Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

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Pokemon Updated 2025-07-16

One of the main children cartoons Ciro Santilli liked to watch. Part of the Pokemon Mania of the 90s of course.

Ciro could not understand why Nintendo won't make a proper 3D MMORPG Pokemon with actually 3D Pokemon roaming the land, which is obviously what everyone wants. There are even fan games getting there!

pokemon-mmo-3d.com Interesting concept here, where when you deploy a Pokemon, you start controlling the Pokemon rather than the main character
www.quora.com/Why-won-t-Nintendo-make-an-open-world-3D-Pokémon-RPG/answer/Ciro-Santilli

until this explaiend it beautifully Video 1. "The Downfall Of Mainline Pokemon Games by GONZ media (2020)":

Pokemon became an industrialized yearly game spitting machine, and therefore any new feature is just extra risk
Pokemon was kept mostly as a handheld exclusive to sell handlhelds, with a few early exceptions such as Pokemon Snap

Figure 1.
Instead of risking anything new, let's play it safe by continuing our slow decline into obsolecense cartoon by Tom Fishburne
. Source.

The Downfall Of Mainline Pokemon Games by GONZ media (2020)

Source. Great video, explains things Ciro had never thought about, e.g. how the Nintendo Switch unified handheld and console for Nintento, this could open the doors for a more ambitious Pokemon release.

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Super Mario Updated 2025-07-16

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The Legend of Zelda Updated 2025-07-16

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Artificial neural network Updated 2025-07-16

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Network interface controller Updated 2025-07-16

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Router (computing) Updated 2025-07-16

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Network switch Updated 2025-07-16

A switch is a box with a bunch of Ethernet wires coming into it:

+--------------------+
| +-+  +-+  +-+  +-+ |
| |1|  |2|  |3|  |4| |
| +-+  +-+  +-+  +-+ |
+--------------------+

Except that it doesn't have to be Ethernet, e.g. it would also be a Wi-Fi.

What the switch does is:

an Ethernet request came in from wire 1
decide which wire to send it out on, e.g. wire 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. You likely don't want to send it back through 1 where it came from.

After the destination is found, a confirmation is somehow sent back to the switch, which then learns which wire to send each MAC address to.

A switch is a bit like a router but it is a bit dumber/operates at a lower level: it basically operates only on MAC addresses, not on IP addresses.

The Internet service provider boxes most people have at home combines a switch for the local network and a router for the ISP communication.

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Networking hardware company Updated 2025-07-16

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Server (computing) Updated 2025-07-16

Unpacking 200 servers by Play with Junk (2021)

Visiting Hetzner in Falkenstein by der8auer (2022)

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Neuron Updated 2025-07-16

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Spinal cord Updated 2025-07-16

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GenBank Updated 2025-07-16

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Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Updated 2025-07-16

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FFmpeg Updated 2025-07-16

FFmpeg is the assembler of audio and video.

As a result, Ciro Santilli who likes "lower level stuff", has had many many hours if image manipulation fun with this software, see e.g.:

the "Media" section of the best articles by Ciro Articles.
Figure "Ciro knows how to convert videos to GIFs"

As older Ciro grows, the more he notices that FFmpeg can do basically any lower level audio video task. It is just an amazing piece of software, the immediate go-to for any low level operation.

FFmpeg was created by Fabrice Bellard, which Ciro deeply respects.

Resize a video: superuser.com/questions/624563/how-to-resize-a-video-to-make-it-smaller-with-ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i input.avi -filter:v scale=720:-1 -c:a copy output.mkv

Unlike every other convention under the sun, the height in scale is the first number.

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ImageMagick Updated 2025-07-16

Crop 20 pixels from the bottom of the image:

convert image.png -gravity East -chop 20x0 result.png

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Developmental biology Updated 2026-10-18

Where is Anatomy Encoded in Living Systems? by Michael Levin (2022)

we are very far from full understanding. End game is a design system where you draw the body and it compiles the DNA for you.
some cool mentions of regeneration

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Chimera (genetics) Updated 2025-07-16

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Germline and somatic cells Updated 2025-07-16

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The simplest multicellular species Updated 2025-07-16

One of the simplest known seems to be: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax

www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/articles/a_00220.html "The simplest multicellular organism unveiled" from 2013 mentions Tetrabaena socialis.

Then of course: Caenorhabditis elegans is a relatively simple and widely studied model organism.

Nicole King (UC Berkeley, HHMI) 1: The origin of animal multicellularity by iBiology (2015)

youtu.be/1v6cgSkiHik?t=513 multicellularity is polyphyletic, e.g. evolved separately on plants, fungi and animals.
youtu.be/1v6cgSkiHik?t=668 describes how unicellular organism choanoflagellates form colony, and how animals are characterized by certain key types of cellular interaction: adhesion, communication, regulation (cell differentiation) and extra cellular matrix production

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Colony (biology) Updated 2025-07-16

It is hard to distinguish between colonies of unicellular organism and multicellular organism as there is a continuum between both depending on how well integrated they cells are.

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