Set SVG background color in Inkscape Updated 2025-11-05
This is related to the underlying SVG pain point of SVG background color:
Silk Road (marketplace) Updated 2025-11-05
Ciro Santilli has become slightly obsessed with this story, and the main mastermind Ross Ulbricht.
The best article available so far is: www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/29/how_i_caught_silk_road_mastermind (archive) which summarizes what one of the investigators said in a 2019 French computer security conference.
The key living posts are:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-connect-to-a-tor-hidden-service-using-curl-in-php (archive) which was originally asked under the real name, and then the username was changed to "Frosty", which matches one of the server's logins after the laptop was captured
- altoid early Silk Road mention: bitcointalk.org/?topic=175.70;wap2 (archive)
The big question is of course how libertarian free market ideologically motivated the website was, and how purely criminal greed it was.
The magnitude of the early operational security mistakes does make Ciro think that Ross did it "because he could" and "for the lolz" in a real world Breaking Bad way.
The entry in Ross' diary does resonate a lot with Ciro and any entrepreneur, full diary at: www.wired.com/2015/01/heres-secret-silk-road-journal-laptop-ross-ulbricht/ (archive).
[i]n 2011," [I believe I will be] "creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before,Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator."
Having this kind of feeling, is the greatest thing any human can have, and what motivates all great things.
Capitalizing in illegal things though is a cheat, big things take longer than a few years to reach, but reaching them is that much more satisfying as well.
Other interesting quotes:which Ciro also feels, see don't be a pussy, and:
Everyone knows I am working on a bitcoin exchange. I always thought honesty was the best policy and now I didn't know what to do. I should have just told everyone I am a freelance programmer or something, but I had to tell half truths. It felt wrong to lie completely so I tried to tell the truth without revealing the bad part, but now I am in a jam. Everyone knows too much. Dammit.
Also very worth reading is the San Francisco flat mate account: www.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3q8g/my-roommate-the-darknet-drug-lord (archive).
The murder for hire allegations are also interesting: mashable.com/2013/10/03/silk-road-hits, he paid 80k dollars to undercover DEA agents!
Except for the fact that Ross was an 80 million Dollar drug lord, those accounts sound exactly like what you would expect from any other nerdy startup founder! The:
- "just do it" strategy effectively going to a minimal viable product (manual transaction management!), while making many mistakes along the way, including hiring mistakes and successes when scaling is needed
- the hardship of self bootstrapping your own social network (here with some kilos of mushrooms)
- the variety of periods, from relatively calm, to hair pulling stress during big changes
It is also amusing to see very concretely the obvious fact that the FBI can get a subpoena for all accounts you ever had, e.g. they knew his laptop model from Amazon and brought a corresponding power cable to the arrest! If you are going to be a cyber criminal, don't use your real name, ever!
Should justice be blind? Maybe. But it does hurt for mere non-blind men to see it sometimes. Especially when drug liberalization is involved.
Inkscape Updated 2025-11-05
Personality type Updated 2025-11-05
Edge (graph) Updated 2025-07-16
How to mine Monero Updated 2025-11-05
Ubuntu 20.10 as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/build/ubuntu:At minexmr.com/#getting_started we see that all you then need is a single CLI command:Seems simple, well done devs!
sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
mkdir xmrig/build && cd xmrig/build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)xmrig -o pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u <your-monero-address>Benchmark on Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/benchmark:gives:which according to the minexmr.com mining pool would generate 0.0005 XMR/day, which at the February 2021 rate of 140 USD/XMR is 0.07 USD/day. The minimum payout in that pool is 0.004 XMR so it would take 8 days to reach that.
./xmrig --bench=1M948.1 h/sSo clearly, application-specific integrated circuit mining is the only viable way of doing this.
www.makeuseof.com/cryptos-you-can-mine-at-home/ is a completely full of bullshit article that says otherwise. How can someone publish that!
Edit war Updated 2025-07-16
Education Updated 2025-07-16
One of the causes Ciro Santilli care the most about: motivation.
How to improve education? Simple:
- tax the fuck out of the rich people and companies: wealth tax and invest it in education
- invest intelligently as mentioned at what poor countries have to do to get richer:
- focus on fewer higher excellence schools that select the most promising poor students, rather than giving crappy average to everyone
- use OurBigBook.com
Educational technology Updated 2025-07-16
Nobel Prize Updated 2025-07-16
Web of Stories contains amazing interviews with many (mostly American) winners.
See Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake's amazing comments about the Nobel Prize.
TODO who is the digital switch person he mentions?
- www.quora.com/unanswered/Who-was-Richard-Feynman-referring-to-in-the-book-Surely-Youre-Joking-Mr-Feynman-chapter-Alfred-Nobels-Other-Mistake-when-he-talks-about-A-friend-of-mine-whos-a-rich-man-he-invented-some-kind-of-simple-digital-switch on Quora
- github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/72
Node.js Updated 2025-07-16
WellSync, if you are gonna useSync this wonky language thing inSync one place, you might as well useSync it everywhereSync and make it more decent. See also: how to convert
async to sync in JavaScript.Their CLI debugger is a bit crap compared to GDB, basic functionality is either lacking or too verbose:Documentation at: nodejs.org/dist/latest-v16.x/docs/api/debugger.html
- stackoverflow.com/questions/65493221/how-to-break-at-a-specific-function-or-line-with-the-node-js-node-inspect-comman
- stackoverflow.com/questions/70486188/how-to-break-on-uncaught-exception-on-the-node-js-node-inspect-command-line-debu Some operations are only possible on the browser debug UI...
Effective field theory Updated 2025-07-16
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB8r7CU7clk&list=PLUl4u3cNGP60TvpbO5toEWC8y8w51dtvm by Iain Stewart. Basically starts by explaining how quantum field theory is so generic that it is hard to get any numerical results out of it :-)
eGroups Updated 2025-07-16
Company co-founded by Scott Hassan, early Google programmer at Stanford University, and Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother.
The company was sold to Yahoo! in August 2000 for $432m and became Yahoo! Groups. They managed to miraculously dodge the Dot-com bubble, which mostly poppet in 2021. After the acquisition, Yahoo started to redirect them to: groups.yahoo.com as can be seen on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20000401000000*/egroups.com The first archive of groups.yahoo.com is from February 2001: web.archive.org/web/20010202055100/http://groups.yahoo.com/ and it unsurprisingly looks basically exactly like eGroups.
eGroups logo
. From the earliest archive of their "about" page: web.archive.org/web/19991004062653/http://www.egroups.com/info/top.html in 1999. Electronic test equipment Updated 2025-07-16
Electron microscope Updated 2025-07-16
All of them need a vacuum because you can't shoot elecrons through air, as mentioned at Video "50,000,000x Magnification by AlphaPhoenix (2022)".
Electrum Updated 2025-07-16
For the love of God, on Ubuntu install from the official AppImage downloaded from electrum.org/#download, not this random outdated Snap snapcraft.io/electrum:
ELF Hello World Tutorial Backlinks Updated 2025-07-16
ELF Hello World Tutorial Dynamic linking sections Updated 2025-07-16
Noether's theorem Updated 2025-07-16
As mentioned at buzzard.ups.edu/courses/2017spring/projects/schumann-lie-group-ups-434-2017.pdf, what the symmetry (Lie group) acts on (obviously?!) are the Lagrangian generalized coordinates. And from that, we immediately guess that manifolds are going to be important, because the generalized variables of the Lagrangian can trivially be Non-Euclidean geometry, e.g. the pendulum lives on an infinite cylinder.
The most beautiful idea in physics - Noether's Theorem by Looking Glass Universe (2015)
Source. One sentence stands out: the generated quantities are called the generators of the transforms.The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 15. Gauge Theory by Sean Carroll (2020)
Source. This attempts a one hour hand wave explanation of it. It is a noble attempt and gives some key ideas, but it falls a bit short of Ciro's desires (as would anything that fit into one hour?)The Symmetries of the universe by ScienceClic English (2021)
Source. youtu.be/hF_uHfSoOGA?t=144 explains intuitively why symmetry implies consevation! No-go theorem Updated 2025-07-16
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.