Ciro Santilli (三西猴)

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

This is the most important technical tutorial project that Ciro Santilli 三西猴 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:

Due to this project, some have considered Ciro to be (archive):

which made Ciro smile, although "Linux kernel documenter God" would have been more precise.

https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245

Ciro Santilli 三西猴'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”.

Stack Overflow has been the initial centerpiece of Ciro Santilli’s campaign for freedom of speech in China.

In Stack Overflow Ciro likes to:

In practice it It also happens that Ciro:

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

He doesn’t like to refresh the homepage looking for easy 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 at the time was VonC, who had 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!

In terms of per year reputation ranks, Ciro was in the top 100 in of the 2018 ranking with 38,710 reputation gained in that year: https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2018-01-01?sort=reputationchange&page=4 (archive). Note that daily reputation is mostly capped to 200 per day, leading to a maximum 73000 per year. It is possible to overcome this limit either with bounties or accepts, and Ciro finds it amazing that some people actually break the 73k limit by far with accepts, e.g. Gordon Linoff reached 135k in 2018 (archive)! However, this is something that Ciro will never do, because it implies answering thousands and thousands of useless semi duplicate questions as fast as possible to get the accept. Ciro’s reputation comes purely from upvotes on important question, and is therefore sustainable without any extra effort once achieved. Interestingly, Ciro appeared on top of the quarter SE rankings around 2019-11: http://web.archive.org/web/20191112100606/https://stackexchange.com/leagues but it was just a bug ;-)

There is no joy like answering an old question, and watching your better answer go up little by little until it dominates all others.

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

What happens on the specialized topics though is that you end up getting to know all the 5 users who contribute 95% of the content pretty soon as you study those subjects.

Like everything that man does, the majority of Ciro’s answers are more or less superficial subjects that many people know but few have the patience to explain well, or they are updates to important questions reflecting upstream developments. But as long as they save 15 minutes from someone’s life, that’s fine.

For example, Ciro’s 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! This did teach a concrete life lesson to Ciro however: it is impossible to know what is the most useful thing you can do right now very precisely. The best bet is to follow your instincts and do as much awesome stuff as you can, and then, with some luck, some of those attempts will cover an use case.

Ciro tends to take most pride on his systems programming answers, which is a subject that truly relatively few people know about.

Ciro also derives great joy from his "media related answers" (3D graphics, audio, video), which are immensely fun to write, and sometimes borderline art, see answers such as those under "OpenGL" and "Media" under The best articles by Ciro Santilli or even simpler answers such as:

Ciro’s deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: Write free books to get famous website. So it is a bit funny to think that after all time Ciro spent on the website, he actually wants to destroy it and replace it with something better. There can be no innovation without some damage. It also led to Ciro’s creation of Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script.

After answering so many questions, he ended up converging to a more or less consistent style, which he formalized at: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18614/style-guide-for-questions-and-answers/326746#326746 Like any other style guide, this answer style guide, once fully incorporated and memorized, allows Ciro to write answers faster, without thinking about formatting issues.

Ciro also made a question title style guide: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903 but for some reason the Stack Overflow community prefers their semi-defined title meta-language to proper English. Go figure.

Ciro started contributing to Stack Overflow in 2012 when he was at École Polytechnique.

Like all things that end up shaping the course of one’s life, Ciro started contributing without thinking too much about it.

His first answer was to the LaTeX question: Standalone diagrams with TikZ?, which reflects the fact that this happened while Ciro was reaching his open source Enlightenment.

Ciro’s first upvote was for his 2012 question: How to run a Python script portably without specifying its full path?

When he started contributing, Ciro was still a newbie. One early event he will never forget was when someone mentioned a "man page", and Ciro commented saying that there was a typo!

When Ciro reached 15 points and gained the ability to upvote, it felt like a major milestone, he even took a screenshot of the browser! 1k, 10k and 100k were also particularly exciting. When the 100k cup (archive) arrived in 2018, Ciro made a show-off Facebook post (archive). At some point though, your brain stops caring, and automatically filters out any upvotes you get except on the answers that you are really proud of and which don’t yet have lots of upvotes. The last remaining useless gamed achievement that Ciro looks forward to is legendary (archive).

From the start, Ciro’s motivations for contributing to Stack Overflow have been a virtuous circle of:

It is also amazing when you start having a repertoire of answers, and as you are writing a new answer, you remember: "hey, the knowledge of that answer would be so welcome here", and so you link to the other answer as well at the perfect point. This somewhat achieves does what Write free books to get famous website aims to do: for each small section of a tutorial, gather the best answers by multiple people.

Ciro feels that his Stack Overflow alter ego is the user kenorb, which has a surprisingly similar contribution pattern (one of the top necromancers) and subjects (Python, Bash). Ciro tried to contact him to say hi, but it was hard to find a contact. kenorb, feel free to send Ciro a hi one of those days.

Another one is Aaron Hall, who is also very high on the necromancer list, answers in Python which is a topic Ciro cares about, and states on his profile:

Way to go.

Ciro also asks some questions on a ratio of about 1 question per 10 answers. But Ciro’s questions tend to be about extremely niche that no one knows/cares about, and a high percentage of them ends up getting self answered either at asking time or after later research.

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

Since 2015 Ciro Santilli 三西猴 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.

Like most people in the West, Ciro has always been for political freedom of speech, and therefore against the Chinese government’s policies.

However, the seriousness of the matter only fully dawned on him in 2015 when, his mother-in-law, a then a 63-year-old lady, was put into jail for 15 days for doing Falun Gong.

And all of this was made 100 times worse because Ciro deeply loves several aspects of China, such as food, language, art and culture, and saw it all being destroyed by the Communists.

The rationale of this is to force the Chinese Government to either:

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 6, “Scatter plot of Stack Overflow user reputation vs profile views in March 2019 with Ciro Santilli marked as A”:

Ciro feels that the view count started increasing more slowly since 2020 compared to his reputation, likely every single Chinese user has already viewed the profile.

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

These are some smaller projects that Ciro Santilli 三西猴 carried out. They are all either for fun, or misguided use of his time done by an younger self:

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

In this project, Ciro Santilli 三西猴 wants 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 Ciro also wants 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:

where any user can create any new subject X.

Ciro envisioned 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 it is 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.

Ciro decided to start with a decent markup language with a decent implementation: https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirodown Once that gets reasonable, he will move on to another attempt at the website itself.

Prototype: https://github.com/cirosantilli/Urho3D-cheat

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

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

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 so far have only created sets of unrelated games, or worse: focused on closed games designed for humans!

What is really 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" is meant "a magic aspect of the game world, which cannot be explained by object’s location and inertia alone". For example:

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

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, it is better to focus on a 2D world at first. Such world with the right mechanics can break any AI, while still being faster to simulate than a 3D world.

The initial prototype uses the Urho3D open source game engine, and that is a reasonable project, but a raw SDL + Box2D + OpenGL solution from scratch would be faster to develop for this use case, since Urho3D has a lot of human-gaming features that are not needed, and because 2019 Urho3D lead developpers disagree with the China censored keyword attack.

Simulations such as these can be viewed as a form of synthetic data generation procedure, where the goal is to use computer worlds to reduce the costs of experiments and to improve reproducibility.

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

As of 2019, the silicon industry is ending, and molecular biology technology is one of the most promising and growing field of engineering.

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

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 is especially excited about xref2:[DNA]-related technologies, because DNA is the centerpiece of biology, and it is programmable.

First, during the 2000’s, the cost of DNA Sequencing fell to about 1000 USD per genome in the end of the 2010’s: Figure 11, “Cost per genome vs Moore’s law from 2000 to 2019. Source.”, largely due to "Illumina's" technology.

The medical consequences of this revolution are still trickling down towards medical applications of 2019, inevitably, but somewhat slowly due to tight privacy control of medical records.

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 predicts that when the 100 dollar mark is reached, every person of the First world will have their genome sequenced, and then medical applications will be closer at hand than ever.

But even 100 dollars is not enough. Sequencing power is like computing power: humankind can never have enough. Sequencing is not a one per person thing. For example, as of 2019 tumors are already being sequenced to help understand and treat them, and scientists/doctors will sequence as many tumor cells as budget allows.

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

What’s next?

Ciro believes that the next step in the revolution could be could be: De novo DNA synthesis .

Other cool topic include: simulations of cell metabolism, protein and small molecule, microscopy (crystallography, cryoEM), 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.

Ciro is sad that by the time he dies, humanity won’t have understood the Brain, maybe not even a measly E. Coli…​ Heck, even key molecular biology events are not yet fully understood, see e.g. transcription regulation.

As of 2020, Ciro Santilli 三西猴 is getting excited about Quantum computing, which is a Deep tech field.

He’s a bit lazy to explain why here, but Googling will be more than enough.

There is a risk it will fizzle and the bubble pop, like any revolution.

But recent developments are making it too exciting to ignore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain–computer_interface

This is one of the Deep tech bets that Ciro Santilli 三西猴 would put his money in as of 2020.

How hard could it be? You just have to learn the encoding of the neural spine/eyes/ear, add an invasive device that multiplexes it, and then the benefits could be mind blowing.

Musk approves.

Interestingly and obviously, the initial advances in the area are happening for people that have hearing or vision difficulties. Since they already have a deficient sense, you don’t lose that much by a failed attempt.

Hearing is likely to be the first since it feels the simplest. Ciro heard there are even already clinical applications there. TODO source.

It is unbelievable that you can’t find easily on YouTube recreations of many of the key Physics/Chemistry experiments and of common laboratory techniques.

Experiments, the techniques required to to them, and the history of how they were first achieved, are the heart of the natural sciences. Without them, there is no motivation, no beauty, no nothing.

School gives too much emphasis on the formulas. This is bad. Much more important is to understand how the experiments are done in greater detail.

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 三西猴 does in his Stack Overflow contributions but with computers, by indicating precise versions of his operating system, software stack, and hardware whenever they may matter.

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 anyone? But experiments up to the mid-20th century before "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Science[big science]"? We should have all of those nailed down.

We should strive to achieve the cheapest most reproducible setup possible with currently available materials: recreating the original historic setup is cute, but not a priority.

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.

This project is to a large extent a political endeavour.

Someone with enough access to labs has to step up and make a name for themselves through the huge effort of creating a baseline of amazing content without yet being famous.

Until it reaches a point that this person is actively sought to create new material for others, and things snowball out of control. Maybe, if the Gods allow it, that person could be Ciro.

Tutorials with a gazillion photos and short videos are also equally good or even better than videos, see for example Ciro’s How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it for an example that goes toward that level of perfection.

The "Applied Science" YouTube channel by Ben Krasnow does well in that direction: it deals with materials, chemistry, microscopy, electronics. Uber practical, well described setups deep science stuff, he is awesome and has been at Google since 2016: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-krasnow-6796a94/

When Ciro Santilli 三西猴 first learnt the old Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory and the idea of Formal proofs, his 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!

There are a few formal proof systems with several theorems in their Git tracked standard library. The hottest ones are:

And here are some more interesting links:

However, it is unbelievable 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.

Bibliography:

If any of you ever read this, do send me an email to Ciro Santilli 三西猴 saying hi and we can agree on a clear separation of usernames.

Although if you are just starting out, maybe you should just go from scratch with a unique Internet alias.

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

Ciro used to like playing soccer too :-)

Unknown:

Unconditional basic income is Ciro Santilli 三西猴's 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:

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

Ciro santilli will not live to see this, and is content with helping it happen faster by increasing the efficiency of the world as. And having at least two well educated kids to carry on the project after he dies :-)

Technologies which would help a lot towards unconditional basic income, and might be strictly required required are:

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: Large cohesive game world for robotic-like artificial intelligence development.

Natural language diversity is beautiful.

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? Solexa (600M USD in 2007)? CSR (2.5B USD in 2015)? Arm Holdings (32B USD in 2016)?

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.

Equally so, it can’t force little fiscal paradises like Ireland, Luxembourg and Switzerland to not offer ridiculously low taxes and incentives which make them entry points for foreign companies to rape Europe.

For this reason, Europe will only continue to go downhill with the years, and the United Kingdom will continue to try and endosymbiose into a state of the USA (although at times it seems that it would rather endosymbiose with China instead).

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is bullshit outside of poetry, and the ending of Arrival (2016) makes one want to puke, where learning a language changes not only your brain, but also Ciro’s precious laws!

Much more likely are To Serve Man / A Small Talent for War events!

Remember that those ideas come from a person who speaks 3.5 languages in 2019, and see absolutely no practical difference between them.

One interesting anecdote is that Ciro met his wife in French, and talking to her primarily in English feels really weird, so language does matter in love.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/05/07/overcome/

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/11/08/not-bend/

For example, when Ciro Santilli 三西猴 was deciding what to do in university, he wanted mostly to do pure Physics.

But because he was afraid he was going to die poor and unemployed because of that, he picked engineering instead.

That was a mistake.

His family was not even poor. He was young and did not have a family to support. His father even told him: "do whatever the fuck you want, we support your decision".

But he was a coward.

Furthermore, while in University, Ciro learnt about a fantastic full time course that any student could transfer to called Molecular Science Course (Curso de Ciêncisa Moleculares, CCM) (good Portuguese overview)that teaches various natural sciences topics which Ciro loves (Mathematics and which students from the entire university can apply to transfer to only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they didn’t adapt to the new course.

But did Ciro do it? Nope, he remained an even larger coward.

Had he studied more sciences, he might have been happier, and might have had greater achievements later in life, in particular when he went to École Polytechnique.

Maybe not, but now this doubt will never leave his mind until the final day.

Similar thoughts crossed his mind when he started his campaign for freedom of speech in China, but this time he had learnt the lesson, and went for it, and it felt very good.

If you have a day job, but also have a dream, and want to keep the day job for a reason, try to reserve the time of the day that your brain works best before or after work for your dream.

Work a little less well for you boss, and a little better for yourself. Ross agrees: "I hated working for someone else and trading my time for money with no investment in myself". Selling drugs online is not advisable however.

Maybe you will be fired, but long term, having tried, or even succeeded your dream, or a one of its side effects, will be infinitely more satisfying.

The same goes for school, and maybe even more so because your parents can still support you there, some Gods who followed this advice:

Companies can help you grow because you see real problems from within them, but their end goal is to consume you as much as possible. Don’t let that happen. Invest part of what you gain, in yourself.

Don’t be a pussy. Be a based God.

Of course, survivorship bias applies.

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

This is one of Ciro Santilli’s most important principles.

Steve Jobs has a great quote about this. He’s totally right on this one!

Decide your goal first, and then do whatever is needed to how to reach it.

Don’t start randomly learning tech, because that means you will waste a lot of time learning useless stuff.

There is of course some level chicken-and-egg paradox in this, as highlighted by Dilbert, since choosing an achievable goal in the first place requires some level of technical understanding.

However, it is much more common that people will get way too involved in learning useless stuff and lose sight of the useful end goals.

Rather, take an iterative approach:

There is some truth to the counter argument that "but if you don’t spend a lot of time learning the basics, you can never find solutions".

However, these people underestimate your brain. The brain is beautiful, and human intuition is capable of generating interest towards the things that are actually useful to reach your goal. When you feel like learning something related to your goal, by all means, give yourself the time to do so. But this still be much more efficient than just learning random things that other people tell you to learn.

A Coding Horror software specific take on this issue: https://blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/

A quote by Ciro’s Teacher R.:

If the goals are not ambitious enough, you risk not even having useful side effects so show in the end!

By doing the prerequisites of the impossible goal you desire, maybe the next generation will be able to achieve it.

This is basically why Ciro Santilli has contributed to Stack Overflow, which has happened while was doing his overly ambitious projects and notice that all kinds of basic pre-requisites were not well explained anywhere.

This is especially effective when you use Backward design, because then you will go "down the dependency graph of prerequisites" and smoothen out any particularly inneficient points that you come across.

Ciro often has the following metaphor in his mind:

These are "original" thoughts that Ciro had which at some point in the past amused him. Some would call them pieces of wisdom, others self delusion. All have likely been thought by others in the past, and some of them Ciro thinks to himself after a few years: "why did I like this back then??".

After Ciro’s colleague was doing that in a project:

On the theory vs practice of computer science:

How software engineers view science:

But Ciro later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.

On how human perception of media is completely unrelated to the computer’s transmission mechanism:

This is of course just another version of one picture is worth a thousand words.

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 has mixed feelings about animal rights.

On one hand, his irrational side wants of course all animals to be happy.

On the other, he does not care about this enough to not kill and eat them, even though he believes that you could live off plants relatively well.

His more rational side says: humans are sacred. Either because you believe in the soul, or because your built-in empathy behaviours. If it is not a human, do whatever you want to it. Killing is already undoubtedly the greatest sin. It is not OK to kill a human painlessly is it? So if torturing it brings humans good, then do it.

Of course, this does get use close and closer to "the what is a human" question, which is more relevant than ever in the awakening of genetics: all species are after all a continuum right?

And Ciro does not have a simple solution to this problem, besides that in 99.9999% the answer is obvious to 99.9999% of the people, and for the others cases, we have to do it like the law and make flawed rules to cover the remaining 0.000099999% cases and let juries decide the rest.

The only other sensible sacredness barrier is the common vegetarian "nervous systems are sacred" one. But how can you believe that if you also follow the religion of Physics, where everything is just made of atoms?

Is it evil to take one neuron and torture it? What does that even mean? It will be fun when pain and pleasure are fully understood.

And you are going to have a really hard time when mosquitoes start transmitting deadly diseases that kill your family.

Laws in most 2020 Western modern societies have converged to a hypocritical balance between not offending people too much by hiding the killing and minimizing the pain when possible at low cost. Killing animals painlessly is basically always fine if it brings any "non sadistic" pleasure to humans. And torturing animals is fine with approval e.g. to make medicines.

This has the downside of increasing costs for society. Maybe there are practical benefits besides people feeling bad about animals? Maybe we would have more serial killers if people were free to torture animals? Maybe people in butcher shops would become depressive if their bosses weren’t forced to use more expensive painless killing methods? Neither of those seems like huge arguments though.

It eventually comes down to: "how much more is a human life worth than that of an animal" which brings Jesus's Matthew 6:25-34 "Do Not Worry" (archive) quote to mind:

Non-vegetarian pets owners also baffle Ciro, as most of them basically extend the sacred human line further arbitrarily to certain other cute looking animals like dogs, cats or rabbits, but will gladly kill a cow indirectly by paying someone to pay someone to pay someone to cut it into small pieces. Or they believe that certain specific individuals are sacred. Admittedly, the latter is more rational, and looks a lot of how we treat our own families well, and can accept that other families are not doing so well.

Ciro’s even more rational evil side says: the real reason why humans are sacred is a practical one: people have families that love them, and they come to kill you if you kill them, and this starts endless chains of violence that make society unbearable.

While animals feel pain when their children are killed, their memory and logic is just not good enough to fully understand that humans in general have an evil plot to it, and they don’t have a method to communicate between themselves and fight back.

For similar reasons, Ciro is pro-abortion.

Futurama’s S02E15 The Problem With Popplers blew Ciro’s mind so much.

Ciro should stop discussing topics in which infinite argument has already been had. Sometimes he writes things down so he can stop caring the next time the subject comes up, as there’s no need to say it again once it is written.

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 is against affirmative action university entry quotas that reserve spaces e.g. for students from discriminated races or poor families.

Notably, Brazil has implemented a very heavy university entry quota system after Ciro had left university there: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23862676

This is of course easy for a white male from a privileged background to say, and infinite debate has already been had on this matter, but here goes again.

First, in defense to the personal attack, Ciro raises the fact that he has dedicated large chunks (all?) of his life to open source software and knowledge in general, which Ciro believes is the only way to actually make the world fairer to poor countries. His money (time) is where his mouth is.

One good argument in favor of the Brazilian quota system, is that the kids who enter university because of quotas do just as well as those who don’t.

Ciro has actually believes that this is possible, and offers the following possible explanation: most of pre-university knowledge is useless.

Both the top end of the quota and non-quota kids are basically equally capable of doing useful stuff therefore.

Only a tiny fraction of what you learn in high school is useful for university or your career.

And possibly more importantly than knowledge, Ciro saw many of his colleagues (basically all of which were from relatively privileged backgrounds) "do badly" in university, because of lack of motivation, because they had chosen a course only to find that they were not interested in it because the existing high school educational system is crap and does not help them find what they love and because it costs you several years of your life to change your choice in most universities (long live École Polytechnique).

Maybe the fact that poor kids know that they are fucked if they fail, and so they have to succeed at any cost, might also help with motivation.

Ciro believes instead that only once kids have learnt university level stuff in their area of interest for free on the Internet should they go through selection based on that specific and much more concentrated useful knowledge.

And this competition must only be used to distribute resources which you can’t learn from fucking computers:

Once this point knowledge is reached however, it starts to become unclear if a single "everyone takes the same test to avoid discrimination" test is feasible anymore, and we start entering the much more relevant (and potentially discriminatory) "I am a teacher trying to advance the state of the art, and I need a person mildly skilled in the art to do some slave labor for me", which is PhDs selection work.

If quota are in place, what will happen is that parents of the rich kids will start investing less in education, and possibly just put their kids in high schools, and do home schooling instead. This would therefore reduce the total investments the country makes in education!

Outside of the obvious technical evolution proposed, Ciro recommends the following:

This advice is similar to what is mentioned at: What poor countries have to do to get richer. When you don’t have money to do everything, you must select a few good bets and focus on them. As those smart bets pay off, you start to have more and more money to expand the system further.

This is one of the main reasons why Ciro Santilli 三西猴 invested in Write free books to get famous website.

Ciro believes that the only thing students must be forced to learn is to speak read and write English and that a teacher’s main job after that is to help students find their next big goals and also ties into the backward design philosophy.

Everything else, the student must choose.

This is most notable in University entry examinations of poor countries, where students often have to wast one extra year of their lives to go through preparation for the useless university entry exams. And then, surprise surprise, if they actually get in, they find that this is not what they really wanted to do, and they just go through to the end miserably because they understandably they don’t want to risk another year of their lives.

Ciro saw this first hand École Polytechnique which was way freer than his university in Brazil.

Steve Jobs's university dropout stories from Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Address also come to mind.

Brown University’s Open Curriculum concept sounds exemplary:

Since Ciro Santilli 三西猴 is Brazilian, this is understandably a common conversation opener.

And rightly so, since soccer in particular is truly ridiculously popular in Brazil, where "what is your local soccer team?" is just a valid a question as "which city are you from?".

So here goes Ciro’s current ironic answer:

The ironic reason is simple: maybe is Brazil loses more on this useless art, then maybe people will get tired of it, and instead invest on more useful and beautiful arts.

Notably, what Ciro really wants people to root for are:

Don’t get Ciro wrong.

Playing sports yourself is amazing.

Observing professionals who do it amazingly can be beautiful.

But why the F do you have to root for a team unless your wife or children are playing in it (and even then…​, how will that help?)?

What will you get from that?

Even if it is your national team, why does it matter if they win or lose?

Hooliganism just takes that uselessness to a hole new level.

Now some confessions.

A five year old Ciro will never forget when the feeling of Brazil won the 1994 World Cup on the penalties and everyone went mad.

A nine year old Ciro stopped watching the 1998 World Cup Final of Brazil vs France half way during the 3-0 massacre and went to his front garden to kick his soccer ball on the metallic fence gate which represented a goal.

After that, Ciro went through puberty he guesses, and noticed that the natural sciences are just cooler.

Ciro’s website is powered by GitHub Pages and Jekyll Asciidoc.

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:

Source: run

The website will be visible at: http://localhost:4000.

Tested on the latest Ubuntu.

Publish changes to GitHub pages:

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:

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

GitHub pages is chosen instead of a single page GitHub README.adoc for the following reasons:

It is interesting to see how your own ideas shift with time, and Ciro Santilli 三西猴 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.

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:

Downsides:

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

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:

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

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

That which does not exist, cannot be broken.

And of course:

True Art cannot be consumed in mobile format.

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

Block: A test block equation

TODO: move to https://github.com/cirosantilli/asciidoctor-katex-2 once major TODOs there are done.

Not perfect yet, but doing some progress, currently xref2 links resolve to .html correctly:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26778329/running-jekyll-generated-files-without-jekyll-local-server

TODO: download all resources, including CSS and JavaScript. Images are already half way because basically all already go through image2. External CSS and JavaScript would require extending Jekyll with a tag plugin, which should not be hard.

Download all images download for development is already possible with;

And after the download was done once before, generate output that uses the downloaded files instead of remote ones:

or when running the development server:

TODO: for some reason when I access How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it in offline mode on the browser at 7c119de0dcf263f5cd24ceb5e171a4bfd433c7e7 + 1 I get a few messages:

Related: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/6899

Because when this gets converted to a Write free books to get famous website page, it will be easier for people to copy paragraphs/fork and write a canonical page about Ciro.

Also, what do you do when creating a pull request? Do you say I, which is not true because Ciro did not say that, or do you say "John Doe thinks" bla bla?

And because his name is awesome! :-) Just kidding.

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 has the power to document stuff in a way that makes using them awesome, as evidenced by his his Stack Overflow contributions and other web presences.

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:

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

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:

A prime example of this ability is his Linux Kernel Module Cheat

See also: The best articles by Ciro Santilli.

When asked, Ciro likes to say that he speaks something between 1.5 and 3.5 languages in total, depending on how you count, because Portuguese, French and English are 99.99% the same, and Chinese is completely different but Ciro only knows about 50% of it if counted optimistically.

Ciro like to interpret this as him having "a creative personality" with the tradeoff of generally not being amazing at his well defined jobs.

Ciro is a high flying bird scientist.

Ciro’s natural fight-or-flight response is to hide in a little corner, and try to solve the problem out. Then get distracted and start procrastinating. And then he tries to solve the unsolvable. Someone once told him quite correctly:

There are of course infinitely many videos on the "entrepreneurial mindset" online, and it is impossible to know if they are bullshit, or if everyone just feels like that, but OK, just let Ciro feels that he is specially creative will you?

Some quotes from the above:

and:

Which brings Steve Jobs's quote to mind:

Ciro also one heard a story, likely apocryphal, but still nonetheless resonated with him, that went something like this (TODO find source, Google wasn’t helping, stuff that happened before website as usual):

Ciro likes this story because although he does not drink, he feels his work mind works in a related way. Often, when there is something really hard he knows needs doing he hides, and distracts himself with less important tasks, or by watching crap on YouTube, because he knows that the hard task will hurt his mind. Then one day he wakes up and says: OK, fuck it, let’s do it, and does it.

Once Ciro got a performance review from a colleague that said:

Yes, low conscientiousness, give it to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei | https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/无为_(道家)

Ciro feels that all really important and productive activities come spontaneously, without being internally forced upon people.

You may say that this is because Ciro is lazy, but Bill says (archive) this isn’t necessarily bad:

You may also say that Ciro is an idealist, because what to do when the food will run out and you have to hunt? To which Jesus replies at Matthew 6:25-34 "Do Not Worry" (archive):

Ciro is also fond of the description of the work method of some writer that his father told him about, possibly Haruki Murakami 村上 春樹. Could not find sources, to treat as apocryphal for now. Basically something like:

Another good one is Hemingway’s work method:

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 has a bad memory for events that happened a medium time ago, for example in order of months / years. Especially if they are one-off things that have no relation to anything else.

For example, Ciro never remembers which places he travelled to just once, and who was in each trip! He has images of several places he travelled to in his head, and would recognize them, but he just doesn’t know where they were!

The same goes for scenes from movies and passages from music, which explains why Ciro’s Art consumption focuses on innovative discrete "what happened" and "general gist" ideas, rather than, analog details such as colors and shapes.

Going back even further in time, Ciro starts to forget the less close friends he had, because the events start to fade away.

Paradoxically however, Ciro believes that this bad memory is one of his greatest strengths and key defining characteristics, because it leads Ciro to want to write down every interesting thing he learns, which motivated Write free books to get famous website and his Stack Overflow contributions.

It also somewhat leads Ciro to like Physics and Mathematics, because in these fields you can deduce everything from very few base principles, so if you forget them, it does not matter that much as you can re-deduce stuff over and over.

Ciro believes that there are two types of people, and most notably software engineers, which are basically data wranglers: those with bad memory and those with good memory.

Those with bad memory, tend to focus on automating and improving their processes a lot. They take much longer to do one-off specific deep knowledge tasks however.

The downside of the good memory ones is that sooner or later they will find tasks that no matter how much memory they have, they cannot solve without automation, and they will fail at those.

Also, good memory people don’t enable others to join the project efficiently as much.

This dichotomy also explains why Ciro sucks at code reviews, but is rather the person who runs the interesting patches by himself and finds some critical problems that the more theoretical code reviewers missed.

If Ciro had become a scientist, he would without doubt be an experimentalist, just like in this reality he is a GDB/runtime person rather than a "static source analysis" person. Those who have bad memory prefer to just run experiments over and over and observe system state at runtime.

A Quora answer! https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-benefits-of-having-a-poor-memory/answer/Ciro-Santilli

Just enough money to raise 3 kids in a rich country without having to work (so he can focus on whatever project he wants) and no more. Then maximize fame.

Fame is slightly convertible into money with generally little liquidity, but is more valuable if money becomes useless in a TEOTWAWKI.

Of course, in the end, one just does whatever seems cool and useful, and the Gods decide what proportion of fame/money/power they will get. Due to Ciro’s love of Open source software however, a higher fame percentage seems more likely than money.

Ciro Santilli’s full name is quite unique and already dominated by this Ciro Santilli 三西猴.

Searching just for just "Santilli" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits. The name appears to be a minor variation of the much more common "Santini". Since the name is not that common, it is possible to go over all noteworthy hits. Some relevant ones are shown at: Interesting members of the Santilli family.

Searching just for just "Ciro" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits, mostly some smaller brands that could be beaten, this is Ciro’s main initial fame metric goal. Reaching it would require doing things known much beyond the programming community however, as Ciro has done until of 2019. http://ciro.com is from an electromechanics consultancy as of 2019, so it’s not bad, let them be.

At the next useless gamified level, an honorary OBE and more ambitiously ForMemRS from the The Royal Society post nominal letters would be nice.

The ultimate dream however would be to beat Cyrus the Great himself on Google searches ("Ciro" == "Cyrus" in Portuguese), maybe becoming "Cyrus the Greater"? That one will be a bit harder though. Maybe if Falung Gong becomes the dominant religion in 2000 years like Christianism did, catapulting the Judaism benefactor Cyrus into greater fame, then there is some hope for Ciro as well.

Ciro’s ideal city to live in contains the following in order of decreasing importance:

Could California be Ciro’s Mecca?

During his teenage years, Ciro created an innovative new dance style combining elements of the various corporal practices that he studied a bit of across the years:

Ciro later called this style Cirodance.

Ciro’s legendary dance style was famous during his university years, when Ciro would go to parties and dance like made while mostly unsuccessfully trying to woo girls.

Ciro has always been critical of dancing conditions in University parties, where people would always be cramped up doing boring non-creative moves. Rather, Ciro would go to to the edges of the dance floor to have enough space for his amazing moves. There is a perhaps a parallel between such tendencies and Ciro’s highly innovative personality. Also perhaps being cramped would have helped wooing said girls.

Ciro later quit dancing, to a large extent because it is too hard to find suitable dancing locations outside: Europe is too cold, also ground conditions have to be perfect, and no patience to book a dance room somewhere. Kid’s playgrounds are ideal, but Ciro is afraid of dancing there because kids parent’s would freak out.

Therefore, all evidence of Cirodance seems to have disappeared into the depths of the Internet. There used to be a notorious video on YouTube entitled "A Piriguete da Poli" ("Poli’s bitch" in Portuguese) but Ciro lost the link/it was deleted? But in any case, the title gives an idea of the amazing style of Ciro’s furor poeticus Axé performance on that day.

One legendary episode linked to Cirodance was when Ciro was living in Paris and jobless around 2014 (but not destitute as he leached from his girlfriend). Cirodance was his main physical activity at the time, and Place de la République, where the skateboarders hung out due to the perfect wide concrete floor and relatively close to Bastille where Ciro lived, was the perfect place for it. One cold dark winter evening, Ciro was practicing Cirodance with his headphones and crappy clothes (dirty public square floor, remember), when someone took him for a homeless person and offered him a bowl of soup! It must be said that Place de la République had many events of giving food to the poor. Ciro was a bit stunned, declined, and continued dancing. And so that was the day when a prestigious Polytechnicien was mistaken for a homeless person. And Ciro liked that.

If Achilles' had his heel, Ciro had his knee.

First during University in Brazil while trying a kick up during the development of Cirodance his knee went a bit weird for a few weeks.

Then, just after arriving in France for École Polytechnique, the boys were playing indoor soccer, and to impress the girls Ciro was playing really hard, even took off his shirt, and suddenly when he was running by himself his knee snapped, he fell and it hurt like hell.

Ciro was on crutches for a few weeks, but the inflammation went away, but then he tried to play more soccer, but the knee was not as stable as before, and so he gave up. And for some reason it was not visible on the tomography.

So from this day on Ciro gave up on all interesting sports, and confined himself to more repetitive stuff like gym weights and cycling: Section 1.9.8, “Ciro Santilli’s sport practice”.

This defect is likely genetic since a close relative had similar problems.

But oh well, his then not-even girlfriend was impressed enough by the soccer or sorry enough for the sucker to marry him, so it worked out.

As a Brazilian, Ciro Santilli 三西猴 used to really love playing soccer (but not watching it), until xef2:ciro-santillis-knee[he hurt his knee].

Playing soccer just feels amazing, because you are constantly running around, but with a more specific goal in mind: to get that ball into that goal!

Playing soccer was specially amazing in the flat wet sand beach of Santos. Weekend, the sea, feet touching the sand, the sun going down, and your school mates next to you. Nirvana.

It is also true that under those conditions, the skin of your feet will get ripped off due to running on the slightly wet and flat sand no matter how thick it has become. But it is worth it.

Ciro became however disillusioned with soccer after his injury. It is a shame.

And so after that, Ciro decided to dedicate himself to sports where you can’t hurt your knee.

Ciro hates water, so swimming is out of the question. What could be more boring than going back and forth on a fixed location a million times to gain some milliseconds?

Also, Ciro has an unidentified condition where his upper legs and lower torso often start to itch when he runs, to the point of being extremely annoying. If some doctor knows why this could be, please tell him.

And so Ciro has been left with the gym as the only main option for a while.

This is until he ended up living in a place with decent roads for cycling in the late 2010’s.

First he was just cycling to work. But then he started to adventure out of town, and it just felt so good.

Like other drugs, you will have some bad trips, e.g. went the wrong way on a highway and are afraid you are going to die crushed by fast cars, got flat tire on 1 hour ride and have no repair kit, destination cafe is closed and you are hungry, wind got so strong you can barely ride, half an hour in you find out that it is way colder than what you expected.

But for every such experience you survive, you learn something to reduce the chances it will happen.

Cycling just gives you an amazing sense of freedom!

Also, as you start cycling, you can feel the endorphins rise little by little, until you reach a point where you fell like you are part of the road.

It is amazing how you feel much less cold and hunger when cycling, to the point of being dangerous: always carry some chocolate bars in case you hit the wall!

As a friend of Ciro once said: you start to become like a wolf, who knows every cyclable little road in a 30km radius around your home.

As of 2020, Ciro is at that "should I buy a more reasonable road bike" moment. Let’s see how it goes. If he does, cycling trips with the bike on a plane are likely.

As a software engineer, trying to repair a mechanical system like his bike reminds Ciro very strongly of how the physical engineering is brutal. Millimetric changes can make huge differences, it is mind blowing! Good lesson to have in mind.

Another thought that often comes to Ciro’s mind is that bicycles are not regular possessions because they break a lot. Rather, they must be seen as a kind of transportation tax that you have to pay to feel amazing riding them rather than feel crappy riding a bus or train.

One interesting feeling that Ciro gets from cycling is that it is an intermediate between walking and riding a car. Ciro felt this especially strongly when he lived near work, at a distance that you could either walk or cycle. When you walk, you can just see so much more of the surroundings, it is astonishing. When you cycle, you just go much faster, and you attention is much more towards the front, so you feel surroundings much less. On the other side, cycling allows you to feel different things. E.g. in wider open areas, there isn’t much detail to see anyway, so you can better feel those areas on the faster speed of the bike. A similar feeling applies to how pedestrians feel like flies when you are on a bike, just like you must feel like a fly to car drivers.

Although Ciro does not run because of his itchy legs issue, he finds it interest to contrast cycling with running, notably:

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 did a double degree program, and obtained degrees in both:

Ciro participated in a double degree program, so he obtained have engineering degrees in both:

Despite studying in great institutions with great teachers, Ciro feels that:

This motivated Ciro to work on Write free books to get famous website.

Ciro’s parents put him to play the piano. This is partly influenced by Ciro’s paternal grandfather, an energetic Italian descendant who liked music

The piano was fine, but a bit boring due to how it was taught.

The teachers were nice old ladies who followed a very traditional and methodic approach which was just like regular school, instead of doing what actually needed to be done: inspire kids into becoming creative musical geniuses that can compose their own stuff.

While in Santos, before going to university, Ciro somehow got into acoustic and electric guitar.

The electric guitar environment was much less formalized in general, and he took courses with an awesome teacher (archive), who actually tried to inspire his students to create their own music and improvisation.

And so a young teenage Ciro once seriously considered becoming a professional guitar player.

In his early teens, Ciro listened to the usual canned music his friends listened to: Music teenager Ciro Santilli liked to listen to, until he started to stumble upon Jazz.

Ciro remembers clearly rainy weekend days where he would go to a run down second hand shop near his home in someone’s garage (Sebo do Alfaiate, R. Frei Francisco de Sampaio, 183 - Embaré, Santos - SP, 11040-220, Brazil :-)), and buy amazing second hand Jazz CDs. It was just a matter of time until he would start scouring the web for "the best jazz albums of all time" and start listening to all of them.

Ciro ultimately decided his bad memory and overwhelming passion for the natural sciences would better suit a scientific carrier.

He also learnt that the Computer is also an extremely satisfying artistic instrument.

Also, with a computer, boring dexterity limitations are no more: you can just record perfect played segments or program things note by note to achieve whatever music or action you want!

Although Ciro quit playing musical instruments, his passion for the music has remained, and who knows how it has influenced his life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment

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

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

Here are a few non well specified demonstrations. TODO how do they know that there is just a single photon though? Single photon production and detection experiments.

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

TODO original setups.

Led to: Planck’s law

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

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 because photons are discrete and energy is proportional to frequency:

The formula is exactly that of two relativistic billiard balls colliding.

Therefore this is evidence that photons exist and have momentum.

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.

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.

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

The key is to define only the minimum number of measures: if you define more definitions become over constrained and could be inconsistent.

Learning the modern SI is also a great way to learn some interesting Physics.

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

As of 2019, the more formal name for Particle physics, which is notably missing General relativity to achieve the Theory of everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations

Unified all previous electro-magnetism theories into one equation.

Explains the propagation of light as a wave, and matches the previously known relationship between the speed of light and electromagnetic constants.

The equations are a limit case of the more complete Quantum Electrodynamics, and unlike that more general theory account for the quantization of Photon.

TODO: what does it mean that it is coherent with Special relativity?

The equations are a system of Partial differential equations.

The system consists of 6 unknown functions that map 4 variables: time t and the x, y and z positions in space, to a real number:

and two known input functions:

Due to the conservation of charge however, those input functions have the following restriction:

Also consider the following cases:

The goal of finding \(\E\) and \(\B\) is that those fields allow us to determine the force that gets applied to a charge via the Lorentz force equation:

and then to find the force we just need to integrate over the entire body.

Finally, now that we have defined all terms involved in the Maxwell equations, let’s see the equations:

and you should review the interpretation of divergence \(\divergence{}\) and curl \(\curl{}\):

For numerical algorithms and to get a more low level understanding of the equations, we can expand all terms to the simpler and more explicit form:

As you can see, this expands to 8 equations, so the question arises if the system is over-determined because it only has 6 variables. As explained at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations#Overdetermination_of_Maxwell’s_equations however, this is not the case, because if the first two equations hold for the initial condition, then they also hold for all time, so they can be essentially omitted.

It is also worth noting that the first two equations don’t involve time derivatives. Therefore, they can be seen as spacial constraints.

Special relativity

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

TODO.

Key experiments that could not work without quantum:

Mathematics: there are a few models of increasing precision which could all be called "quantum mechanics":

Ciro feels that the largest technological revolutions since the 1950’s have been quantum related, and will continue to be for a while, from deeper understanding of chemistry and materials to Quantum computing, understanding and controlling quantum systems is where the most interesting frontier of technology lies.

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

Gotta understand this because the name sounds cool.

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.

There aren’t any, it’s useless:

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

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

Adds Special relativity to the Schrodinger equation. Spin and antimatter comes out for free.

Experiments explained:

Experiments not explained: those that Quantum Electrodynamics explains like the Lamb shift.

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

Theory that describes electrons and photons really well, and as Feynman puts it, accounts very precisely for all physical phenomena we have ever observed, except for gravity and nuclear physics ("including the laughter of the crowd" ;-)).

Learning it is one of Ciro Santilli 三西猴's main intellectual fetishes.

Experiments explained:

Applications:

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

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.

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

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

This is the key thing to understand!!

TODO correct and clean this up.

The state of a quantum system is a vector of unit length in a Hilbert space. TODO why Hilbert Space.

"Doing a measurement" means applying a Self-adjoint operator to the state, and after a measurement is done

Self adjoint operators are chosen because they have the following key properties:

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_in_quantum_mechanics

Where derivation == "intuitive routes", since a "law of physics" cannot be derived, only observed right or wrong.

TODO why is there a Complex number in the equation? Intuitively and mathematically.

As always, the best way to get some intuition about an equation is to solve it for some simple cases, so let’s give that a try with different fixed potentials.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/229885/energy-equation-in-quantum-mechanics

TODO is there any good intuitive argument or proof of conservation of energy, momentum, angular momentum?

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266359/when-we-say-electron-spin-is-1-2-what-exactly-does-it-mean-1-2-of-what

More interestingly, how is that implied by the Stern Gerlach experiment?

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266359/when-we-say-electron-spin-is-1-2-what-exactly-does-it-mean-1-2-of-what/266371#266371 suggests that half could either mean:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Nuclear/nspin.html

TODO experiments. Can you do Stern Gerlach experiment with alpha particles?

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

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistic

How are the bands measured experimentally?

Why are there gaps? Why aren’t bands infinite? What determines the width of gaps?

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

The basis of 1970-20XX computers, gotta understand them I guess.

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

Experiments:

Lectures:

Media:

Experiments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose–Einstein_condensate

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

Specific type of Josephson Junction. Probably can be made tiny and in huge numbers through photolithography.

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

TODO can anything interesting and deep be said about "why phase transition happens?" https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29128/what-causes-a-phase-transition

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

Ah, the jewel of computational physics.

Also known as an ab initio method: no experimental measurement is taken as input, QED is all you need.

But since QED is thought to fully describe all relevant aspects mollecules, it could be called "the" ab initio method.

For one, if we were able to predict protein molecule interactions, our understanding of Molecular biology technologies would be solved.

No more ultra expensive and complicated X ray crystallography or Cryogenic Electron Microscopy.

And the fact that quantum computers are one of the most promising advances to this field, is also very very exciting: Quantum algorithms.

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

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

Eccentric nerdy slow speaking Physicist mostly based in University of Cambridge.

Created the Dirac Equation, what else do you need to know?!

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

While learning black-hole stuff is not on top of Ciro Santilli 三西猴's priorities, Hawking’s spirit is to be admired.

To never give up even when everything seems lost, and still have a sense of humour is respectable.

An ex-physicist colleague who had met Hawking told an anecdote. Hawking was around in the department one day, they said hi and all. But then Hawking wanted to tell a joke. It took like 5 minutes of typing, and you can imagine that things were pretty awkward and the joke’s timing was "a bit off". But Hawking did tell the joke nonetheless.

This is also suggested in the The Theory of Everything (2014) film, and therefore likely the biographies.

Not the usual bullshit you were expecting right?

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 also likes how Monod "learned from other students a little older than himself, rather than from the faculty.", read somewhere else that it is because faculty is more likely outdated.

The natural sciences are not just a tool to predict the future.

They are a reminder that the lives that we live daily are mere illusions, just like Buddhists and Hinduists say.

We as individuals perceive nothing about the materials that we touch every day really work, nor more importantly how our Brain and cells work.

Everything is magic out of our control.

The natural sciences allow us peek, with huge concentrated effort, into tiny little bits a little of those unknowns, and blow our minds as we notice that we don’t know anything.

Every one or two week Ciro Santilli 三西猴 remembers that he and everything he touches are just a bunch of atoms, and that is an amazing feeling.

Alan Watts's "Philosopher" talk mentions related ideas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(mathematics)

Intuitively: unordered container where all the values are unique, just like C++ std::set.

More precisely for set theory Formalization of mathematics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)

Set of ordered pairs. That’s it!

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1480651/is-fx-x-1-x-2-a-function/1481099#1481099

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

Good definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedekind_cut

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

An Ordered pair of two real numbers with addition and multiplication defined to match whatever bullshit formula they taught you in school.

TODO visual interpretations.

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

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

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

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

Applications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-adjoint_operator

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

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

"More complex" integral. Matches "Reimann" for "simple functions", but also works for some "funkier" functions that Reimann does not work for.

Key motivation: Lebesgue integral of \(\LP\) is complete but Reimann isn’t.

https://youtu.be/PGPZ0P1PJfw?t=710 also mentions that one advantage is being able to switch the order of integrals and limits of function sequences on non-uniform convergence. TODO why do we care?

https://youtu.be/PGPZ0P1PJfw?t=808 shows how Lebesgue can be visualized as a partition of the function range instead of domain, and then you just have to be able to measure the size of pre-images.

One advantage of that is that the range is always one dimensional.

But the main advantage is that having infinitely many discontinuities does not matter.

Infinitely many discontinuities can make the Reimann partitioning diverge.

But in Lebesgue, you are instead measuring the size of preimage, and to fit infinitely many discontinuities in a finite domain, the size of this preimage is going to be zero.

So then the question becomes more of "how to define the measure of a subset of the domain".

Which is why we then fall into Measure theory

\(\LP\) is:

And then this is why Quantum mechanics basically lives in \(\LTwo\): not being complete makes no sense physically, it would mean that you can get closer and closer to states that don’t exist!

TODO intuition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_(mathematics)

Main motivation: Lebesgue integral.

The Bright Side Of Mathematics 2019 playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ69KEg7ccU&list=PLBh2i93oe2qvMVqAzsX1Kuv6-4fjazZ8j

The key idea, is that we can’t define a measure for the power set of R. Rather, we must select a large measurable subset, and the Borel sigma algebra is a good choice that matches intuitions.

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

Applications:

The continuous Fourier transform behaves especially nicely in \(\LTwo\) (with the Lebesgue integral), where there are completeness guarantees, see: Fourier basis is complete for \(\LTwo\).

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

Topology is the plumbing of Calculus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_(mathematics)

Generalize functions to allow adding some useful things which people wanted to be classical functions but which are not,

It therefore requires you to redefine and reprove all of calculus.

For this reason, most people are tempted to assume that all the hand wavy intuitive arguments undergrad teachers give are true.

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

The surprising thing is that a bunch of results are simpler in complex analysis!

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

Key for Quantum mechanics, see: Mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, the most important example by far being \(\LTwo\).

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

TODO Ciro Santilli 三西猴 really wants to understand what all the fuss is about:

Oh, there is a low dimensional classification! Ciro is a sucker for classification theorems! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_low-dimensional_real_Lie_algebras

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics)

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simple_groups

How can so much complexity come out from so few rules?

How can the proof be so long (thousands of papers)?? Surprise!!

And to top if all off, the awesomely named monster group could have a relationship with string theory via the monstrous moonshine?

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 is very fond of this one.

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

TODO understand, give intuition, justification of bounds and JavaScript demo.

Simulate it. Just simulate it.

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

Ciro once read that there are two types of mathematicians/scientists (he thinks it was comparing Einstein to some Jack of all trades polymath who didn’t do any new discoveries):

Ciro is without a doubt the bird type. Perhaps the ultimate scientist is the one who can combine both aspects in the right amount.

Ciro gets bored of things very quickly.

Once he understands the general principles, if the thing is not the next big thing, Ciro considers himself satisfied without all the nitty gritty detail, and moves on to the next attempt.

This was very clear for example after Ciro achieved Linux Kernel Module Cheat: he now had the perfect setup to learn all the Linux kernel shady details but at the same time after all those years he finally felt that "he could do it, so that was enough", and soon moved to other projects.

If Ciro had become a scientist, he would write the best review papers ever, just like in the current reality he writes amazing programming tutorials on Stack Overflow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool-assisted_speedrun

The most beautiful TAS content ever made are:

It is also amusing to see console verification of emulations, e.g.: "Super Mario 64 "120 Stars" in 1:20:41.52 Console Verified".

Why would anyone ever waste time playing a closed source game, when this will inevitably lead to endless hours of decompilation down the line when you want to:

Those who devote their time to the useless development of open source video games, before we even have decent open source development tooling, will, without a doubt, have their place in Heaven.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering

Magic is the best card game of all time. Ciro Santilli 三西猴 agrees with this fact, and this has nothing to do with the nostalgia factor of having played it when he was a teenager.

However, Magic has one flaw: the cards of old formats (Legacy and Modern), which are the really interesting ones, are fucking expensive. 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!

There however one good solution to that: watch people who have nothing better to do in their lives play on YouTube, notably ChannelFireball.

Like in Mathematics, the most beautiful decks are those that do crazy things:

It is also really interesting to watch as new sets as spoiled and try to guess if certain cards will have any impact on the Modern or Legacy metagame.

Here are some cool decks:

Competitive commander is also interesting, although matches tend to be much more random so the format is harder to digest, see for example this channel; Playing With Power MTG channel.

Urza’s block is the most epic of all. Ridiculous power level and epic art, and happened just before Ciro Santilli 三西猴 started playing, so Ciro saw some cards from it floating around, but not many, and it felt mystical.

In 2019, a paper proved that MTG is Turing complete with a legacy legal deck. Live demo with some hand waving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdmODVYPDLA "I Built a COMPUTER in Magic: The Gathering" by "Because Science" published in Oct 31, 2019. TODO: how is this reflected in the rules? https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/42

The following creators share many of Ciro’s interests and output large quantities of interesting content covering all memes/overpowered combos of new sets:

https://www.youtube.com/user/webofstories "Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People". 1-2 to hour long interviews, the number of Nobel prize winners is off-the-charts.

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

Has the best opening scene of all time.

Top quotes:

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

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

Interesting how Algeria now supports China’s Xinjiang policy in 2019.

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

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

Things that can be understood are boring.