~244k USD. Donation breakdown:More details: Section "Accounting method"

How to give:And if you have a different preferred payment mechanism not listed above, please contact Ciro, and he will set it up.

Ciro's current ambitions require him to remain in developed countries, because Ciro wants to document advanced science and technology by liaising with top universities, and there is not nearly as much high technology in poor countries. Remaining in developed countries is also a required due to family reasons.

Note to potential anonymous crypto donors: anonymous donations incur a regulatory risk. I cash out most of such donations and announce it very clearly to the government and banks. For example, at one point Barclays even froze my UK account. Things have been manageable for now, but it is stressful to think that at any point I might be kicked out from my bank. On one hand, such donations serve as a fun test of the financial system. But on the other, if all banks reject my money or if the government decides to take it, I will write off the anonymous donation at zero.

If you would like public acknowledgement for your support, Ciro will very gladly give it, just let Ciro know how you'd prefer it. Due to Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, many supporters have chosen to be anonymous, and that is totally fine, not everyone is interested in politics, or has a situation where going public is acceptable, so we don't have a standard setup yet, let's build it together. A acknowledgement section at the bottom of this page would be a minimum, but I for larger donations we could add a your advertisement in a locations such as:

100k USD/year is a semi arbitrary amount that sounds nice. My last day job total compensation as of 2024 was about 150k USD/year.