Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40
Joined 2022-11-02 Message
Incoming links: Google
John M. Martinis Created 2024-12-23 Updated 2025-07-16
Julian Kelly Created 2024-12-13 Updated 2025-07-16
Timeline:He went pretty much in a straight line into the quantum computing boom! Well done.
- 2015: joined Google as a Google Quantum AI employee
- 2010: UCSB Physics PhD. His thesis was "Fault-tolerant superconducting qubits" and the PDF can be downloaded from: alexandria.ucsb.edu/lib/ark:/48907/f3b56gwb.
- 2006: UCSB Physics undergrad. In 2008 he joined John Martinis' lab during his undergrad itself.
Largey Brage Updated 2025-07-16
Both of them attended Montessori education at some point. Interesting! Mentioned in a talk by Sergey and highlighted at The Google Story.
They stepped down from leading Google roles in 2019: www.npr.org/2019/12/03/784570156/google-founders-brin-page-step-down-pichai-takes-over-as-alphabet-ceo
As The Google Story puts it about Largey:Ciro Santilli likes that.
Scholarship was not just emphasized in their homes; it was treasured.
Machine learning company Updated 2025-07-16
This section is about companies that primarily specialize in machine learning.
The term "machine learning company" is perhaps not great as it could be argued that any of the Big tech are leaders and sometimes, especially in the case of Google, has a main product that is arguably a form of machine learning.
Meme Updated 2025-07-16
Nerds 2.0.1 Updated 2025-07-16
Very very good. Those nice pre-Dot-com bubble vibes.
Might be freely watchable? Wikipedia links to:
But they do start with an FBI warning about copyright. So... erm.
Part 1 - Networking The Nerds talks about the TCP/IP and early machines implementing it:
- 21:00: shows inside The Pentagon. The way the dude who works there opens a his locked office door with an electric switch is just amazing. Cringely also mentions that there's an actual official speed limit in the corridors as he rides a carrier bike slowly through them.
- 21:45: the universities weren't enthusiastic, because people from other locations would be able to use your precious computer time. But finally ARPA forced the universities' hands, and they joined.
- 24:24 mentions that some of the guys who created ARPANET were actually previously counting cards at Casinos in Las Vegas, just like in the 21 (2008) film
- one of the centerpieces of development was at UCLA. The other was the BBN company. 33:55 shows the first router, then called them Interface Message Processor
- the first message was from UCLA to Stanford University. He was trying to write "Login", and it crashed at the 'g'. Epic. They later debugged it.
- towards the end talks about ALOHAnet, the first wireless computer communication done
Part 2 - Serving the Suits
- Robert Metcalfe. He's nice. Xerox PARC. Ethernet.
- Explains what is a "Workstation", notably showing one by Sun Microsystems. This is now an obscure "passé" thing in 2020 that young people like Ciro Santilli have only heard of in legend (or in outdated university computer labs!). Funny to think that so many people have had this idea before, including e.g. the Chromebook
- 10:46 mentions that all of Cisco, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems and where founded at Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460, at Stanford University.
- he then talks a lot about Sun. Sun became dominant in Wall Street.
- 19:05: Novell, from Utah. How they almost went bust, but were saved at the last moment by Ray Noorda, who refocused them to their NetWare product which was under recent development. It allowed file and printer sharing in IBM PCs. 22:55 shows how they had a live radio host for people waiting on customer support calls!
- 33:56 mentions how The Grateful Dead had in impact on the Internet, as people wanted computers to be able to access The WELL online forum. They still own the domain as of 2022: www.well.com/. It is interesting how Larry Page also liked The Grateful Dead as mentioned at The Google Story, his dad would take him to shows. Larry is a bit younger of course than the people in this documentary.
- 37 show McAfee
- 43:56: fantastic portrait of Cisco
Part 3 - Wiring the World:
- Berners-Lee at CERN and the invention of the URL.
- 1992: US Government allow commerce on the Internet
- Web browser history, Mosaic and Marc Andresseeen.
- 20:45: America Online
- 23:29: search engines and Excite. Google was a bit too small to be on his radar!
- 25:50: porn
- 27: The Motley Fool and advertising
- 30: Planet U grocery shopping
- 31:50: Amazon
- 33:00: immigrant workers, Indians playing cricket, outsourcing, Wipro Systems
- 41:25: Java
- 46:30: Microsoft joins the Internet. The Internet Tidal Wave Internet memo. Pearl Harbour day talk.
- 56:40: Excite Tour. If they had survived, they would have been Google with their quirky offices.
OAuth Updated 2025-07-16
The fatal flaw of OAuth is that websites have to enable specific providers, they can't just automatically select the correct OAuth for a given email domain. This means that the vast majority of websites will only provide the most widely popular providers such as Google, and the like, which means people won't have decent privacy.
Open Images dataset Updated 2025-07-16
As of v7:
- ~9M images
- 600 object classes
- bounding boxes
- visual relatoinships are really hard: storage.googleapis.com/openimages/web/factsfigures_v7.html#visual-relationships e.g. "person kicking ball": storage.googleapis.com/openimages/web/visualizer/index.html?type=relationships&set=train&c=kick
- google.github.io/localized-narratives/ localized narratives is ludicrous, you can actually hear the (Indian women mostly) annotators describing the image while hovering their mouses to point what they are talking about). They are clearly bored out of their minds the poor people!
OpenStreetMap Updated 2025-07-16
E.g., as of 2020, their help login help.openstreetmap.org/ shows MyOpenID as an option, which was discontinued in 2014, and not Google OAuth.
They do still seem to have a bit more activity than gis.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/openstreetmap on Stack Exchange.
Complaints:
- Transliteration is off by default!...... wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Translation You just have to learn all scripts ever. Good luck with the Chinese characters. Genius.
- In order to see information about places, you have to click "Query features" on the toolbar first. Who made such a terrible UI? Direct click is a much, and so easy to implement?
- It is impossible to discern different types of paths and other walking path symbols, the symbols are too small, and just scale down to a line no matter how much you zoom in.
- Power lines are way too visible. While that is kind of cool, it is useless and distracting to most people most of the time.
- No street-level imagery...: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/1178/adding-photos
- No aerial imagery: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/6849/how-can-i-see-the-aerial-imagery-without-editing-the-map But that is kind of understandable, as that one might not be free.
- No restaurant ratings: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/64852/ratings-for-pois because it is "Subjective". OMG those people, such a huge value powerhouse wasted.
Oracle Database Updated 2025-07-16
OurBigBook.com Other projects Updated 2025-07-16
- HyperCard: we are kind of a "multiuser" version of HyperCard, trying to tie up cards made by different users. It is worth noting that HyperCard was one of the inspirations for WikiWikiWeb, which then inspired Wikipedia
- Semantic Web
- NLab
- physicstravelguide.com/ Nice manifesto: physicstravelguide.com/about by Jakob Schwichtenberg.
- OpenStax
- www.ft.com/content/5515ec3e-0040-4d90-85a9-df19d6e3ebd2 (archive) Twilio’s Jeff Lawson: an evangelist for software developersYou can never be first. But you can have the correct business model. That company's website must have gone into IP Purgatory, and could never be released as an open source website.As a student at the University of Michigan, he started a company that made lecture notes available free online, drawing a large audience of Midwestern college students and, soon enough, advertisers. At the height of the dotcom bubble, he dropped out of college, raised $10m from the venture firm Venrock and moved the company to Silicon Valley.His start-up drew interest from an acquirer that was planning to go public early in 2000. They closed the acquisition but missed their IPO window as the market plunged, and by August the company had filed for bankruptcy. Stock that Lawson and investors in his start-up received from the sale became worthless.He might actually be interested in donating to OurBigBook.com if it move forward now that he's a billionaire.
- Knol: basically the exact same thing by Google but 14 years earlier and declared a failure. Quite ominous:
- leanpub: similar goals, markdown-based, but the usual "you own your book copyright and you are trying to sell your book" approach
- nature Scitable
OK, just going random now:
OurBigBook.com Stack Exchange Updated 2025-07-16
Stack Exchange solves to a good extent the use cases:
points of view. It is a big open question if we can actually substantially improve it.
Major shortcoming are mentioned at idiotic Stack Overflow policies:
- Scope restrictions can lead to a lot of content deletion: closing questions as off-topicThis greatly discourages new users, who might still have added value to the project.On our website, anyone can post anything that is legal in a given country. No one can ever delete your content if it is legal, no matter their reputation.
- Although you can answer your own question, there's no way to write an organized multi-page book with Stack Exchange due to shortcomings such as no table of contents, 30k max chars on answer, huge risk of deletion due to "too broad"
- Absolutely no algorithmic attempt to overcome the fastest gun in the West problem (early answers have huge advantage over newer ones): meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535/closing-an-old-upvoted-question-as-duplicate-of-new-unvoted-questions/404567#404567
- Native reputation system:
- if the living ultimate God of
C++upvotes you, you get10reputation - if the first-day newb of
Javaupvotes you, you also get10reputation
- if the living ultimate God of
- Randomly split between sites like Stack Overflow vs Super User, with separate user reputations, but huge overlaps, and many questions that appears as dupes on both and never get merged.
- Possible edit wars, just like Wikipedia, but these are much less common since content ownership is much clearer than in Wikipedia however
OurBigBook.com User acquisition Updated 2025-07-16
The general and ideal user acquisition is of course organic Googling:
However, before that point, it is very likely that Ciro will have to physically do some very hard and specific user acquisition work at some University. Maybe there is a more virtual way of achieving this.
This work will involve going through some open set of university lecture notes, and creating a superior version of them on OurBigBook.com, and somehow getting students to notice it and use it as a superior alternative to their crappy lecture notes.
Another very promising route is publishing the answers to old examination questions on the website. It is likely that we will be able to overcome any copyright issues by uploading only the answers to numbered questions. There is a minor risk that these would be considered derivative works of the copyrighted questions. But universities would have to be very anal to enforce a DMCA for that!!!
Getting in contact with students is an epic challenge, as an incredibly deep chasm separates us:
- it is basically impossible to try and approach teachers: how to convince teachers to use CC BY-SA
- and on the other hand, how will you get university students to trust you are not a pedophile and that you actually want to help them?The missing aspect is how to join their main "class communication group", e.g. a WhatsApp or Discord chat they have. That would be the perfect entry point to communicate with the end users. But that entry point is also generally closed exclusively for students, and sometimes lecturers, and will not accept anyone external.Perhaps Ciro would be able to do something with one of the two Universities he attended in the past: École Polytechnique or University of São Paulo. But there was no clear channel in those institutions for that. There is either an "infinitely noisy Facebook with everyone that bothered" or silence, deathly silence and isolation of no contact. The key hard part is getting a per-course granularity chat. Discord Student Hubs are a fantastic initiative in that area. Shame that Discord is an unusable mess with zero ways to select which notifications you care about: Section "Discord email notifications"!One approach method that shows some promise is to follow the Student societies, which often host open events of interest outside of work hours.
Walking with advertisement t-shirts mentioning specific course names in some university location is something Ciro seriously considers, that's how desperate things are. Watch out: docs.ourbigbook.com/#public-relations for T-shirt news!
Pageviews Analysis Updated 2025-07-16
Cool tool that allows you to graphically visualize page view counts of specific pages. It offers somewhat similar insights to Google Trends.
Homepage: pageviews.wmcloud.org/
Documentation: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pageviews_Analysis#Massviews
The homepage shows views of selected pages, e.g. when Google had their 25th birthday: pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2023-09-11&end=2023-10-01&pages=Cat|Dog|Larry_Page Larry Page briefly beat "Cat" and "Dog".
/topviews shows the most viewed pages for a given month: pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&date=2023-08&excludes= It is extremelly epic that XXX: Return of Xander Cage, a 2017 film, is on the top ten of the August 2023 month. The page was around 8th place on a Google search for "xxx": archive.ph/wip/giRY8 at the time. XXXX (beer) was also on the top 20, followed by Sex on 21. Peter Todd's hash collision puzzles Updated 2025-07-16
As mentioned at the prize was claimed at 8d31992805518fd62daa3bdd2a5c4fd2cd3054c9b3dca1d78055e9528cff6adc (2017-02-23) which spends several inputs with the same unlock script that presents two different constantants that have the same SHA-1:both givingIt was claimed on the same day that Google disclosed the collision: security.googleblog.com/2017/02/announcing-first-sha1-collision.html
printf 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 | xxd -r -p | sha1sum
printf 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 | xxd -r -p | sha1sumf92d74e3874587aaf443d1db961d4e26dde13e9cBoth of these are PDF prefixes, so they start with the PDF file signature, but are not fully viewable PDFs on their own.
Project Euler problem style 2026-01-30
Project Euler problems typically involve finding or proving and then using a lemma that makes computation of the solution feasible without brute force. There is often an obvious brute force approach, but the pick problem sizes large enough such that it is just not fast enough, but the non-brute-force is.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057408 which is mega high on Google says:
I love project euler, but I've come to the realization that its purpose is to beat programmers soundly about the head and neck with a big math stick. At work last week, we were working on project euler at lunch, and had the one CS PhD in our midst not jumped up and explained the chinese remainder theorem to us, we wouldn't have had a chance.
In many cases, the efficient solution involves dynamic programming.
There are also a set of problems which are very numerical analysis in nature and require the approximation of some real number to a given precision. These are often very fiddly as I doubt most people can prove that their chosen hyperparameters guarantee the required precision.
Many problems ask for solution modulo some number. In general, this is only so that C/C++ users won't have to resort to using an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library and be able to fit everything into
uint64 instead. Maybe it also helps the judge system slightly having smaller strings to compare. The final modulos usually don't add any insight to the problems.Bibliography:
Quantum computer physical implementation Updated 2025-07-16
Lists of the most promising implementations:
As of 2020, the hottest by far are:
Super quick overview of the main types of quantum computer physical implementations, so doesn't any much to a quick Google.
He says he's going to make a series about it, so then something useful might actually come out. The first one was: Video "How to Turn Superconductors Into A Quantum Computer by Lukas's Lab (2023)", but it is still too basic.
The author's full name is Lukas Baker, www.linkedin.com/in/lukasbaker1331/, found with Google reverse image search, even though the LinkedIn image is very slightly different from the YouTube one.
Quantum electrodynamics Updated 2025-07-16
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" ;-)).
While Ciro acknowledges that QED is intrinsically challenging due to the wide range or requirements (quantum mechanics, special relativity and electromagnetism), Ciro feels that there is a glaring gap in this moneyless market for a learning material that follows the Middle Way as mentioned at: the missing link between basic and advanced. Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979) is one of the best attempts so far, but it falls a bit too close to the superficial side of things, if only Feynman hadn't assumed that the audience doesn't know any mathematics...
The funny thing is that when Ciro Santilli's mother retired, learning it (or as she put it: "how photons and electrons interact") was also one of her retirement plans. She is a pharmacist by training, and doesn't know much mathematics, and her English was somewhat limited. Oh, she also wanted to learn how photosynthesis works (possibly not fully understood by science as that time, 2020). Ambitious old lady!!!
Combines special relativity with more classical quantum mechanics, but further generalizing the Dirac equation, which also does that: Dirac equation vs quantum electrodynamics. The name "relativistic" likely doesn't need to appear on the title of QED because Maxwell's equations require special relativity, so just having "electro-" in the title is enough.
Before QED, the most advanced theory was that of the Dirac equation, which was already relativistic but TODO what was missing there exactly?
As summarized at: youtube.com/watch?v=_AZdvtf6hPU?t=305 Quantum Field Theory lecture at the African Summer Theory Institute 1 of 4 by Anthony Zee (2004):
- classical mechanics describes large and slow objects
- special relativity describes large and fast objects (they are getting close to the speed of light, so we have to consider relativity)
- classical quantum mechanics describes small and slow objects.
- QED describes objects that are both small and fast
That video also mentions the interesting idea that:Therefore, for small timescales, energy can vary a lot. But mass is equivalent to energy. Therefore, for small time scale, particles can appear and disappear wildly.
- in special relativity, we have the mass-energy equivalence
- in quantum mechanics, thinking along the time-energy uncertainty principle,
QED is the first quantum field theory fully developed. That framework was later extended to also include the weak interaction and strong interaction. As a result, it is perhaps easier to just Google for "Quantum Field Theory" if you want to learn QED, since QFT is more general and has more resources available generally.
Like in more general quantum field theory, there is on field for each particle type. In quantum field theory, there are only two fields to worry about:
- photon field
- electromagnetism field
Lecture 01 | Overview of Quantum Field Theory by Markus Luty (2013)
Source. This takes quite a direct approach, one cool thing he says is how we have to be careful with adding special relativity to the Schrödinger equation to avoid faster-than-light information. Quantum field theory lecture notes Updated 2025-07-16
Lecture notes found by Googling "quantum field theory pdf":
- www.ppd.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Dasgupta_08_Intro_to_QFT.pdf "An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory" by Mrinal Dasgupta from the University of Manchester (2008). 48 pages.
- www.thphys.uni-heidelberg.de/~weigand/QFT2-14/SkriptQFT2.pdf "Quantum Field Theory I + II" by Timo Weigand from the Heidelberg University. Unknown year, references up to 2008.
- edu.itp.phys.ethz.ch/hs12/qft1/ Quantum Field Theory 1 by Niklas Beisert
Ray Sidney Updated 2025-07-16
Said to be the 5th Google employee, and Eileen Gu's father: gossipnextdoor.com/meet-ray-sidney-eileen-guus-alleged-dad/