Ciro Santilli (三西猴)

Ciro Santilli is a male human software engineer and activist born in Brazil, Earth in 1989 AD.

Quick facts:

Other people with the same name are listed at Section "Ciro Santilli's homonyms".

If you are going to live, you might as well chase one of them.

You might not achieve them in your lifetime, but you never know. At some point, the pieces just "fall into place", and they happen.

And they will all come from deep tech.

Ciro Santilli would like to contribute to them. but this is a bit less realistic than software projects.

But who knows? Maybe he can code some stuff in those areas.

And one can at least have some fun by learning deeply about those subjects.

See also: 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 is especially excited about 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 4. "Cost per genome vs Moore's law from 2000 to 2019.", 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 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.

This technology could be the key to the one of the ultimate dream of biologists: cheap programmable biology with push-button organism bootstrap!

Just imagine this: at the comfort of your own garage, you take some model organism of interest, maybe start humble with Escherichia coli. Then you modify its DNA to your liking, and upload it to a 3D printer sized machine on your workbench, which automatically synthesizes the DNA, and injects into a bootstrapped cell.

You then make experiments to check if the modified cell achieves your desired new properties, e.g. production of some protein, and if not reiterate, just like a software engineer.

Of course, even if we were able to do the bootstrap, the debugging process then becomes key, as visibility is the key limitation of biology, maybe we need other cheap technologies to come in at that point.

This a place point we see the beauty of evolution the brightest: evolution does not require observability. But it also implies that if your changes to the organism make it less fit, then your mutation will also likely be lost. This has to be one of the considerations done when designing your organism.

Other cool topic include:

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 human brain, maybe not even a measly Escherichia coli... Heck, even key molecular biology events are not yet fully understood, see e.g. transcription regulation.

One of the most exciting aspects of molecular biology technologies is their relatively low entry cost, compared for example to other areas such as fusion energy and quantum computing.

As of 2020, Ciro Santilli 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.

Main article: brain-computer interface.

This is one of the deep tech bets that Ciro Santilli 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.

Main section: fusion power.

This is a long haul. But we have to give it a shot.

Ciro Santilli is very happy to meet people with related interests, he really loves his like-minded online friends. Even if you don't have something a specific goal in mind for the contact, please just say hi.

To contact Ciro publicly about any general subject that is not covered in a more specific GitHub repository, including saying hi or suggestions about his website either:

For comments about China, first read:and then create a GitHub issue at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/new

Publicly viewable contact is preferred if possible to more effectively share Ciro's wisdom with the world.

But if you feel more comfortable with private contact, no problem, either:

If you are a privacy freak or are going to tell Ciro state secrets Ciro has:

If you have Ciro's phone number (available to closer acquaintances), Ciro's preferred messaging software is Signal. But he basically also runs all other major apps as well. Ciro sets a 1 week disappearing messages timer to all conversations. This is slightly less secure than protonmail as Ciro does not use multi-factor authentication to open the messages every time, but it should be pretty damn good already.

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

Ciro Santilli has the power to document stuff in a way that makes using them awesome, as evidenced by his his Stack Overflow contributions (notably those in the best articles by Ciro Santilli), and other online contributions.

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:A prime example of kind of setup is Ciro's Linux Kernel Module Cheat.

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:

Ciro's passion for documentation and tooling has the effect that if you have crappy documentation and tooling and don't want them to be fixed, Ciro will end up trying to fix those tools instead of doing what you tell him to do anyways, which might lead to him quitting because he can't stand the tools, or you firing him because he's not doing the job you think I should be doing. So please, don't bother hiring Ciro if you have crappy documentation and tooling.

Psychological analysis of why Ciro has this gift: How Ciro Santilli manages to write so much.

Ciro often has the following metaphor in his mind:

New discoveries are like very rough trails where you have to cut through heavy bushes (an original research paper).

After a brave explorer goes through this rough path for the first time and charts it, it does become much easier for others to follow it later on, but it still requires a lot of effort to go through them, because there are still a lot of rough bushes and some parts of the map are not very clear (reading and reproducing the research paper to further advance the state of the art).

As enough people start going through, the probability that someone with a bad memory ends up walking it increases, and that person ends up pounding the earth into a beaten track and increasing the trail clearance of the beginning of the trail at least (review paper).

There finally comes a point when even the local government starts to notice this trail is important, and pays someone to add some stone pavement and rails on the most exposed parts of the trail (post and undergrad education).

And at last, Ciro Santilli comes with a bulldozer and creates an autoroute that thousands of people can cruise at high speed without any effort (Q&A, open knowledge HTML websites).

This is somewhat the centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers: dumping your brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.

This is also the closest one can get to immortality pre full blown transhumanism.

Ciro's still looking for the restore this plaintext backup on a new body though.

Related:

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) section "Whole brain emulation" provides a reasonable setup: post mortem, take a brain, freeze it, then cut it into fine slices with a Microtome, and then inspect slices with an electron microscope after some kind of staining to determine all the synapses.

Well, mind uploading would be kind of pointless without whole brain emulation, so they are almost synonyms.

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ mentions one page to rule them all:

How many Zettelkästen should I have? The answer is, most likely, only one for the duration of your life. But there are exceptions to this rule.

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 Santilli never did any illegal drugs, because he:so don't expect any amazing stories here.

Like LDS believers, Ciro never drinks coffee nor smokes, and only drinks alcohol and tea sparingly, because they are all addictive drugs and bring no net increase of energy and concentration.

Ciro prefers to only enjoy a glass of tea when going out cycling on a cold day (Earl gray, with milk, no sugar), or get a half pint of beer when going out with friends to a pub.

Ciro only got reasonably drunk twice on his life:

Later in life, around the time of his wedding, there were guests around all the time, and he was drinking beer with them all the time. Then one day, during lunch, Ciro felt a weirdly strong desire to drink one more pint. It was at this point that Ciro realised first-hand what mild, but real, alcohol addiction felt like, and he didn't get that drink, and swore from then on to never drink more than one glass a week, and only with friends at a bar after work. Richard Feynman tells a very similar story on his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!, see: Section "Richard Feynman's drug use".

Maybe Ciro Santilli should do something useful and remarkable so that someone might actually want to read his biography in the first place. But hey, procrastination.

Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil in a small/medium city in the State of São Paulo in 1989 AD.

At the age of 10, Ciro Santilli spent 10 months in Coventry, United Kingdom, where he greatly improved his English.

After Coventry, Ciro's family lived in the city of Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, which made a deep impression on Ciro, until he left to go to the University of São Paulo in 2007.

When Ciro Santilli was very young, about 6, he was a fatty, and other evil boys picked on him.

Ciro was even more stupid than as of 2020, and continued to try and hang out with those evil kids to show them he was cool too or that he was strong, and so continued to get hurt.

Advice to his children: stay away from evil people.

The bullied sometimes feels an almost masochistic desire to overcome the bullies' contempt, and to try and either become friends with the bullies, or to overpower them.

You must never give into those thoughts.

If you come across evil people, smile a fake smile to them, and walk away, but never give your back to them, and always be ready to fight.

If they laugh at you, know that you are shit like everyone else, pretend to laugh with them, take their post and repost it on your public profile, and silently stay away from those idiots.

Never show any weakness.

If a fight is likely, always be ready, always have your friends nearby, be as well armed as the enemy, and never be outnumbered.

On the Internet, never care about e-bully posts, either block them immediately, and anyone that likes their posts, or follow Ciro's reply policy.

Call parents or other authorities as soon as there is risk of physical harm. Better a living free pussy than dead or in youth detention for murder. Similar advice applies if you are going to jail I guess.

If a physical fight is inevitable however, ignore Jesus this once and don't give the other face, but rather follow the Talmud and fight all out on the beaches:

If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill first.

References:

The Sikh knife, the Kirpan, which Sikhs must carry at all times as a religious obligation, also comes to mind. The Sikh must have been bullied out of the their minds at some point in history, Ciro understands.

Non-violence only works when you have bodies to spare from your followers.

Perhaps it was good to learn those lessons early, before the stakes were too high. Adults fake it much better, and therefore it is harder to learn those lessons from them, but they are still just as evil on the inside.

These experiences might have contributed to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.

In the year 2000, Ciro lived with his parents for 10 months in the Coventry because his father took some courses at the University of Warwick. This was Ciro's most important educational experience, more so than any other inCiro Santilli's formal education, because it taught him the Holy Language of English, which infinitely expanded Ciro's Internet horizons, and shaped Ciro's having more than one natural language is bad for the world philosophy. When he came back to Brazil, Ciro skipped dozens of levels in his English school in Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, a Brazilian chain called Cultura Inglesa, and was put to study with much older teenagers who marveled at Ciro's incredibly cute, but since lost, British accent.

Another huge advantage of Coventry is that the Hearsall Community Primary School where Ciro studied was a regular British primary school but with two classes dedicated to foreign students to learn English before integrating with the British students. There were a several kids from Kosovo there due to the Kosovo War which was just ending, and it was there that Ciro made his first Chinese friend, yet unaware of course of the role the country would later play in his life. One particularly fun memory was that of playing soccer on the school playground with a sponge ball to avoid breaking the windows. Then one day it was raining, british weather of course, but Ciro still went for a header, and the soaked sponge ball was soaked and splashed Ciro with dirty water all over. Good days.

Ciro also played a bit of Rugby in those days in a local club.

Some other good memories are of reading the first two Harry Potters, playing and mostly watching other kids play Pokemon on their Game Boys and Pokemon trading cards, and going to a nearby commons playing field and woods, as it typical throughout the UK. Ciro also played some rugby with a local boys team TODO name? but for some reason his team was always crushed when they went to nearby towns to play against other teams. And Ciro also went with his family or with school to some nearby attractions, like Stratford-Upon-Avon (Shakespeare's hometown), and some castles.

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

See also further remarks on Ciro Santilli's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli/

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

This motivated Ciro to work on OurBigBook.com.

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, see e.g. the best modern instrumental Western music. https://digitaldreamdoor.com/index.html was a good resource from those times!

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.

For more china-related stuff see: https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/wife

Excerpt of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940), slightly adapted for brevity:

"The earth moved," Maria said, not looking at Pilar. "Truly. It was a thing I cannot tell thee."

"It never moves more than three times in a lifetime. Did it really move?" Pilar Said.

"Yes," the girl said. "Truly."

"For you, Inglés?" Pilar looked at Robert Jordan. "Don't lie."

"Yes," he said. "Truly."

The old lady was arrested in 2015 for a few days for doing Falun Gong, which was an important motivation to Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China.

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