Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Text materials are generally superior to video because they:

Only produce video material if:

Never create videos of people just speaking hardcore content for long amounts of time.

If you have to use videos, make them as short as possible, and index them with a textual table of contents.

Also consider using sequences of images or GIFs instead of videos, since those are cheaper.

By writing in English you reach more people.

Writing in any other language is a waste of time.

The reason is simple: English speakers control a huge proportion of the world's GDP.

English is the de-facto Lingua Franca of the second half of the 20th Century, it is the new lingua franca, the new Latin, and there is no escaping it.

Students who don't know English will never do anything truly useful in science and technology. So it is pointless to teach them anything (besides English itself).

See also: having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

Ciro Santilli often sees all those genius who are much smarter than him making shitty forum/mailing list posts, they need to learn this:

The website moved from AsciiDoctor to OurBigBook Markup in 2020, making this section mostly useless. But hey, history!

Ciro's website is powered by GitHub Pages and Jekyll Asciidoc.

The source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io

Build locally, watch for changes and rebuild automatically, and start a local server with:

Source: ./run.

The website will be visible at: localhost:4000.

Tested on the latest Ubuntu.

Publish changes to GitHub Pages:

Source: ./publish.

GitHub forces us to use the master branch for the build output... so the actual source is in the branch dev.

Update the gems with:

His website was originally written in markdown, however those were deprecated in favour of AsciiDoctor when Ciro saw the light, rationale shown at: markdown-style-guideuse-asciidoc

GitHub pages is chosen instead of a single page GitHub README.adoc for the following reasons:

Allows us to draw with JavaScript pixel by pixel! Great way to create computational physics demos!

Here is an animation demo with some useful controls:

new class extends OurbigbookCanvasDemo {
  init() {
    super.init('hello');
    this.pixel_size_input = this.addInputAfterEnable(
      'Pixel size',
      {
        'min': 1,
        'type': 'number',
        'value': 1,
      }
    );
  }
  draw() {
    var pixel_size = parseInt(this.pixel_size_input.value);
    for (var x = 0; x < this.width; x += pixel_size) {
      for (var y = 0; y < this.height; y += pixel_size) {
        var b = ((1.0 + Math.sin(this.time * Math.PI / 16)) / 2.0);
        this.ctx.fillStyle =
          'rgba(' +
          (x / this.width) * 255 + ',' +
          (y / this.height) * 255 + ',' +
          b * 255 +
          ',255)'
        ;
        this.ctx.fillRect(x, y, pixel_size, pixel_size);
      }
    }
  }
}

Bibliography: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/Tutorial/Basic_animations">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/Tutorial/Basic_animations

Ah, the Holy Grail of both biology and computer science!

Ciro Santilli feels it is not for his generation though, and that is one of the philosophical things that saddens him the most in this world.

On the other hand, Ciro's playing with the Linux kernel and other complex software which no single human can every fully understand cheer him up a bit. But still, the high level view, that we can have...

For now, Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games.

Basically means "company with huge server farms, and which usually rents them out like Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform

Cover up the entire sky in a compatible way with the traditional constellations. They are also very square, the boundaries consisting only of vertical and horizontal lines on the sphere.

TODO what's the largest molecule done on a classical computer?

SGML predecessor.

Ice is the name of one of the solid phases of water.

In informal contexts, it usually refers to the phase of ice observed in atmospheric pressure, Ice I_h.

This can be seen with Wireshark very clearly for example, just make a ping and disssemble it.

These were ordinals that were only indexed in later versions of the script. So to prevent changing the useless indices of existing ordinals, they gave them negative numbers.

The word "cursed" is a meme from the 2010/20s, e.g. knowyourmeme.com/memes/cursed-images--2.

Some examples:

Bibliography:

The traffic is designed for cars, which makes many red stops for bicycles completely stupid.

In a bicycle you just have too much more control and awareness than in a car, so if the way is completely clear, you should be allowed to stop, look if the way is clear, and then run reds.

Of course, this does increase the chances of hitting pedestrians a little bit. But the risk change feels so little that it would be worth it. Studies quoted by Wikipedia corroborate. It just feels extremely unintuitive to make cyclists stop in certain places when the street is clear.

Selected answers by Ciro Santilli on the subject:

Founding CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits.

As mentioned at www.investmentmonitor.ai/tech/innovation/in-conversation-with-oxford-quantum-circuits-ilana-wisby she is not the original tech person:Did they mean Oxford Sciences Enterprises? There's nothing called "Oxford Science and Innovation" on Google. Yes, it is just a typo oxfordscienceenterprises.com/news/meet-the-founder-ilana-wisby-ceo-of-oxford-quantum-circuits/ says it clearly:

oxfordquantumcircuits.com/story mentions that the core patent was by Dr. Peter Leek: www.linkedin.com/in/peter-leek-00954b62/

This website used to allow embedding text messages with OP_RETURN, here's an archive from 2015: web.archive.org/web/20150718052659/http://eternitywall.it/

As of January 2024, it seems to read-only mode, where it simply indexes matching transactions that were made via other means: web.archive.org/web/20230929075331/https://eternitywall.it/

A Reddit announcement from July 2015: www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3dxy9f/eternity_wall_messages_lasting_forever/

There were 3191 hits for the search term:in our data starting with tx a3b3af21514bd79a4cbcac9916a8514636a72d813539192214542fd85247082e (2015-06-24):up to the last entry on tx 28820bc14cf2cfda58ecbc9ac6df3f41a1cb90f4246543f01ba42a5e9dac3cf8 (2023-06-15)no doubt initials of 4 Chinesepeople. A blood brother oath comes to mind, akin to the Oath of the Peach Garden. Will these four be the ones to take down the evil dictator Xi Jinping?

The very first message gives away the name of what we assume is a web-based upload system, "EW" being its advertisement signature added to every message.

Running bitcoin-cli:shows that the messages are encoded with OP_RETURN:

Mt. Gox was the first Cryptocurrency exchange in existence, and when it shutdowon in Febrauary 2014 because the website was crap and they got hacked, some people were not happy at all about their missing funds!

tx 0540b5dda23ee870330c6b1e18a88c592cf8d847c47f1dc1d5328f46115b12b3 (2014-02-25)

tx 2374f8575f65763caf6909551c131d3ae45399a73aee638bcbccaebdb1219d67 (2014-02-25):

tx c00a4a04905a2e8d8dee8a768165aa6bdf842413a8a648462a6349db89cd77f2 (2014-02-27) has an ASCII art of a seal, TODO understand meme:

There are also a few Base58 messages referring to Mt Gox, the nicest and most expensive one being to burn addres:which as of 2025 holds 0.014537 BTC burnt on:Many of these transactions also contain other quick messages, e.g.:

bitfossil.com/78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e/ in block 273536 (2013-12-07).

This is one of the earliest AtomSea & EMBII uploads.