Incoming links: WhatsApp
Ciro Santilli visited Qatar in 2025, here are some notes.
The lady at the border crossing that checked the passports was terrible. She and all her colleagues had their hijabed colleagues had cell phones on social media right on the job, and a terrible attitude. But one of them had an Apple Watch, they are not poor. They must be the disliked third wives of the cousin of the king of something. During exit the ladies were much better. Perhaps is also because they had the late shift. The facial recognition system was terrible and took several tries to work for some people. Quite funnily, all the border crossing male officers look like Saddam Hussein. Interestingly, Chinese nationals need to take more fingerprint than Europeans. Also there's a company that has a service to collect your bags for you, they have an infinitely long line of Indian valets waiting to pick up other people's bags.
Signal is blocked at my hotel 1 but not hotel 2, and also works on Vodaphone SIM. pornhub.com is blocked everywhere: www.reddit.com/r/qatar/comments/uyhwdz/comment/m6d5980/. WhatsApp voice calling was blocked on hotel 1 and 4G, but not on hotel 2. The National Museum of Qatar blocks YouTube comments with: "Restricted mode has hidden comments for this video".
The place looks a lot like Singapore. Both have an infinite money glitch, and they import cheap NPC foreign labor like there is no tomorrow. At the end of the day you can see a bunch of Indian dudes sitting on the grass in the park as is their custom, exactly like Singapore. But is is way more extreme, with 85%-90% of the population being immigrants.
Paintings of the dictator and his father are visible everywhere. The father is important to suggest that he willingly chose this son to power and give smooth transition. Sometimes the mother is also together, presumably in part to identify which of the wives is the mother!
Drivers are a bit wild, definitely a step up from UK level.
Messaging software that force you to have a mobile phone Updated 2025-02-26 +Created 1970-01-01
Chat programs that don't have a proper web-only operation and force you to have a mobile phone, e.g. WhatsApp.
Heck, even Signal, which is supposed to be super secure and good for your privacy, forces you to disclose your freaking cell phone to all contacts! lifehacker.com/how-to-use-signal-without-revealing-your-private-phone-1818996580
What is my phone breaks? What if I don't want to have a fucking phone? What if I move countries and have to change the fucking number? Also evil but less because done by all: chat programs that can't send you an email if you don't see the message in X minutes.
The solution to "how to prevent spam" is simple: your ID is a public key that you own the private key for. If you start getting spammed, generate a new public key, and send it to all contacts, and dump the previous ID.
The general and ideal user acquisition is of course organic Googling:
- user does not understand his teacher's explanation of a subject
- user Googles into rare specific subject
- looks around, then login/create account with OAuth to leaves a comment or upvote
- notice that you can fork anything
- mind = KABOOM
However, before that point, it is very likely that Ciro will have to physically do some very hard and specific user acquisition work at some University. Maybe there is a more virtual way of achieving this.
This work will involve going through some open set of university lecture notes, and creating a superior version of them on OurBigBook.com, and somehow getting students to notice it and use it as a superior alternative to their crappy lecture notes.
Another very promising route is publishing the answers to old examination questions on the website. It is likely that we will be able to overcome any copyright issues by uploading only the answers to numbered questions. There is a minor risk that these would be considered derivative works of the copyrighted questions. But universities would have to be very anal to enforce a DMCA for that!!!
Getting in contact with students is an epic challenge, as an incredibly deep chasm separates us:
- it is basically impossible to try and approach teachers: how to convince teachers to use CC BY-SA
- and on the other hand, how will you get university students to trust you are not a pedophile and that you actually want to help them?The missing aspect is how to join their main "class communication group", e.g. a WhatsApp or Discord chat they have. That would be the perfect entry point to communicate with the end users. But that entry point is also generally closed exclusively for students, and sometimes lecturers, and will not accept anyone external.Perhaps Ciro would be able to do something with one of the two Universities he attended in the past: École Polytechnique or University of São Paulo. But there was no clear channel in those institutions for that. There is either an "infinitely noisy Facebook with everyone that bothered" or silence, deathly silence and isolation of no contact. The key hard part is getting a per-course granularity chat. Discord Student Hubs are a fantastic initiative in that area. Shame that Discord is an unusable mess with zero ways to select which notifications you care about: Section "Discord email notifications"!One approach method that shows some promise is to follow the Student societies, which often host open events of interest outside of work hours.
Walking with advertisement t-shirts mentioning specific course names in some university location is something Ciro seriously considers, that's how desperate things are. Watch out: docs.ourbigbook.com/#public-relations for T-shirt news!