Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

Ciro Santilli is extremely passionate about this issue, partly due to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.

Ciro Santilli's main approaches to reduce it:

One of Ciro's most direct experiences with social inequality is described at: São Remo, the favela next to USP.

We have to be careful not to make everyone poorer when trying to reduce inequality.

But as things stand as of 2020, increasing taxes on the very richest, and notably wealth tax, and investing it in free gifted education, seems like a safe bet to achieve any meaningful level of equal opportunity and meritocracy.

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 is there a publicly visible list?

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

PDF table of contents feature requests: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1459844683925008385

Remarkable 2 is really, really good. Relatively fast refresh + touchscreen is amazing.

No official public feedback forum unfortunately:

PDF table of contents could be better: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1459844683925008385

The by far dominating DNA sequencing company of the late 2000's and 2010's due to having the smallest cost per base pair.

Illumina actually bought their 2010's dominating technology from a Cambridge company called Solexa.

To understand how Illumina's technology works basically, watch this video: Video 1. "Illumina Sequencing by Synthesis by Illumina (2016)".

The key innovation of this method is the Bridge amplification step, which produces a large amount of identical DNA strands.

They put a lot of emphasis into base calling. E.g.:

Incredible that there hasn't been a Nobel Prize for it as of 2022, e.g. as mentioned at: theconversation.com/no-nobel-but-epigenetics-finally-gets-the-recognition-it-deserves-18970

Some old dudes getting another prize in 2016: www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/pioneers-epigenetics-awarded-horwitz-prize

The main way to sequence DNA methylation. Converts methylated cytosine to uracil, and then we can sequence those.

There are 3: real numbers, complex numbers and quaternions.

Notably, the octonions are not associative.