Only after Ciro became an adult did he finally understand that Sun Wukong was the basis for Dragon Ball as mentioned at: Figure "19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong". And that Sun Wukong was a million times more famous overall. Mind blown.
His given name "Wukong" literally means "the one who mastered the void" (Wu = Comprehend, Kong = void), so clearly a Dharma name. Edit: it is actually given in the novel, he was born without name. They seem to be Taoist however.
The family name sun1 孙 is the same character as "grandson", but most educated Chinese people seem to be able to recognize it as a reference to "monkey" from some archaic context not anymore in current usage.
The very first chapter opens with Grand Commander Hou disrespecting spirits by opening up a sealed tomb and unintentionally releasing 108 demons who presumably reincarnate as humans, a backstory to the events that follow years later.
This is well shown in the Japanese The Water Margin, but is skipped in the Chinese The Water Margin unfortunately.
Actually, now that Ciro Santilli thinks about it, these were already likely meant as a "collectible" element by the author of the original book, as is strongly suggested by all the little illustrations of each character present on the Wikipedia page. Just like e.g. Catholic saints. It's Pokemon, but 2000 years earlier.
Ciro would notably feel many years later, that as he met random people online who were interested in improving eduction, or was otherwise networking to reach his goals, as if he were actually building up his 108 stars of destiny.
A central part, and perhaps the most interesting part of the novel, is how each character has been motivated by injustice to join the rebellion. This reminds Ciro of Final Fantasy VI
Unmigrated sections of the old version of Ciro Santilli's website Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
It is interesting to see how your own ideas shift with time, and Ciro Santilli doesn't think the following are very important anymore, so he was lazy to migrate them.
Like all poor countries, Brazil's lack of money and scientific culture severely limit its ability to make technological and scientific advances.
While this sounds obvious, Ciro Santilli has felt it first hand since he moved from Brazil to Europe, and it is just shocking.
This is meant to be an answer to: diy.stackexchange.com/questions/27669/how-can-i-thoroughly-blackout-a-bedroom-window-on-a-budget but that question was protected and I can't answer right now because I don't have 10 reputation on the website, so here goes.
Off-the-shelf techniques to become a teaching superhero.
Customized website idea at: OurBigBook.com.
Pokemon had just launched in Brazil in 1999, 2 years after the Japanese launch: br.historyplay.tv/hoje-na-historia/comeca-exibicao-original-do-anime-pokemon (archive) And Dragon Ball, was first aired in 1989 in Japan! My God, those translations took forever back then!
And everyone was playing Pokemon on their Game Boy Color. Ciro was already cheap however, and didn't buy the console despite wanting it, and just played it through his friends handhelds. But maybe this is a good thing. Playing alone sucks.
It basically came about because of the endless stream of useless software startups made since the 2000's by one or two people with no investments with the continued increase in computers and Internet speeds until the great wall was reached.
Deep tech means not one of those. More specifically, it means technologies that require significant investment in expensive materials and laboratory equipment to progress, such as molecular biology technologies and quantum computing.
And it basically comes down to technologies that wrestle with the fundamental laws of physics rather than software data wrangling.
Computers are of course limited by the laws of physics, but those are much hidden by several layers of indirection.
Full visibility, and full control, make computer tasks be tasks that eventually always work out more or less as expected.
The same does not hold true when real Physics is involved.
Physics is brutal.
To start with, you can't even see your system very clearly, and often doing so requires altering its behaviour.
For example, in molecular biology, most great discoveries are made after some new technique is made to be able to observe smaller things.
But you often have to kill your cells to make those observations, which makes it very hard to understand how they work dynamically.
What we would really want would be to track every single protein as it goes about inside the cell. But that is likely an impossible dream.
The same for the brain. If we had observations of every neuron, how long would it take to understand it? Not long, people are really good at reverse engineering things when there is enough information available to do so, see also science is the reverse engineering of nature.
Then, even when you start to see the system, you might have a very hard time controlling it, because it is so fragile. This is basically the case of quantum computing in 2020.
The next big things will come from deep tech. Failure is always a possibility, and you can't know before you try.
But that's also why its so fun to dare.
Stuff that Ciro Santilli considers "deep tech" as of 2020:
- brain-computer interface
- fusion power. The question there is, when is "deep", "too deep"?
Unconditional basic income is Ciro Santilli's ultimate non-transhumanist technological dream: to reach a state of technological advancement and distribution of resources so high that everyone gets money for doing nothing, enough for:
Once a person has that, they can "learn, teach" and create whatever they want. Or play video games all day long if they wish.
Ciro Santilli will not live to see this, and is content with helping it happen faster by increasing the efficiency of the world as. And having at least two well educated kids to carry on the project after he dies :-)
Technologies which would help a lot towards unconditional basic income, and might be strictly required required are:
- artificial general intelligence
- This is even less likely than AGI due to the end of silicon Moore's Law and at the start of the Genome's Moore's law: information doubles, small sizes halve, but macroscopic mechanical artifacts stay the same.brain-computer interfaces are pretty certain to happen however after Ciro Santilli dies.
So in the worst case we can just grow brainless bodies and replace the cavity hole with a computer that controls the body, possibly with high level decisions coming from a remote building-sized genetically engineered biological AGI brain.
Of course, it is all about costs. A human costs about 130k 2010 USD/year. So how cheap can we make the AGI / robot human equivalent / year for a given task?
AGI + humanoid robots likely implies AI takeover though. It would then come down to human loving bots vs human hating bots fighting it out. It will be both terrifying and fun to watch.
AGI alone would be very dangerous, in case it can get control of our nuclear arsenals through software zero days or social engineering. Although some claim that is unlikely.
Humanity's best bet to achieve silicon AGI today is to work on: Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games.
By Charles Bukowski mentioned e.g. at tatyanany.medium.com/slavery-was-never-abolished-it-was-only-extended-to-include-all-the-colors-6ca21d586e7e:
Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.
Bibliography:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=bldeaDRWJYcLecture 24: Unemployment, Re-employment & Income Security by Ian Shapiro (2019)
Easy street by Stan Kenton and June Christy (1945)
Source. TODO exact lyrics for copy paste? There seem to be several variants, and I don't have the patience to transcribe. Close enough: lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/e/easystreet.html. Except that with UBI there won't be a:guy that you can hire to plant trees so you can have shade
Tis term was invented by Ciro Santilli, it refers to ASCII art of text, essentially creating a typeface. in that medium..
Governments should provide basic Internet infrastructure Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
Taxes pay for the physical car roads, so why shouldn't they also pay for the "online roads" of today?
The following services are obvious picks because they are so simple:
Other less simple ones that might also be feasible:
- geographic information system. Notable anti-example: United Kingdom's Ordnance Survey's apparently non-free-data
- App stores
All of them should have strong privacy enabled by default: end-to-end encryption, logless, etc. Governments are not going to like this part.
And then if you ever forget a password or lose a multi-factor authentication token, you can just go to an ID center with your ID to recover it.
Having more than one natural language is bad for the world Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
Natural language diversity is beautiful, but useless.
Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)
Source. 
Even the Bible writers already know that multiple languages suck as seen from the Tower of Babel parable
Isn't it incredibly fitting that the building of the European Parliament looks like the Tower of Babel?
The fact that in poor countries a huge number of people do not speak the economically dominating language of the world, the lingua franca, English as of 2020, is a major obstacle to the development of those countries.
Despite us being in the information age, the people in those countries cannot fully benefit from it at all!
Teaching its people English should be the number one priority of any country. Without that, there can be no technological development. Everything else is secondary and can be learnt off the Internet once you know English.
And the most efficient way to do that, is that every country should create amazing free open source English learning material for their own language.
European countries are perhaps the most perfect example of how many languages destroy once powerful countries: Section "European Tower of Babel"
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is bullshit outside of poetry, and the ending of Arrival (2016) makes one want to puke, where learning a language changes not only your brain, but also Ciro's precious "laws" of Physics!
Much more likely are To Serve Man/A Small Talent for War events which we have already seen countless times!
Remember that those ideas come from a person who speaks 3.5 languages in 2019, and sees absolutely no practical difference between them.
Of course, like all non-constructed languages, English is not fully optimal in terms of regularity and information density. It could be argued that other languages are better in those aspects.
For example, Ciro does believe that spoken Chinese is a better language than English overall from a purely "ease of learning from scratch point of view" as mentioned at: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/tree/6fdeb5aa3826c69f7c058de4e6f652a6924bc08a#does-ciro-santilli-speak-chinese. Chinese writing is completely insane of course, completely out of the question.
However, Ciro just doesn't think that the difference is that great to justify replacing English which is already dominant. How much more efficient can a perfect constructed language be than English? 1.01? 1.001? Such margins don't matter. Once you have learnt it young, it's done, for good.
English-based a posteriori constructed languages that regularize English further are perhaps the only reasonable alternative, like how C++ evolved from C by creating a low cost upgrade path. Although in practice they will never take off unless a dictatorship rules the world:
One interesting anecdote is that Ciro met his wife in French, and talking to her primarily in English feels really weird, so language does matter in love.
Different languages might also good at producing interesting diverse touristic locations, with different diverse and interesting foods. Because that's what tourism is all about. The exotic. The unique. And therefore, also necessarily the inefficient.
People with similar ideas:
- English as a universal language by Dan Dascalescu (2008)
- harmful.cat-v.org/society/cultural_protectionism from cat-v.org
- blog.codinghorror.com/the-ugly-american-programmer/ highlights that the situation is even more critical for software development. But he's a moderate ideology. Newbie.
- Charles Kay Ogden, creator of Basic English, according to the Basic English Wikipedia page:
Ogden's Basic, and the concept of a simplified English, gained its greatest publicity just after the Allied victory in World War II as a means for world peace. Ogden was convinced that the world needed to gradually eradicate minority languages and use as much as possible only one, English in either a simple or complete form.
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