Bert Hubert Updated 2025-07-16
Co-founder of PowerDNS, an open source dNS implementation.
Homepage: berthub.eu/ says:.
All stuff Ciro cares about too! Cool dude! In particular Ciro loved his quote of I should have loved biology.
All stuff Ciro cares about too! Cool dude! In particular Ciro loved his quote of I should have loved biology.
He's writing a fun-sounding book about molecular biology as of 2022: berthub.eu/dna-book. Appears to be closed source though. Ciro wonders if he really needs to sell the book for money after all those years though, rather than just publishing it online for free.
Looking at Bert just brings the Dutch Golden Age, and more in particular Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to mind. Epic.
How life is Digital by Bert Hubert (2021)
Source. Just a "boring" overview of the central dogma of molecular biology ;-) Eli Benderski Updated 2025-07-16
Homepage: eli.thegreenplace.net/
Also has many great contributions on Stack Overflow: stackoverflow.com/users/8206/eli-bendersky
As of 2016, Eli worked at Google (reference). TODO before that, I had found his earlier info previously but lost it.
Eli focuses mostly on compiler toolchains.
He also has some mathematics stuff, so cute: eli.thegreenplace.net/2015/change-of-basis-in-linear-algebra/
Fabrice Bellard Updated 2025-07-16
Creator of QEMU and FFmpeg, both of which Ciro Santilli deeply respects. And a bunch other random stuff.
What is shocking about Fabrice this is that both are insanely important software that Ciro Santilli really likes, and both seem to be completely unrelated subjects!
Google made billions on top of this dude:
- FFmpeg is the backend of YouTube
- QEMU is the default emulator for Android Studio as of 2019, which Android developers use by default under the hood to develop Android Apps on their desktop without the need for a real device.
At last but not least, Fabrice also studied in the same school that Ciro Santilli studied in France, École Polytechnique.
It is a shame that he keeps such a low profile, there are no videos of him on the web, and he declines interviews.
Another surprising fact is that Fabrice has not worked for the "Big Tech Companies" as far as can be publicly seen, but rather mostly on smaller companies that he co-founded: www.quora.com/Computer-Programmers/Computer-Programmers-Where-is-Fabrice-Bellard-employed
And he's also into some completely random projcts unsurprisingly:
- www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/ Computer Scientist Fabrice Bellard Announces Computing Pi to Record Number of Digits
Bibliography:
- smartbear.com/de/blog/2011/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/ contains a list of his projects as of 2011
Fabrice Bellard in 2007
. Source. At a restaurant with the author apparently. Plus Miguel De Icaza who was in Paris for some conference, which they all presumably attended.
Fabrice Bellard with light
. There are no in-focus images of Fabrice on the Internet. Linus Torvalds Updated 2025-07-16
Aaron Swartz Updated 2025-07-16
Aaron, Ciro Santilli will complete your quest to make eduction free. Just legally this time, with the and with the Creative Commons license you helped to create.
Ciro likes how The Internet's Own Boy (2014) explains how Aaron felt like high school was bullshit, and that he could learn whatever he wanted from books, which is one of Ciro's key feelings.
James Somers Updated 2025-07-16
Huge interest overlap with Ciro Santilli, e.g. he's into
- molecular biology in general: I should have loved biology by James Somers
- JCVI-syn3.0: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/a-journey-to-the-center-of-our-cells
- cryo-EM: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/a-journey-to-the-center-of-our-cells
- David Goodsell: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/a-journey-to-the-center-of-our-cells
- History of Google: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge
Sandy Maguire Updated 2025-07-16
Lots of similar ideologies to Ciro Santilli, love it:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/reaching-climbing/: don't be a pussyOne is also reminded of Gwern Branwen. Sandy is also into self-improvement stuff, so even more like Gwern. This is a point Ciro diverges on. Ciro works actively on self-worsening.
Last Friday was my final day at work. According to my facebook profile, I am now "happily retired." As of today, I don't plan to do another day of "traditional work" in my life. That's not to say that I'll be sitting idle playing tiddly winks. I want to build things, to dedicate my life to independent study, and to get really, really good with building communities. I don't have time for any of this "work" stuff that somehow pervades our entire culture, choking our inspiration and sapping our energy away from the things we'd rather be doing.
- he thinks university is useless:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/where-uni-fails/ Where University Fails (2018), mostly talking about backward design
- sandymaguire.me/blog/gatekept/ rejected from Imperial College PhD program due to grade being slightly too low for their stupid requirements, even though he had a referral already, and an amazing CV
- he likes jazz: sandymaguire.me/blog/too-smart/
Other interesting points:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/sandy-runback/ he changed his own name to Sandy because he didn't like it, he was born Alexander
- algebradriven.design/ closed source books though, ouch. At least they seem to have been made with leanpub though, could be worse.
Dan Dascalescu Updated 2025-07-16
This dude is interesting. Quite crazy type. It is hard to differentiate genius from mad.
Ciro Santilli bumps on his Stack Overflow from time to time: stackoverflow.com/users/1269037/dan-dascalescu.
Donald Knuth Updated 2025-07-16
Cocaine Updated 2025-07-16
Marijuana Updated 2025-07-16
Heroin Updated 2025-07-16
Lysergic acid diethylamide Updated 2025-07-16
CNOT gate Updated 2025-07-16
The CNOT gate is a controlled quantum gate that operates on two qubits, flipping the second (operand) qubit if the first (control) qubit is set.
On the standard basis:we see that this means that only and should be possible. Therefore, the state must be of the form:where and are two complex numbers such that
If we operate the CNOT gate on that state, we obtain:and so the input is unchanged as desired, because the control qubit is 0.
Therefore, in that case, what happened is that the probabilities of and were swapped from and to and respectively, which is exactly what the quantum NOT gate does.
So from this we understand more concretely what "the gate only operates if the first qubit is set to one" means.
Now go and study the Bell state and understand intuitively how this gate is used to produce it.
Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm Updated 2025-07-16
Grover's algorithm Updated 2025-07-16
JT-60 Updated 2025-07-16
Joint European Torus Updated 2025-07-16
ITER Updated 2025-07-16
Bitmessage Updated 2025-07-16
TODO evaluate. No
pip install??? There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.