Samurai cinema by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Chanbara (チャンバラ).
Those movies are "all the same". A quasi lone superhuman samurai with a good inside but painful problems helping out random people, mostly villagers in trouble and bitches in debt.
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter 4 "Entropy and Probability" mentions well how Boltzmann first thought that the second law was an actual base physical law of the universe while he was calculating numerical stuff for it, including as late as 1872.
But then he saw an argument by Johann Joseph Loschmidt that given the time reversibility of classical mechanics, and because they were thinking of atoms as classical balls as in the kinetic theory of gases, then there always exist a valid physical state where entropy decreases, by just reversing the direction of time and all particle speeds.
So from this he understood that the second law can only be probabilistic, and not a fundamental law of physics, which he published clearly in 1877.
Zatoichi effect by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This is a neologism by Ciro Santilli, it refers to the fact that Zatoichi was not fully blind, but extremely hard of sight, which makes him:
  • too capable for the blind people, who did not trust him
  • too incapable for non-blind people, who despised him
and metaphorically refers to similar situations where a person or group of people are in the middle of two groups and not part of either of them.
A related thing that comes to mind is Aum Shinrikyo's Prophet Shoko Asahara, who was semi blind, and would bully the fully blind people of his school for blind people.
And by artificial intelligence, read of course (non-human-identical) artificial general intelligence.
Today-2022, this is placed under the science fiction film category. But maybe this might change during Ciro Santilli's own lifetime?
The basic criteria of "is a film about artificial intelligence good or not" to Ciro Santilli is: does the AI inhabit humanoid, or fully human looking, bodies? Bodies is a bad sign due to:
  • the best science fiction works deeply explore the consequences of one single technology: efficient humanoid bodies are a second technological breakthrough besides AI itself. The first AI will obviously be a supercomputer without a body
  • it is hard to imagine that the AI wouldn't organize itself as one huge central computer and R&D/command center. Perhaps there will be need for a few separate ones to optimize usage of natural resources, and to have some redundance in case a nuke blows the region, but there would be very very few of the think tanks. But having big centers is fundamental, because you centralize all the flow of ideas and their combination leading to new better outcomes for the AI. The mobile robot actors controlled by this center, if any exist, would then be slaves with some degree of autonomy and infinitely less computational powerful than the think tank.
This is a tag for films that depict some sort of artificial general intelligence, but in which that is not the primary focus of the film.
Primer (2004) by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Things that can be understood are boring.
Aaron Swartz agrees: www.aaronsw.com/weblog/looperexplained "Next week we'll explain Primer." He never did though :'-(
Limtless (2011) by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
That makes Ciro Santilli most mad about this film is the fact that the dude was passionate about writing, and when he became a genius, rather than write the best novels ever written, he decided instead to play the stock market instead. This paints an accurate picture of 2020's society, where finance jobs make infinitely more money than other real engineering jobs, and end up attracting much of the talent.
Another enraging thing is how his girlfriend starts liking him again once he is a genius, and instead of telling her to fuck off, he stays with her.
The other really bad thing is the ending. He fixed the drug by himself? He scared off De Niro just like that?
The Matrix (1999) by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli just keep watching that a gazillion times whenever it showed on TV.
All action scenes are useless crap, but the premise with Ciro's precious simulation hypothesis subject, related physics and the illusion of life.
It is a shame that the key premise of using human bodies to produce energy is completely and impossibly stupid. You would obviously get more energy by directing burning the food you feed into humans.
If the film had been made later, maybe the much more plausible concept of AI alignment would would have been used instead. What a shame.
Video 1.
Blue Pill or Red Pill scene from The Matrix (1999)
Source.
Transcendence (2014) by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The premise that "we can't make AGI, but we know enough about the human brain to upload on to a computer" is flawed. Edit: after reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014), Ciro Santilli was convinced otherwise. What is flawed is of course just the "extracting connectome with macroscopic probes part". A post mortem connectome extraction with microtome is much more believable. But of course they weren't going to show fake slices of Jonny Depp's brain, are they? Famous actor bodies are sacred! What a huge lost opportunity. On the other hand however, the scale of the first connectome extraction would be arguably too huge to be undertaken by a random pair of rogue researchers. The same would also likely apply to any first time human brain connectome. It would much more likely be a huge public effort, much like the Human Genome Project.
But this film does have the merit of exploring how an AGI might act to take over the AGI might act to take over the world once created, notably by creating its own physical research laboratory. Though it doesn't feel likely that it could go under the radar for 2 years given the energetic requirements of the research. Even the terrorists find it before the FBI!
I also wish they had shown the dildo (or more likely, direct stimulation!) computerized Jonny Depp used to use with his wife before he managed to re-synthesized his body. But you know, 18+ would cut too much profits. Ah, what a shame.
Video 1.
Can You Prove You're Self Aware? in the big lab scene from Transcendence (2014)
Source.
The Message (1976) by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The film starts off with more interesting "near the revelation" stuff. But then it degrades into religious wars. Ciro was reminded notably of S.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact