Effortless effort Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli feels that all really important and productive activities come spontaneously, without being internally forced upon people.
You may say that this is because Ciro is lazy and irresponsible, but Bill thinks this isn't necessarily always bad:
I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
This is yet another manifestation of YAGNI.
As another way to put it, Ciro has very little "self-discipline", and acts very heavily based on small passions that take hold of him. Related: high flying bird vs gophers.
You may also say that Ciro is an idealist, because what to do when the food will run out and you have to hunt? To which Jesus replies at Matthew 6:25-34 "Do Not Worry" (archive):
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? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you - you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, "What shall we eat?" or "What shall we drink?" or "What shall we wear?" For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Also closely related: man shall not live by bread alone.
Ciro is also fond of the description of the work method of Yukio Mishima presented in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (TODO based on Mishima's self descriptions?). Ciro Santilli's father highlighted this to him, and Ciro had already watched that movie and thought it was amazing:
Every night I return to my desk precisely at midnight. I thoroughly analyze why I am attracted to a particular theme. I drag it into my conscious mind. I boil it into abstraction. I am constantly calculating until I sit down to write. Only then can my unconscious dreams take over.
This is perfectly complemented by him making tea, as if suggesting:
Don't rush the work. Just let it happen. Every day at midnight, I would boil a teapot of tea. I would watch the steam rise, and with it feel my consciousness deepen. Everything was pure silence. When the hand was ready, it would, by itself, pick up the brush, and writing would start.
Another good one is Hemingway's work method:
Always stop while you are going good and don't think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.
Ciro generally feels that many major developments in his life happened "by miracle", beyond his control. So when he saw the quote by Carl Jung:
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Ciro tends to do major decisions in his life due to uncontrollable passion rather than logic.
Ciro believes that this is linked to his self perceived creative personality, Because Ciro gives in to such uncontrollable passions, this leads him to do things which are more unusual/creative, because other more logical people would write such options off as weird.
Another type of laziness Ciro is to blame for is passionately seeking instrumental goals rather than hard end goals, in order to reach the hard goals more effectively. This is well put in the quote apocryphallyref attribute to Abraham Lincoln:
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe
For example, whenever joining a new company, Ciro would first try to improve any exceedingly shitty systems, like the build system or test system, rather than doing whatever random task the manager felt like doing that week. He was somewhat fired for that actually. But in the end, if your infrastructure sucks, your project will fail, so better be fired early and go work on something that might succeed than later when the enterprise goes bankrupt.
Video 1.
Alan Watts' wuwei talk
. Source. During this talk, Alan quotes Jesus: Matthew 18:3 "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.".
Video 2.
Alan Watts' "How to turn work into play" talk
. Source.
Video 3.
Don't Try - The Philosophy of Charles Bukowski by Pursuit of Wonder (2019)
Source. www.openculture.com/2013/02/dont_try_charles_bukowskis_concise_philosophy_of_art_and_life.html
We work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told. Classes? Classes are for asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a bottle of beer.
Video 4.
Charles Bukowski Scandanavian TV interviews
. Source.
I think the magic moment is when you're walking around the house and you think: "Typewritter!". And I know, when I sit down, I never have any idea what I'm gonna write, there's nothing in my mind. And you walk in, you move toward it, and there it is, and things come out of it.
Atomic theory evidence Updated +Created
Balance of power Updated +Created
Bell Labs Holmdel Complex Updated +Created
101 Crawfords Corner Rd Holmdel, NJ 07733 USA
It started with radio research apparently, including Karl Guthe Jansky.
They had a smaller building first: youtu.be/BPq_ZyOvbsg?t=51 and in 1962 opened the large new building.
Video 1.
Holmdel 20th Anniversary by AT&T Tech Channel (1982)
Source.
Video 2.
N.J.’s historic Bell Labs complex brought back to life as Bell Works by nj.com (2022)
Source. Shows the renewed building after the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex closure.
Ciro Santilli's open source contributions / Patches Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's open source contributions / Security Updated +Created
DateProjectSizeDescription
2016-05All GitHub Commit Emails1Password disclosure grep password on email data. Gmail password worked and user confirmed.
Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality Updated +Created
Ciro like to interpret this as him having "a creative personality" with the tradeoff of generally not being amazing at his well defined jobs.
Ciro is a high flying bird scientist. As mentioned at by Tommaso Fontana at zom.wtf/about/
I'm what happened when you can't choose a single career path
Ciro is obsessed by that which is "quirky". This also often has a parallel with "naughty". He often fantasizes about an imaginary parallel between that feeling and Jobs and Wozniak's blue box.
Ciro's natural fight-or-flight response is to hide in a little corner, and try to solve the problem out. Then get distracted and start procrastinating. And then he tries to solve the unsolvable. Someone Ciro barely new once told him quite correctly:
In the event of war, you would be the type that hides away and makes the bombs.
This is also perhaps why Ciro likes prison decks in Magic: The Gathering. You just sit on your corner, making yourself safer and safer, until the opponent can't do you any harm and concedes.
There are of course infinitely many videos on the "entrepreneurial mindset" online, and it is impossible to know if they are bullshit, or if everyone just feels like that, but OK, just let Ciro feels that he is specially creative will you?
In the words of Rob Pike[ref]:
mostly building weird stuff no one uses, but occasionally getting it right, such as with UTF-8 and Go
Video 1.
What Predicts Academic Ability? by Jordan B Peterson (2017)
Source. Good quotes:
Creative people continuously step outside of the domain of evaluation structures
and:
If you are creative and you go off on tangents all the time, there's some probability that one of those tangents is going to be exactly what is needed at the time, and you are going to become hyper-successful as a consequence
[but the probability of that being the right time and place for the idea is extraordinarily low]
The sensible thing to tell anybody is "you shouldn't do it, your probability of success is so low, that its better to just to something sensible".
But the problem with that, is that creative people can't do that, because they are creative. A creative person who isn't being creative, they just wither and die.
Which brings Here's to the crazy ones to mind.
Ciro also one heard a story, likely apocryphal, but still nonetheless resonated with him, that went something like this (TODO find source, Google wasn't helping, stuff that happened before website as usual):
The newly hired manager of some subsection of DuPont (or some other gigantic chemical company) came into the office, and found a chemical engineer, completely drunk in the middle of the day.
Outraged, the manager searched for this colleagues who explained.
Ah, don't mind John (or some other name), the guy invented Teflon (or some other substance) which accounted for 20% of our revenue last year. Even if he does not do anything else in his entire career, his salary won't make any difference compared to those gains, and we take the chance that he might invent something else later.
Ciro likes this story because although he does not drink, he feels his work mind works in a related way. Often, when there is something really hard he knows needs doing he hides, and distracts himself with less important tasks, or by watching crap on YouTube, because he knows that the hard task will hurt his mind. Then one day he wakes up and says: OK, fuck it, let's do it, and does it.
Once Ciro got a performance review from a colleague that said:
If Ciro spent as much effort on his job as he does on side projects, he'd be the most amazing worker.
This is closely related to effortless effort.
Yes, low conscientiousness, give it to me.
Video 2.
And I am not and never have been 'familiar' scene from The Big Short (2015)
. Source.
People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar. And I am not and never have been familiar.
blog.sbensu.com/posts/high-variance-management/ High Variance Management:
Like movies, software projects have parts that require high variance and parts that don't. For most projects, the logging system can be off-the-shelf and predictable. But core parts of the product that require novel design should be as good as they can be.
Computer music bibliography Updated +Created
Electrical engineer Updated +Created
GitBook Updated +Created
This is good, and very close competitor to OurBigBook.com.
But they killed local build, so they are going to die.
How to teach / Publish your source Updated +Created
For example, if you write LaTeX files for you PDFs, give both PDFs and the LaTeX.
This allows other people to:
  • modify and reuse your material
  • make improvement suggestions that you can accept by clicking a button
    The perfect way to do this is to use GitHub pull requests
Lemma (mathematics) Updated +Created
A theorem that is not very important on its own, often an intermediate step to proving something that the author feels deserves the name "theorem".
OurBigBook CLI Updated +Created
Point (geometry) Updated +Created
Semiconductor package Updated +Created
Based God Updated +Created
Someone who is not a pussy.
Someone once called Ciro Santilli that: archive.is/W1ocv. It's an overstatement, considering that Ciro's parents have some money. Not infinite. But still. Changes everything. A real Based God is someone like Charles Bukowski, who had to work decades at the post office.
Bell Labs Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli sometimes fantasizes of having worked there in their golden years...
Original headquarters and laboratories: 463 West Street in New York, Manhattan area. On Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman Feynman mentions that in 1941 they could see the construction of the George Washington Bridge, presumably from that building, when William Shockley brought him over to visit to get a job there. However, the actual
Bell Labs Murray Hill Updated +Created
600 Mountain Ave bldg 5, New Providence, NJ 07974, United States.
Became headquarters in 1967,
Drone footage: www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0Ld2KFjaC8 Bell LABS Headquarters Murray Hill NJ in 4K Drone Flight by ESTOUCHFPV (2017)
Notable inventions made there:
Bra Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli personality type test results Updated +Created
Which two persons are hard to satisfy?:
He who stores up whatever he gets and he who gives away whatever he gets - these two persons are hard to satisfy.
In a way, Ciro Santilli is both. In Ciro Santilli's knowledge hoarding, he both:
  • stores every knowledge he admires
  • and also gives it away for all to read
Worse of both worlds!

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