Ciro Santilli has mixed feelings about animal rights.
On one hand, his irrational side wants of course all animals to be happy.
On the other, he does not care about this enough to not kill and eat them, even though he believes that you could live off plants relatively well.
His more rational side says: humans are sacred. Either because you believe in the soul, or because your built-in empathy behaviours. If it is not a human, do whatever you want to it. Killing is already undoubtedly the greatest sin. It is not OK to kill a human painlessly is it? So if torturing it brings humans good, then do it.
Of course, this does get use close and closer to "the what is a human" question, which is more relevant than ever in the awakening of genetics: all species are after all a continuum right?
And Ciro does not have a simple solution to this problem, besides that in 99.9999% the answer is obvious to 99.9999% of the people, and for the others cases, we have to do it like the law and make flawed rules to cover the remaining 0.000099999% cases and let juries decide the rest.
The only other sensible sacredness barrier is the common vegetarian "nervous systems are sacred" one. But how can you believe that if you also follow the religion of physics, where everything is just made of atoms?
Is it evil to take one neuron and torture it? What does that even mean? It will be fun when pain and pleasure are fully understood.
And you are going to have a really hard time when mosquitoes start transmitting deadly diseases that kill your family.
Laws in most 2020 Western modern societies have converged to a hypocritical balance between not offending people too much by hiding the killing and minimizing the pain when possible at low cost. Killing animals painlessly is basically always fine if it brings any "non sadistic" pleasure to humans. And torturing animals is fine with approval e.g. to make medicines.
This has the downside of increasing costs for society. Maybe there are practical benefits besides people feeling bad about animals? Maybe we would have more serial killers if people were free to torture animals? Maybe people in butcher shops would become depressive if their bosses weren't forced to use more expensive painless killing methods? Neither of those seems like huge arguments though.
It eventually comes down to: "how much more is a human life worth than that of an animal" which brings Jesus's Matthew 6:25-34 "Do Not Worry" (archive) quote to mind:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
Non-vegetarian pets owners also baffle Ciro, as most of them basically extend the sacred human line further arbitrarily to certain other cute looking animals like dogs, cats or rabbits, but will gladly kill a cow indirectly by paying someone to pay someone to pay someone to cut it into small pieces. Or they believe that certain specific individuals are sacred. Admittedly, the latter is more rational, and looks a lot of how we treat our own families well, and can accept that other families are not doing so well.
Ciro's even more rational evil side says: the real reason why humans are sacred is a practical one: people have families that love them, and they come to kill you if you kill them, and this starts endless chains of violence that make society unbearable.
Their only undergraduate courses that matter:
Groups concepts by hyponymy and hypernymy and meronymy and holonymy. That actually makes a lot of sense! TODO: is there a clear separation between hyponymy and meronymy?
Browse: wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn Appears dead as of 2025 lol.
The online version of WordNet has been deprecated and is no longer available.
Does not contain intermediat scientific terms, only very common ones, e.g. no mention, of "Josephson effect", "photoelectric effect"
Get all Bitcoin transactions from and to a given address Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/77984/find-all-transactions-for-a-bitcoin-address bad close
- Blockchair
- stackoverflow.com/questions/28205667/list-transactions-from-given-address-in-bitcoind/78009760#78009760
- stackoverflow.com/questions/28205667/list-transactions-from-given-address-in-bitcoind/29244421#29244421 mentions --addrindex but that is dead now:
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/71019/filter-transactions-by-time-on-a-given-address/121720#121720
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/121718/fnd-the-most-valuable-transactions-made-to-a-given-address/121719#121719
- stackoverflow.com/questions/28205667/list-transactions-from-given-address-in-bitcoind/78009760#78009760
Ciro Santilli worked on it for a brief time in 2016, when it was still called Ring, before he got fired. :-)
The people were quite nice and the project idea is fine, Ciro hopes they succeed.
Ring - Peer to peer network for real time communication - FOSDEM 2016 by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Second quantization also appears to be useful not only for relativistic quantum mechanics, but also for condensed matter physics. The reason is that the basis idea is to use the number occupation basis. This basis is:
- convenient for quantum field theory because of particle creation and annihilation changes the number of particles all the time
- convenient for condensed matter physics because there you have a gazillion particles occupying entire energy bands
Bibliography:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVqOfEYzwFY "How to Visualize Quantum Field Theory" by ZAP Physics (2020). Has 1D simulations on a circle. Starts towards the right direction, but is a bit lacking unfortunately, could go deeper.
** The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of
** a legal notice, here is a blessing:
**
** May you do good and not evil.
** May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
** May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Basic must haves:
Other cool stuff:
- sealed sender: signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ Nice!
Missing:
- Tor routing by default:
- option to enable disappearing messages by default:
- community.signalusers.org/t/ability-to-set-your-own-default-timer-for-disappearing-messages-on-all-new-conversations/5144 "Ability to set your own default timer for disappearing messages on all new conversations"
- www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/jhknuz/default_disappearing_messages_timeout_for_new/
- messages are not encrypted on desktop via the password manager!?!?
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/549
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1318
- www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/fwux29/signal_desktop_stores_the_encryption_key_in_a/
- whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/t/improve-security-of-desktop-apps-encryption-of-data-at-rest/26494
- community.signalusers.org/t/why-cant-we-lock-the-desktop-app-with-a-password/1383
- web client:
- secure anti-forensic data erasure to attain plausible deniability of disappearing messages:
Previously missing:
- remove the need to share your phone number with contacts: messaging software that force you to share your mobile phone with contacts. This is a deal breaker for online acquaintances:Beta February 2024: signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
- security.stackexchange.com/questions/231637/signal-contact-people-or-have-people-contact-me-without-revealing-phone-numbe/245665#245665
- community.signalusers.org/t/have-option-to-set-up-username/8723
- www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/8kybil/is_signal_ever_going_to_include_usernames/
- community.signalusers.org/t/usernames-lets-throw-phone-numbers-in-the-dustbin-of-history/7282
- remove need for phone completely:
- community.signalusers.org/t/a-proposal-for-alternative-primary-identifiers/3023
- community.signalusers.org/t/remove-the-need-for-a-mobile-phone/1543
- community.signalusers.org/t/registering-with-an-email-address/919
- community.signalusers.org/t/username-id-registration-without-phone-number/9800
- community.signalusers.org/t/more-reasons-why-signal-should-ditch-phone-numbers-the-guardian-confirmed-the-identity-of-those-in-the-chat-by-cross-checking-phone-numbers-attached-to-the-signal-accounts/7311
- community.signalusers.org/t/why-is-phone-and-phone-number-required/1425 community.signalusers.org/t/what-is-the-technical-reason-that-i-cannot-use-signal-without-a-phone-number-and-that-i-cannot-use-signal-desktop-without-signal-on-my-phone/11400
TODO what's the fucking official discussion/feature request forum?
- community.signalusers.org appears to be the de-facto non-official one.
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/5372
- whispersystems.discoursehosting.net
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1318 closes and points to discoursehosting
- github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/549
- www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/lipo6z/community_signal_forum_vs_reddit/ gives some good history, says they pay for community.signalusers.org/ and have admin powers there.
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.