Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

The Twelve Apostles were actually officially appointed by Jesus amongst his followers. It was not simply that they were the first followers. It was official rank.

Do as I say, not as I do: Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019, meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/381577/is-it-ok-to-have-links-on-how-to-create-sock-puppets-and-gain-rep-fraudulently-i/381635#381635.

This is a really good project. So fun to play around with. Low level IO part only like drawing to screen and handling keyboard inputs.

Ciro Santilli has:

Implies antisymmetric multilinear map.

Firstly, in 2012, while he was at École Polytechnique, Ciro Santilli was introduced to LaTeX (thank God for French mathematical obsession), and his mind was blown:he though. Why isn't everyone doing that!

One particular event stood out: Ciro made a small change to his teacher's course material, who blessed be him (dude's a legend, Ciro just noticed he has some Chinese publications with another French dude, e.g. www.amazon.co.uk/高效算法-应试与提高必修128例-克里斯托弗-Christoph-Durr/dp/B078SJQPVK "High-efficiency algorithm competitions 128 examples", did he write it the Chinese himself?? Must be of course to complement the notoriously low French professor salaries), made it available, and then Ciro gave him back the .tex file. Ciro was just a bit worried about how the teacher would be able to tell what he had changed in the file to validate the change. The teacher just said of course, "no problem, I'll just use diff". Ciro had never heard of diff. Let alone Git of course, though yes, this was a bit early in Git's history version control systems had been around since forever of course. This was 2011 or 2012, about 4 or 5 years into a superior education curricula with various courses involving computers, some requiring quite a lot of "fill these empty functions" style programming. Education is a joke. Anyways, this was a prelude to exactly what Ciro wanted to do in OurBigBook.com. This might have been the one actually: webia.lip6.fr/~durrc/Iut/Notes580.pdf

Not long afterwards, Ciro started playing with Linux. Until then, Ciro had had some contacts with the mysterious operating system at university, and was a bit puzzled what the point of it was! He clearly remembers:University should be forced to use only open source software and hardware in undergrad teaching courses by law BTW.

Then came an Ubuntu live disk on his own machine, and finally a measly 40GB dual book partition in a Microsoft Windows machine on a laptop. At first, it took a lot of time to learn all the crazy new terminal stuff! Yes, at this point, Ubuntu was already usable enough without the terminal, an accomplishment actually. But as a programmer, Ciro felt obliged to learn. Many hours were spent reading man pages at the library. But it all just felt so right, and sometimes powerful... true wizardry.

And ten years later, Ciro was seriously considering buying a computer without Windows pre-installed. He had not used Windows a single tie on a personal machine even once in those ten years!

Finally, to finish things off Ciro found two websites that changed his life forever, and made be believe that there was an alternative: Stack Overflow and GitHub.

The brutal openness of it all. The raw high quality content. Ugliness and uselessness too no doubt. But definitely spark in a sea of darkness.

While Ciro Santilli is a big fan of having "one global country" (and language), which is somewhat approximated by globalization, he has come to believe that there is one serious downside to globalization as it stands in 2020: it allows companies to pressure governments to reduce taxes, and thus reduces the power of government, which in turn increases social inequality. This idea is very well highlighted in Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021).

The only solution seems to be for governments to get together, and make deals to have fair taxation across each other. Which might never happen.

Author of gwern.net.

Accounts:He posts insanely much on these websites. It's a bit like Ciro Santilli on Stack Overflow.

Ciro Santilli envies this guy a bit. He dumps his brain more or less full time on his highly customized static website partly due to early Bitcoin investments gwern.net/me says:

Also unsurprisingly he likes Haskell:

Ciro Santilli considers Gwern Ciro Santilli's e-soulmates due to his interest in "dark web things" like Bitcoin and Silk Road, his immense writing output in encyclopedic book-sized articles on a static website, and his desire to live frugally and just research and write all day. Ah, if only Ciro had some old coins!!!

This is likely a pseudonym, his real name not being publicly unknown, e.g. at news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5659278:

Equivalent to Lagrangian mechanics but formulated in a different way.

Motivation: Lagrangian vs Hamiltonian.

TODO understand original historical motivation, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZXHoWwBcDc says it is from optics.

Intuitively, the Hamiltonian is the total energy of the system in terms of arbitrary parameters, a bit like Lagrangian mechanics.

Bibliography:

The most important program ever written!!!

Other programs that can be considered "hello worlds" in different contexts: