by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 34)
All companies with investors are evil, make no mistake.
They may have nice looking save the world charity campaigns, but once you get even close to affecting their revenue stream, the axe falls. The charity is only a publicity stunt to reduce wages.
Some level of government intervention is needed to control investor's greed.
It is just a question of business model: some business models are eviler than others. Making people pay for operating systems being possible the most evil of all.
One thing must be said however. You can learn a lot by working in a good company, because it ends up putting you in contact with practical real problems that you wouldn't otherwise see by just doing your own random low-tech startup. This is especially valuable if said company is also enlightened enough to use and contribute back to open source software, thus improving the world and paying back the moral debt of using other people's work for free.
Another important point to consider is who in the company is evil. In a sane tech company, the lowly engineers are going to be non-evil. And then the more you go up the management chain, the more aligned you have to be with investors, and thus the more and more evil you get. HR is just evil from the bottom though, it's just the nature of their job.

Ciro's everyone gets a raise story

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Once upon a time, when Ciro worked at a company, one day the company decided to give everyone a 20% raise.
The likely reason was that Apple was coming to town, and was sucking the fuck out of the company's talent.
Nothing ever drove it so clearly into Ciro's heart the obvious fact that even for skilled jobs, companies don't pay you what you're worth. They pay you as little as possible so you won't quit to join someone else. It is pure market forces in play.
The annoying thing is that people are highly non-fungible, so much like painting auctions, you can only estimate your price by putting yourself on auction and seeing what people will pay for you, i.e. interviewing for new jobs.
Another point is that people have all sorts of stupid restrictions such as not wanting to work on certain areas for moral reasons, or not wanting to move away from a certain area they like. Companies will of course readily exploit such weakness to be able to pay less. Silly non-rational beings.
Many/most companies are unable to give any beauty to its employees.
Hiring is simply a process of "let's get this money making project working ASAP", bring people in, without considering Brooks's law.
And then when that happens, companies put people in extremely narrow knowledge areas, making them unable to see or participate in the bigger picture of things, unless they spend 10 years there and reach architect status.
This is perhaps particularly painful for high flying birds like Ciro Santilli.
Companies need a higher top to down force that attempts to actually teach the business and tech to every employee to counter the low level manager get things done now pressure.
Companies that are able to do that, will have many more employees with a sense of purpose, and with the ability to innovate. Those companies will win.
Video 1.
Humourous depiction of some big tech organization charts
. TODO author.
Bibliography:
Video 1.
Target Big Markets by Don Valentine (2010)
Source.
He was at Fairchild. That place was nuts.
Video 1.
Michael Moritz interview by Stanford Graduate School of Business (2019)
Source. The dude is quirky.
Video 1.
John Doerr Q&A at Berkeley (2015)
Source.
Musk is a truly ambivalent personality. Some points are very good. Some are very bad.
Respect on the technical side by Ciro Santilli.
But the way he treated his first wife Justine Musk, is very very weird, incomprehensible: www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/
Positive Cirocoins for possibly going to reverse Twitter's unfair Trump ban if his Twitter acquisition goes through:
Negative Cirocoins for according to Wikipedia:
Within the merged company [Thiel's Confinity + Elon's X.com], Musk returned as CEO. Musk's preference for Microsoft software over Unix created a rift in the company and caused Thiel to resign.
Video 1.
The REAL Reason Why Tesla Made All Patents Open-Source by The not so boring Man (2021)
Source. Supercut from various interviews/presentations in which Elon saying that Tesla has open source patents and pro open source stuff. Can we trust it? Maybe.
Video 1.
Xavier Niel, Iliad - Free: Je suis un casseur de monopoles by DECIDEURSTV (2011)
Source. Title translation: "I'm a hunter of monopolies".
In this section we list charitable organizations that support education or research:
At crankstart.org/grants the organization's website describes mostly California activities, but they do at least also act in the University of Oxford, see: Section "University of Oxford study costs".
Presumably the name refers to crank starting an old car, as in helping out those in difficulty like poor students get started in life. But is also an obscure slang for a type of handjob according to Urban Dictionary.
Follows the "certified teacher only" approach which is in Ciro Santilli's opinion a fatal flaw of most elearning systems out there, OurBigBook.com won't suffer from that!
But that is a very, very good project.
All notes appear to have been extracted from existing notes, as noted on the bottom of each page.
TODO how does it work exactly? Do they ask for permission from authors in every case, including when the content has open license? Or when it has open license, do they just do it? In some cases, the notes have no license, so they must have asked.
TODO what is the source code that authors write? LaTeX or something else? LaTeX feels extremely likely given that it is what most original materials were already written in.
They are attempting a "model up this entire university" thing: phys.libretexts.org/Courses which is good. E.g. they have a bunch of "quantum mechanics ones under: phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Quantum_Mechanics
Appears to be UC Davies-based mostly.
They claim to use this closed source backend: www.nice.com/resources/cxone-expert-knowledge-management? Seriously? For a publicly funded project with low-tech requirements?? It is mind blowing.
Some issues:
OK let's database it:
This is an interesting initiative which has some similarities to Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook project.
The fatal flaw of the initiative in Ciro Santilli's opinion is the lack of user-generated content. We will never get there without UGC and algorithms, never.
Also as of 2021, it mostly useless business courses: learn.saylor.org unfortunately.
But it has several redeeming factors which Ciro Santilli aproves of:
The founder Michael J. Saylor looks a bit crooked, Rich people who create charitable prizes are often crooked comes to mind. But maybe he's just weird.
Video 1.
Michael Saylor interview by Lex Fridman (2022)
Source.
At the timestamp:
When I go, all my assets will flow into a foundation, and the foundation's mission is to make education free for everybody forever.
What statement... maybe he's actually not crooked, maybe it was just an accounting mistake... God, why.
If only Ciro Santilli knew how to contact him and convince him that his current approach is innefective and that Ciro has something better! Michael, please Google into this page some day, Ciro Santilli needs funding for OurBigBook.com. A hopeless Tweet at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1548350114623660035. Also tried to hit his saylor@strategy.com.
  • twitter.com/saylor 2.6 M followers as of 2022. Because of Bitcoin? Or was he famous before that?
  • www.michael.com/ yes, he is Michael.com lol. When did he get the domain, and at what price? He's mildlly obsessed with domain names it seems: www.domainsherpa.com/saylor/. He also bought frank.com, mike.com. emma.com. This was between 1994 and 2000. He mentions that his email is saylor@strategy.com. strategy.com redirects to microstrategy.com as of 2022, so seems still valid.
    We actually got a backlink from tvt.phishlabs.com to this page in August 2022, a phising security provider, presumably for showing his email here. This reminds Ciro of the All GitHub Commit Emails event!
    A quick google for that address also leads to www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveonline/00/business/saylor0621.htm, a year 2000 profile page by the Washington Post, followed by a Q&A. In the Q&A, Michael himself gives his email in relation to Saylor Academy:
    Kensington, Maryland: What has happened to your vision of an internet university? I believe it is an important initiative and it doesn't require $100 million to get started. We at the Rockefeller Foundation would like to become involved. How can we do this?
    Michael Saylor: The internet university is alive and well. My goal is to initially roll out a cyber-libary of digital video that can be used by any for-profit or non-profit organization in order to accelerate the free education initiative. Eventually, people may just go direct to the web site.
    I think the entire thing will unfold over about 10 years.
    Send me an email if you would like to get involved. (saylor@strategy.com)
    so it was already beyond leaked. Ciro did hit that email address seeking funding for OurBigBook.com, but no reply unfortunately. Maybe you gotta be part of the Rockefeller family to get a reply from these people? Well, at least this led to Ciro learning about the Rockefeller Foundation.
No mention of education specifically on website. But at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveonline/00/business/saylor0621.htm from Michael J. Saylor they did show interest, so adding to this Educational charitable organization list anyways.
Of all the rich person foundations, this is the one that feels the most hardcore.
They put huge focus on autism. Do they have an autistic child? Yes: www.forbes.com/pictures/eilm45mll/james-simons-autism/?sh=7825234250ce his adughter.
Video 1.
What I learned in Harvard part 1 by Jorge Paulo Lemann (2012)
Source. Portuguese talk about his experiences. A bit bably, but has a few good comments:
  • You don't learn the Harvard experience, you absorb it.
  • Being amongst excellent people makes you learn what excelent people are like, just like only by tasting many different types of wine can you know what good wine is like.
    This one does have bias danger though. But detecting greatness, is as type of bias arguably.
It is harder to measure the impact of nonprofits than of for-profits, since you can't just look at their bank balances.
This is one fundamental difficulty of nonprofit work, how to prove that you deserve the investments and not someone else.
The reason public relations is evil in modern society is because, like discrimination, public relations works by dumb association and not logic or fairness.
If you're the son of the killer, you're fucked.
This is unlike our ideal for law which attempts, though sometimes fails, at isolating cause and effect.

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