Ciro Santilli's formal education Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli participated in a double degree program, so he obtained have engineering degrees in both:
Despite studying in great institutions with great teachers, Ciro feels that:
This motivated Ciro to work on OurBigBook.com.
Fashion Updated +Created
Mathematics Genealogy Project Updated +Created
The bullying of young Ciro Santilli Updated +Created
When Ciro Santilli was very young, about 6, he was a fatty, and other evil boys picked on him.
Ciro was even more stupid than as of 2020, and continued to try and hang out with those evil kids to show them he was cool too or that he was strong, and so continued to get hurt.
Advice to his children: stay away from evil people.
The bullied sometimes feels an almost masochistic desire to overcome the bullies' contempt, and to try and either become friends with the bullies, or to overpower them.
You must never give into those thoughts.
If you come across evil people, smile a fake smile to them, and walk away, but never give your back to them, and always be ready to fight.
If they laugh at you, know that you are shit like everyone else, pretend to laugh with them, take their post and repost it on your public profile, and silently stay away from those idiots.
Never show any weakness.
If a fight is likely, always be ready, always have your friends nearby, be as well armed as the enemy, and never be outnumbered.
On the Internet, never care about e-bully posts, either block them immediately, and anyone that likes their posts, or follow Ciro's reply policy.
Call parents or other authorities as soon as there is risk of physical harm. Better a living free pussy than dead or in youth detention for murder. Similar advice applies if you are going to jail I guess.
The Sikh knife, the Kirpan, which Sikhs must carry at all times as a religious obligation, also comes to mind. The Sikh must have been bullied out of the their minds at some point in history, Ciro understands.
Non-violence only works when you have bodies to spare from your followers.
Perhaps it was good to learn those lessons early, before the stakes were too high. Adults fake it much better, and therefore it is harder to learn those lessons from them, but they are still just as evil on the inside.
Trope Updated +Created
A recurring narrative device, i.e. a cliche that has been used endless across stories.
x86 bare metal examples Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's data projects Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli has enjoyed doing projects dealing with with lots of data! They usually have a large overlap with Ciro Santilli's naughty projects, but not always!
Ciro Santilli's hardware / Cell phones Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's hardware / Cleaning products Updated +Created
2019-11 www.amazon.co.uk/B00I8JC4WC Mr Muscle 5 in 1 Shower Shine, 500 ml
2019-11 www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00FGOY51A Lakeland Moth Stop Moth Killer Carpet & Fabric Spray, 500ml
2019-10 Mykal Sticky Stuff Remover 250ml. Helped remove sticky tape adhesive from surfaces. Still required a lot of elbow grease, but worked. www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000TAT4GM (archive).
Ciro Santilli's hardware / Computers Updated +Created
Machines used extensively while developing the Linux Kernel Module Cheat will be documented there for reference performance.
Ciro Santilli's hardware / Vacuum cleaner Updated +Created
OurBigBook Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli has the power to document stuff in a way that makes using them awesome, as evidenced by his his Stack Overflow contributions (notably those in the best articles by Ciro Articles), and other online contributions.
If your project does something awesome, hiring Ciro means that more people will be able to notice that it is actually awesome, and use it.
He likes to do this in parallel to contributing new features, quickly switching between his "developer" and "technical documentor" hats.
This means of course that he will develop new features a bit slower than others, but he feel it is more valuable if end users can actually use your project in the first place.
His technique is to provide upfront extremely interactive and reproducible getting started setups that immediately show the key value of the project to users.
He backs those setups with:
  • scripts that automate the setup much as possible to make things enjoyable and reproducible
  • a detailed description of the environment in which he tested: which OS, version of key software, etc.
  • a detailed description of what is expected to happen when you take an action, including known bugs with links to bug reports
  • theory and rationale on the sections after the initial getting started, but always finely interspersed with concrete examples
  • all docs contained in a Git-tracked repo, with the ability to render to a single HTML with one TOC
  • short sentences and paragraphs, interspersed with many headers, lists and code blocks
A prime example of kind of setup is Ciro's Linux Kernel Module Cheat.
While he create this setup, he inevitably start to notice and fix:
  • bugs
  • annoyances on the public interface of the project
  • the devs were using 50 different local scripts to do similar things, all of them semi-broken and limited. Every new hire was copying one of those local scripts, and hacking it up further.
  • your crappy build / test / version control setup
Exploiting this skill, however, requires you to trust him.
When he tells to managers that he's good at documenting, they always say: great, we need better documentation! But then, one of the following may happen:
  • managers forget that they wanted good documentation and just tell him to code new features as fast as possible
  • they don't let him own the getting started page, but rather and expect him to try and fix the existing crappy unfixable existing getting started, without stepping on anyone's pride in the process >:-)
    This makes him tired, and less likely to do a good job.
    Good documentation requires a large number of small iterative reviews, and detailed review of every line is not always feasible.
    Too many cooks.
Ciro's passion for documentation and tooling has the effect that if you have crappy documentation and tooling and don't want them to be fixed, Ciro will end up trying to fix those tools instead of doing what you tell him to do anyways, which might lead to him quitting because he can't stand the tools, or you firing him because he's not doing the job you think I should be doing. So please, don't bother hiring Ciro if you have crappy documentation and tooling.
Psychological analysis of why Ciro has this gift: How Ciro Santilli manages to write so much.
Ciro often has the following metaphor in his mind:
New discoveries are like very rough trails where you have to cut through heavy bushes (an original research paper).
After a brave explorer goes through this rough path for the first time and charts it, it does become much easier for others to follow it later on, but it still requires a lot of effort to go through them, because there are still a lot of rough bushes and some parts of the map are not very clear (reading and reproducing the research paper to further advance the state of the art).
As enough people start going through, the probability that someone with a bad memory ends up walking it increases, and that person ends up pounding the earth into a beaten track and increasing the trail clearance of the beginning of the trail at least (review paper).
There finally comes a point when even the local government starts to notice this trail is important, and pays someone to add some stone pavement and rails on the most exposed parts of the trail (post and undergrad education).
Ciro's documenation obsession is partly part of his braindumping effort of dumping his brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
Ciro Santilli's natural languages skills Updated +Created
When asked, Ciro likes to say that he speaks something between 1.5 and 3.5 languages in total, depending on how you count, because Portuguese, French and English are 99.99% the same, and Chinese is completely different but Ciro only knows about 50% of it if counted optimistically.
Reactions to cirosantilli.com Updated +Created
Deep psychological analyses:
Astrophysics Updated +Created
Strava Updated +Created
Comedy troupe Updated +Created
Compulsive hoarding Updated +Created
Mathematics YouTube channel Updated +Created

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