Ciro Santilli (三西猴)

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:

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

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

https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245

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”.

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

In Stack Overflow Ciro likes to:

When he gets an upvote on one of his more obscure answers, he 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 ;-)

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.

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 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 gamed achieved 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:

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.

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”:

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 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 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.

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

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.

When Ciro Santilli 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:

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

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

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 10, “Cost per genome vs Moore’s law from 2000 to 2019. Source.”. 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.

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?

DNA synthesis, see for example: https://twistbioscience.com/ | https://www.evonetix.com/technology/ | http://dnascript.co/ | https://www.ansabio.com/ | https://www.nuclera.com/

Other cool topic include: 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.

Ciro Santilli is sad that by the time he dies, humanity won’t have understood the brain, maybe not even a measly E. Coli…​

The only other fields that might become as big are:

but those have had enourmous investments for several decades without any fruits. Molecular biology is a much lower hanging fruit.

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.

If any of you ever read me, do send me an email to Ciro Santilli 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 that can be found through Google:

Unconditional basic income is Ciro Santilli'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, 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.

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/

It does not mean that you should take crazy risks. But do evaluate your situation, but if the failure outcome is not catastrophic or not concrete, just go for it.

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

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.

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. Selling drugs online is not advisable however.

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

Companies can help you grow, 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.

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??".

Quotes by other people can be found at: The best original quotes presenced by Ciro Santilli

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

On the theory vs practice of computer science:

How software engineers view science:

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

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 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.

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

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:

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.

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

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 Santilli 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.

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.

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.

Ciro Santilli’s full name is quite unique, however searching 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.

The ultimate dream however would be to beat Cyrus the Great himself ("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 Santilli 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.

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

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_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:

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

TODO original setups.

Led to: Planck’s law

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 billiard balls colliding, which further suggests that photons are real.

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/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.

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

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 ;-)).

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.

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.

Not the usual bullshit you were expecting right?

I also like 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 nothing about the materials that we touch every day, nor more importantly how our brain and cells work.

Everything is 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 remembers that I and everything I touch are just a bunch of atoms, and that is an amazing feeling.

If you have a PDE that models physical phenomena, it is fundamental that:

Unlike for ordinary differential equations which have the Picard–Lindelöf theorem, the existence and uniqueness of solution is not well solved for PDEs. For example, Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness was one of the Millennium Prize Problems.

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

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

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

Magic is the best card game of all time. Ciro Santilli 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 good decks:

Competitive commander is also amazing, 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 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

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.

List at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship#music

Country at: China.

You have to know the language to appreciate them.

The 60’s and 70’s were the days, those great proxy wars and CIA dictatorships allowed hippies to make awesome freedom music without too imminent a fear of death.

Songs making fun of things or that are pure Brazil nostalgia are also accepted. No love songs, ever. Except some by Caetano, but that’s it!

English:

French:

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

That self blame, imminent end of the world and hatred for tax collectors stuff is a bit over the top, you should chill man.

But please keep the parables coming:

Proverbs 27:17:

Matthew 4:19:

Matthew 7:13:

Ciro really likes this one, because he feels that where many people go, it is useless to go again. It is much better to explore that which few can do, but which many will need.

Ciro presenced, so likely paraphrased and anonymized, and likely originally said by someone else famous without Ciro knowing it due to limited culture.

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:

Ciro’s reply was:

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

Reply and unsuspend quickly followed, with link still removed:

A meta thread was later created by Yvette, to which Ciro 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

Keep the example / theory ratio high, very, very high.

For natural sciences, add as many reproducible experiment videos / descriptions as you can.

Whenever you make a change to your material, people should still be able to access the previous version.

Maybe there was something in the previous version that they needed, and you just removed.

Git + GitHub is the perfect way to do versioning.

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

One of the best in the world, but you need to know how to find real restaurants if you are not in China.

But worry not, Ciro Santilli has got you covered: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship#restaurants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Communications_Directive_2002

Europe has made good regulations to limit the absolute power of immoral companies.

But the law that forces every fucking website to show a message "Do you consent to cookies?" is not one of them.

Ciro cannot stand fucking clicking the "I consent" button anymore.

Please stop, for the love of God.

At most, there must be a standardized API that allows your browser to say "I agree or I disagree".

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

Nice looking and expensive operating system by Apple Inc.. Ciro Santilli believes that:

Evil and interesting co-founder of Apple Inc.

E.g. International Mathematical Olympiad, International Physics Olympiad.

Events that trick young kids into thinking that they are making progress, but only serve to distract them from what really matters, which is to dominate a state of the art as fast as possible, contact researches in the area, and publish truly novel results.

Backed by high schools trying to make ads showing how they will turn your kids into geniuses.

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

The dominating model of a computer.

The model is extremely simple, but has been proven to be able to solve all the problems that any reasonable computer model can solve, thus its adoption as the "default model".

The smallest known Turing machine that cannot be proven to halt or not as of 2019 is 7,918-states: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2725. Shtetl-Optimized by Scott Aaronson is just the best website.

A bunch of non-reasonable-looking computers have also been proven to be Turing complete for fun, e.g. Magic the Gathering.

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

The leading open source cross architecture and KVM emulator of the 2010’s.

Great way to understand how operating systems work, which Ciro Santilli used extensively in his Linux Kernel Module Cheat.

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

The language all browsers converted to as of 2019, and therefore the easiest one to distribute and most widely implemented programming language.

Hopefully will be killed by WebAssembly one day.

Cheatsheet on HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Old cheat on separate repo: web/

Now moving to either:

Index:

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

Revolutionary for its time, and a big part of Ciro’s Enlightenment.

But too insane, and did not keep up with internet age, and so Ciro wants to kill it now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)

Ciro Santilli has become slightly obsessed with this story, and the main mastermind Ross Ulbricht.

The best article available so far is: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/29/how_i_caught_silk_road_mastermind (archive) which summarizes what one of the investigators said in a 2019 French computer security conference.

The key living posts are:

The big question is of course how libertarian free market ideologically motivated the website was, and how purely criminal greed it was.

The magnitude of the early operational mistakes does make Ciro think that Ross did it "because he could" and "for the lolz" in a real world Breaking Bad way.

The entry in Ross' diary does resonate a lot with Ciro and any entrepreneur, full diary at: https://www.wired.com/2015/01/heres-secret-silk-road-journal-laptop-ross-ulbricht/ (archive).

Having this kind of feeling, is the greatest thing any human can have, and what motivates all great things.

Capitalizing in illegal things though is a cheat, big things take longer than a few years to reach, but reaching them is that much more satisfying as well.

Other interesting quotes

which Ciro also feels, see Don’t be a pussy, and:

Also very worth reading is the San Francisco flat mate account: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3q8g/my-roommate-the-darknet-drug-lord (archive).

Except for the fact that Ross was an 80 million dollar drug lord, those accounts sound exactly like what you would expect from any other nerdy startup founder! The:

It is also amusing to see very concretely the obvious fact that the FBI can get a subpoena for all accounts you ever had, e.g. they knew his laptop model from Amazon and brought a corresponding power cable to the arrest! If you are going to be a cyber criminal, don’t use your real name, ever!

Should justice be blind? Maybe, but it does hurt.

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

It ain’t perfect, but it’s decent enough.

From a technical point of view, it can do anything that Microsoft Windows can. Except being forcefully installed on every non-Mac 2019 computer you can buy.

Ciro's conversion to Linux happened around 2012, and was a central part of his open source Enlightenment, since it fundamentally enables the discovery and contribution to Open source software. Because what awesome open source person would waste time porting their amazing projects to closed source OSes?

Ciro’s modest nature can be seen as he likes to compare this event Buddha’s Great Renunciation.

Linux should track glibc and POSIX CLI utilities in-tree like FreeBSD, otherwise people have no way to get the thing running in the first place without blobs or large out-of-tree scripts!

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

Legal issues stalled them at the turning point of the internet, and Linux won. Can’t change history.

Apple Inc. stole their work and made Mac OS X without giving anything back for free as usual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)

However, many, many, many terrible horrors come with it:

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

A monopolistic operating system that only exists in the 2010’s because of the IBM-linked 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, and it is barely impossible to buy a non-Mac computer without paying for it, which should be illegal. European Union, time to use your regulatory powers.

The following anecdote illustrates Windows' pervasiveness. Ciro Santilli was once tutoring a high school student in Brazil, and decided to try and get her into programming. When the "Windows is not free" subject came up, the high school student was shocked: "I paid 100 dollars for this?". She never even knew it was there. To her, it was "just a computer".

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

The real explanation: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1780599/what-is-the-meaning-of-posix/31865755#31865755