Synthetic virus Updated 2025-11-18
Man-made virus!
TODO: if we had cheap de novo DNA synthesis, how hard would it be to bootstrap a virus culture from that? github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/60
Is it easy to transfect a cell with the synthesized DNA, and get it to generate full infectious viral particles?
If so, then de novo DNA synthesis would be very similar to 3D printed guns: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printed_firearms.
It might already be possible to order dissimulated sequences online:
ARPA Updated 2026-02-08
gvgai Updated 2025-12-13
The project kind of died circa 2020 it seems, a shame. Likely they funding ran out. The domain is dead as of 2023, last archive from 2022: web.archive.org/web/20220331022932/http://gvgai.net/ is marked as funded by DeepMind. Researchers really should use university/GitHub domain names!
Similar goals to Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, but they were focusing mostly on discrete games.
They have some source at: github.com/GAIGResearch/GVGAI TODO review
From QMUL Game AI Research Group:From other universities:TODO check:
- Simon M. Lucas: gaigresearch.github.io/members/Simon-Lucas, principal investigator
- Diego Perez Liebana www.linkedin.com/in/diegoperezliebana/
- Raluca D. Gaina: www.linkedin.com/in/raluca-gaina-347518114/ from Queen Mary
- Ahmed Khalifa
- Jialin Liu
Asian fetish Updated 2025-10-27
Whenever Ciro's wife starts with "the Asian fetish talk", Ciro reminds her of her own claimed "tall person fetish", and they call it quits.
Asian fetish is much more than sex. It is about the culture, the history, the language. It is the same fetish that makes great mathematicians an Artists do what they do.
When Ciro Santilli was at École Polytechnique, he had to do a presentation for his stupid English courses that all students were forced to take, no matter how good their English was.
The topic was likely something like "pick a country", and Ciro was delighted when he managed to pick "China", after it had gone around a table with many many people before him.
The PowerPoint presentation Ciro made over the weekend was so amazing (and making it was actually fun to make, Ciro actually remembers it a bit!), drawing partly from stuff his wife then girlfriend showed him, that at the end the one of the other students asked him if he had lived in China.
It is a shame Ciro couldn't find the presentation when he wrote this line many many years later. Anything that is not in a BLOB-free monorepo, will disappear, heed my words. But he's certain about two things which it contained:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#History_of_originssubservient, passive, mysterious are understandable. But Hyper-sexual and villainous? OMG have these people never seen real Asians?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#Pornography:
In the United States, women of East and Southeast Asian descent are sometimes stereotyped as subservient, passive, mysterious, villainous in nature, and hyper-sexual.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#Pornography:
Physics and the illusion of life Updated 2025-12-13
The natural sciences are not just a tool to predict the future.
They are a reminder that the lives that we live daily are mere illusions, religious concepts such as Maya and Samsara come to mind.
We as individuals perceive nothing about the materials that we touch every day really work, nor more importantly how our brain and cell work.
Everything is magic out of our control.
The natural sciences allow us peek, with huge concentrated effort, into tiny little bits a little of those unknowns, and blow our minds as we notice that we don't know anything.
For all practical purposes in life, there is a huge macro micro gap. We are only able to directly perceive and influence the macro events. And through those we try to affect micro events. Because for good or bad, micro events reflect in the macro world.
It is as if we live in a different plane of existence above molecules, and below galaxies. The hierarchy of Figure "xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity" puts that nicely into perspective, shame it only starts at the economical level, not going up to astronomy.
The great beauty of science is that it allows us to puncture through some of the layers of reality, either up or down, away from our daily experience.
And the great beauty of artificial intelligence research is that it allows to peer deeper into exactly our layer of existence.
Every one or two weeks Ciro Santilli remembers that he and everything he touches are just a bunch of atoms, and that is an amazing feeling. This is Ciro's preferred source of Great doubt. Another concept that comes to mind is when you see it, you'll shit bricks.
Perhaps, the feeling of physics and the illusion of life reaches its peak in molecular biology.
Just look at your fucking hand right now.
Do you have any idea of each of the cells in it work? Isn't is at least 100 times more complex than the materials of the table you hand is currently resting on?
This is the non-science fiction version of the lotus-Eater Machine.
Alan Watts's "Philosopher" talk mentions related ideas:
The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
The toddler of a friend of Ciro Santilli's wife asked her mum:Our perception of the macroscopic world is so magic that children have to learn the difference between living and non-living things.
James Somers put it very well as well in his article I should have loved biology by James Somers, this quote was brought to Ciro's attention by Bert Hubert's website[ref].The same applies to other natural sciences.
I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail:For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.
Alan Watts' "Philosopher" talk (1973)
Source. Lecture given at UCLA on 1973-02-21. Some key quotes from the talk:The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
Games young Ciro Santilli played Updated 2025-12-13
Mostly video games of course.
First when he was really young, about 5, Ciro played a lot of NES, but he doesn't remember things from that era very well. Contra, Ninja Turtles, Battle Tanks, Duck Hunt, and some modern "real world jet" top to bottom rail shooter (TODO identify) are definitely some of the games he clearly remembers playing, see also: Figure "Five year old Ciro Santilli playing NES on a joystick". Nintendo hard was truly a thing back then.
As an honorable mention, Ciro remembers his teenage/young adult neighbours in Jundiaí playing some DOS games on their computer, notably there was a 3D racing one. This must have been around 1995/1997, so using some of the very earliest GPUs. Those games felt so incredibly advanced, including the required setup to play them, which required some command-line commands. It felt like some kind of black magic! But Ciro didn't really play them however.
Ciro then skipped the SNES and handhelds, which he played only through friends because he was cheap (but also because Brazil is a poor country remember, and imports are pretty expensive). He clearly remembers playing Super Mario World for the SNES and Pokemon on friends' Gameboys of course.
Ciro then went straight to 5th generation with the Nintendo 64 in 1994 which his parents bought for him during a trip to the United States. Once again, because he was cheap, the only game he bought was Super Mario 64, which likely came with the console? He played that game to death.
Then came Ocarina of Time, which blew everyone's minds, and Ciro would go to Blockbuster to rent it for the weekend, and again play to death with his friends. You had to arrive early at Blockbuster to rent it, otherwise other people would rent all copies!!!
The only time Ciro got robbed as of 2020 was when an older teenager stopped his bicycle in front of Ciro and took his rented Golden Eye 64 copy away from his hand, and run off. Poor drug addict.
Ciro always felt that the PS1 had a much uglier aesthetics than the N64, and didn't like the console. Playing a bit of Final Fantasy VI on his memory did stick deeply to his mind however. Ciro later played all good PS1 RPGs on emulation during University of São Paulo during amazing solitary nights.
And on the PC, Ciro was particularly touched by Age of Empires II and Diablo II.
As a young teenager Ciro would also play Counter-Strike with his friends at LAN houses. Playing that game would make Ciro extremely anxious, his hands got all cold, and it was a lot of fun.
After this Ciro grew up and notice that the only fun game is that of becoming become rich and famous in the real world.
Outside of video games, Ciro got mildly addicted to Magic: The Gathering in his early teens.
Formalization of mathematics Updated 2025-12-13
Here is a more understandable description of the semi-satire that follows: math.stackexchange.com/questions/53969/what-does-formal-mean/3297537#3297537
You start with a very small list of:
- certain arbitrarily chosen initial strings, which mathematicians call "axioms"
- rules of how to obtain new strings from old strings, called "rules of inference" Every transformation rule is very simple, and can be verified by a computer.
Using those rules, you choose a target string that you want to reach, and then try to reach it. Before the target string is reached, mathematicians call it a "conjecture".
Since every step of the proof is very simple and can be verified by a computer automatically, the entire proof can also be automatically verified by a computer very easily.
Finding proofs however is undoubtedly an uncomputable problem.
Most mathematicians can't code or deal with the real world in general however, so they haven't created the obviously necessary: website front-end for a mathematical formal proof system.
The fact that Mathematics happens to be the best way to describe physics and that humans can use physical intuition heuristics to reach the NP-hard proofs of mathematics is one of the great miracles of the universe.
Once we have mathematics formally modelled, one of the coolest results is Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which states that for any reasonable proof system, there are necessarily theorems that cannot be proven neither true nor false starting from any given set of axioms: those theorems are independent from those axioms. Therefore, there are three possible outcomes for any hypothesis: true, false or independent!
Some famous theorems have even been proven to be independent of some famous axioms. One of the most notable is that the Continuum Hypothesis is independent from Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory! Such independence proofs rely on modelling the proof system inside another proof system, and forcing is one of the main techniques used for this.
The landscape of modern Mathematics comic by Abstruse Goose
. Source. This comic shows that Mathematics is one of the most diversified areas of useless human knowledge. ZynAddSubFX Updated 2025-07-16
Instruments are edited on a GUI. It is a multi-window program, and you open new windows from new windows from new windows, all filled with hundreds of virtual knobs that you drag with your keyboard, and which would be better done from textual software like Csound. It is a thing of beauty.
It does not seem possible to program arbitrary modular synthesizer circuits therefore. But if you understand additive synthesis and subtractive synthesis well, you can make some funky sounds with it.
It is basically a superset of all popular hardware synthesizers ever made.
Has its own built-in MIDI keyboard which is nice.
On Ubuntu 20.04 Version: 3.0.5:as per askubuntu.com/questions/220802/no-sound-zynaddsubfx-and-jack-wont-run/1297988#1297988
To do anything of interest, switch to the Advanced UI:
sudo apt install zynaddsubfx
zynaddsubfx -O alsaTo do anything of interest, switch to the Advanced UI:
- Misc
- Switch Interface Mode
The UI is completely different form what is shown on the website as of 2020: zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.io/, it looks instead like: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVPr6iUuO3g Maybe on the website it is the new zyn-fusion UI... www.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio/comments/bxn3ur/some_help_for_installing_zynfusion_zynaddsubfx/ so confusing.
And they have some crappy policy of asking for 45 USD for binary downloads.
Compiling from source:fails with:Ciro gives up for now.
git clone https://github.com/zynaddsubfx/zynaddsubfx
cd zynaddsubfx
git checkout a789866de4d45a784c1f4d95fcf5a1938347baef
sudo apt build-dep zynaddsubfx
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j`nproc`Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/cxxtestgen", line 7, in <module>
import cxxtest.cxxtestgen
File "/usr/share/cxxtest/cxxtest/__init__.py", line 33, in <module>
from cxxtest.cxxtestgen import *
File "/usr/share/cxxtest/cxxtest/cxxtestgen.py", line 18, in <module>
import __release__
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named '__release__' ZX-calculus Updated 2025-07-16
As en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ZX-calculus&oldid=1071329204#Diagram_rewriting tries to explain but fails to deliver as usual consider the GHZ state represented as a quantum circuit.
The naive way would be to just do the matrix multiplication as explained at Section "Quantum computing is just matrix multiplication".
However, ZX-calculus provides a simpler way.
And even more importantly, sometimes it is the only way, because in a real circuit, we would not be able to do the matrix multiplication
This is always possible, because we can describe how to do the conversion simply for any of the Clifford plus T gates, which is a set of universal quantum gates.
Then, after we do this transformation, we can start applying further transformations that simplify the circuit.
It has already been proven that there is no efficient algorithm for this (TODO source, someone said P-sharp complete best case)
But it has been proven in 2017 that any possible equivalence between quantum circuits can be reached by modifying ZX-calculus circuits.
There are only 7 transformation rules that we need, and all others can be derived from those, universality.
So, we can apply those rules to do the transformation shown in Wikipedia:
and one of those rules finally tells us that that last graph means our desired state:because it is a Z spider with and .
Year 4 of the physics course of the University of Oxford Updated 2025-07-16
Students choose only one of the Cx courses.
Then there are PhDs corresponding to each of them: www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/mpls/physics
Yang-Mills existence and mass gap Updated 2025-07-16
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_qNKbwM_eE Unsolved: Yang-Mills existence and mass gap by J Knudsen (2019). Gives 10 key points, but the truly hard ones are too quick. He knows the thing though.
Yang-Mills 1 by David Metzler (2011)
Source. A bit disappointing, too high level, with very few nuggests that are not Googleable withing 5 minutes.
Breakdown:
- 1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3fsPHnrgLg: too basic
- 2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=br6OxCLyqAI?t=569: mentions groups of Lie type in the context of classification of finite simple groups. Each group has a little diagram.
- 3 youtu.be/1baiIxKKQlQ?list=PL613A31A706529585&t=728 the original example of a local symmetry was general relativity, and that in that context it can be clearly seen that the local symmetry is what causes "forces" to appear
- youtu.be/1baiIxKKQlQ?list=PL613A31A706529585&t=933 local symmetry gives a conserved current. In the case of electromagnetism, this is electrical current. This was the only worthwhile thing he sad to 2021 Ciro. Summarized at: local symmetries of the Lagrangian imply conserved currents.
- 4 youtu.be/5ljKcWm7hoU?list=PL613A31A706529585&t=427 electromagnetism has both a global symmetry (special relativity) but also local symmetry, which leads to the conservation of charge current and forces.lecture 3 properly defines a local symmetry in terms of the context of the lagrangian density, and explains that the conservation of currents there is basically the statement of Noether's theorem in that context.
Xah Lee Updated 2025-07-16
fuseki.net/home/List-of-Patreon-Subs-with-Justification.html describes him well:
Homepage xahlee.org/ says:Nice Second brain vibe.
Let's see:
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/xahlee/
- youtu.be/a6J62TwOreY?t=271 OMG he also uses a Kinesis Advantage 2 keyboard-like keyboard! Maybe there is something here after all.
- he's also a mad tutorial writer: xahlee.info/Wallpaper_dir/c4_Derivation.html#gc2.2.2.1 like Ciro's Stack Overflow
- www.patreon.com/xahlee £835.2/month from ony 27 members as of 2023, holy crap not bad!
- he was in a bad spot as of 2014: xahlee.info/emacs/misc/xah_as_good_as_dead.htmlThread: www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/25pypq/im_about_as_good_as_dead_the_end_of_xah_lee/One is reminded of Chill and eat your bread in peace and Quote "Omar Khayyam's chill out quote". xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html autobiography is also of interest.
The same linear address can translate to different physical addresses for different processes, depending only on the value inside
cr3.Both linear addresses
00002 000 from process 1 and 00004 000 from process 2 point to the same physical address 00003 000. This is completely allowed by the hardware, and it is up to the operating system to handle such cases.This often in normal operation because of Copy-on-write (COW), which be explained elsewhere.
Such mappings are sometime called "aliases".
x86 Paging Tutorial Linux kernel usage Updated 2025-07-16
The Linux kernel makes extensive usage of the paging features of x86 to allow fast process switches with small data fragmentation.
There are also however some features that the Linux kernel might not use, either because they are only for backwards compatibility, or because the Linux devs didn't feel it was worth it yet.
x86 Paging Tutorial How the K-ary tree is used in x86 Updated 2025-07-16
Addresses are now split as:
| directory (10 bits) | table (10 bits) | offset (12 bits) |Then:
- The top table is called a "directory of page tables".
cr3now points to the location on RAM of the page directory of the current process instead of page tables.Page directory entries are very similar to page table entries except that they point to the physical addresses of page tables instead of physical addresses of pages.Each directory entry also takes up 4 bytes, just like page entries, so that makes 4 KiB per process minimum.Page directory entries also contain a valid flag: if invalid, the OS does not allocate a page table for that entry, and saves memory.Each process has one and only one page directory associated to it (and pointed to bycr3), so it will contain at least2^10 = 1Kpage directory entries, much better than the minimum 1M entries required on a single-level scheme. - Second level entries are also called page tables like the single level scheme.Each page table has only
2^10 = 1Kpage table entries instead of2^20for the single paging scheme. - the offset is again not used for translation, it only gives the offset within a page
One reason for using 10 bits on the first two levels (and not, say,
12 | 8 | 12 ) is that each Page Table entry is 4 bytes long. Then the 2^10 entries of Page directories and Page Tables will fit nicely into 4Kb pages. This means that it faster and simpler to allocate and deallocate pages for that purpose. x86 Paging Tutorial CAM Updated 2025-07-16
Using the TLB makes translation faster, because the initial translation takes one access per TLB level, which means 2 on a simple 32 bit scheme, but 3 or 4 on 64 bit architectures.
The TLB is usually implemented as an expensive type of RAM called content-addressable memory (CAM). CAM implements an associative map on hardware, that is, a structure that given a key (linear address), retrieves a value.
Mappings could also be implemented on RAM addresses, but CAM mappings may required much less entries than a RAM mapping.
linear physical
------ --------
00000 00001
00001 00010
00010 00011
FFFFF 00000 Erdős number Updated 2025-10-27
Discrete logarithm Updated 2025-10-27
An important case is the discrete logarithm of the cyclic group in which the group is a cyclic group.
x86 Paging Tutorial 64-bit architectures Updated 2025-07-16
x86_64 uses 48 bits (256 TiB), and legacy mode's PAE already allows 52-bit addresses (4 PiB). 56-bits is a likely future candidate.
But that would mean that the page directory would have
2^18 = 256K entries, which would take too much RAM: close to a single-level paging for 32 bit architectures!x86_64 uses 4 levels in a
9 | 9 | 9 | 9 scheme, so that the upper level only takes up only 2^9 higher level entries.The 48 bits are split equally into two disjoint parts:
----------------- FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF
Top half
----------------- FFFF8000 00000000
Not addressable
----------------- 00007FFF FFFFFFFF
Bottom half
----------------- 00000000 00000000A 5-level scheme is emerging in 2016: software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/2b/80/5-level_paging_white_paper.pdf which allows 52-bit addresses with 4k pagetables.
x86 Paging Tutorial Updated 2025-07-19
This tutorial explains the very basics of how paging works, with focus on x86, although most high level concepts will also apply to other instruction set architectures, e.g. ARM.
The goals are to:
This tutorial was extracted and expanded from this Stack Overflow answer.
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