Check out: OurBigBook.com, the best way to publish your scientific knowledge. It's an open source note taking system that can publish from lightweight markup files in your computer both to a multi-user mind melding dynamic website, or as a static website. It's like Wikipedia + GitHub + Stack Overflow + Obsidian mashed up. Source code: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook.
Sponsor me to work on this project: 100k USD = I quit me job and work on it one year full time. Status: ~144k / 200k USD reached: 1st year locked-in, 2nd year stretch goal open at 200k USD. 1M USD = I retire and do it forever. How to donate: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
I reached 100k USD after a 1000 Monero donation, so I quit my job for 1 year starting 1st June 2024 to solve as many STEM courses as I can from a world leading university to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. If I reach 200k USD, then I'll do it for two years instead. A second year greatly improve chances of success: year one I solve a bunch of courses, year two I come guns blazing with the content and expand further.
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous. More rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
Explaining things is my superpower, e.g. I was top user #39 on Stack Overflow in 2023[ref][ref] and I have a few 1k+ star educational GitHub repositories[ref][ref][ref][ref]. Now I want to bring that level of awesomeness to masters level Mathematics and Physics. But I can't do it alone! So I created OurBigBook.com to allow everyone to work together towards the perfect book of everything.
My life's goal is to bring hardcore university-level STEM open educational content to all ages. Sponsor me at github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli starting from 1$/month so I can work full time on it. Further information: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". Achieving what I call "free gifted education" is my Nirvana.
This website is written in OurBigBook Markup, and it is published on both cirosantilli.com (static website) and outbigbook.om/cirosantilli (multi-user OurBigBook Web instance). Its source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io and also at
cirosantilli.com/_dir
and it is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted.To contact Ciro, see: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". He likes to talk with random people of the Internet.
GitHub | Stack Overflow | LinkedIn | YouTube | Twitter | Wikipedia | Zhihu 知乎 | Weibo 微博 | Other accounts
Besides that, I'm also a freedom of speech slacktivist and recreational cyclist. I like Chinese traditional music and classic Brazilian pop. Opinions are my own, but they could be yours too. Tax the rich.
Let's create an educational system with:
- no distinction between university and high school, students just go as fast as they can to what they really want without stupid university entry exams
- fully open source learning material
- on-demand examinations that anyone can easily take without prerequisites
- granular entry selection only for space in specific laboratories or participation in specific novel research projects
I offer:
- online private tutoring for:
- any STEM university course
- passionate younger STEM students (any age) who want to learn university level material and beyond. Can your kid be the next Fields Medalist or Nobel Prize winner? I'm here to help, especially if you are filthy rich! I focus moving students forward as fast as they want on and on producing useful novel tutorials and results
Let your child be my Emile, and me be their Adolfo Amidei, and let's see how far they can go! I will help take your child:and achieve their ambitious STEM goals!- into the best universities
- into the best PhD programs
- educational consulting for institutions looking to improve their STEM courses
- do you know that course or teacher that consistently gets bad reviews every year? I'll work with the teacher to turn the problem around!
- are you looking to create a consistent open educational resources offering to increase your institutions internationally visibility? I can help with that too.
My approach is to:For minors, parents are welcome to join video calls, and all interactions with the student will be recorded and made available to parents.
- propose interesting research projects. The starting point is always deciding the end goal: Section "Backward design"
- learn what is needed to do the project together with the student(s)
- publish any novel results or tutorials/tools produced freely licensed online, and encourage the student to do the same (Section "Let students learn by teaching", digital garden)
I have a proven track of explaining complex concepts in an interesting and useful way. I work for the learner. Teaching statement at: Section "How to teach". Pricing to be discussed. Contact details at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli".
I am particularly excited about pointing people to the potential next big things, my top picks these days are:I am also generally interested in:
- 20th century physics, notably AMO and condensed matter
- the history of science, and in particular trying to look at seminal papers of a field
-------------------------------------
| Force of Will 3 U U |
| --------------------------------- |
| | //////////// | |
| | ////() ()\////\ | |
| | ///_\ (--) \///\ | |
| | ) //// \_____///\\ | |
| | ) \ / / / / | |
| | ) / \ | | / _/ | |
| | ) \ ( ( / / / / \ | |
| | / ) ( ) / ( )/( ) \ | |
| | \(_)/(_)/ /UUUU \ \\\/ | | |
| .---------------------------------. |
| Interrupt |
| ,---------------------------------, |
| | You may pay 1 life and remove a | |
| | blue card in your hand from the | |
| | game instead of paying Force of | |
| | Will's casting cost. Effects | |
| | that prevent or redirect damage | |
| | cannot be used to counter this | |
| | loss of life. | |
| | Counter target spell. | |
| `---------------------------------` |
| l
| Illus. Terese Nelsen |
-------------------------------------
A quick 2D continuous AI game prototype for reinforcement learning written in Matter.js, you can view it on a separate page at cirosantilli.com/_raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport. This is a for-fun-only prototype for Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, C++ or maybe Python (for the deep learning ecosystem) seems inevitable for a serious version of such a project. But it is cute how much you can do with a few lines of Matter.js!
HTML snippet:
<iframe src="_raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport" width="1000" height="850"></iframe>
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:
- seqanswers.com/forums/member.php?u=90053
- answers.gazebosim.org/users/2289/cirosantilli/
- 4programmers.net/Profile/86786
- 500px.com/p/cirosantilli
- 9gag.com/u/cirosantilli
- addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/cirosantilli/
- agoradesk.com/user/cirosantilli
- androidforums.com/members/ciro-santilli.1918307
- app.element.io/#/user/@cirosantilli:matrix.org. Proof: matrix.to/#/!OisxJPszSYdWdwXrrL:matrix.org/$YbrChbGFvlgYiDM5E2OgWXSp0vy7ayLfGkCXftAUyTI?via=matrix.org
- archive.org/details/@ciro_santilli_ourbigbook created during the account deletion mess.
- ask.libreoffice.org/en/users/2352/cirosantilli/
- bbs.archlinux.org/profile.php?id=116270
- bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile
- brilliant.org/profile/ciro-il1uxz/
- bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=describeuser.html&login=ciro.santilli@gmail.com
- cirosantilli.blogspot.com/
- cirosantilli.itch.io
- cirosantilli.livejournal.com/profile
- cirosantilli.medium.com/ on Medium
- cirosantilli.substack.com/
- cirosantilli.wordpress.com/ on WordPress
- codeforces.com/profile/cirosantilli reverse proof codeforces.com/blog/entry/98393
- coderwall.com/Ciro%20Santilli Note that space on the username. Beauty.
- community.arm.com/people/cirosantilli
- community.atlassian.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/680821
- community.fandom.com/wiki/User:Cirosantilli
- community.plos.org/people/cirosantilli
- community.skype.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2646858
- community.zimbra.com/members/cirosantilli
- connect.mozilla.org/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/46889
- del.icio.us/cirosantilli
- dev.to/cirosantilli
- developer.mbed.org/users/cirosantilli/
- devtalk.nvidia.com/member/2118846/
- droit-finances.commentcamarche.net/profile/user/cirosantilli
- en.gravatar.com/cirosantilli
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ciro.santilli also belongs to Ciro, but he lost the password
- eternagame.org/web/player/260828/
- figshare.com/authors/Ciro_Santilli/656781
- forums.developer.nvidia.com/u/cirosantilli
- forum.osdev.org/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=16372
- forum.pine64.org/member.php?action=profile&uid=17386
- forum.videolan.org/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=173503
- forum.xda-developers.com/member.php?u=7116837
- forums.androidcentral.com/members/cirosantilli-2734491
- forums.lenovo.com/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1561639
- framasphere.org/people/78a975c0b6c40133a3032a0000053625 framasphere.org/posts/1519871
- freesound.org/people/cirosantilli
- gitlab.com/u/cirosantilli
- hackaday.io/cirosantilli
- hinative.com/en-US/profiles/5276462
- home.gamer.com.tw/homeindex.php?owner=cirosantilli but can't post anything publicly because cannot verify phone in many countries
- huggingface.co/cirosantilli
- identity.kde.org/index.php?r=people/view&uid=cirosantilli
- imgur.com/user/cirosantilli/about: Proof: imgur.com/gallery/mexv1Bk/comment/1734086983
- jsfiddle.net/user/cirosantilli/
- kiwifarms.net/members/cirosantilli.82011/
- launchpad.net/~cirosantilli
- leanpub.com/u/cirosantilli
- leetcode.com/cirosantilli/
- makandracards.com/ciro-santilli
- mastodon.social/@cirosantilli
- nanohub.org/members/146301/
- next-episode.net/user/cirosantilli/
- openclipart.org/artist/cirosantilli. TODO but not yet able to login after the "first upload". But it did get uploaded: openclipart.org/artist/cirosantilli.
- opencollective.com/ciro-santilli
- open.spotify.com/user/cirosantilli
- orcid.org/0000-0003-2895-7763
- parler.com/profile/cirosantilli/posts
- paypal.me/cirosantilli. United Kingdom account.
- peerj.com/cirosantilli/
- profile.edx.org/u/ciro_santilli
- profiles.3dgames.com.ar/profiles/1002278
- protonmail.uservoice.com/users/6491333990-ciro-santilli
- pypi.org/user/cirosantilli/
- raidforums.com/User-cirosantilli
- rubygems.org/profiles/cirosantilli
- software.intel.com/en-us/user/1090688
- soundcloud.com/cirosantilli
- sourceforge.net/u/cirosantilli/profile/
- stackshare.io/cirosantilli
- steamcommunity.com/id/cirosantilli/
- subreply.com/cirosantilli
- support.discord.com/hc/en-us/profiles/427813342894 on the Discord forum
- support.mozilla.org/en-US/user/cirosantilli
- tabmixplus.org/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=59846
- talk.commonmark.org/users/cirosantilli
- talk.jekyllrb.com/users/cirosantilli
- talks.cam.ac.uk/user/show/81142
- tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/cirosantilli
- telegram.me/cirosantilli on Telegram
- trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Waveform?action=history username
cirosantilli
- tuleap.net/users/cirosantilli
- tuleap.ring.cx/users/cirosantilli
- twittercommunity.com/users/cirosantilli/activity
- wefunder.com/cirosantilli
- wise.com/pay/me/cirod3. The name shows as "Ciro Duran Santilli" and that's correct.
- wiki.qemu.org/User:Cirosantilli
- www.airbnb.com/users/show/45794827
- www.behance.net/cirosantilli
- www.bibsonomy.org/user/cirosantilli
- www.biostars.org/u/50170/
- www.bountysource.com/people/25676-ciro-santilli
- www.bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=11704
- www.codewars.com/users/cirosantilli
- www.codingame.com/profile/cddd0a711c22d97e8264361f7c8205567563841
- www.coursera.org/user/f65b08c191d792eb809fe2808d771ee7
- www.dailymotion.com/cirosantilli
- www.deviantart.com/cirosantilli
- www.digitalocean.com/community/users/cirosantilli
- www.ebay.com/usr/cirosantilli
- www.edaboard.com/member587087.html
- www.flickr.com/people/cirosantilli/
- www.freecodecamp.org/fcc8f660b91-167c-4b04-a8da-5d50cdb46def
- www.f6s.com/cirosantilli
- www.f6s.com/cirosantilli1
- www.gitbook.com/@cirosantilli
- www.hackerrank.com/cirosantilli
- www.hackster.io/cirosantilli
- www.html5gamedevs.com/profile/30103-cirosantilli/
- www.imdb.com/user/ur59802249 on IMDb
- www.instagram.com/cirosantilli/ Impossible to disable their notifications without removing your email. So all their notifications go to trash.
- www.kaggle.com/cirosantilli
- www.lesswrong.com/users/ciro-santilli on LessWrong
- www.linux.org/members/ciro-santilli.62540/
- www.linuxquestions.org/questions/user/cirosantilli-688439/
- www.meetup.com/members/252568305/
- www.mentebinaria.com.br/profile/1987-ciro-santilli/
- www.metacritic.com/user/cirosantilli
- www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/163587/
- www.mohu.rocks/people/cirosantilli
- www.mudhut.com/user/1995000
- www.myopportunity.com/en/profile/ciro-santilli
- www.npmjs.com/~cirosantilli
- www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/member.php/40269-cirosantilli
- www.openstreetmap.org/user/Ciro%20Santilli
- www.patreon.com/cirosantilli
- www.physicsforums.com/members/cirosantilli.422056/
- www.pixiv.net/en/users/64347194
- www.plurk.com/cirosantilli
- www.raspberrypi.org/forums/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=273389
- www.shadertoy.com/user/cirosantilli
- www.strava.com/athletes/47913768
- www.tastekid.com/ciro.santilli
- www.ted.com/profiles/5822760
- www.thestudentroom.co.uk/member.php?u=5930160
- www.tiktok.com/@cirosantilli2
- www.transifex.com/user/profile/cirosantilli
- www.tripadvisor.com/members/cirosantilli
- www.twitch.tv/cirosantilli
- www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/ciro_santilli/profile
Profiles without URLs (OMG...):
- Discord: username
cirosantilli
, previouslycirosantilli#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:
Dead websites:
- www.citeulike.org/user/cirosantilli (2019-05)
These are the best articles ever authored by Ciro Santilli, most of them in the format of Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro posts update about new articles on his Twitter accounts.
A chronological list of all articles is also kept at: Section "Updates".
Some random generally less technical in-tree essays will be present at: Section "Essays by Ciro Santilli".
- Trended on Hacker News:
- CIA 2010 covert communication websites on 2023-06-11. 190 points, a mild success.
- x86 Bare Metal Examples on 2019-03-19. 513 points. The third time something related to that repo trends. Hacker news people really like that repo!
- again 2020-06-27 (archive). 200 points, repository traffic jumped from 25 daily unique visitors to 4.6k unique visitors on the day
- How to run a program without an operating system? on 2018-11-26 (archive). 394 points. Covers x86 and ARM
- ELF Hello World Tutorial on 2017-05-17 (archive). 334 points.
- x86 Paging Tutorial on 2017-03-02. Number 1 Google search result for "x86 Paging" in 2017-08. 142 points.
- x86 assembly
- What does "multicore" assembly language look like?
- What is the function of the push / pop instructions used on registers in x86 assembly? Going down to memory spills, register allocation and graph coloring.
- Linux kernel
- What do the flags in /proc/cpuinfo mean?
- How does kernel get an executable binary file running under linux?
- How to debug the Linux kernel with GDB and QEMU?
- Can the sys_execve() system call in the Linux kernel receive both absolute or relative paths?
- What is the difference between the kernel space and the user space?
- Is there any API for determining the physical address from virtual address in Linux?
- Why do people write the
#!/usr/bin/env
python shebang on the first line of a Python script? - How to solve "Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"?
- Single program Linux distro
- QEMU
- gcc and Binutils:
- How do linkers and address relocation works?
- What is incremental linking or partial linking?
- GOLD (
-fuse-ld=gold
) linker vs the traditional GNU ld and LLVM ldd - What is the -fPIE option for position-independent executables in GCC and ld? Concrete examples by running program through GDB twice, and an assembly hello world with absolute vs PC relative load.
- How many GCC optimization levels are there?
- Why does GCC create a shared object instead of an executable binary according to file?
- C/C++: almost all of those fall into "disassemble all the things" category. Ciro also does "standards dissection" and "a new version of the standard is out" answers, but those are boring:
- What does "static" mean in a C program?
- In C++ source, what is the effect of
extern "C"
? - Char array vs Char Pointer in C
- How to compile glibc from source and use it?
- When should
static_cast
,dynamic_cast
,const_cast
andreinterpret_cast
be used? - What exactly is
std::atomic
in C++?. This answer was originally more appropriately entitled "Let's disassemble some stuff", and got three downvotes, so Ciro changed it to a more professional title, and it started getting upvotes. People judge books by their covers. notmain.o 0000000000000000 0000000000000017 W MyTemplate<int>::f(int) main.o 0000000000000000 0000000000000017 W MyTemplate<int>::f(int)
- IEEE 754
- What is difference between quiet NaN and signaling NaN?
- In Java, what does NaN mean?
Without subnormals: +---+---+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+ exponent | ? | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | +---+---+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+ | | | | | | v v v v v v ----------------------------------------------------------------- floats * **** * * * * * * * * * * * * ----------------------------------------------------------------- ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ | | | | | | 0 | 2^-126 2^-125 2^-124 2^-123 | 2^-127 With subnormals: +-------+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+ exponent | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | +-------+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+ | | | | | v v v v v ----------------------------------------------------------------- floats * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ----------------------------------------------------------------- ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ | | | | | | 0 | 2^-126 2^-125 2^-124 2^-123 | 2^-127
- Computer science
- Algorithms
- Is it necessary for NP problems to be decision problems?
- Polynomial time and exponential time. Answered focusing on the definition of "exponential time".
- What is the smallest Turing machine where it is unknown if it halts or not?. Answer focusing on "blank tape" initial condition only. Large parts of it are summarizing the Busy Beaver Challenge, but some additions were made.
- Algorithms
- Git
| 0 | 4 | 8 | C | |-------------|--------------|-------------|----------------| 0 | DIRC | Version | File count | ctime ...| 0 | ... | mtime | device | 2 | inode | mode | UID | GID | 2 | File size | Entry SHA-1 ...| 4 | ... | Flags | Index SHA-1 ...| 4 | ... |
tree {tree_sha} {parents} author {author_name} <{author_email}> {author_date_seconds} {author_date_timezone} committer {committer_name} <{committer_email}> {committer_date_seconds} {committer_date_timezone} {commit message}
- How do I clone a subdirectory only of a Git repository?
- Python
- Web technology
- OpenGL
- What are shaders in OpenGL?
- Why do we use 4x4 matrices to transform things in 3D?
- Image Processing with GLSL shaders? Compared the CPU and GPU for a simple blur algorithm.
- Node.js
- Ruby on Rails
- POSIX
- What is POSIX? Huge classified overview of the most important things that POSIX specifies.
- Systems programming
- What do the terms "CPU bound" and "I/O bound" mean?
+--------+ +------------+ +------+ | device |>---------------->| function 0 |>----->| BAR0 | | | | | +------+ | |>------------+ | | | | | | | +------+ ... ... | | |>----->| BAR1 | | | | | | +------+ | |>--------+ | | | +--------+ | | ... ... ... | | | | | | | | +------+ | | | |>----->| BAR5 | | | +------------+ +------+ | | | | | | +------------+ +------+ | +--->| function 1 |>----->| BAR0 | | | | +------+ | | | | | | +------+ | | |>----->| BAR1 | | | | +------+ | | | | ... ... ... | | | | | | +------+ | | |>----->| BAR5 | | +------------+ +------+ | | | ... | | | +------------+ +------+ +------->| function 7 |>----->| BAR0 | | | +------+ | | | | +------+ | |>----->| BAR1 | | | +------+ | | ... ... ... | | | | +------+ | |>----->| BAR5 | +------------+ +------+
- Electronics
- Computer security
- Media
- How to resize a picture using ffmpeg's sws_scale()?
- Is there any decent speech recognition software for Linux? ran a few examples manually on
vosk-api
and compared to ground truth.
- Eclipse
- Computer hardware
- Scientific visualization software
- Numerical analysis
- Computational physics
- Register transfer level languages like Verilog and VHDL
- Android
- Debugging
- Program optimization
- Data
- Mathematics
- Section "Formalization of mathematics": some early thoughts that could be expanded. Ciro almost had a stroke when he understood this stuff in his teens.
- Network programming
- Physics
- Biology
- Quantum computing
- Bitcoin
- GIMP
- Home DIY
- China
Ciro Santilli believes that these tools basically solve all the brain-dead problems which newbies would ask, and easy rep seekers would reply to.
Also, because Ciro Santilli only goes for long term reputation, which often means hard questions, this shot his yearly reputation rankings up without him doing anything, because all the guys who answered easy questions were decimated.
This was followed by Stack Overflow attempting to immorally and likely illegally trying to restrict free access to its previously commendable data dumps:which people were using to train LLMs.
This can be very clearly seen by several metrics on Stack Exchange Data Explorer, e.g. Ciro Santilli noticed that very clearly at: Total reputation in Stack Overflow over time how activity has been steadily falling since 2020.
Related posts:
- www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1592s82/the_fall_of_stack_overflow/. www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1592s82/comment/jte8aju/ is amazing:Well known Stack Overflow user mipadi comments:You've fallen for the common misconception that the goal of stackoverflow is helping users solve problems.When the reality is that it's actually a video game. The only players are the admins/mods, and their goal is to use their "hammers" and attempts at pedantry/nitpicking (correctness not important) to compete with each other to get the highest "close" point scores. Pew pew pew!!! Bang bang bang!!! How many points can you score today?!?!Us users are just the NPCs, there as fodder for the real players.
And the niche Stack Exchange sites tend to be even worse, although I can still get a question answered after much teeth gnashing, usually.Ciro Santilli concurs, for professional niche sites. Non-professional ones are fine.
- www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/195ygru/stackoverflow_questions_down_66_in_2023_compared/
- observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
Centerpiece: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship
Fully rendered at: github.com/china-dictatorship
The campaign has centered around publishing censored keywords on his Stack Overflow username, thus using his considerable Stack Overflow presence to sabotage the website in China. Here is an early web archive.
Like most people in the West, Ciro has always been for political freedom of speech, and therefore against the Chinese government's policies.
However, the seriousness of the matter only fully dawned on him in 2015 when, his mother-in-law, a then a 63-year-old lady, was put into jail for 15 days for doing Falun Gong.
And all of this was made 100 times worse because Ciro deeply loves several aspects of China, such as food, language, art and culture, and saw it all being destroyed by the Communists: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/does-ciro-santilli-hate-china
The rationale of this is to force the Chinese government to either:
- leave things as they are, and let censored keywords appear on Stack Overflow (most likely scenario)
- block Stack Overflow, and lose billions of dollars with worse IT technology
- disable the Great Firewall
In the beginning, this generated some commotion, but activity reduced as novelty wore off, and as he collected the reply to all possible comments at: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship.
This campaign has led him to have an insane profile view/reputation ratio, since many people pause to look at his profile. He is point "A" at the top right corner of Figure 2. "Scatter plot of Stack Overflow user reputation vs profile views in March 2019 with Ciro Santilli marked as A":
Ciro feels that the view count started increasing more slowly since 2020 compared to his reputation, likely every single Chinese user has already viewed the profile.
Further analysis has been done at: stats.stackexchange.com/questions/376361/how-to-find-the-sample-points-that-have-statistically-meaningful-large-outlier-r
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.
The more patents a research project generates, the less actually working products it produces.
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 Santillis or even simpler answers such as:
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:Intersperse paragraphs with lists, code blocks and other block elementsBeautiful text is not just text. Beautiful text is half text, and half ASCII art. There is almost a texture, or tempo, to it.
- 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.
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!
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
After Ciro Santilli got a lot of attention on Hacker News news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19428700 his Stack Overflow account was suspended for 3 days web.archive.org/web/20190320163458/https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245/ciro-santilli-新疆改造中心-六四事件-法轮功 and he received a magic notification that led to a private message:
Hello,I'm writing in reference to your Stack Overflow account:I don't understand why you are actively promoting and assisting people to commit fraud on the site.I've removed this from your profile github.com/cirosantilli/stack-overflow-vote-fraud-script and do not expect you to post it around the site.I'm suspending you to gain your attention on this matter.We have temporarily suspended your account; you may return after 3 days.Regards,Stack Overflow Moderation TeamTo: Aaron Hall ♦;Andy ♦;Baum mit Augen ♦;Bhargav Rao ♦;Bohemian ♦;BoltClock ♦;Brad Larson ♦;ChrisF ♦;Cody Gray ♦;deceze ♦;Ed Cottrell ♦;Flexo ♦;George Stocker ♦;Jean-François Fabre ♦;Jon Clements ♦;josliber ♦;Madara Uchiha ♦;Martijn Pieters ♦;meagar ♦;Michael Myers ♦;Rob ♦;Robert Harvey ♦;Ry- ♦;Samuel Liew ♦;Undo ♦;Yvette Colomb ♦
Ciro's reply was:
Hi mods,
Security by obscurity does not work. If that is all Stack Overflow relies on, and that is what it looks like, then it is guaranteed to be flawed and already been attacked.That is one of the reasons that my website will eventually beat Stack Overflow: github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website/tree/d77b18d2e7acb3558615797c36195f60dfd26306#pagerank-with-tags If you had messaged me and told me "take down or suspend" I would have done it immediately because I understand the meaning of political power.That would have been the better course of action for everyone: I get no block, and you get no bad publicity as I shout Kerckhoff's principle on Twitter.But maybe it is a good thing that people learn more about that. Is there an existing public discussion saying that you cannot advertise vote fraud tools on this website?If not, can you please create that meta thread as a reference for future users, and perhaps let the community decide by itself?In particular, will you still suspend me if I don't take down the GitHub repo?Because if not, does it make any sense to prevent it from being mentioned in Stack Overflow? Any good GitHub repo just gets enough Google pagerank that it won't matter.And if yes, nothing prevents me from re-uploading on an anonymous account.
Reply and unsuspend quickly followed, with link still removed:
I suspended you to get your attention. Your attitude about going to Twitter about it does not bode well with me.Feel free to have whatever you want in your GitHub repo. Just don't advertise tools to make it easier for people to circumvent the rules. As easy or as hard as it may be to circumvent them, you're handing it to people who may not be capable of doing so. It doesn't help.Don't make threats to upload on an anonymous account. Accounts created to circumvent previous warnings are not welcomed on the site.We don't need a meta thread to discuss whether it's ok to post voting fraud links in your profile and we definitely don't need to give it anymore publicity.I'll unsuspend you, now we've had this discussion.Regards,Stack Overflow Moderation Team
A meta thread was later created by Yvette, kudos, to which Ciro answered with the correct unpopular answer that will be downvoted to oblivion: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/381577/is-it-ok-to-have-links-on-how-to-create-sock-puppets-and-gain-rep-fraudulently-i/381635#381635
Yvette had also previously deleted one or two of Ciro's answers for being duplicates, which is a policy Ciro is against: if the questions are not dupes, a single answer might still directly reply to both of them.
Yvette later announced that she was leaving the website: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/399495/leaving-the-site-and-the-network-mid-election-is-not-the-best-but-theres-no. This is evil, but Ciro was happy. He does not mean harm to Yvette, but in their limited interaction, Ciro disagreed with her choices.
CommonMark is a good project. But its initial release method was not very nice, they first developed everything behind closed doors with the big adopters like GitHub and Stack Overflow, and only later released the thing read, thus wasting the time of people who were working on alternative in the meanwhile, e.g. github.com/karlcow/markdown-testsuite which Ciro contributed to: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.
His website is down as of 2020, shame: wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/english-universal-language
This dude is interesting. Quite crazy type. It is hard to differentiate genius from mad.
Ciro Santilli bumps on his Stack Overflow from time to time: stackoverflow.com/users/1269037/dan-dascalescu.
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