Poet warriors monkeys? Or Code peasants (码农) according to the Chinese.
Ciro Santilli claims to be one of them.
Much like a pianist plays his piano, a software engineer plays his computer.
www.quora.com/Why-do-successful-geeky-white-men-have-Asian-wives-This-seems-to-be-the-norm-in-Silicon-Valley suggests it is just an statistical inevitability.
Ciro Santilli believes that there is a positive correlation between being a software engineer and liking Buddhist-like things.
Maybe it is linked to minimalism and DRY, which software engineers value so greatly.
Even Ciro had to try an unoriginal Buddhist joke intro in one of this Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro also feels that his "minimal reproducible example" scientific language/concept learning method obsession of breaking things into tiny sub-problems has a strong link with Koans.
Some notable Buddhism/programmer examples:
- www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ "The Unix Koans of Master Foo - Rootless Root (无根的根)" by the legendary Eric Steven Raymond is notable
- thecodelesscode.com/ "The Codeless Code" by anonymous Qi.
- canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html
- wiki.c2.com/?MysticalProgrammingKoans
- rubykoans.com/ even evil programming languages adopt them!
- The Zen of Python
Another thing that points the correlation out is the existence of wattsalan.github.io/ on a
github.io
about Alan Watts.Ciro Santilli's joke version of the Chinese Four Treasures of the Study!In the past, Ciro used to use file managers, which would be the fourth tresure. But he stopped doing so for years due to his cd alias... so it became three. He actually had exactly three windows open when he was checking if there was anything else he could not open hand of.
- web browser
- Text editor
- terminal. Though to be honest, circa 2022, Ciro learned of the ctrl + click to open file (including with file.c:123 line syntax) ability of Visual Studio Code (likely present in other IDEs), and he was starting considering dumping the terminal altogether if some implementation gets it really really right. The main thing is that it can't be a tinny little bar at the bottom, it has to be full window and super easily toggleable!
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.
It also mentions how he was a natural teacher from a very early age.
Hmmm, he does not know how to spell guerilla? sic? www.quora.com/What-is-the-correct-spelling-guerilla-or-guerrilla
Note to self: if you are going to commit a crime, don't publish your plans online.
Ross Ulbricht's diaries come to mind.
That's how Russian shadow library maintainers do it, they know how to crime good old Russians. Maybe there is a good thing about having dictatorships in the world that give zero fucks about American copyright laws. There will always be some random Russian academic who will implement this and not go to jail. Maybe it's even state sponsored.
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
This resonates a lot with Ciro Santilli's ideas!
- physics and the illusion of life
- physics education needs more focus on understanding experiments and their history:
- education is broken
- molecular biology feels like systems programming
I've never come across a subject so fractal in its complexity. It reminds me of computing that way.
Lots of similar ideologies to Ciro Santilli, love it:
- sandymaguire.me/about/:
- he's an idealist
I might best be described somewhere between independent researcher and voluntarily-unemployed bum. At the ripe old age of 27 I decided to quit my highly-lucrative engineering job and decide to focus more on living than on grinding for the man. It's what you might call a work in progress.
- sandymaguire.me/blog/reaching-climbing/: don't be a pussy
One 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.
He's a Haskell person.
His website is down as of 2020, shame: wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/english-universal-language
One of the dudes from the AtomSea & EMBII Bitcoin-based file upload system.
- github.com/embiimob
- Real name: likely "Eric Bobby" according to:According to Figure "
Loraine.jpg
" however, his mother's name was "Loraine Elizabeth White", so there's some chance his real family name is Mr. White.However according to bitfossil.org/937f70bf641ccabaf623772367df64bd867ad44c53fd227d01f2662e74aeacbf/ his daughter is Maddy Bobby, so maybe he is actually Bobby. - twitter.com/EMBII4U
- twitter.com/TheAtomSea/status/990318090738196481 sample link
Author of gwern.net.
Accounts:He posts insanely much on these websites. It's a bit like Ciro Santilli on Stack Overflow.
- news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern
- www.lesswrong.com/users/gwern LessWrong
- twitter.com/gwern locked 2021: www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kp2fek/does_anybody_know_what_happened_to_gwern/
- www.reddit.com/user/gwern/
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gwern on Wikipedia. Self summary: gwern.net/wikipedia-resume. Also he is a critic of deletionism on Wikipedia like Ciro Santilli
Ciro Santilli envies this guy a bit. He dumps his brain more or less full time on his highly customized static website partly due to early Bitcoin investments gwern.net/me says:
Also unsurprisingly he likes Haskell:
I mostly contribute to projects in Haskell, my favorite language
Ciro Santilli considers Gwern Ciro Santilli's e-soulmates due to his interest in "dark web things" like Bitcoin and Silk Road, his immense writing output in encyclopedic book-sized articles on a static website, and his desire to live frugally and just research and write all day. Ah, if only Ciro had some old coins!!!
This is likely a pseudonym, his real name not being publicly unknown, e.g. at news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5659278:
Why do you choose relative anonymity?For the reasons I've said in the past. To which I can add personal safety: my Silk Road page is a bit questionable legally, and we all know that there are ways to exploit knowledge of one's True Name and address (even if, as far as I know, I have no enemies willing to resort to, say, 'swatting' me) - one group of stalkers called up a college they thought I worked at to see if they could get me fired or otherwise ruin my day.
Gwern Branwen's website.
One thing that annoys Ciro Santilli about that website are the footnote overload. Ciro likes linear things.
TODO find the best source for the amazing "I have done your mother" quote.
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