Software engineer. Passion for low-level technologies and educational applications. Opinions are my own.

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ciro santilli id photo 2013 ciro santilli logo

1. Ciro Santilli

Ciro Santilli is a male human born in Brazil in 1989 AD.

Quick facts:

  • Nationalities: Italian and Brazilian

  • Grew up in: Brazil

  • Relationship status 2017-: married

  • Chinese name: 三西猴, means "three western monkeys". Phonetic approximation to SANtilli CIRO. Semi-unintentionally reminds Chinese people of Sun Wukong.

  • Laptop: high end ThinkPad

  • Distro: latest Ubuntu release

  • Vim or Emacs: Vim. But for The Love, will someone please make an open source C++ IDE that actually just works?

  • Tabs or spaces: spaces

  • Mailing list or Git(Hub|Lab): Git(Hub|Lab), with passion

  • System or unit tests: system

  • Default programming languages: Python and C++. he’ll learn Rust and Haskell once he’s rich

  • Favorite musical instruments to listen: Chinese Guqin and electric Jazz-fusion guitar

1.1. The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli

Ciro Santilli has sometimes wasted time with low impact projects such as those listed at Ciro Santilli’s minor projects instead of doing higher impact projects such as those mentioned at: Section 1.2, “The most important projects Ciro Santilli wants to do”.

But maybe "Everything you did brought you where you are now." applies, maybe it is during the "low impact activities" that one gets the inspiration and experience required for the "high impact ones".

1.1.1. Linux kernel module cheat

https://github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat

This is the most important technical tutorial project that Ciro Santilli has done in his life so far as of 2019.

The scope is insane and unprecedented, and goes beyond Linux-kernel-land alone.

It ate up every system programming content he had previously written, including:

so that this repo would better be called "system-programming-cheat". But "Linux kernel module cheat" sounds more hardcore ;-)

Other major things that could be added there as well in the future are:

1.1.2. Ciro Santilli’s Stack Overflow contributions

https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245

Stack overflow flare
Figure 1. Ciro Santilli’s amazing Stack Overflow profile

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 a Git, Python, Bash and Ubuntu.

His best answers are listed at: Section 1.3, “The best articles by Ciro Santilli”

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, but in which he specializes

When he gets an upvote on one of his more obscure answers, he often re-read it, and often finds improvements to be made and makes them.

He doesn’t like to refresh the homepage looking for easy rep on widely known subjects.

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 is VonC, who has about 16 times more answers than Ciro in total! From this query: https://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!

Stack Overflow reputation is of course, in itself, meaningless. People who contribute to popular subjects like web development will always have infinitely more reputation that the low level subjects.

For example, his most upvoted answer as of July 2019 is https://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 ShareLaTeX, later merged into Overleaf, for education), which he didn’t touch again for several years, and still hasn’t "mastered" as of 2019!

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.

Ciro’s deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: Write free books to get famous website.

After answering so many questions, he ended up converging to a more or less consistent style, which he formalized at: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18614/style-guide-for-questions-and-answers/326746#326746

1.1.3. Ciro Santilli’s campaign for freedom of speech in China

https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship

Since 2015 Ciro Santilli has carried out a campaign to promote freedom of speech in China.

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.

xi jinping chrysanthemum 230 liusi
Figure 2. Chrysanthemum Xi Jinping with 六四 spice added by Ciro Santilli

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.

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: https://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 3, “Stack Overflow reputation vs Profile Views as of 2019 with Ciro Santilli marked as "A"”:

stack overflow reputation profile views ciro santilli
Figure 3. Stack Overflow reputation vs Profile Views as of 2019 with Ciro Santilli marked as "A"

Further analysis has been done at: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/376361/how-to-find-the-sample-points-that-have-statistically-meaningful-large-outlier-r

1.1.4. Ciro Santilli’s minor projects

These are some smaller projects that Ciro Santilli carried out. They are all either for fun, or misguided use of his time done by an younger self:

1.2. The most important projects Ciro Santilli wants to do

These are projects which Ciro seriously considering doing, and which he believe could have a considerable impact in the world, given a few months of work.

They are sorted in order of "most likely to get done first".

1.2.1. Write free books to get famous website

https://github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website

In this project, I want to explore if it is possible to create a sustainable website that will make people write university-level natural science books for free.

The initial incentive for those people is to make them famous and allow them to get more fulfilling jobs more easily, although I also want to add money transfer mechanisms to it later on.

The key intended technical innovation of the website is a PageRank-like algorithm that answers the key questions:

  • who knows the most about subject X

  • what is the best content for subject X

where any user can create any new subject X.

I envision a Wikipedia-like page, where you can fork a version of any subject or header to improve it, suggest changes via a "GitHub-pull-request-like" mechanism, and create bug reports under any given header.

Then, while reading an article about a subject, say, "The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus", you would be able to click a button, and easily view the other best articles about that subject.

Many subjects have changed very little in the last hundred years, and so I find it mind-blowing that people have to pay for books that teach them!

More than that however, if such project succeeds, it could fundamentally change the way university is organized, enormously improving its efficiency.

It could destroy the current educational system and replace it by one that lets people choose what they want to learn.

1.2.1.1. Write free books to get famous website motivation

Since I was young, I have been bewildered by the natural sciences and mathematics.

As a result, I have always suffered a lot at school: my grades were good, but I wasn’t really learning those beautiful things that I wanted to learn!

School, instead of helping me, was just wasting my time with superficial knowledge.

First, before university, school organization had only one goal: put you into the best universities, to make a poster out of you and get publicity, so that more parents will be willing to pay them money to put their kids into good university.

Then, after entering university, although things got way better, teachers were still to a large extent researchers who didn’t want to, know how to and above all have enough time and institutional freedom to teach things properly and make you see their beauty.

This is especially true because I was in Brazil, a third world country, where the opportunities are comparatively extremely limited to the first world.

And all of this is considering that was I was very luck and was already in some of the best educational institutions locally available already, and had comparatively awesome teachers. I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t had such advantages in the first place.

But no matter how awesome one teacher is, no single person can overcome a system so large and broken, without technological innovation that is.

The key problem all along the way is the Society’s / Government’s belief that everyone has to learn the same things, and that grades in exams mean anything.

I believe however, that exams are useless, and that there are only two meaningful metrics:

  • reputation points for doing useful work for society

  • how much money you make

Around 2012 however, I finally saw the light.

Firstly, I was introduced to LaTeX, and my mind was blown. Ha, so I can write my own books, and so can anyone, for free? Why isn’t everyone doing that!

Then I found two websites that changed my life forever, and made be believe that there was an alternative: Stack Overflow and GitHub.

The brutal openness of it all. The raw high quality content. Ugliness and uselessness too no doubt. But definitely spark in a sea of darkness.

University was not needed anymore. I could learn whatever I wanted. A vision was born.

To make things worse, for a long time I was tired of seeing poor people begging on the streets every day and not doing anything about it.

So, by the time I left University, instead of pursuing a PhD in theoretical Mathematics or Physics just for the beauty of it as I had once considered, I had new plans.

We needed a new educational system. One that would allow people to fulfill their potential and desires, and truly improve society as a result, both in rich and poor countries.

And I found out that programming and applied mathematics could also be fun, so I might as well have some fun while doing this! ;-)

So I started Booktree in 2014, worked on it for an year, noticed the idea was dumb, and then started building this new idea and the courage to do it.

1.2.2. Design a large cohesive game world for robotic-like artificial intelligence development

Prototype: https://github.com/cirosantilli/Urho3D-cheat YouTube demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_fl4xoGTKU

Less good discrete prototype: https://github.com/cirosantilli/rl-game-2d-grid YouTube demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ5k2u25eI8

Prior art research: https://github.com/cirosantilli/awesome-reinforcement-learning-games

ai game 2d continuous basketball
Figure 5. Screenshot of the "Basketrock" stage

The goal of this project is to reach artificial general intelligence.

A few initiatives have created reasonable sets of robotics-like games for the purposes of AI development, most notably: OpenAI and Google DeepMind.

However, all projects I’ve seen so far have only created sets of unrelated games, or worse: focused on closed games designed for humans!

What I really feel is needed is to create a single cohesive game world, designed specifically for this purpose, and with a very large number of game mechanics.

Notably, by "game mechanic" I mean "a magic aspect of the game world, which cannot be explained by object’s location and inertia alone". For example:

  • when you press a button here, a door opens somewhere far away

  • when you touch certain types of objects, a chemical reaction may happen, but not other types of objects

Much in the spirit of http://www.gvgai.net/, I we have to do the following loop:

  • create an initial game

  • find an AI that beats it well

  • study the AI, and add a new mechanic that breaks the AI, but does not break a human!

The question then becomes: do we have enough computational power to simulation a game worlds that is analogous enough to the real world, so that our AI algorithms will also apply to the real world?

To reduce computation requirements, I have decided to focus on a 2D world at first. I am confident that such world with the right mechanics can break any AI, while still being faster to simulate than a 3D world.

My prototype used the Urho3D open source game engine, and that is a reasonable project, but I feel a raw SDL + Box2D + OpenGL solution from scratch would be faster to develop for my use case, since Urho3D has a lot of human-gaming features that I don’t need. Also me and the 2019 maintainer don’t share certain political views :-), so I was blocked from the GitHub project and forum.

1.2.3. Create a website front-end for a mathematical formal proof system

When I first learnt the old Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory and the idea of Formal proofs, my mind was completely blown.

Finally, there it was: a proper and precise definition of mathematics, including a definition of integers, reals and limits!

Theorems are strings, proofs are string manipulations, and axioms are the initial strings that you can use.

Once proved, press a button on your computer, and the proof is automatically verified. No messy complicated "group of savants" reading it for 4 years and looking for flaws!

I am aware of a few formal proof systems with several theorems in their Git tracked standard library. I don’t know which one is best, nor have I used any of them, but the hottest ones seem to be:

And here are some more interesting links:

However, it still blows my mind, that there isn’t one awesome and dominating website, that hosts all those proofs, possibly an on the browser editor, and which all mathematicians in the world use as the one golden reference of mathematics to rule them all!

Just imagine the impact.

Standard library maintainers don’t have to deal with the impossible question of what is "beautiful" or "useful" enough mathematics to deserve merged: users just push content to the online database, and star what they like!

Interested in a conjecture? No problem: just subscribe to its formal statement + all known equivalents, and get an email on your inbox when it gets proved!

Are you a garage mathematician and have managed to prove a hard theorem, but no will will read your proof? Fuck that, just publish it on the system and let it get auto verified. Overnight fame awaits.

Notation incompatibility hell? A thing of the past, just automatically convert to your preferred representation.

Such a system would be the perfect companion to Write free books to get famous website. Just like computer code offers the backbone of Linux kernel module cheat Linux kernel tutorials, a formal proof system website would be the backbone of mathematics tutorials!

Furthermore, it would not be too hard to achieve this system!

All we would need would be something analogous to a package registry like Python’s PyPI or NodeJS' registry.

Then, each person can publish packages containing proofs.

Packages can rely on other packages that contain pre-requisites definition or theorem.

Packages are just regular git repos, with some metadata. One notable metadata would be a human readable description of the theorems the package provides.

The package registry would then in addition to most package registries have a CI server in it, that checks the correctness of all proofs, generates a web-page showing each theorem.

All proofs can be conditional: the package registry simply shows clearly what axiom set a theorem is based on.

1.2.4. Molecular biology

https://github.com/cirosantilli/awesome-whole-cell-simulation

I know "nothing" about this domain, but I see it clearly that silicon industry is ending, and that molecular biology technology is the most promising and growing field today.

Such advances could one day lead to both biological super-AGI and immortality.

First, during the 2000’s, the cost of sequencing fell to about 1000 USD per genome in the end of the 2010’s: Figure 6, “Cost per genome vs Moore’s law from 2000 to 2019, image by the NIH”. The medical consequences of this revolution are still trickling down the application ladder today, inevitably, but somewhat slowly due to tight control of medical records.

human genome sequencing cost evolution
Figure 6. Cost per genome vs Moore’s law from 2000 to 2019, image by the NIH

Then, in the 2010’s, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing started opening up the way to actually modifying the genome that we could now see.

What’s next?

I’d put my money on DNA synthesis, see for example: https://twistbioscience.com/ | https://www.evonetix.com/technology/ | http://dnascript.co/ | https://www.ansabio.com/ | https://www.nuclera.com/

I’m also curious about simulations of cell metabolism, protein and small molecule, microscopy (cristalography, cryo-EM), analytical chemistry (mass spectroscopy), single cell techniques (Single-cell RNA sequencing), …​

It’s weird, cells feel a lot like embedded systems: small, complex, hard to observe, and profound.

It saddens me that I’ll die and humanity won’t have understood the brain, maybe not even a measly E. Coli…​

1.2.5. Create videos of all key physics experiments

It is unbelievable that you can’t find easily on YouTube recreations of many of the key physics / chemistry experiments.

The videos must be completely reproducible, indicating the exact model of every experimental element used, and how the experiment is setup.

A bit like what Ciro Santilli does in his Stack Overflow contributions but with computers!

It is understandable that some experiments are just to complex and expensive to re-create, as an extreme example say, a precise description of the LHC, but up to the mid 20th century? We should have all of those nailed down.

We should strive to achieve the cheapest most reproducible setup possible.

Furthermore, it is also desirable to reproduce the original setups whenever possible in addition to having the most convenient modern setup.

Lists of good experiments to cover be found at: The most important physics experiments.

1.3. The best articles by Ciro Santilli

These are the articles ever authored by Ciro Santilli, most of them in the format of Stack Overflow answers.

Ciro posts updates on Twitter when new considerably cool ones are published: https://twitter.com/cirosantilli

1.4. Ciro Santilli’s ideology

Welcome to the wonderful world of Cirism!

1.4.1. Ciro Santilli’s ultimate life goal

Unconditional basic income is my ultimate non-transhumanist technological dream: to reach a state of technological advancement and distribution of resources so high that everyone gets money for doing nothing, enough for:

  • basic survival needs: food, housing, clothes, hygiene, etc.

  • two children to keep the world going. Or immortality tech, but I think that is harder and borderline transhumanist :-)

  • high speed computer and Internet

Once a person has that, they can learn, teach and create whatever they want. Or play video games all day long if they wish.

I don’t think I will live to see this, so I content myself with helping it happen faster by increasing the efficiency of the world as I can. And having at least two well educated kids to carry on the project after I die :-)

Technologies which would help a lot towards unconditional basic income and might be required but which I don’t think I will live to see:

  • Artificial general intelligence

  • affordable humanoid robots with human-like energy efficiency and power-to-weight ratio.

    But I feel that this is even less likely than AGI, since I’m alive at the end of silicon Moore’s law and at the start of the Genome’s Moore’s law: information doubles, small sizes halve, but macroscopic mechanical artifacts stay the same.

    I’m pretty certain about brain–computer interfaces, in particular full BCI as defined here. Post my life time however.

    So in the worst case we can just grow brainless bodies and replace the cavity hole with a computer that controls the body, possibly with high level decisions coming from a remote building-sized genetically engineered biological AGI brain.

Of course, it is all about costs. A human costs about 130k 2010 USD / year. So how cheap can we make the AGI / robot human equivalent / year for a given task?

AGI + humanoid robots likely implies AI takeover though. It would then come down to human loving bots vs human hating bots fighting it out. It will be both terrifying and fun to watch.

AGI alone would be very dangerous, in case it can get control of our nuclear arsenals through software zero days or social engineering. Although some claim that is unlikely.

Humanity’s best bet to achieve silicon AGI today is to work on: Design a large cohesive game world for robotic-like artificial intelligence development

1.4.2. Having more than one natural language is bad for the world

Natural language diversity is beautiful, but useless.

The fact that in poor countries a huge number of people do not speak the economically dominating language of the world (currently English), is a major obstacle to the development of those countries.

Despite us being in the information age, the people in those countries cannot fully benefit from it at all!

Teaching its people English should be the number one priority of any country. Without that, there can be no technological development. Everything else is secondary and can be learnt off the Internet once you know English.

And the most efficient way to do that, is that every country should create amazing free open source English learning material for their own language.

Also consider the European countries.

What big companies have been created in Europe in the past 50 years, that have not been bought out by American or Japanese companies?

The key problem is that there are so many small countries in Europe, that any startup has to deal with too many incompatible legislation and cannot easily sell to the hole of Europe.

So then a larger company from a more uniform country comes and eats it up!

So why can’t Europe unify its laws?

Because the countries are still essentially walled off by languages.

There isn’t true mobility of people between countries.

You just can’t go study or work in any other country (except for the UK, when it was still in the EU) without putting a huge effort into learning its language first.

Without this, there isn’t enough mixing to truly make cultures more uniform, and therefore allow the laws to be more uniform.

Europe can’t even unify basic things like a marriage registry, or the posting of parcels, which often get lost and require you to contact people who may not speak English.

For this reason, Europe will only continue to go downhill with the years, and the UK will continue to try and endosymbiose into a state of the USA.

It is the European Tower of Babel.

I believe that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is bullshit outside of poetry, and the ending of Arrival (2016) made me want to puke.

1.5. How to contact Ciro Santilli

To contact Ciro Santilli publicly about any general subject that is not covered in a more specif repository, including saying hi or suggestions about his website, create a GitHub issue at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/new

For comments about China first read:

and then create a GitHub issue at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/new

If you need private contact, extract his email from on of his GitHub repos or use LinkedIn.

Disqus comments were removed from his website in 2019-05-04, a manual dump is available here, removal rationale at: Why Ciro Santilli removed Disqus comments from his website in 2019-05-04.

1.6. How to develop Ciro Santilli’s website

His website is powered by GitHub Pages.

The source code is located at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io

Build locally, watch for changes and rebuild automatically, and start a local server with:

bundle install
./run

and then visit the website at:

xdg-open http://localhost:8000

After making any changes to the README.adoc, simply refresh the page to view the updates.

If you make changes to other files however, e.g. image, you must also do the full rebuild with:

./build

Source: build

Publish changes:

git add -u
git commit -m 'make yourself look sillier'
./publish

Source: publish

GitHub forces us to use the master branch for the build output…​ so the actual source is in the branch dev.

Update the gems with:

bundle update
git add Gemfile.lock
git commit -m 'update gems'

His website was originally written in Markdown and Jekyll, however those were deprecated in favour of Asciidoctor when Ciro saw the light, rationale shown at: /markdown-style-guide#use-asciidoc

Jekyll is only used now for backwards compatibility to not break some key content with high PageRank, Ciro might kill it entirely at some point.

GitHub pages is chosen instead of a GitHub README for the following reasons:

1.7. Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli

Ciro Santilli controls the following accounts:

Accounts in Chinese websites. These accounts might be banned or altered or offer other limitations, so Ciro only communicates briefly through them:

Dead websites:

A younger unrelated Argentinian homonym that can be found through Google:

2. Programming language choice

There is only space for two languages at most in the world: the compiled one, and the interpreted one.

For now, when you have a choice, you must go for:

  • Python as the interpreted one

  • C++ for compiled

Those two are languages not by any means perfect from a language design point of view, and there are likely already better alternatives, they are only chosen due to a pragmatic tradeoff between ecosystem and familiarity.

Bash can also be used when you’re lazy. But if the project goes on, you will sooner or later regret that choice.

The language syntax in itself does not matter. All that matters is how many useful libraries and tooling it has.

This is how other languages compare:

  • C cool, but cannot make a large codebase DRY without insanity

  • Ruby: the exact same as Python, and only strong in one domain: web, while Python rules everything else, and is not bad on web either. So just kill Ruby, please.

  • JavaScript: it is totally fine if NodeJS destroys Python and becomes the ONE scripting language to rule them all since Python and JavaScript are almost equally crappy.

    People just don’t use it much because of ecosystem / unfamiliarity.

  • Java: good language, but has an ugly enterprisey ecosystem, Oracle has made / kept the development process too closed, and API patenting madness on Android just kills if off completely

  • Haskell: many have tried to learn some functional stuff, but too hard. Sounds really cool though.

  • Rust: sounds cool, you will gladly replace C and C++ with it if the ecosystem ramps up.

  • Go: likely a good replacement for Python. If the ecosystem gets there, you will gladly use it more.

  • Swift: Apple Inc. is Evil

  • C#: Microsoft is Evil

  • Tcl, Perl: Python killed them way back and is less insane

  • R, GNU Octave: all of this is a waste of society’s time, applied mathematicians are capable of writing a few braces in exchange for a sane general purpose language, we should just invest in good libraries with fast C bindings for those languages like NumPy where needed. And when Ciro see the closed source ones like MATLAB being used, it makes him lose all hope on humanity.

3. Ciro Santilli’s website

Ciro Santilli's website is hosted at https://cirosantilli.com.

3.1. License of Ciro Santilli’s website

Ciro Santilli's website is licensed as: CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted on a more specific page or header. The license can also be found at: LICENSE.

3.2. Unmigrated sections of the old version of Ciro Santilli’s website

It is interesting to see how your own ideas shift with time, and Ciro Santilli doesn’t think the following are very important anymore, so he was lazy to migrate them:

When he did the original website Ciro was in a "I must show off my skills to get a job mindset", but then after he landed a few jobs he moved to a "CV websites are useless, just do amazing projects and showcase them on your website to help them succeed" mindset.

3.3. Why Ciro Santilli removed Disqus comments from his website in 2019-05-04

Commit: https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/commit/794705a201a79b5128934e69df85e3511655c03f

As Ciro started getting a lot of comments on his home page about China, he decided that Disqus does not scale, and that it would be more productive long term to remove it and point people to GitHub issues instead.

Upsides of removal:

  • Disqus discoverability is bad:

    • there is no decent way to search existing issues, you have to do JavaScript infinite loading + Ctrl + F. So every reply that he wrote is a waste of time, as it will never be seen again.

    • comments don’t have: decent URLs, titles, metadata like tags or open / close

  • Disqus archival is bad: http://web.archive.org/ does not work, and no one knows how to export the issues: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Disqus

  • before, there were two places where people could comment, Disqus and GitHub issues. Now there is just one.

  • Disqus has ads if you ever reach enough traffic, which unacceptable, especially if the website owner don’t get paid for them! It also makes page loads slower, although that likely does not matter much.

Downsides:

  • people are more likely to comment on Disqus than to create an issue on GitHub, especially because most people use GitHub professionally. But this has the upside that there will be less shitposts as well.

  • with Disqus you can see all issues attached to a page automatically, which is nice. But for as long as Ciro is alive, he intends to just solve the issues, cross link between content and issues and tag things appropriately.

Ciro’s stance towards China hasn’t changed, and China comments and corrections about his website are still welcome as always.

Related issue: https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/37

3.4. DNS configuration of Ciro Santilli’s website

AKA how this GitHub page gets served under the domain: https://cirosantilli.com

Ciro only touches this very rarely, and always forgets and go into great pain whenever a change needs to done, so it is important to document it.

The last change was of 2019-07-07, when Ciro moved from the www subdomain https://www.cirosantilli.com to the APEX https://cirosantilli.com. A redirect is setup from the www subdomain to APEX.

GoDaddy DNS entries:

Type    Name    Value                   TTL
A       @       185.199.108.153         1 Hour
A       @       185.199.109.153         1 Hour
A       @       185.199.110.153         1 Hour
A       @       185.199.111.153         1 Hour
CNAME   www     cirosantilli.github.io  1 Hour

where the IPs are obtained from: https://help.github.com/en/articles/setting-up-an-apex-domain#configuring-a-records-with-your-dns-provider (archive).

Under https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/settings

  • Custom domain: cirosantilli.com

  • Enforce HTTPS: checked

And the CNAME file is tracked in this repository: CNAME.

3.5. The CSS of Ciro Santilli’s website looks broken

That which does not exist, cannot be broken.

3.6. Ciro Santilli’s website is not mobile friendly

True art cannot be consumed in mobile format.

3.7. Mathematics typesetting setup of Ciro Santilli’s website

Inline: \(\sqrt{2+2} = 2\)

Block: A test block equation

A test block equation
\[\sqrt{2+2} = 2\]

4. Stack Overflow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow

The best place to get answers to programming questions as of 2019. Google into Stack Overflow is always the best bet.

An overview of Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contribution can be found at: Ciro Santilli’s Stack Overflow contributions.

4.1. Reply to Stack Overflow is doomed posts

Stack Overflow does have an super naive reputation and moderation system and overly restrictive subject matter, which Ciro Santilli wants to improve upon with: Write free books to get famous website.

However, it is the best that we have now, and if you use it like Ciro, you won’t get tired:

  • monitor only rare tags that you know a lot about, let others answer duplicates on big tags for you

  • only answer on bigger tags when you find a better answer than can be found on the page

  • accept that sometimes things are bound to go wrong, that reputation is meaningless, and move on

What else would you expect from a naive algorithm system that has 10 million newbies asking stuff?

4.2. The Machiavellian Stack Overflow contributor

  • always upvote questions you care about, to increase the probability that they will get answered

  • never upvote other people’s answers unless you might gain from it somehow, otherwise you are just giving other high reputation users more reputation relative to you

  • only mark something to close or as a duplicate if it will bring you some advantage, because closing things creates enemies, especially if the OP has a high profile

  • protect questions you’ve answered whenever someone with less than 10 reputation answers it with a bad answer, to prevent other good contributors from coming along and beating you

  • when you find a duplicate pool answer every question with similar answers.

    Alter each answer slightly to avoid the duplicate answer detector.

    If one of the question closes, it is not too bad, as it continues netting you to upvotes, and prevents new answers from coming in.

  • follow on Twitter / RSS someone who comments on the top features of new software releases. E.g. for Git, follow GitHub on Twitter. Then run back to any question which has a new answer.

  • always upvote the question when you answer it:

    • the more upvotes, more likely people are to click it.

    • the OP is more likely to see your answer and feel good and upvote you

  • if a niche question only has few answers and you come with a good one, upvote the existing ones by other high profile users.

    This may lead to them upvoting or liking you.

    Even if they don’t, other people will still see your answer anyways, and this will lead to people to upvoting you more just to make your great answer surpass the current ones, especially if the accepted one has less upvotes than yours. Being second is often an asset.

  • always upvote comments that favor you:

    • "I like this answer!" on your answers

    • "also look at that question" when you have answered that question

  • don’t invest a lot of time in edits. They don’t give you rep, and they can get reverted and waste your time.

  • if you answer a question by newbie without 15 reputation, find their other questions if any and upvote them, so that the OP can upvote your answer in addition to just accepting

  • If you haven’t answered a question, link to related questions you’ve answered on question comments, so more people will come to your answers.

    If you have answered the question, only link to other questions at the bottom of your answer, so that people won’t go away before they reach your answer, and so as to strengthen your answer.

4.3. Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script

https://github.com/cirosantilli/stack-overflow-vote-fraud-script

4.3.1. Ciro Santilli’s Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019-03-20

After Ciro Santilli got a lot of attention on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19428700 his Stack Overflow account was suspended for 3 days http://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 https://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 Team

To: 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,

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/533965/why-is-security-through-obscurity-a-bad-idea

    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: https://github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website/tree/d77b18d2e7acb3558615797c36195f60dfd26306#pagerank-with-tags

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

https://twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1108413211840339970

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, to which I answered with the correct unpopular answer that will be downvoted to oblivion: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/381577/is-it-ok-to-have-links-on-how-to-create-sock-puppets-and-gain-rep-fraudulently-i/381635#381635

5. Ciro Santilli’s skills

5.1. Ciro Santilli’s documentation superpowers

Ciro Santilli has the power to document stuff in a way that makes using them awesome.

If your project does something awesome, hiring Ciro means that more people will be able to notice that it is actually awesome, and use it.

He likes to do this in parallel to contributing new features, quickly switching between his "developer" and "technical documentor" hats.

This means of course that he will develop new features a bit slower than others, but he feel it is more valuable if end users can actually use your project in the first place.

His technique is to provide upfront extremely interactive and reproducible getting started setups that immediately show the key value of the project to users.

He backs those setups with:

  • scripts that automate the setup much as possible to make things enjoyable and reproducible

  • a detailed description of the environment in which he tested: which OS, version of key software, etc.

  • a detailed description of what is expected to happen when you take an action, including known bugs with links to bug reports

  • theory and rationale on the sections after the initial getting started, but always finely interspersed with concrete examples

  • all docs contained in a Git-tracked repo, with the ability to render to a single HTML with one TOC

  • short sentences and paragraphs, interspersed with many headers, lists and code blocks

While he create this setup, he inevitably start to notice and fix:

  • bugs

  • annoyances on the public interface of the project

  • the devs were using 50 different local scripts to do similar things, all of them semi-broken and limited. Every new hire was copying one of those local scripts, and hacking it up further.

  • your crappy build / test / version control setup

Exploiting this skill, however, requires you to trust him.

When he tells to managers that he’s good at documenting, they always say: great, we need better documentation! But then, one of the following may happen:

  • managers forget that they wanted good documentation and just tell him to code new features as fast as possible

  • they don’t let him own the getting started page, but rather and expect him to try and fix the existing crappy unfixable existing getting started, without stepping on anyone’s pride in the process >:-)

    This makes him tired, and less likely to do a good job.

    Good documentation requires a large number of small iterative reviews, and detailed review of every line is not always feasible.

    Too many cooks.

A prime example of this ability is his Linux kernel module cheat

See also: The best articles by Ciro Santilli.

5.2. Ciro Santilli’s natural languages skills

6. Art

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art

Stuff that is beautiful but useless because it does not make food or houses cheaper.

6.1. The best video game content of all time

The most beautiful TAS content ever made are:

6.2. The best YouTube channels

6.3. The best television series of all time

BBC 1979-1982 adaptations of John le Carré’s novels are the best miniseries ever made:

They are the most realistic depiction of spy craft ever done.

6.4. The best movies of all time

6.4.1. Once upon a time in the west (1968)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_the_West

Has the best opening scene of all time.

Top quotes:

6.4.2. Battle of Algiers (1966)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Algiers

There’s nothing like seeing the hypocrisy of the "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" people destroyed.

6.4.3. The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974)

Part 3 (1990) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godfather_Part_III is an abomination and disgrace to the bilogy.

6.4.4. Primer (2004)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)

Things that can be understood are boring.

6.5. The best music albums of all time

6.5.1. Surfing with the Alien (1987) by Joe Satriani

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfing_with_the_Alien

6.5.2. Secrets (1989) by Allan Holdsworth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_(Allan_Holdsworth_album)

6.5.3. Romantic Warrior (1976) by Return to Forever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_Warrior

6.5.4. Maiden Voyage (1965) by Herbie Hancock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_Voyage_(Herbie_Hancock_album)

6.5.5. Aurora (1976) by Jean-Luc Ponty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(Jean-Luc_Ponty_album)

7. Artificial general intelligence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

Shortened to: "AGI".

Given enough computational power per dollar, AGI is inevitable, but it is not sure certain ever happen given the end of Moore’s Law.

Alternatively, it could also be achieved genetically modified biological brains + brain in a vat.

Imagine a brain the size of a building, perfectly engineered to solve certain engineering problems, and giving hints to human operators + taking feedback from cameras and audio attached to the operators.

This likely implies transhumanism, and mind uploading.

Ciro Santilli joined the silicon industry at one point to help increase our computational capacity and reach AGI.

8. Physics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics

Ciro Santilli doesn’t know physics. He writes about it partly to start playing with some scientific content for: Write free books to get famous website, partly because this stuff is just amazingly beautiful. He is especially curious about Particle physics and condensed matter.

8.1. The most important physics experiments

Videos should be found / made for all of those: Create videos of all key physics experiments

8.1.1. Speed of light experiments

8.1.2. Double slit experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

When done with individual electrons it amazingly confirms the wave particle duality of quantum mechanics.

TODO here are a few non well specified demonstrations:

8.1.3. Blackbody radiation experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation

TODO original setups.

Led to: Planck’s law

8.1.4. Compton scattering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compton_scattering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uICnnfYHYJ4 "Compton Scattering" by "Compton Scattering" experiment with a Cesium-137 source.

Classic theory predicts that the output frequency must be the same as the input one since the electromagnetic wave makes the electron vibrate with same frequency as itself, which then irradiates further waves.

But the output waves are longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR88_Vzfcx4 "L3.3 Compton Scattering" by "MIT OpenCourseWare", because photons are discrete and energy is proportional to frequency.

The formula is exactly that of two relativistic billard balls colliding, which further suggests that photons are real.

Therefore this is evidence that photons exist and have momemtum.

8.1.5. Photoelectric effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect

No matter how hight the wave intensity, if it the frequency is small, no photons are removed from the material.

This is different from classic waves where energy is proportional to intensity, and coherent with the existence of photons and the Planck-Einstein relation.

8.1.6. Lamb shift

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift

2s / 2p energy split, not predicted by the Dirac Equation, but explained by Quantum Electrodynamics, which is one of the first great triumphs of that theory.

8.2. Particle physics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_physics

Currently an informal name for the Standard Model.

Key outline of the theories:

8.2.1. Quantum mechanics

8.2.1.1. Planck’s law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law

Used to explain: Blackbody radiation experiment

Good explanation of how discretization + energy increases with frequency explains the curve: https://youtu.be/KabPQLIXLw4?list=PL193BC0532FE7B02C&t=7 "Quantum Mechanics 2 - Photons" by "viascience". You need more and more energy for small wavelengths, each time higher above the average energy available.

TODO full equation derivation.

8.2.1.2. Spin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(physics)

TODO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sR6RV2znXI&list=PL193BC0532FE7B02C&index=17 "Quantum Mechanics 9a - Photon Spin and Schrödinger’s Cat I" by "viascience" shows nicely how:

  • Photon spin can be either linear or circular

  • the linear one can be made from a superposition of circular ones

  • straight antennas produce linearly polarized photos, and Helical antennas circularly polarized ones

  • a jump between 2s and 2p in an atom changes angular momentum. Therefore, the photon must carry angular momentum as well as energy.

8.2.2. Why do symmetries such as SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) matter in particle physics?

TODO.

Physicists love to talk about that stuff, but no one ever has the guts to explain it into enough detail to show its beauty.

8.2.3. Applications of particle physics

There aren’t any, it’s useless:

8.2.4. Particle physics bibliography

Some light YouTube channels, good for the first view, but which don’t go into enough detail to truly show the subject’s beauty:

8.2.5. Dirac Equation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation

8.2.5.1. How does Dirac’s equation model spin?

This tutorial is awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCuaBmAzqek "Quantum Mechanics 12a - Dirac Equation I" by "viascience" published 2015-12-19.

8.2.6. Quantum Electrodynamics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics

8.2.6.1. What does it mean that photons are force carriers for electromagnetism?

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/61095/photon-as-the-carrier-of-the-electromagnetic-force

TODO find / create decent answer.

8.2.7. Quantum Chromodynamics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoR3hq5b5yE "Quarks, Gluon flux tubes, Strong Nuclear Force, & Quantum Chromodynamics" by "Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky". Some decent visualizations of the field lines.

8.2.8. Photon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon

Initially light was though of as a wave because it experienced interference as shown by experiments such as:

But then, some key experiments also start suggesting that light is made up of discrete packets:

This duality is fully described mathematically by Quantum Electrodynamics.

8.2.8.1. Planck-Einstein relation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%E2%80%93Einstein_relation

Photon energy is proportional to its frequency:

\[energy = (plancks \space constant) * (frequency)\]

or with common weird variables:

\[E = h * \nu\]

This only makes sense if the Photon exists, there is no classical analogue.

Experiments that suggest this:

9. Countries

9.1. United States of America

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States

The ruler of the 1950-2020 world by Dollar and nuke count.

Capable of Evil like any other country, and somewhat merciless to its poor and overly egocentric, but not nearly as evil as any dictatorship.

Has the huge advantage of being one large country which speaks English.

9.2. China

The most awesome country in the world, except for it’s horrible government as of 2019 which Ciro Santilli is trying to replace with democracy.

9.3. Brazil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil

An awesome country, with amazing people and natural resources, and without an evil government like China.

But like most poor countries, it does not have enough money or scientific culture to make technological or scientific advances.

In order to get richer, Brazil should teach it’s people English very well and invest on projects that make education cheaper such as Write free books to get famous website.

9.4. Europe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe

For the most part, a great pseudo-country to live in with lots of cultural diversity, Art and safety, but in economic decline after all its Jewish geniuses fled in WWII and due to Having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

10. Companies

10.1. Microsoft Windows

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows

A monopolistic operating system that only exists today because of historical lock-in and constant useless changes of the Microsoft Word document format to prevent cross operability.

It offers no technical advantages over free Linux distros in the late 2010’s, and it is barely impossible to buy a non-Mac computer without paying for it, which should be illegal.

10.2. Apple Inc.

An American company that:

  • owns the entire stack and creates high quality highly optimized systems

  • uses way more open source than it gives back

  • creates closed lock-in systems without inter-operability and actively fights users from owning their devices

  • was founded by an Evil man who had interesting thoughts and behaviours

11. Evil

Things that are not nice such as: