Home Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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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.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/ID_photo_of_Ciro_Santilli_taken_in_2013.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Ciro_Santilli's_learn_teach_apply_logo.png
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.
I offer:
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.
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:
Figure 1.
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
. Ciro contributes almost exclusively by answering question he Googles into out of his own need, and never by refreshing the newest question of big tags for low hanging fruit! More information at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions".
Video 1.
Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
. Source.
Video 2.
OurBigBook Web topics demo
. Source. The OurBigBook topic feature allows users to "merge their minds" in a "sort by upvote"-stack overflow-like manner for each subject. This is the killer feature of OurBigBook Web. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-topics.
Video 3.
OurBigBook dynamic article tree demo
. Source. The OurBigBook dynamic tree feature allows any of your headers to be the toplevel h1 header of a page, while still displaying its descendants. SEO loves this, and it also allows users to always get their content on the correct granularity. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-dynamic-article-tree.
Video 4.
OurBigBook local editing and publishing demo
. Source. With OurBigBook you can store your content as plaintext files in a Lightweight markup, and then publish that to either OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features, or as a static website where you are in full control. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/publish-your-content.
Video 5.
Top Down 2D continuous game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)
Source. More information: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games". This is Ciro's underwhelming stab at the fundamental question: Can AGI be trained in simulations?. This project could be taken much further.
Video 6.
Water Margin tribute to Chinese dissidents by Ciro Santilli (2022)
Source. Part of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, see also: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/water-margin.
Figure 2.
Lenovo ThinkPad T430 running a BIOS hello world
. Source code: github.com/cirosantilli/x86-bare-metal-examples. Ciro's Linux Kernel Module Cheat is a closely related and much more important project that covers the Linux kernel and assembly language.
 -------------------------------------
|  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               |
 -------------------------------------
Code 1.
ASCII art of a Force of Will Magic: The Gathering card inscribed in the Bitcoin blockchain
.
Artist unknown, uploaded December 2014. Part of Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" where Ciro Santilli maintains a curated list of such interesting inscriptions.
This was a small project done by Ciro for artistic purposes that received some attention due to the incredible hype surrounding cryptocurrencies at the time. Ciro Santilli's views on cryptocurrencies are summarized at: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?".
Figure 3.
YellowRobot.jpg
. Source.
JPG image fully embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain depicting some kind of cut material art depicting a yellow robot, inscribed on January 29, 2017.
Ciro Santilli found this image and others during his research for Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" by searching for image fingerprints on every transaction payload of the blockchain with a script.
The image was uploaded by EMBII, co-creator of the AtomSea & EMBII upload mechanism, which was responsible for a large part of the image inscriptions in the Bitcoin blockchain.
The associated message reads:
Chiharu [EMBII's Japanese wife] and I found this little yellow robot while exploring Chicago. It will be covered by tar or eventually removed but this tribute will remain. N 41.880778 E -87.629210
This is one of Ciro Santilli's favorite AtomSea & EMBII uploads, as it perfectly encapsules the "medium as an art form" approach to blockchain art, where even non-novel works can be recontextualized into something interesting, here depicting an opposition between the ephemeral and the immutable.
At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1615389973343268871 EMBII announced that he would be giving off shares of that image on Sup!?, a Bitcoin-backed NFT system he was; making. In December 2023, he gave some shares of the robot to Ciro Santilli.
Figure 4.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
.
This website was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites, a covert system the CIA used to communicate with its assets. More details at: Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites".
Ciro Santilli had some naughty OSINT fun finding some of the websites of this defunct network in 2023 after he heard about the 2022 Reuters report on the matter, which for the first time gave away 7 concrete websites out of a claimed 885 total found. As of November 2023, Ciro had found about 350 of them.
Figure 5.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of noticiasmusica.net
.
This is another website that was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites. This website is written in Brazilian Portuguese, and therefore suggests that the CIA had assets in Brazil at the time, and thus was spying on a "fellow democracy".
Although Snowden's revelations made it extremely obvious to the world that the USA spies upon everyone outside of the Five Eyes, including fellow democracies, it is rare to have such a direct a concrete proof of it visible live right on the Wayback Machine. Other targeted democracies include France, Germany, Italy and Spain. More details at: USA spying on its own allies.
Video 7.
How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Slightly edited VOD of the talk Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects about the CIA 2010 covert communication websites.
Figure 6.
Diagram of the fundamental theorem on homomorphisms by Ciro Santilli (2020)
Shows the relationship between group homomorphisms and normal subgroups.
Figure 7.
Spacetime diagram illustrating how faster-than-light travel implies time travel by Ciro Santilli (2021)
Used in the Stack Exchange ansewr to Does faster than light travel imply travelling back in time?. One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Figure 8.
Average insertion time into heaps, binary search tree and hash maps of the C++ standard library by Ciro Santilli (2015)
Source. Used in the Stack Overflow answer to Heap vs Binary Search Tree (BST). One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Video 8.
Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture in two minutes by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Quick and direct explanation of the statement of the BSD conjecture for people who know basic university mathematics. This is one of the Millennium Prize Problems, and you will get a million dollars if you can solve it! This therefore falls in the Simple to state but hard to prove of Ciro Santilli's the beauty of mathematics aesthetics.
Figure 9.
Top view of an open Oxford Nanopore MinION
. Source. This is Ciro Santilli's hand on the Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Nanopore_Technologies. He put it there after working a bit on Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it" :-) And he would love to document more experiments like that one Section "Videos of all key physics experiments", but opportunities are extremely rare.
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>
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Computer science course of the University of Oxford Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Course lists: www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/ True to form, courses appear to have identifiers, e.g. qi for the Quantum Information course of the University of Oxford rather than more arbitrary A1/A2/A3, B1/B2/B3, naming convention used by the Mathematics course of the University of Oxford and the Physics course of the University of Oxford, and URLs can either have years or not:
The "course materials" section of each course leads to courses.cs.ox.ac.uk/ which is paywalled by IP (accessible via Eduroam): TODO which system does it use? Some courses place their materials directly on "www.cs.ox.ac.uk", and when that is the case they are publicly accessible. So it is very much hit and miss. E.g. www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2022-2023/quantum/index.html from Quantum Processes and Computation course of the University of Oxford has the assignments such as www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/courses/qpc2022/assignment1.pdf publicly visible, but e.g. www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2022-2023/modelsofcomputation/ has nothing.
Handbook:
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Manifesto Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Education has become an expensive bureaucratic exercise, completely dissociated from reality and usefulness.
It completely rejects what the individual wants to achieve, and instead attempts to mass homogenize and test people through endless hours of boredom.
And the only goals it achieves are testing student's resilience to stress, and facilitating the finding of sexual partners. True learning is completely absent.
Teachers only teach because they have to do it to get paid, not for passion. Their only true incentive is co-authoring papers.
We reject this bullshit.
Education is meant to help us, the students, achieve our goals through passionate learning.
And, we, the students, are individuals, with different goals and capabilities.
The way we protest is to publish the knowledge from University for free, on the Internet, so that anyone can access it.
And we do this is a law-abiding way, without copyright infringement, so that no one can legally take it down.
We come to our courses just for the useless roll calls. But we already know all the subject better than the "teacher" on the very first day.
And we are already more famous than the "teacher" online, and through the Internet have already taught more way way more people than they ever will.
The effect of this is to demoralize the entire school system at all levels, until only one conclusion is possible: implosion.
And from the ashes of the old system, we will build a new one, which does only what matters with absolute efficiency: help the individual students achieve their goals.
A system in which the only reason why university exist will be to allow the most knowledgeable students to access million dollar laboratory equipment, and to pay the most prolific content creators so they can continue content creating.
No more useless courses. No more useless tests. Only passion, usefulness and focus.
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School must offer free accommodation for students Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 2024-11-15
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More precisely, for students whose parents don't live near the school. Or alternatively, online-only courses that offer the same diploma as the presencial version. Or a compromise where the best N% students get accommodation, where N is a parameter of how decent your society is overall.
Since all the learning resources will be available online on OurBigBook.com, or through online 1-to-1 chats with mentors, it might be cheaper for students to work either from their parent's homes if their home has reasonable work conditions: a silent room with reasonable Internet access and no drug addicts in the house.
Alternatively, a public local library with free WiFi would do as well. But there would need to be a strict silence policy enforced, unlike most public libraries we see today. Ciro once saw a bird shaped noise detector that would sing if the noise went above a certain threshold, that was a good idea. Just like linting, it is easier to let machines decide deterministically on subjective questions to reduce useless arguments over who is right. Ciro has even seen libraries where the local council uses the same library open space as a citizen counsel area. What's the fucking point... these people have never done any deep work in their lives.
Then the state only needs to pay transportation and temporary accommodation to attend concentrated month-long laboratory workshop courses and week-long conferences, since the only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories. In cases where the home conditions are not good enough, the state can either pay for on-demand WeWork-like offices near the student's home, of for a full on-campus accommodation as in a boarding school. What is indispensable is that all students who pass the entry criteria must have such working conditions. Students who stay home can also earn a scholarship to help pay for their rent, food and Internet access.
Anything else is just incredibly unfair to the poor. Ciro Santilli has already witnessed two cases, in developed, and under-developed countries, where very high potential poorer students were forced to work to support themselves in parallel to a demanding degree because their parents couldn't pay their rent on a different city, and the students mental health issues due to this. In one of those cases the student had to abandon the course altogether.
It doesn't help that school has become a pure student-evaluation system, which basically implies putting studets through a lot of useless pressure.
One of the stories that Ciro Santilli's father tells is about how when they were dating, one of Ciro Santilli's mother's greatest wish for her hypotetical child would be that "they should not need to work during their studies as she had". As destiny would have it, Ciro Santilli's family had good conditions and Ciro never thought even once about money. And even then, school still sucked. Imagine without that basic, mandatory, stability!
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The main function of university is sexual selection Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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This is the actual main function of university for many people as of the 2020s. And it fulfills it quite well. A breeding ground.
In a closely related sense, university is simply a symbol of personal status. Not a place where you go to learn. And especially in the Anglophone world of fancy colleges, university also doubles down as a form of long term luxury hotel. Even if it ends up meaning debt.
There's nothing wrong with sexual selection. This type of natural eugenics is an important part of humankind. It is however just sad that any type of learning falls so much behind. A close second would be fine. But as it stands, it is just too far off.
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The missing link between basic and advanced Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Video 1.
Being valued as a lab technician interview with Norman Greenwood by Web of Stories (2017)
Source.
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Thiel Fellowship Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli approves of this one, related: Section "Free gifted education".
The downside of the Thiel Fellowship is that it is realistically impossible for its fellows to do anything in deep tech, only information science startups would be possible, as they would not have the labs, or lab skills required for any deep tech if they drop out before a PhD. Related: Section "The only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories".
The only solution is the harder process of actually remodelling our very broken educational system.
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University entry exam Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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These are the most evil examinations society has.
They mean that until you are 18, you have to study a bunch of generic crap you hate just to get into university. Rather than studying whatever it is that you truly love to become a God at it as fast as possible and have any chance of advancing the field.
And then, if you decide that you want to change, which is not unlikely since you haven't really try to study what you signed up for before then, it can be very hard and time consuming, leading to a bunch of adults with useless degress they will never use at work.
With the invention of the Internet, all teaching material can be free and open source. Only laboratory space has any cost (besides the opportunity cost of participation in actual projects in a research team).
Per-country list: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_admission_tests_to_colleges_and_universities
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When in doubt, choose the course that has the most experimental work Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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You can always learn pure theory later on for free or very cheap from books.
And above all, you can always learn software engineering later on for free, because the programming community is so much more open than any other so far, notably e.g. with Stack Overflow and GitHub, see also: Section "Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment". Ciro Santilli is trying to change that with OurBigBook.com, but don't hold your breath. But it is increasingly hard to understand why there isn't an university that forces teachers to publish all their notes and lecture videos (which should be mandatorily recorded) with a Creative Commons License, and then let anyone take whichever exams they want for a small fee or for free.
Actually, there is a good chance you will learn to program, like it or not, because chances are that you won't be able to find as decent a job doing anything else.
But there is one thing you cannot learn for free: laboratory work. Laboratory work is just too expensive to carry out outside of an institution.
Basically, if you don't do laboratory work in undergrad, you will very likely never be able to do so in your entire life.
Because laboratories are so rare and expensive, it is laboratories that put you in the best most unfair position at creating world changing deep tech startups, which is why when in doubt, choose the course that has the most experimental work. Yes, you won't be able to achieve those insanely concentrated equities of the early-Internet, as you will need more venture capital to run your company, but those days are over now, deal with it.
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