Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37 

His website is down as of 2020, shame: wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/english-universal-language

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.

Data Updated 2025-07-16

Magic the gathering's banning of 7 cards due to "racism" (2020) Updated 2025-07-16

Official announcement: magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/depictions-racism-magic-2020-06-10

List of cards with images: www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/wizards-bans-7-cards-that-depict-racism-including-invoke-prejudice/

Invoke prejudice: depicts the Ku Klux Klan. Card's title clearly criticizes them "prejudice".
Stone-Throwing Devils: not sure about this one: boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/54341/what-is-offensive-about-the-card-stone-throwing-devils
Cleanse: it does not seem to have any reference to black people, image depicts fantastic animals. There are hundreds of cards that talk about black since it is one of the 5 colors of magic.
Pradesh Gypsies: does not appear to suggest any bad things about gypsies, on the contrary
Jihad: does not appear to suggest any bad things about Islam, on the contrary
Imprison: depicts a black slave. Let's pretend it never happened.
Crusade: pretend it never happened

By Wizards of the Coast, parent company of Magic: The Gathering.

Reddit discussion: www.reddit.com/r/mtgfinance/comments/h0kb84/depictions_of_racism_in_magic_aka_invoke/

Magnetic dipole Updated 2025-07-16

A tiny idealized magnet! It is a very good model if you have a small strong magnet interacting with objects that are far away, notably other magnetic dipoles or a constant magnetic field.

The cool thing about this model is that we have simple explicit formulas for the magnetic field it produces, and for how this little magnet is affected by a magnetic field or by another magnetic dipole.

This is the perfect model for electron spin, but it can also be representative of macroscopic systems in the right circumstances.

The intuition for the name is likely that "dipole" means "both poles are on the same spot".

Marie Curie Updated 2025-07-16

Like all big names in science, she was at the right place at the right time and with the right interest and passion.

Notably, the man she married, Pierre Curie, happened to be a the world master at precisely the technique that she needed to carefully measure radioactivity: he had the most precise electrometers in the world, which allowed to detect small amounts of radioactivity via the ionization of air by radiation . These used piezoelectricity, which Pierre Curie co-discovered with his brother.

Marie Curie section of The Mystery of Matter episode 2

. Source. Fantastic illustration of Marie's life and work!

youtu.be/wbuDmY5gpXQ?t=2041 she specifically avoided X-ray research because she felt that there was too much competition in that area. TODO find a written reference about that and add it to Wikipedia.

How to mine Monero Updated 2025-07-16

Ubuntu 20.10 as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/build/ubuntu:

sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
mkdir xmrig/build && cd xmrig/build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)

At minexmr.com/#getting_started we see that all you then need is a single CLI command:

xmrig -o pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u <your-monero-address>

Seems simple, well done devs!

Benchmark on Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/benchmark:

./xmrig --bench=1M

gives:

948.1 h/s

which according to the minexmr.com mining pool would generate 0.0005 XMR/day, which at the February 2021 rate of 140 USD/XMR is 0.07 USD/day. The minimum payout in that pool is 0.004 XMR so it would take 8 days to reach that.

So clearly, application-specific integrated circuit mining is the only viable way of doing this.

Some people considering Raspberry Pis also conclude obviously that it is useless at a 10H/s rate:

www.makeuseof.com/cryptos-you-can-mine-at-home/ is a completely full of bullshit article that says otherwise. How can someone publish that!

Mastodon (software) Updated 2025-07-16

Of course those racist Nazis are a bunch of idiots, but how can you be surprised when freedom-of-speech focused tech gets used by them? www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking

Obviously, a few large instances dominate the user base for all practical purposes: kevq.uk/centralisation-and-mastodon/. And likely the network splits into hate-speech/non-hate-speech blacklist boundaries. And since the dominating closed networks will never lose user counts (???), the only instance that dominates will be the main hate speech one.

The flagship instance was mastodon.social and then in 2020 they closed signups for it and created a secondary mastodon.online.

The multi-instance thing is confusing and problematic. E.g. replies and likes might not show up across instances in some occasions: www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/ynt7ta/is_there_a_way_to_see_post_replies_displayed_on/

The "advanced interface" feature is bad. Really bad. MacOS file browser inspired.

Figure 1.

Mastodon logo

. Source.

Microscopy connectome extraction Updated 2025-07-16

This is the most plausible way of obtaining a full connectome looking from 2020 forward. Then you'd observe the slices with an electron microscope + appropriate Staining. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) really opened Ciro Santilli's eyes to this possibility.

Once this is done for a human, it will be one of the greatest milestone of humanities, coparable perhaps to the Human Genome Project. BUt of course, privacy issues are incrediby pressing in this case, even more than in the human genome project, as we would essentially be able to read the brain of the person after their death.

As of 2022, the Drosophila connectome had been almost fully extracted.

This is also a possible path towards post-mortem brain reading.

Figure 1. Source. Unconfirmed, but looks like the type of frozen brain where a Microtome would be used.

MIDI Updated 2025-07-16

In simple terms, represents keystrokes of a piano, but it can likely also represent other effects (TODO confirm: bend, vibrato, slides, attack strength)

Can contain multiple parallel tracks as seen from the Wikipedia example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MIDI_sample.mid

You can see what it contains well with GUI music editor.

MIDI is fun. It is a basic high level representation of most instrumental music, including beats.

To actually listen to MIDI, you need a software synthesizer, which knows what sound to make for each note. One way to specify such instruments is the SoundFont file format.

Convert MIDI to more common standalone formats:

David Tong Updated 2025-07-16

A charismatic, perfect-English-accent (Received Pronunciation) physicist from University of Cambridge, specializing in quantum field theory.

He has done several "vulgarization" lectures, some of which could be better called undergrad appetizers rather, a notable example being Video "Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe by David Tong (2017)" for the prestigious Royal Institution, but remains a hardcore researcher: scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=felFiY4AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate. Lots of open access publications BTW, so kudos.

The amount of lecture notes on his website looks really impressive: www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html, he looks like a good educator.

David has also shown some interest in applications of high energy mathematical ideas to condensed matter, e.g. links between the renormalization group and phase transition phenomena. TODO there was a YouTube video about that, find it and link here.

Ciro Santilli wonders if his family is of East Asian, origin and if he can still speak any east asian languages. "Tong" is of course a transcription of several major Chinese surnames and from looks he could be mixed blood, but as mentioned at www.ancestry.co.uk/name-origin?surname=tong it can also be an English "metonymic occupational name for a maker or user of tongs". After staring at his picture for a while Ciro is going with the maker of tongs theory initially.

Deep learning Updated 2025-07-16

Deep learning is the name artificial neural networks basically converged to in the 2010s/2020s.

It is a bit of an unfortunate as it suggests something like "deep understanding" and even reminds one of AGI, which it almost certainly will not attain on its own. But at least it sounds good.

DeepMind Lab Updated 2025-07-16

github.com/deepmind/lab

github.com/deepmind/lab/tree/master/game_scripts/levels/contributed/dmlab30 has some good games with video demos on YouTube, though for some weird reason they are unlisted.

TODO get one of the games running. Instructions: github.com/deepmind/lab/blob/master/docs/users/build.md. This may helpgithub.com/deepmind/lab/issues/242: "Complete installation script for Ubuntu 20.04".

It is interesting how much overlap some of those have with Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games

The games are 3D, but most of them are purely flat, and the 3D is just a waste of resources.

Human player test of DMLab-30 Collect Good Objects task by DeepMind (2018)

Source.

Video 2.

Human player test of DMLab-30 Exploit Deferred Effects task by DeepMind (2018)

Source.

Video 3.

Human player test of DMLab-30 Select Described Object task by DeepMind (2018)

Source. Some of their games involve language instructions from the use to determine the desired task, cool concept.

Video 4.

Human player test of DMLab-30 Fixed Large Map task by DeepMind (2018)

Source. They also have some maps with more natural environments.

DeepMind Lab2D Updated 2025-07-16

Open sourced in 2020: analyticsindiamag.com/deepmind-just-gave-away-this-ai-environment-simulator-for-free/

Gridworld version of DeepMind Lab.

A tiny paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07027.pdf

Very similar to gvgai, Julian Togelius actually called them out on that: DeepMind Lab2D vs gvgai.

TODO get running, publish demo videos on YouTube.

DeepMind Lab2D vs gvgai Updated 2025-07-16

At twitter.com/togelius/status/1328404390114435072 called out on DeepMind Lab2D for not giving them credit on prior work!

This very much looks like like GVGAI which was first released in 2014, been used in dozens (maybe hundreds) of papers, and for which one of the original developers was Tom Schaul at DeepMind...

As seen from web.archive.org/web/20220331022932/http://gvgai.net/ though, DeepMind sponsored them at some point.

DeepMind project Updated 2025-07-16

Deepmind soccer simulation Updated 2025-07-16

From Motor Control to Team Play in Simulated Humanoid Football

From Motor Control to Team Play in Simulated Humanoid Football by Ali Eslami (2023)

Source. Likely a reupload by DeepMind employee: www.linkedin.com/in/smalieslami.

Video 2.

DeepMind’s AI Trained For 5 Years by Two Minute Papers (2023)

Source. The 5 years bullshit is of course in-game time clickbait, they simulate 1000x faster than realtime.

Military-industrial complex Updated 2025-07-16

This is notably what the United States emerged to be after World War II. But it was likely what Nazi Germany also was, and many other superpowers.

Ciro Santilli feels that much more relevant would be to also include academia as in "military-industrial-academic" complex, the Wikipedia page actually mentions precedents to this idea.

The addition of congress/politicians is also relevant.

But hey, the name wouldn't sound so slick with three parts.

It is basically in this context that American science and technology flourished after World War II, including notably the development of quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman being a prototypical example, having previously worked on the Manhattan Project.

Millennium Prize Problems Updated 2025-07-16

Ciro Santilli would like to fully understand the statements and motivations of each the problems!

Easy to understand the motivation:

Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness is basically the only problem that is really easy to understand the statement and motivation :-)
p versus NP problem

Hard to understand the motivation!

Riemann hypothesis: a bunch of results on prime numbers, and therefore possible applications to cryptography
Of course, everything of interest has already been proved conditionally on it, and the likely "true" result will in itself not have any immediate applications.
As is often the case, the only usefulness would be possible new ideas from the proof technique, and people being more willing to prove stuff based on it without the risk of the hypothesis being false.
Yang-Mills existence and mass gap: this one has to do with finding/proving the existence of a more decent formalization of quantum field theory that does not resort to tricks like perturbation theory and effective field theory with a random cutoff value
This is important because the best theory of light and electrons (and therefore chemistry and material science) that we have today, quantum electrodynamics, is a quantum field theory.

MuJoCo getting started Updated 2025-07-16

Tested on Ubuntu 23.10;

git clone https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco
cd mujoco
git checkout 5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac
mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j

Now let's play. Minimal interactive UI simulation of a simple MJCF scene with one falling cube:

bin/basic ../doc/_static/hello.xml

Test soure code: github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco/blob/5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac/sample/basic.cc. The only thing you can do is rotate the scene with the computer mouse it seems. Mentioned at: mujoco.readthedocs.io/en/2.2.2/programming.html#sabasic

Some more interesting models can be found under the model/ directory: github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco/tree/5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac/model E.g. the imaginary humanoid robot DeepMind used in many demos can be seen with:

bin/basic ../model/humanoid/humanoid.xml

A more advanced UI with a few controls:

bin/simulate ../doc/_static/hello.xml

Test soure code: github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco/tree/5d46c39529819d1b31249e249ca399f306a108ac/simulate. Mentioned at: mujoco.readthedocs.io/en/2.2.2/programming.html#sasimulate

A very cool thing about that UI is that you can manually control joints. There are no joints in the hello.xml, but e.g. with the humanoid model:

bin/simulate ../model/humanoid/humanoid.xml

under "Control" you move each joint of the robot separately which is quite cool.

Demo of MuJoCo's built-in simulate viewer by Yuval Tassa (2019)

Source.

There's also a bin/record test executable that presumably renders the simulation directly to a file:

bin/record ../doc/_static/hello.xml 5 60 rgb.out
ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pixel_format rgb24 -video_size 800x800 -framerate 60 -i rgb.out -vf "vflip" video.mp4

Mentioned at: mujoco.readthedocs.io/en/2.2.2/programming.html#sarecord but TODO that produced a broken video, related issues:

Nintendo 64 Updated 2025-07-16

This is the one that hit Ciro Santilli the hardest, coming in at the point in which he started to discern between games and the real world a little better. His parents bought it for him during a trip to Disney World in Florida in 1996 (?), since electronics were much cheaper in the USA.

So as Ciro became older, and turned into a software engineer, he started to become more and more morbidly curious about "N64 internals": tool-assisted speedrun, how the devkit looks like, how games were developed for it, hardware leaks, etc.

Luckily Ciro's mind is not interested enough by that useless shit for Ciro to seriously study it himself. But that's what YouTube is for, right? Why do useless stuff when other more useless people can do it for you?

The console has only 4 MB of RAM memory. It is quite incredible what can be done with 8 MB, from the point of view of a 2020 worls where 16 GB laptops are the norm.