Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

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_origins

In the United States, women of East and Southeast Asian descent are sometimes stereotyped as subservient, passive, mysterious, villainous in nature, and hyper-sexual.

subservient, passive, mysterious are understandable. But Hyper-sexual and villainous? OMG have these people never seen real Asians?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#Pornography:

Several studies have implied that Asian women are over-represented in the American pornography industry. Asian women make up perhaps 20% of all female performers, despite being roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population. Asian men also appear to be considerably over-represented, at 10% of male actors.

Video 1.

How my boyfriend CHEATED with another Asian girl by Jenny Tian

. Source.

Video 2.

Sam Rockwell monologue about being an Asian girl on The White Lotus

. Source.

 Read the full article

Ciro Santilli's 2021 cycling accident Updated 2025-12-25

 View more

Ciro had a small accident in 2021. It wasn't ultra serious, a few cuts, but could have been worse. Here's a post mortem.

Ciro was going to cycle 120 km between two locations he had never cycled before. Ciro had cycled this distance before many many times, so he thought he could do it.

What went wrong:

on both ends were cities, larger than those Ciro is used to
on the start, was a port city. You do not want to cycle in port areas, ever! Lots of trucks, narrow side-walks, bad road, danger danger!
on both sides, endless suburbia. This means you have to check your map every 3 seconds to know which little stress to turn, which is very hard without a way to attach your map to your bike. Ciro had his on his pocket. You lose a lot of time like that!
there wasn't a lot of sunlight at the time of the year. Not critical, but still, less than ideal.
during the ride, part of the "well documented and safe cycle route" was closed off for repairs. It was unclear what the best alternative would be. Ciro went down a path, but it turned to be horrendous countryside, he had to pull his bike over fences
by then, Ciro was tired and a bit late. He had only eaten sweets all day long. They give you calories, but there's always something missing in them.
Ciro arrived at the very very large target city, and it was getting dark, and it was rush hour, lots of cars. This was already back on the official bike path, but even those paths are tortuous in suburbia
also, Ciro was meant to meet his wife later, and he was in a rush, worried that she would be worried about him
at one point, Ciro took the wrong turn for a few hundred meters
he realized, and turned back
when coming back, now extra impatient because o the wrong turn, the place he had come from was actually one way street for a very short while until the right turn, so Ciro went against the correct direction...
a car came. It was relatively slow, because the road was slight uphill for the car, and a turn. The slight downhill also meant Ciro was going a bit faster than he realized
Ciro tried to go into the sidewalk anyways to make sure he was clear off the car (he was already). When he tried, the wheel stuck, and he flew forward, hitting a wall slightly

This was a perfect example of how many small things add up to an accident.

You have to know when you are tired and hungry and impatient. This is where huge danger lies.

Stop at a shop, eat, sit down. Darkness is not that dangerous if you have lights.

Take a train outside of large cities if needed. Crossing large cities is not something to be taken lightly. You need calm and time to do so safely.

 Read the full article

Ciro Santilli's hardware / P51 benchmark Updated 2025-12-25

 View more

Ubuntu 23.10:

glmark2 -b build:duration=3:model=horse

~4.8K

Ubuntu 25.10 after fresh ISO install, defaults to Nouveau driver which gets enabled by default: 900 FPS. After moving back to NVIDIA drivers back to 4.6 kFPS. Wow, Nouveau sucks terribly bad.

Monero 0.18.3.1 hashrate: 2.6 KH/s

 Read the full article

How to contact Ciro Santilli Updated 2025-12-25

 View more

Ciro Santilli is very happy to meet people with related interests, he really loves his like-minded online friends. Even if you don't have something a specific goal in mind for the contact, please just say hi.

To contact Ciro publicly about any general subject that is not covered in a more specific GitHub repository, including saying hi or suggestions about his website either:

create a GitHub issue at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/new or Giscus thread
at mention Ciro's main Twitter account

For comments about China, first read:

and then create a GitHub issue at: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/new

Publicly viewable contact is preferred if possible to more effectively share Ciro's wisdom with the world.

But if you feel more comfortable with private contact, no problem, either:

email: username cirosantilli with provider ProtonMail which has domain name proton.me. Note that Ciro also controls the Gmail address with that same username, and keep in mind that dots are ignored in Gmail addresses. But ProtonMail preferred because why should we give our private minds to the CIA by default? Push notifications disabled.
Signal: username cirosantilli.89 signal.me/#eu/BuJjV0enXYTOnFFc1FZV5LFcWodL1a2Oy9VZ5uyQU7xrYxqw+npIcaHBqghWudrI. 89 is a reference to Ciro Santilli's birth year 1989. Push notifications enabled, but treat like email unless we are actively chatting back and forth.

For other less good methods that will also likely work, use direct messages of the following profiles from under Section "Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli":

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli
Reddit: www.reddit.com/user/cirosantilli
Facebook: www.facebook.com/cirosantilli
Telegram: telegram.me/cirosantilli. Note that end-to-end encryption is present on secret chats only, which don't have device sync. Ridiculous.

Ciro's Twitter DMs are also open, but note that Ciro receives endless Chinese language SPAM there which Twitter is doing nothing to combat, so it's not as reliable.

If you are a privacy freak or are going to tell Ciro state secrets Ciro has this GNU Privacy Guard public key: pubkey.gpg, but it's not something that he has ever really used.

Disqus comments were removed from his website in 2019-05-04, a manual dump is available here, removal rationale at: why Ciro Santilli removed Disqus comments from his website in 2019-05-04.

 Read the full article

ZynAddSubFX Updated 2025-07-16

 View more

askubuntu.com/questions/220802/no-sound-zynaddsubfx-and-jack-wont-run/1297988#1297988

Contains a large database of instruments, and allows you to edit them. This is a fun toy.

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:

sudo apt install zynaddsubfx
zynaddsubfx -O alsa

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:

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:

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`

fails with:

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__'

Ciro gives up for now.

 Read the full article

ZX-calculus Updated 2025-07-16

 View more

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.

How can we easily prove that that quantum circuit equals the state:

\frac{∣000 > + ∣111 >}{2}

(1)

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

What we do in ZX-calculus is we first transform the original quantum circuit into a ZX graph.

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:

Figure 1.
GHZ circuit as ZX-diagram
. Source.

and one of those rules finally tells us that that last graph means our desired state:

\frac{∣000 > + ∣111 >}{2}

(2)

because it is a Z spider with

m = 3

and

n = 1

Video 1.

Working with PyZX by Aleks Kissinger (2019)

Source. This video appears to give amazing motivation on why you should care about ZX-calculus, it mentions

Bibliography:

 Read the full article

Publishing Updated 2025-07-16

 Read the full article

The Quantum Story by Jim Baggott (2011) Updated 2025-07-16

 View more

archive.org/details/quantumstoryhist0000bagg on the Internet Archive Open Library.

 Read the full article

Version of the Hebrew Bible Updated 2025-07-16

 Read the full article

x86 Paging Tutorial / The problem with single-level paging Updated 2025-07-16

 View more

The problem with a single-level paging scheme is that it would take up too much RAM: 4G / 4K = 1M entries per process.

If each entry is 4 bytes long, that would make 4M per process, which is too much even for a desktop computer: ps -A | wc -l says that I am running 244 processes right now, so that would take around 1GB of my RAM!

For this reason, x86 developers decided to use a multi-level scheme that reduces RAM usage.

The downside of this system is that is has a slightly higher access time, as we need to access RAM more times for each translation.

 Read the full article

Minimal growth medium Updated 2025-07-16

 Read the full article

Person educated at home Updated 2025-07-16

 View more