Ciro Santilli's hardware / Raspberry Pi 2 Updated +Created
As of 2018-12, I believe that I might have fried the UART on this board when I burnt my last UART to USB converter by connecting ground to 5V.
Linux kernel logs don't show, but do show with the exact same components on the Pi 3 (SD card with enable_uart=1 + image Raspbian Lite 2018-11-03 and UART cables).
Serial from cat /proc/cpuinfo: 00000000a50c1f69
Datasheets: Raspberry Pi 2.
Ciro Santilli's hardware / Raspberry Pi Pico W Updated +Created
With pre-soldered male pin headers.
>>> machine.unique_id()
b'\xe6ad\x08C8%$'
Cayley-Dickson construction Updated +Created
Constructs the quaternions from complex numbers, octonions from quaternions, and keeps doubling like this indefinitely.
Ciro Duran Santilli Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's full birth name is "Ciro Duran Santilli", with mother's last name "Duran" in the middle as per Brazilian tradition.
But Ciro's usage of "Duran" got gradually dropped to "Ciro Santilli", Ciro's official Italian name, as Ciro moved more and more definitively to Europe.
It can still however be seen in certain online places where Ciro didn't have the patience or power to change it e.g. some old École Polytechnique stuff: gitlab.binets.fr/ciro.duran-santilli/china-dictatorship
Also, don't have multiple names if you can avoid it, it is confusing!
Ciro Santilli's given name Updated +Created
"Ciro" is "Cyrus" from Cyrus the Great in both Portuguese and Italian (although with very different pronunciations), thus doubly appropriate given that Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil, and has Italian ancestry.
After he conquered Babylon in 539 BC from the hands Neo-Babylonian Empire, Cyrus the Great did a great service to the Hebrews by allowing war prisoners that were held in Babylon to back to their home Judea, thus terminating the Babylonian captivity. These Jews were imprisoned because they had previously fought a war or revolted against the Neo-Babylonian Empire and lost. As Wikipedia puts it:
According to Isaiah 45:1 of the Hebrew Bible, God anointed Cyrus for this task, even referring to him as a messiah (lit. 'anointed one'); Cyrus is the only non-Jewish figure in the Bible to be revered in this capacity.
He is therefore viewed extremely positively in the good old book. Ciro was quite happy about this name choice by his father, given the human rights connotations of the figure and Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.
Particularly fun things related to modern Cyrus are:
Because it belongs to some relatively obscure character of the Bible, the name it has been mostly passed on by writing to every single Christian country, and every single language came up with different way of saying it, because the only place they would possibly hear that name said out loud would be in Church!
As of 2020, the country in which the name is most popular in undoubtedly Italy. In Brazil, it is definitely not common, but also not completely unheard of either, e.g. Ciro Gomes is a notable Brazilian politician.
And Ciro responds to all the versions of the name that he knows of. These include:
  • English:
    • direct English reading of "Ciro" as "See Roll". Not the most cultured, but its what things tend to converge to, especially in highly international environments where it would be impossible to try and learn the origin of everyone's name! So it's fine. Slightly too close to "zero" for comfort.
    • Cyrus, the actual English version of the name. Ciro was so happy when his elderly English neighbour who went to Eton College, upon recognizing what Ciro was, immediately said: "Ah, Cyrus the Great!" He was the cutest, and he had some culture. Many/most English speaking people can't or won't be very sure about the spelling, but the sound of the name has a distinctly exotic feel to it, and the sounds are immediately recognized without sound ambiguity (unlike Ciro vs Zero).
  • French:
    • direct French reading of "Ciro" as "See Rho" with accent on Rho. This sounds exactly like "Sirop", i.e. Syrup in French, which can be good or bad depending on how you look at it.
    • Cyrus, the actual version of the name in French. Similar remarks to those of English apply.
  • Portuguese: "See Ru" with accent on See, and rolling r, and very weak "u". Some people might have some doubt of how to spell it and will ask for confirmation if needed, though many/most will get it right. Not particularly exotic like it is for English speakers.
  • Italian: "Chee Ro" with accent on Chee and rolling r. Widely understood and correctly spelled, more than in any other language. Not exotic at all, could be any random dude from Naples.
  • German: Kyrus. Because Cyrus the Great is known Kyrus II. (Cyrus the Second, his grandfather was also called Cyrus), Ciro once joked to a German friend that he should call him Kyrus III! He liked that.
and glad to add any new ones as they come.
  • Persian (spoken in 2020s Iran): something like Kurush. Likely the closest sound one to the original, though not sure how certain we can be of this.
He is actually quite happy when people use the name in their own language, because that means they understand the origin of the name.
Some Ciro's of interest:
Ciro Santilli's hardware / Dell Inspiron 15 3520 Updated +Created
Some reviews:
  • the keyboard is kind of crap. Notably the key "a" is very hard to press!!
  • the lack of a sleep state indication LED and "I'm powering on LED" compared to Lenovo is really sad
  • it gets way too hot doing work (Monero bootstrap) with lid closed, likely brought system down
OPSEC: will run only cryptocurrency wallets and nothing else. Will connect to Internet, but never ever to a non clean USB flash drive.
The OPSEC for this machine supposes:
Bootstrap OPSEC:
It must have taken about one week running full time to sync the Monero blockchain which at the time was at about 3.1M blocks! I checked on system explorer, and CPU and internet usage was never maxed out, suggesting simply slow network. But the computer still overheated quite a bit and froze a few times.
Ciro Santilli's hardware / House 2021 / Fire alarm Updated +Created
2021-08 bedroom battery out, 7.29V out of 9V duracell duralock. Buying pack of 12 Energizer nine-volt batteries. Measurement on new battery: 9.68V.
Ciro Santilli's hardware / Nike Run Swift 2.0 Updated +Created
Bought 2021-11, grey, size EUR 44.5, 80$ (later found cheaper online): www.sportsdirect.com/nike-run-swift-2-running-shoes-mens-121052
Whole organism simulation Updated +Created
Computer by operating principle Updated +Created
Computer company Updated +Created
This section is about companies that were primarily started as computer makers.
Computer network Updated +Created
History of computers Updated +Created
Holomorphic function Updated +Created
Being a complex holomorphic function is an extremely strong condition.
The existence of the first derivative implies the existence of all derivatives.
Another extremely strong consequence is the identity theorem.
"Holos" means "entire" in Greek, so maybe this is a reference to the fact that due to the identity theorem, knowing the function on a small open ball implies knowing the function everywhere.
How computers work? Updated +Created
A computer is a highly layered system, and so you have to decide which layers you are the most interested in studying.
Although the layer are somewhat independent, they also sometimes interact, and when that happens it usually hurts your brain. E.g., if compilers were perfect, no one optimizing software would have to know anything about microarchitecture. But if you want to go hardcore enough, you might have to learn some lower layer.
It must also be said that like in any industry, certain layers are hidden in commercial secrecy mysteries making it harder to actually learn them. In computing, the lower level you go, the more closed source things tend to become.
But as you climb down into the abyss of low level hardcoreness, don't forget that making usefulness is more important than being hardcore: Figure 1. "xkcd 378: Real Programmers".
Here's a summary from low-level to high-level:
Figure 1.
xkcd 378: Real Programmers
. Source.
Video 1.
How low can you go video by Ciro Santilli (2017)
Source. In this infamous video Ciro has summarized the computer hierarchy.
Imaginary unit Updated +Created
Work (physics) Updated +Created
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Updated +Created

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