The most awesome systems programmers Updated 2025-07-16
Notable mentions:
Other notable people that are likely also awesome but Ciro has less familiarity with their contributions:
The old man lost his horse Updated 2025-07-16
Another notable reference is in Lost Horse LLC, MacKenzie Bezos's charity instrument.
Breakdown:
  • 塞翁 sai4 weng1: TODO his name?
  • 失马 shi1 ma3: lost horse
  • 焉知 yan1 zhi1: who knows, literary
  • 非福 fei1 fu2: bad (or) good
Video 1.
Zen master and the little boy scene from Charlie Wilson's War
. Source. This is how Ciro Santilli first heard the old man lost his horse! The scene happens after the Americans seem to have had sucess in arming the Taliban in the 1980s to fight the Soviets, and then they decide to stop all monetary help to rebuild the country, which then leads to a terrorism threat many years later.
Video 2.
The Blessing of Bad Luck by Pursuit of Wonder (2022)
Source. A bit too long. But worth it.
vmpk Updated 2025-07-16
VMPK is a virtual device that replicates what you would get by connecting a physical MIDI keyboard to your computer. It is not a software synthesizer on its own. But it does connect to a working synthesizer by default (Sonivox EAS) which makes it produce sounds out-of-the box.
TODO: then I messed with my sound settings, and then it stopped working by default on the default "MIDI Connection" > "MIDI Out Driver" > "Network". But it still works on "SonivoxEAS".
Reasonable default key mappings to keyboard covering 2 octaves.
3 multiple simultaneous keys did not work (tested "ZQI"). This might just be a limitation of my keyboard however.
Besides of course sexual selection, considering in this section only "formal learning" activities.
Consider e.g. the 2020 University of Oxford, where many many people are taking courses without any laboratory work (and also without much use at all) like literature and history, and they are paying about 9k pounds/year for it: how much it costs to study at the University of Oxford?.
Basically all of this could be done online from books.
Laboratories are impossible however, because expendables of every experiment you do cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars, not to mention crazy upfront equipment costs.
For this reason, the brick and mortar aspect universities should focus exclusively on laboratories, and ensuring that the students with the most relevant knowledge (which can be readily obtained online) get access to those laboratories. Students should of course fully master every aspect of theory pertinent to their experiments. principal investigators should hand pick whichever criteria they want to select their students, possibly based partly on exam as a service if they find it a useful metric.
Furthermore, the use of laboratories should put great focus on novel research. A lot of laboratory instruction could be done from video of an experiments. As much as possible, we should use laboratories for novel research. Related: Section "Videos of all key physics experiments".
Haven't found the one yet:
Optional but really ideal:
  • can delete messages from the device of the person you sent it to, no matter how old
  • decentralized, your username is a public key
The state of messaging is ridiculous as of 2020.
The place for beauty in companies Updated 2025-07-16
Many/most companies are unable to give any beauty to its employees.
Hiring is simply a process of "let's get this money making project working ASAP", bring people in, without considering Brooks's law.
And then when that happens, companies put people in extremely narrow knowledge areas, making them unable to see or participate in the bigger picture of things, unless they spend 10 years there and reach architect status.
This is perhaps particularly painful for high flying birds like Ciro Santilli.
Companies need a higher top to down force that attempts to actually teach the business and tech to every employee to counter the low level manager get things done now pressure.
Companies that are able to do that, will have many more employees with a sense of purpose, and with the ability to innovate. Those companies will win.
The Playlist Updated 2025-07-16
Great reports to how 2022-Ciro Santilli views how OurBigBook.com could go. Ciro can't help to feel that he is a mixture of both of the vision, tech and people guy. Not as extreme as any of them, but more like a well rounded (and less good individually) version of each. High flying bird vs gophers.
The Three Treasures of the Programmer Updated 2025-09-09
Ciro Santilli's joke version of the Chinese Four Treasures of the Study!
  • web browser
  • Text editor
  • terminal. Though to be honest, circa 2022, Ciro learned of the ctrl + click to open file (including with file.c:123 line syntax) ability of Visual Studio Code (likely present in other IDEs), and he was starting considering dumping the terminal altogether if some implementation gets it really really right. The main thing is that it can't be a tinny little bar at the bottom, it has to be full window and super easily toggleable!
In the past, Ciro used to use file managers, which would be the fourth tresure. But he stopped doing so for years due to his cd alias... so it became three. He actually had exactly three windows open when he was checking if there was anything else he could not open hand of.
Figure 1.
The three Treasures of the Programmer
. Featuring: Gvim, tmux running in GNOME terminal, and Chromium browser on Ubuntu 22.04. The minimized windows are for demonstration purposes, Cirism mandates that all windows shall be maximized at all times. Splits withing a single program are permitted however.
Think different Updated 2025-07-16
Of course, this only made sense when Apple was more of an underdog to IBM, and Ciro Santilli greatly admires their defiance of the norm.
As of 2020 however, Apple is kind of on the top of the mobile world, and Think different simply makes no sense anymore, notably because it relies on closed source offline software used by millions.
This is a trap every company that prides itself on it's "alternative culture" sets for itself. If they succeed, they could become the norm.
Figure 2.
1976 Think different. 2011 Think mainstream
. Cropped from wallpapersafari.com/w/RqYUEj.
Video 1.
1984 Macintosh advertisement by Apple (1984)
Source. This ad suggests that Apple was the new thinker that would destroy IBM, as Steve Jobs said it himself when introducing the ad: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlQvMp5rB6g. And then Apple became IBM in the 2000's starting with the launch of the iPod and then leading up to the iPhone.
Three-level laser Updated 2025-07-16
The type of laser described at: Video "How Lasers Work by Scientized (2017)", notably youtu.be/_JOchLyNO_w?t=581. Mentioned at: youtu.be/_JOchLyNO_w?t=759 That point also mentions that 4-level lasers also exist and are more efficient. TODO dominance? Alternatives?
Video 1.
Three-level laser system by Dr. Nissar Ahmad (2021)
Source.
The time-independent Schrödinger equation is a variant of the Schrödinger equation defined as:
Equation 1.
Time-independent Schrodinger equation
.
So we see that for any Schrödinger equation, which is fully defined by the Hamiltonian , there is a corresponding time-independent Schrödinger equation, which is also uniquely defined by the same Hamiltonian.
The cool thing about the Time-independent Schrödinger equation is that we can always reduce solving the full Schrödinger equation to solving this slightly simpler time-independent version, as described at: Section "Solving the Schrodinger equation with the time-independent Schrödinger equation".
Because this method is fully general, and it simplifies the initial time-dependent problem to a time independent one, it is the approach that we will always take when solving the Schrodinger equation, see e.g. quantum harmonic oscillator.
Timeline of quantum mechanics Updated 2025-07-16
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Updated 2025-07-16
Some key points that are a bit hard to grasp, at least in some versions:
  • How did Bill Haydon know Jim Prideaux was going to Prague if it appears to be organized as a closely guarded secret by Control?
    • the film suggests Prideaux must have told Haydon himself, his close friend, against Control's orders of secrecy, out of loyalty, and in order to protect his friend.
    • The series suggests it was a honeypot
    so which one is it?
  • How does Smiley deduce that the Witchcraft source, Merlin, is Poliakov? A key step is when top people at the Circus question him about Ricki Tarr, and appear to suggest that there is a link between Ricki Tarr and Merlin. And Ricki told Smiley that Poliakov as the link to the Mole. Smiley understands that it was Karla who tipped off London Center about Ricki's coming through Merlin. He also observers that Witchcraft gives ideological infiltration campaign intelligence after Ricki comes back, as a way to discredit Ricki. It is still all a bit indirect.
Transcendence (2014) Updated 2025-07-16
The premise that "we can't make AGI, but we know enough about the human brain to upload on to a computer" is flawed. Edit: after reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014), Ciro Santilli was convinced otherwise. What is flawed is of course just the "extracting connectome with macroscopic probes part". A post mortem connectome extraction with microtome is much more believable. But of course they weren't going to show fake slices of Jonny Depp's brain, are they? Famous actor bodies are sacred! What a huge lost opportunity. On the other hand however, the scale of the first connectome extraction would be arguably too huge to be undertaken by a random pair of rogue researchers. The same would also likely apply to any first time human brain connectome. It would much more likely be a huge public effort, much like the Human Genome Project.
But this film does have the merit of exploring how an AGI might act to take over the AGI might act to take over the world once created, notably by creating its own physical research laboratory. Though it doesn't feel likely that it could go under the radar for 2 years given the energetic requirements of the research. Even the terrorists find it before the FBI!
I also wish they had shown the dildo (or more likely, direct stimulation!) computerized Jonny Depp used to use with his wife before he managed to re-synthesized his body. But you know, 18+ would cut too much profits. Ah, what a shame.
Video 1.
Can You Prove You're Self Aware? in the big lab scene from Transcendence (2014)
Source.
Transformation (genetics) Updated 2025-07-16
Current Wikipedia seems to say that this refers specifically to cells taking up DNA from other dead cells as in the Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment, excluding other types of horizontal gene transfer like bacterial conjugation
The term is sometimes just used a synonym for horizontal gene transfer in general it seems however.
They are actually inheritable! But alleles are rare: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5559844
Figure 1.
To rats with the same genome differing only in DNA methylation with a different tail phenotype.
Source.

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