Incoming links: YouTube
FFmpeg is likely the backend of YouTube through reverse engineering: streaminglearningcenter.com/blogs/youtube-uses-ffmpeg-for-encoding.html (archive)
A person who gives financial advice, notably personal finance advice. Some of them are questinable guru-like beings, and many are on YouTube.
Google has put considerable effort into custom hardware to greatly optimize its stack, in a way that is quite notable compared to other tech companies.
- 2021 www.theregister.com/2021/03/23/google_to_build_server_socs/ Google vows to build its own server system-on-chips, hires Intel veteran. Inevitable with the end of Moore's law. Instruction set architecture unannounced however. I'll bet ARM instruction set
- 2021 codec acceleration for YouTube: www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/intel-replaces-xeons-with-custom-vcus
How can a chemical substance be unstable but not flammable? Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01
I can't believe there isn't a YouTube video comparing various substances for each flammability and instability ratings, this would be a huge hit.
Examples:
- html/min.html: minimal valid HTML document. It is insane however.
- html/min-sane.html: minimal sane HTML document. There are smaller valid ones, but they are insane.
- html/img.html
- html/img-broken.html: stackoverflow.com/questions/22051573/how-to-hide-image-broken-icon-using-only-css-html
- html/img-load-lazy.html: stackoverflow.com/questions/2321907/how-do-you-make-images-load-lazily-only-when-they-are-in-the-viewport/57389607#57389607
- html/iframe.html. Uses: html/iframe2.html, html/hello.txt and html/hello
- forms
- YouTube embeds
An ion selective electrode is tool used in analytical chemistry used to determine the concentration of a given ion in a solution.
The method can determine the concentration of one ion even if there are multiple different types of ion in the solution, although in some cases this can alter the results. This is done with the help of a selective membrane that only allows certain ions through.
One cool example application mentioned on LibreTexts[ref] is the measurement of fluorine concentration in water. They explain that fluorine is added to the drinking water supply in some countries to help protect people's teeth, and so you want to be able to measure as part of quality control to make sure it is being added in correct the quantities.
The method requires calibrating with calibrating solutions which takes one hour, but once you are calibrated you just stick the sensor into the analyte and get readings in a minute without any expendables. The membrane seems to be a bit fragile which requires care, but overall it looks like a convenient method.
Ion selective electrode schematic
. Source. 
Sample calibration curve for an ion selective electrode
. Source. The curve is simple and log linear, so once you have that it is easy to fit new measurements to the curve.Ion selective electrodes Tech Tips by Vernier
. Source. The plump Asian American lady with a PhD explains how to use the thing.
It seems like a proprietary training video given with the product that this Peruvian university decided to upload to YouTube. Heroes.
Using an Ion Selective Electrode by University of Alberta
. Source. Ciro Santilli enjoyed watching the temple flashback moments on YouTube.
Combat in the USA is of course terribly ridiculous due to guns Are Worthless.
Ciro thinks this is idiotic, and that Wizards should sell all cards individually with unlimited supply and all with the same prices, especially online where there are no printing costs. But because Wizards made the silly promise never to reprint certain cards with the reserved list in 1994, they can't even correct this mistake legally! (TODO maybe, see further discussion at: www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/contract-from-below-promissory-estoppel-and-the-reserved-list). There is however one simple solution: create and promote a new no reserve list format, and let reserve list formats rot away:One interesting outcome of this would be to have card cost limited formats. Penny Dreadful puts a super low limit, on individual cards, but it would be cool to have a max cost per deck version of it.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIq0NWSLAJA Magic TV - A Look at Non Reserve List Legacy by ChannelFireball (2015). Notably, they suggest the workaround of printing very slightly differently functional reprints, e.g. "Snow covered duals". Genius.
- www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/8gtoj4/no_reserve_list_legacy/
A cool thing is when they printed Garth One-Eye, which allows you to make imaginary copies of some of those restricted list cards during play. This is the type of "flirting with the rules", that Ciro Santilli admires. The introduction of online-only cards such as XXX has pushed that even further as of 2021.
This was especially insane when Ciro was young and the Internet was not very widely available in Brazil yet, and Ciro did not know how to check the values of cards on online markets, and would trade cards with older much more knowledgable teenagers, based solely on his appraisal of a card's strength! Can you imagine how many young Timmys got ripped off in this manner, trading useless one million mana spells for ultra expensive black lotuses?
Another option we could pursue would be to make governments consider TCG pack opening a form of gambling, which it obviously is:
There is however one good solution to Magic's insane cost: watch people who have nothing better to do in their lives play on YouTube.
And as Internet formats dominate more and more, if they have any brains at will they will migrate to a subscription model where you pay to play for a given period of time, and have immediate access to all cards. It could even be a tiered access, with older formats being more expensive (more bugs to fix on different cards), but you must get access to all cards of a format at once.
This incredibly foul mouthed band was incredibly funny.
Ciro Santilli was a bit young to understand the songs at the time, but the older boys were singing them, and he sang along. So maybe there is a nostalgia factor in play.
But it can't be just that. They are just too funny and brutal, even when Ciro re-listens to it as of 2020.
Many Brazilian religious cranks in were really happy when their plane crashed and killed all of them in 1996.
Official YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCPmfP5LNbxYwlN0k6C3F_6w
Best songs:
- Pelados Em Santos (1995). Not too amazing, they only try to be funny by making fun of the North-Eastern accent of Brazil, which is considered somewhat funny in São Paulo, and they fail at being funny.But it talks about Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, Ciro's idolized city, so let's hear it. They didn't live in Santos apparently, but being from São Paulo City, they would have been familiar with that popular local beach location.
Marc Verdiell is a French electrical engineer born in 1963 or 1964[ref] and best known for being the creator and host of the CuriousMarc YouTube channel where he does mind blowing repairs and reverse engineering of vintage computers and other electronic equipment.
Marc made $58.4m from the sale of LightLogic, an optoelectronics company he founded, to Intel in April 2001. This was just after the dot-com crash, but Intel apparently still correctly believed that the networking and the Internet would continue to grow and was investing in the area. His associate Frank Shum sued claiming he should be credited for some of the inventions sold but lost and Marc got it all.[ref][ref][ref]. Marc was then almost immediately appointed an Intel fellow at the extremelly early age of 37, and then stayed for a few years at Intel until 2006 according to his LinkedIn.[ref][ref]
Marc's LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/marc-verdiell-9742795/
Marc's full name is actualy Jean-Marc Verdiell, but Ciro Santilli remembers there was one YouTube video where he mentions he gave up on "Jean" partly because anglophones would murder its pronounciation all the time.
ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/20160274316 also suggests he may have a seldom used middle name "André", though that would be unusual in French custom
Marc's PhD thesis is listed at: theses.fr/1990PA112048 and it is entitled:which is translated into English as:but the full text is not available online.
Mise en phase de reseaux de lasers a semi-conducteur
Phase locking of semiconductor laser arrays
Profile of Marc Verdiell by Gizmodo (2018)
Source. youtu.be/tJ2-kkhghD4?t=74 gives his house's location Atherton, California, part of Silicon Valley. youtu.be/tJ2-kkhghD4?t=279 shows his amazing garden a bit more.
youtu.be/ZgAreiFXhJk?t=253 lists some famous people who live there. It's like a micro heaven.
And a person who makes open educational content like Marc, truly deserves it.
radaris.com/p/Jean-Marc/Verdiell/ and many other sources list the exact address as:On Google Maps: maps.app.goo.gl/LM2iN9fz6YBteggp8
48 Linden Ave, Atherton, CA 94027
www.realtyhop.com/property-records/search/hoang-oanh-verdiell mentions that the property was bought on 2013-11-07 for $8,650,000 and lists other properties they've bought and sold and possibly inhabited:
- 2002-03-21: sold 4159 El Camino Way, Palo Alto, CA Unit B
- 2001-06-18: bought 763 Florales Dr, Palo Alto, CA
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEcnjh0lSsY give a tour of the house given by the real state agent Ken DeLeon. The dude has a very suspicious Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_DeLeon He is mentioend e.g. at www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/12/20/ken-deleon-top-silicon-valley-sales-agent-why-chinese-buyers-love-palo-alto/ as selling a lot to the Chinese.
A quick look on Google Maps show that that area is full of some incredible mansions. They managed to keep the entire place green and every house has a pool. Wikipedia comments web.archive.org/web/20220906010554/https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/most-expensive-zip-codes-us/:and Forbes confirms it for 2022: web.archive.org/web/20220906010554/https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/most-expensive-zip-codes-us/, by far on top.
Atherton is known for its wealth; in 1990 and 2019, Atherton was ranked as having the highest per capita income among U.S. towns with a population between 2,500 and 9,999, and it is regularly ranked as the most expensive ZIP Code in the United States [(94027)]. The town has very restricting zoning, only permitting one single-family home per acre and no sidewalks. The inhabitants have strongly opposed proposals to permit more housing construction
Starting in 2016, Marc appears to be have had a small court battle with some building contractors led by the Yip family, Cynthia Yip and Wai Yip, as Javelin Construction Inc. for selling them "a brand-new but defective home for $9m. The Verdiells then spent $5.3m further renewing it."[ref]. After endless back-and-forth, the Verdiell's won $1.2m in 2024.[ref]
Soyuz Clock Part 4: How accurate is it? by CuriousMarc (2020)
Source. The timestamp youtu.be/HKsjwT53yXw?t=580 mentions that his wife is called "Lori", and that she escaped the Soviet Union, and two of her brothers went to jail in the escape process.
The name is kind of hard to hear, but Google resolves it for us e.g. she and Marc were donnors to the Computer History Museum d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/core/core-2019.pdf
Since images are large, they bring the following challenges:
- keeping images in the main Git repository with text content makes the repository huge and slow to clone, and should not be done
- storing and serving images could cost us, which we want to avoid
To solve those problems, the following alternatives appear to be stable enough and should be used decreasing preference:
- for all images, use the separate GitHub repository: github.com/cirosantilli/mediaThis way, the entire website is relies on a single third party: GitHub, so we have a simple single point of failure.We are at the mercy of GitHub's 1GB size policy: help.github.com/en/articles/what-is-my-disk-quota, but it will take a while to hit that.GitLab however has a 10Gb maximum size: about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/gitlab-dot-com-storage-limit-raised-to-10gb-per-repo/ so we could move there is we ever blow up 1Gb on GitHub.Both GitLab and GitHub allow uploading files through the web UI, so downloading a large repo is never needed to contribute.GitHub does not serve videos like it does images however as of 2019.
- Wikimedia Commons for videos if the following conditions are met:
- in scope: "educational material in a broad sense", but not e.g. "Private image collections, e.g. private party photos, photos of yourself and your friends, your collection of holiday snaps and so on.". I don't think they will be too picky even with low quality photos.
- allowed format, e.g. images or videos, but not ZIPs
- allowed license: CC BY SA, but no fair use
Since Wikimedia Commons has a higher level of curation and is an educational not-for-profit, it is the method most likely to remain available for the longest time.For this reason, we highly recommend uploading any acceptable files there as well as an additional backup.The downside is that its tooling is not as good, e.g. there are a bunch of messy unofficial tools for batch operations, and upload takes more effort.Another downside of Wikimedia Commons is that while we can choose the basename of files, it also adds some extra SHA crap to the beginning of URLs, making them harder to predict.Another serious downside is that they randomly rename images without redirects... e.g. they renamed upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/03/STJ_SVG_file.svg to upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Superconducting_tunnel_junction.svgAnother "downside" is that they are extremely strict about copyright compliance. This is good because you can be pretty sure that they are correct in general, but it also means that they are very conservative, and delete things where fair use would be OK. And if those fair uses have no Wikipedia page, they won't show up anywhere. - archive.org for anything else, e.g. videos that Wikimedia commons does not accept.All content will be tracked under the
cirosantillicollection: archive.org/details/cirosantilliarchive.org has a very convenient upload and lax requirements. The generated URLs are predictable (single SHA prefix for the entire collection).Never trust a website that is not on GitHub Pages, for-profit companies will take down everything immediately as soon as it stops making them money.Every external link to non-GitHub pages must be archived. And GitHub links must be forked.We should also backup images that Wikimedia Commons does not accept here in addition to the github.com/cirosantilli/media repository.
The following alternatives seem impossible because Ciro could not find if they expose direct links to the images:
The following do have direct links:
- www.flickr.com e.g. live.staticflickr.com/7437/27402357162_7d91b73cd5_z.jpg documented at help.flickr.com/en_us/get-the-url-of-a-flickr-photo-S1Hnnmjym Also does automatic image size conversion. But only provides ugly autogenerated URLs.
- Instagram does not support upload from computer? Lol?
For videos, YouTube does not allow download, even of Creative Commons videos so uploading only there is not acceptable as it prevents reuse:
This is the one that hit Ciro Santilli the hardest, coming in at the point in which he started to discern between games and the real world a little better. His parents bought it for him during a trip to Disney World in Florida in 1996 (?), since electronics were much cheaper in the USA.
So as Ciro became older, and turned into a software engineer, he started to become more and more morbidly curious about "N64 internals": tool-assisted speedrun, how the devkit looks like, how games were developed for it, hardware leaks, etc.
Luckily Ciro's mind is not interested enough by that useless shit for Ciro to seriously study it himself. But that's what YouTube is for, right? Why do useless stuff when other more useless people can do it for you?
The console has only 4 MB of RAM memory. It is quite incredible what can be done with 8 MB, from the point of view of a 2020 worls where 16 GB laptops are the norm.
Don't like this very much, but if it's the only way...
Maybe focus on job ads like Stack Overflow.
Then:
- like YouTube, pay creators proportionally to views/metrics
- paid subscription to remove ads from site
Some possible/not possible sources that could be used to manually bootstrap content:
- LibreTexts. Good project. "Teacher-only-content" unfortunately as usual. But besides that fundamental flaw, they do exactly what we want to do in a sense.
- OpenStax: CC BY. This could be a great entry point, as they already have some university integration going on, and might be interested in this project.
- physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6157/list-of-freely-available-physics-books "List of freely available physics books" explicitly asks for:but the thread was locked, and basically none of the sources in the answers have free licenses, nor do they note it. It just seems that the physicists don't know what a free license is.
a list of physics books with open-source licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL
- MIT OpenCourseWare: CC BY-NC-SA, so not really usable
- github.com/certik/theoretical-physics: MIT License. Workable but wonky.
- subwiki.org/: wiki with some upper graduate math subjects presumably by this Indian dude: www.linkedin.com/in/vipul-naik-0ab1898/. Description on his homepage: vipulnaik.com/subwiki/. He's also got other interesting but not so relevant projects:He's also into Stack Overflow, Quora and Wikipedia editing. That's a cool dude. He's into in LessWrong it seems.
- pro freer immigration laws: vipulnaik.com/openborders/
- vipulnaik.com/cognito-mentoring/ free mentoring project for interested students
- massive mathematics books
- Infinite Napkin.CC BY-SA mathematics infinite book: github.com/vEnhance/napkin/issues/77. Very similar type of content to what we want in this project!
- Stacks Project
Existing lecture notes by students:
- github.com/mb2g17/NotesNetworkArchive Google Docs-based: docs.google.com/document/d/1OIcQ8dJ_FAhdkirU94M29-ZbNZ4oQs1LbWF3Nz-mq_U/edit#heading=h.vehxib58w1iw. An actual student uploading tons of lecture notes in one coherent system. CC BY-NC-SA unfortunately.
- academia.stackexchange.com/questions/148261/do-you-keep-your-study-notes-publicly-available mentions:Related: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/40381/how-common-is-it-that-professors-have-their-students-write-textbooks
- Cambridge Mathematics Lecture Notes by Dexter Chua (2014-2018)Comments:
Lecture note upload website:
- nexusnotes.com likely illegal reuploads of PDFs from teachers
- www.studocu.com/en-gb Paywall. PDF uploads. Unclear if simple teacher reuploads or actual novel notes.
- www.studydrive.net/
- Chinese GitHub repos. Some of these are very advanced in terms of content quantity and organizational quality! The Chinese are miles ahead in this area:
- github.com/PKUanonym/REKCARC-TSC-UHT Guidance for courses in Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. Chinese. Appears to try and store all past exams.
- github.com/lib-pku/libpku
- github.com/openwhu/OpenWHU: Wuhan University
- github.com/USTC-Resource/USTC-Course: USTC
- github.com/Zeal-L/UNSW: UNSW from Australia, but by a Chinese dude
- github.com/apachecn/mit-18.06-linalg-notes: translation of MIT course to Chinese
- github.com/chenyang1999/MyComputerCollegeCourses: TODO which univeresity
- github.com/elder-frog/OpenCourseCatalog: nothing to do with this project, but since I'm making a list, this dude is copying YouTube videos to Bilibili. And he's edgy anti-CCP on Twitter, what a legend.
- github.com/TheBloodthirster/BUAA_Course_Sharing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beihang_University
- github.com/1051727403/SHU-CS-Source-Share: ShangHai University CS course source code
- github.com/Willie169/tw-gifted-k12-notes: Taiwanese high school notes
Exams uploads:
- questions.tripos.org/part-ib/all/ University of Cambridge Mathematics past examinations
This is a porn style defined by Ciro Santilli as:Ciro believes that this is an interesting type of pornography, as it feels more natural and humane than all the horrible trash that comes out of horrendous professional mainstream porn industry.
- content is designed and owned by the actors
- full face reveal
- doing normal vlog things like talking, visiting places, eating, etc., not just fucking
Yes, it could go down the YouTube/Instagram alley, and lead the vloggers to do things they wouldn't normally do because of the audience. But who is to say that Ciro Santilli doesn't do the same on Stack Overflow to some extent?
That type of porn requires some big courage to make. Or balls if you will. Kudos to those creators, as it is so taboo it could greatly impact their future job prospects.
The travel sex vlog appears to be the most popular way to do it. Presuamably the reason being that you would not be able to interact with people in a normal job, so to keep things interesting you need to go to some random places.
Examples:
- lunaokko.com/social-media/ Luna Okko. French sex vlogger, basically a super normal travel vlog with sex scenes with her boyfriend added in, see e.g. the series "Luna's Journey".Perhaps the travel porn vlog is the simplest way to do it. A sex vlog is much like a cooking flog in some way, except it is hard to get new ingredients, so changing the scenery is the easiest way to get some diversity.Some day some nymphomaniac should actually make a sex vlog fucking a different man each time, that would be amazing, even from a scientific point of view, so we can see how different men fuck, a bit like an open version of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Sex.2022 interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGcWrpXXtuQ
- twitter.com/JamesWithLola also a travel sex vlog, also French. Hum.
Quora is crap in many, many senses, but in part due to some bad Stack Overflow policies, it is the best crap we've got for certain (mostly useless) subjects. Until OurBigBook.com dominates the world.
The worst thing about quora is that you cannot subscribe only to certain subjects on your feed. Quora just keeps pumping shit you never subscribed to, no matter what. Ciro, for sport, unfollowed every single idiotic subject it was proposing, but it didn't work, sooner or later Quora just keeps pumping more shit back. Mind you, some of that shit is fun. But it's still shit. Though on second thought, YouTube also randomly decides to reset Ciro's humongous "don't recomend this shitty channel" choices from time to time, which is not much different...
Other terrible things, they just seem to have an incredible ability of making the website worse and more annoying over time! Truly amazing:
- around 2022, quora started showing "related" answers to other questions, possibly before actualy answers to the question itself. This, together with an insane number of inline ads that look very similar to answers, makes it very hard to decide what is an actual answer or not!!! E.g.: people complaining:This "feature" is so bad that it is even comical. Quora looks more like a spambot than a Q&A site now. Unusable!
- around 2021, quora started expanding any link as a huge preview box that completely takes over the answer, and it is very hard to stop it from doing so
- Quora used to show question details beyond the title by default, but stopped: www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/uqyvfp/comment/jd6go1b/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Quora is getting so bad that it is basically being killed by Reddit, especially after they lifted the 6-month hard thread lock...
See also: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/quora for a coverage of the intense pro-CCP astroturfing present on the website.
Rorogwela by Afunakwa (1970)
Source. Later used as a vocal sample in the Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest (1992), which notably featured in Where the hell is Matt (2006), an early YouTube viral video. The original destroys the Deep Forest version however.John Thompson's Guqin website.
Holy crap amazing list of Guqin pieces by the guy for MP3 download! www.silkqin.com/06hear.htm And the explanations are insane. What a dude. Ciro Santilli's hero.
Download all MP3:
wget -r -np -l 1 -A mp3 http://www.silkqin.com/06hear.htmCiro Santilli Contacted John by email in 2019 telling him to put his stuff on YouTube and offering help, and he replied, but nothing came of it unfortunately. Edit: he uploaded a bunch of videos of him playing live in 2020! www.youtube.com/user/silkqin/videos
John focuses on playing the tunes in a "historically informed performance", in particular using silk strings rather than metal ones which are used by most modern artists: www.silkqin.com/08anal/hip.htm
Dialog between Fisherman and Woodcutter performed by John Thompson (2020)
Source. Ciro Santilli defines "Smooth Jazz" simply as jazz that he can leave on the background to work without being particularly distracted.
It does not mean that the music is bad in any way. Just not particularly distracting.
Ciro Santilli's "Soft Jazz" YouTube playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcZOZrP1P_V4Sxz8y1JLKLbZOv3GLb_Xf
List:
- Page One by Joe Henderson (1963)