Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

This was one of the only bad experience Ciro had at Polytechnique, besides the inevitable fear of not graduating.

Ciro wanted to do a robotics internship in Germany, linked to his interests in artificial general intelligence, see also: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games".

But the head of the applied mathematics department Polytechnique prevented him from going because Ciro didn't have the necessary grades, even though the Germans had already agreed to it: he had a C, but he needed a B. As mentioned at École Polytechnique, most Brazilians had crappy grades due to their Polytechnique-incompatible background.

This was done because in the past students with bad grades had abandoned their internships halfway and given foreigners a bad impression of Polytechnique.

It is impossible to say if the head of department really agreed with this bullshit policy, or if it was something beyond his powers and he hid his true opinion, but it felt like the agreed.

What an extremely limited view!!!

To leave the worse, the worse. To assume that grades mean anything!

And thus Ciro had to choose a last moment internship that he hated, rather than becoming the greatest roboticist that ever lived, and did terribly at it.

At least on the other hand Ciro learnt Python instead of working at the internship, and became the greatest programming tutorial writer that ever lived. Maybe.

TODO didn't manage to get it working with TP Link ARCHER VR2800 even though it shows DHCP as enabled and it also shows MAC addresses and corresponding hostnames in the router management interface.

The musical study of software engineering.

Ciro Santilli is obsessed by those in order to learn any new concept, not just for bug reporting.

This includes to learn more theoretical subjects like physics and mathematics.

Wikipedia defines Mind uploading as a synonym for whole brain emulation. This sounds really weird, as "mind uploading" suggests much more simply brain dumping, or perhaps reuploading a brain dump to a brain.

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) section "Whole brain emulation" provides a reasonable setup: post mortem, take a brain, freeze it, then cut it into fine slices with a Microtome, and then inspect slices with an electron microscope after some kind of staining to determine all the synapses.

Likely implies AGI.

As of 2025, you can check if someone with a given name was at polytechnique and at which year at: programmes.polytechnique.edu/en/about/ecole-polytechnique/list-of-graduates

Jeff has spoken a lot in public about Amazon, perhaps even more than other comparable founders, see e.g. Section "History of Amazon". Kudos for that.