Ludic Science Updated 2025-07-16
Maybe Spanish accent, but might also be from some other european language.
Very practical, low-cost experiments.
Tried a quick port to SQLite to get rid of annoying local databases for development, but failed, at c1c2cc4e448b279ff083272df1ac50d20c3304fa
npm install sqlite3 --save-dev
and
{
  "type": "sqlite",
  "database": "db.sqlite3",
  "entities": ["src/**/**.entity{.ts,.js}"],
  "synchronize": true
}
then:
npm start
fails with:
DataTypeNotSupportedError: Data type "timestamp" in "ArticleEntity.created" is not supported by "sqlite" database.
Attempt to hack it:
--- a/src/article/article.entity.ts
+++ b/src/article/article.entity.ts
@@ -20,10 +20,10 @@ export class ArticleEntity {
   @Column({default: ''})
   body: string;

-  @Column({ type: 'timestamp', default: () => "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"})
+  @Column({ default: () => "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"})
   created: Date;

-  @Column({ type: 'timestamp', default: () => "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"})
+  @Column({ default: () => "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"})
   updated: Date;
and after that it seems to run.
I can signup and login, terrible error reporting as usual, make sure to use long enough usernames/passwords.
However, article creation fails with:
Unhandled Rejection (TypeError): Cannot read property 'slug' of undefined
Luke Dashjr Updated 2025-12-25
Author of the prayer side of the Prayer wars.
According to LinkedIn he studied at the Benedictine College in Kansas.
TODO is his real birthname "Luke Dash Jr."?
Apparently he had his coins stolen in January 2023, then worth $3.5m: blog.cryptostars.is/luke-dashjr-an-original-bitcoin-developer-loses-all-his-btc-88421c395ce5p...
www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/4936kw/lukejr_is_a_seriously_a_super_crazy_person_quotes/ "Luke-Jr is a seriously a super crazy person quotes gigathread." (2016) on Reddit. Apparently he has some fun views of life.
Luminiferous aether Updated 2025-07-16
Can you just imagine what if luminiferous aether was one single fixed rigid body? This is apparently what Maxwell believed, Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 111 quoting his entry to Encyclopedia Britannica:
There can be no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty but are occupied by a material substance or body, which is certainly the largest, and probably the most uniform, body of which we have any knowledge.
Then it would provide a natural space coordinate for the entire universe!
Apparently Einstein was the first to completely say: let's just screw this aether thing completely then, it's getting too complicated, and we don't really need it. As Wikipedia puts it well, in very unencyclopedic tone[ref]: Aether fell to Occam's razor.
MAC address Updated 2025-07-16
Hardcoded and unique network addresses for every single device on Earth.
Started with 48 bits (6 bytes), usually given as 01:23:45:67:89:AB but people now encouraged to use 64-bit ones.
How they are assigned: www.quora.com/How-are-MAC-addresses-assigned Basically IEEE gives out the 3 first bytes to device manufacturers that register, this is called the organizationally unique identifier, and then each manufacturer keeps their own devices unique.
Machine learning Updated 2025-07-16
The main reason Ciro Santilli never touched it is that it feels that every public data set has already been fully mined or has already had the most interesting algorithms developed for it, so you can't do much outside of big companies.
This is why Ciro started Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games to generate synthetic data and thus reduce the cost of data.
The other reason is that it is ugly.
Machine learning company Updated 2025-07-16
This section is about companies that primarily specialize in machine learning.
The term "machine learning company" is perhaps not great as it could be argued that any of the Big tech are leaders and sometimes, especially in the case of Google, has a main product that is arguably a form of machine learning.
Most of the companies in this section likely going to be from the AI boom era.
Madelung energy ordering rule Updated 2025-07-16
Looking at the energy level of the Schrödinger equation solution for the hydrogen atom, you would guess that for multi-electron atoms that only the principal quantum number would matter, azimuthal quantum number getting filled randomly.
However, orbitals energies for large atoms don't increase in energy like those of hydrogen due to electron-electron interactions.
In particular, the following would not be naively expected:
Magarena Updated 2025-07-16
Open source MtG engine implementation written in Java.
Seems to have an option to download art from internet as well.
Ciro Santilli wonders how legal it is. They very explicitly do not mention the words Magic: The Gathering anywhere.
Their UI does a good job at being self explanatory. Space is the shortcut to skip phases.
No online play.
TODO it appears to parse card functionality out of the human readable text! That's genius, as it helps automatically get new cards working, and squirt around legal issues.
Magic Aids Updated 2025-07-16
His combination of politically incorrect dirt talk with amazing quirky decks captures Ciro's imagination.
Anonymous no face-reveal.
The videos are heavily edited with all pauses cut out, which makes them very quick to watch and saves viewer time.
Modern focused, with some occasional newer formats mixed in.
When Wizards publishes several useless sets in a row without a single modern playable card, he's just forced into Standard.
Video 1.
Magic Aids vs. Magic Rainbows by Magic Aids (2018)
Source. In this amazing video Magic Aids makes fun of Wizards for forcing him to change is Magic Online handle from Magic Aids to something else due to the AIDS part. He claims the Aids is not meant as a reference to the disease, but just as in "memory aid". Ciro doubts this wasn't intentional. But the video is still amazing, and happens to involve a sex doll dressed as Liliana Vess squirting glitter from her vagina. Wizards must love this guy. It is also a good criticism of political correctness in general. This is a work of art.
Magic: The Gathering Updated 2025-07-16
It is also the one with the most cumbersome name possible, containing even a bloody colon punctuation in it!
However, besides that, Magic has another major flaw: the cards of old formats (Legacy and Modern), which are the only really interesting ones, are fucking expensive: Section "Magic: The Gathering is too expensive".
Like in mathematics, the most beautiful decks are those that do crazy things:
  • infinite combos
  • semi-infinite combos that allow you to likely draw your entire deck or deal 20 damage
  • all-in decks that either win or lose on turn two
  • and lands
All of this comes to a certain extent from the deep asymmetry that permeates the game.
It is also really interesting to watch as new sets as spoiled and try to guess if certain cards will have any impact on the Modern or Legacy metagame.
Here are some cool decks:
If Ciro were to ever overcome his cheapness and play the legacy forma (which will never happen), he would likely play one of the following decks when trying to be able to win at all:Both of this decks focus on cheating a huge creature into play in one go, and both have combo protection methods (discard for turbo depths, and counterspells for sneak and show). Ciro believes that those decks reflect his personality well, notably Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality. Related decks that don't appeal as much to Ciro:
  • reanimator: you have to worry about graveyard hate all the time, worrying is bad
  • storm: you have to play too many spells, it's tiring. Ciro would rather put a fattie into play and swing once.
And above all, Ciro would never play a fair deck. Grinding victories is not for him. He'd rather quickly decide win/lose status and move on.
Competitive commander is also interesting, although matches tend to be much more random so the format is harder to digest, see for example this channel; Playing With Power MTG channel.
In Ciro's mind, Urza's block is the most epic of all, followed by the masques block. Those sets had a ridiculous power level and epic art, and they happened just before Ciro Santilli started playing during Invasion, which had an extremely low power level in comparison. So Ciro saw some cards from those slightly older formats floating around, but not many, and they felt so mystical and awesome.
ChannelFireball is one of the best Legacy resources out there, but they have too much crap filling in between legacy videos unfortunately.
The following creators share many of Ciro's interests and output large quantities of interesting content covering all memes/overpowered combos of new sets:
Ciro was pleased when he learnt that Steve Wozniak plays magic the gathering.
Magic's competitive play became a mess in the late 2010's. They had a clear tournament structure, but they decided to start changing things every 6 months, and give tournaments meaningless names like "Mythic championship", and it just became impossible to follow what is what.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hk3IOQiisg Crazy MTG Scandals That Changed The Game by Nikachu (2021). Good list:
  • obviously wrong card named
  • Dryad arbour camouflaging as a land
  • go to combat
Magic: The Gathering is addictive Updated 2025-07-16
Paraprasing a friend of Ciro Santilli:
Magic: The Gathering is like cocaine in card form.
Luckily, early teens Ciro Santilli was partly protected from this by Ciro Santilli's cheapness.
But Ciro distinctly remembers one day in his early teens that he couldn't sleep very well, and he got up, and the was decided that he would become the greatest Magic: The Gathering player who ever lived. Can you imagine the incredible loss that this would have been to humankind? And talk about the incredible lack of development opportunity present in poor countries, related:
Ciro had initially Googled for the "4-card limit thought experiment" but he reached: www.channelfireball.com/articles/what-if-the-4-card-limit-was-abolished-in-modern/ "What if the 4-Card Limit Was Abolished in Modern?" by Frank Karsten (2018) and was much more pleased with the mathematical result. Like-minded people.
That links to www.channelfireball.com/articles/what-if-the-4-card-limit-was-abolished-in-modern/ the related article: "The Mythic Invitational's Duo Standard Format Game Theory Optimized" by Frank Karsten (2019) which explains well how Nash equilibrium is naturally reached: if there is any imbalance, someone can take advantage of it, and then it rebalances. Therefore once you've calculated the equilibrium, your best course of action is to pick a deck at random from a list of possible winners.
Of course, part of the beauty of Magic is that we can never really know the full matrix since deck choice is basically infinite. But at the very least it could give good archetype results.
Magnetic confinement fusion Updated 2025-09-09
Once again, relies on superconductivity to reach insane magnetic fields. Superconductivity is just so important.
Ciro Santilli saw a good presentation about it once circa 2020, it seems that the main difficulty of the time was turbulence messing things up. They have some nice simulations with cross section pictures e.g. at: www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/937941.

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