Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Bought by Illumina for 600 million in 2007 for 600 million dollars.

This is one of the prime examples of Europe's decline.

Instead of trying to dominate the sequencing market and gain trillions of dollars from it, they local British early stage investors were more than happy to get a 20x return on their small initial investments, and sold out to the Americans who will then make the real profit.

And now Solexa doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page, while Illumina is set out to be the next Microsoft. What a disgrace.

Here are some good articles about the company:

Cambridge visitors can still visit the Panton Arms pub, which was the location of the legendary "hey we should talk" founders meeting, chosen due to its proximity to the chemistry department of the University of Cambridge.

In 2021 the founders were awarded the Breakthrough Prize. The third person awarded was Pascal Mayer. He was apparently at Serono Pharmaceutical Research Institute at the time of development. They do have a wiki page unlike Solexa: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serono. They paid a 700 million fine in 2005 in the United States, and sold out in 2006 to Merck for 10 billion USD.

Bibliography:

I copied this grading scale mechanism from a failed Google interview ;-)

One problem with it is that I am always very hesitant to put a 5 on anything, who can not look at the documentation?

It is also hard to scope things right. Who can claim to be a C++ or Linux kernel expert, even if you wrote a book about it, since those are such humongous topics?

As a result, I haven't updated this in a while, and things may be out of date.

If your project does something that interests me, I can what it takes to contribute. Tell me what I must know, how long I have to learn it, and I'll call you back when I've mastered it.

A network interface controller that does more than just the base OSI model protocols, notably in a programmable way.

During the early 2020s, many of the idiotic social media platforms started adding a non optional "feature" of suggesting feed posts by people you don't follow:

It must have been some A/B testing overload that made that decision to try and make things more addictive for everyone. Or perhaps as a way to drive revenue with people paying to cheat the algorithm and boost their posts.

European Union we need you.

Some of the software-based artificial life simulators can be used as AI training game.

Ciro Santilli just always feels that what can be classified as "artificial life" simulators have too much focus on beating more continuous population mechanics, and lack the discrete elements which he feels could be important to AGI: Section "The missing link between continuous and discrete AI".

There is great interest in this direction of research however quite clearly.

Mammals and a bunch of extinct animals that look more like mammals than reptiles.

TODO name: Wikipedia says "being with a fused arch" but what does that mean???

The most important on in metabolism internals, everything else gets converted to it before being processed in the .

TODO. Can't find it easily. Anyone?

This is closely linked to the Pauli exclusion principle.

What does a particle even mean, right? Especially in quantum field theory, where two electrons are just vibrations of a single electron field.

Another issue is that if we consider magnetism, things only make sense if we add special relativity, since Maxwell's equations require special relativity, so a non approximate solution for this will necessarily require full quantum electrodynamics.

As mentioned at lecture 1 youtube.com/watch?video=H3AFzbrqH68&t=555, relativistic quantum mechanical theories like the Dirac equation and Klein-Gordon equation make no sense for a "single particle": they must imply that particles can pop in out of existence.

Bibliography:

Explains how it is possible that everyone observes the same speed of light, even if they are moving towards or opposite to the light!!!

This was first best observed by the Michelson-Morley experiment, which uses the movement of the Earth at different times of the year to try and detect differences in the speed of light.

This leads leads to the following conclusions:

All of this goes of course completely against our daily Physics intuition.

The "special" in the name refers to the fact that it is a superset of general relativity, which also explains gravity in a single framework.

Since time and space get all messed up together, you have to be very careful to understand what it means to say "I observed this to happen over there at that time", otherwise you will go crazy. A good way to think about is this:

Synthesizing the DNA itself is not the only problem however.

You then have to get that DNA into a working living form state so that normal cell processes can continue:

Multicellular questions:

Apparently achieved for the first time in 2021: www.jcvi.org/research/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell by the J. Craig Venter Institute.

Ciro Santilli's preferred visualization of the real projective plane is a small variant of the standard "lines through origin in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$".

Take a open half sphere e.g. a sphere but only the points with $z>0$.

Each point in the half sphere identifies a unique line through the origin.

Then, the only lines missing are the lines in the x-y plane itself.

For those sphere points in the circle on the x-y plane, you should think of them as magic poins that are identified with the corresponding antipodal point, also on the x-y, but on the other side of the origin. So basically you you can teleport from one of those to the other side, and you are still in the same point.

Ciro likes this model because then all the magic is confined just to the $z=0$ part of the model, and everything else looks exactly like the sphere.

It is useful to contrast this with the sphere itself. In the sphere, all points in the circle $z=0$ are the same point. But this is not the case for the projective plane. You cannot instantly go to any other point on the $z=0$ by just moving a little bit, you have to walk around that circle.

A detailed list of all transactions is kept at: sponsor/budget.js.

Ciro Santilli use the following accounting for this sponsorship calculations.

For significant one time donations, he takes the final money received in one of his cash GBP accounts, then he checks how much that is in dollars on Google at the time of cash out, and then writes that amount down as the final dollar value which is what ultimately counts. This exposes Ciro to USD/GBP fluctuations, but it simplifies accounting for donors which is more important, so it is likely worth it.

For small regular donations, Ciro just tallies it all up in GBP from time to time and converts it all to dollars in one go as it is not worth spending too much time updating those too often.

At github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/738 a user made a comment about gang raping my mother (more like country-raping).

As mentioned at github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/739, ally Martin then reported the issue, and GitHub took down the wumao's account for a while using their undocumented shadowban feature, until the wumao edited the issue.

Based on the discussion with Martin, I then recommended at github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/blob/41b4741a4e6553f44f5f1ef85cf63c55eb7b8277/CONTRIBUTING.md that we do not report such issues, and that GitHub do not delete such accounts, with rationale explained on the CONTRIBUTING.