Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli) - undefined articles

Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

How to give:

one time donations:
- cryptocurrency: note that Ciro is not a regular crypto user, so you might want to make a smaller test donation and confirm that it worked by contacting Ciro before going for colossal amounts (one can dream):
  - Monero address: 4A1KK4uyLQX7EBgN7uFgUeGt6PPksi91e87xobNq7bT2j4V6LqZHKnkGJTUuCC7TjDNnKpxDd8b9DeNBpSxim8wpSczQvzf. Secret view key: 7ccaf885ff5540b0ff18927e6ac5da30130afb1eaee09ad95d3c4536a6337e0f. This is a self-custody wallet on a "clean" dedicated Monero laptop connected the Internet. I check for incoming transactions from my dirty main laptop via a view-only wallet each weekend. The cash out method used is latest simplest thing that wasn't yet blocked in my country on a given week, the last time that was centralized swappers ^[ref]. The fact that the cash out method changes weekly confirms that Monero privacy hadn't yet been broken by countries and that Monero is still one of the most useful cryptocurrencies: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?". For transparency, I announce all non-trivial transactions on social media, and the full list of transactions can be seen by anyone with the secret view key provided. I previously had different addresses, so pre-existing donations on older addresses will not be visible there.
  - Bitcoin address: 3KRk7f2JgekF6x7QBqPHdZ3pPDuMdY3eWR. This is a Coinbase wallet, off-chain transactions with no transaction fees accepted from other Coinbase users. This method has been tested, I have been able to receive funds from this address in 2023. Fees: non-fixed trading fees^[ref] + 0% withdrawal fee on top of any Bitcoin network for on-chain transactions^[ref]
  - Ethereum address: 0x44cF8C9C015F46d3b2Df730b6492823FD7A91044. Test transaction recommended.
  - Solana address: DjdaGawoVFdqxJEqpBGsSWuR4G4MVFNiNkAEu89HuKcE. Test transaction recommended.
- TransferWise tag: wise.com/pay/me/cirod3. It shows as "Ciro Duran Santilli" and that's correct. No fees apparently? Love it!
- PayPal: paypal.me/cirosantilli. Note that dots in Gmail address are ignored, and it is perfectly normal if the email you see has some extra dots in it. Fees: 2.9% + 0.30 GBP^[ref].
monthly subscriptions of 1$/month or more on either:
- GitHub Sponsors: github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli. Fees: 0% for individuals, up to 6% for organizations^[ref]
- Patreon: www.patreon.com/cirosantilli. Fees: 8% pro plan + 1% PayPal withdrawal capped at 20 USD^[ref]. We are waiting to reach the cap to withdraw!
Symbolic 1 dollar/month donation are extremely welcome to signal your interest! This way if a certain critical mass of sponsors is ever reached (~100?), Ciro can start to more actively asking slightly higher amounts to really try to achieve full time self sufficiency.
larger grants/contracts from filthy rich individuals or organizations: contact Ciro as mentioned at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to discuss.
Ciro is interested in contracts/voluntary work that would be compatible/synergic with the OurBigBook.com project. Some possibilities include:
- interacting directly with classes of university students to help them learn the class subject, while at the same time spreading the university knowledge outside of the university walls
- one-to-one mentoring of individuals of any age that are looking to make an impact in the world, and not just pass their exams
- fixing specific bugs in related projects Ciro has experience in. These could be either via one-off contracts, or on platforms such as:
  www.bountysource.com/people/25676-ciro-santilli

And if you have a different preferred payment mechanism not listed above, please contact Ciro, and he will set it up.

The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

Ciro Santilli has sometimes wasted time with low impact projects such as those listed at Ciro Santilli's minor projects instead of doing higher impact projects such as those mentioned at: Section "The most important projects Ciro Santilli wants to do".

But maybe "Everything you did brought you where you are now." applies, maybe it is during the "low impact activities" that one gets the inspiration and experience required for the "high impact ones".

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The most important projects Ciro Santilli wants to do  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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They are sorted in order of "most likely to get done first".

Top one: OurBigBook.com.

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The next big thing  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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If you are going to live, you might as well chase one of them.

You might not achieve them in your lifetime, but you never know. At some point, the pieces just "fall into place", and they happen.

And they will all come from deep tech.

Ciro Santilli would like to contribute to them. but this is a bit less realistic than software projects.

But who knows? Maybe he can code some stuff in those areas.

And one can at least have some fun by learning deeply about those subjects.

 Read the full article

The best articles by Ciro Santilli  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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These are the best articles ever authored by Ciro Santilli, most of them in the format of Stack Overflow answers.

Ciro posts update about new articles on his Twitter accounts.

A chronological list of all articles is also kept at: Section "Updates".

Some random generally less technical in-tree essays will be present at: Section "Essays by Ciro Santilli".

Trended on Hacker News:
- CIA 2010 covert communication websites on 2023-06-11. 190 points, a mild success.
- x86 Bare Metal Examples on 2019-03-19. 513 points. The third time something related to that repo trends. Hacker news people really like that repo!
  - again 2020-06-27 (archive). 200 points, repository traffic jumped from 25 daily unique visitors to 4.6k unique visitors on the day
- How to run a program without an operating system? on 2018-11-26 (archive). 394 points. Covers x86 and ARM
- ELF Hello World Tutorial on 2017-05-17 (archive). 334 points.
- x86 Paging Tutorial on 2017-03-02. Number 1 Google search result for "x86 Paging" in 2017-08. 142 points.
  Figure 1.
  BIOS bare metal hello world running on a Lenovo ThinkPad T430
  . Source.
x86 assembly
- What does "multicore" assembly language look like?
- What is the function of the push / pop instructions used on registers in x86 assembly? Going down to memory spills, register allocation and graph coloring.
Linux kernel
QEMU
gcc and Binutils:
- How do linkers and address relocation works?
- What is incremental linking or partial linking?
- GOLD (-fuse-ld=gold) linker vs the traditional GNU ld and LLVM ldd
- What is the -fPIE option for position-independent executables in GCC and ld? Concrete examples by running program through GDB twice, and an assembly hello world with absolute vs PC relative load.
- How many GCC optimization levels are there?
- Why does GCC create a shared object instead of an executable binary according to file?
C/C++: almost all of those fall into "disassemble all the things" category. Ciro also does "standards dissection" and "a new version of the standard is out" answers, but those are boring:
- What does "static" mean in a C program?
- In C++ source, what is the effect of extern "C"?
- Char array vs Char Pointer in C
- How to compile glibc from source and use it?
- When should static_cast, dynamic_cast, const_cast and reinterpret_cast be used?
- What exactly is std::atomic in C++?. This answer was originally more appropriately entitled "Let's disassemble some stuff", and got three downvotes, so Ciro changed it to a more professional title, and it started getting upvotes. People judge books by their covers.
- notmain.o 0000000000000000 0000000000000017 W MyTemplate<int>::f(int) main.o 0000000000000000 0000000000000017 W MyTemplate<int>::f(int)
  Code 1.
  nm outputs showing that objects are redefined multiple times across files if you don't use template instantiation properly
  . From: What is explicit template instantiation in C++ and when to use it?

IEEE 754

What is difference between quiet NaN and signaling NaN?
In Java, what does NaN mean?

Without subnormals:

          +---+---+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+
exponent  | ? | 0 |   1   |       2       |               3               |
          +---+---+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+
          |   |   |       |               |                               |
          v   v   v       v               v                               v
          -----------------------------------------------------------------
floats    *    **** * * * *   *   *   *   *       *       *       *       *
          -----------------------------------------------------------------
          ^   ^   ^       ^               ^                               ^
          |   |   |       |               |                               |
          0   |   2^-126  2^-125          2^-124                          2^-123
              |
              2^-127

With subnormals:

          +-------+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+
exponent  |   0   |   1   |       2       |               3               |
          +-------+-------+---------------+-------------------------------+
          |       |       |               |                               |
          v       v       v               v                               v
          -----------------------------------------------------------------
floats    * * * * * * * * *   *   *   *   *       *       *       *       *
          -----------------------------------------------------------------
          ^   ^   ^       ^               ^                               ^
          |   |   |       |               |                               |
          0   |   2^-126  2^-125          2^-124                          2^-123
              |
              2^-127

Code 2.

Visualization of subnormal floating point numbers vs what IEEE 754 would look like without them

. From: What is a subnormal floating point number?

Computer science
- Algorithms
  - Figure 5.
    Average insertion time into heaps, binary search tree and hash maps of the C++ standard library
    . Source. From: Heap vs Binary Search Tree (BST)
- Is it necessary for NP problems to be decision problems?
- Polynomial time and exponential time. Answered focusing on the definition of "exponential time".
- What is the smallest Turing machine where it is unknown if it halts or not?. Answer focusing on "blank tape" initial condition only. Large parts of it are summarizing the Busy Beaver Challenge, but some additions were made.

Git

  | 0           | 4            | 8           | C              |
  |-------------|--------------|-------------|----------------|
0 | DIRC        | Version      | File count  | ctime       ...| 0
  | ...         | mtime                      | device         |
2 | inode       | mode         | UID         | GID            | 2
  | File size   | Entry SHA-1                              ...|
4 | ...                        | Flags       | Index SHA-1 ...| 4
  | ...                                                       |

Code 3.

ASCII art depicting the binary file format of the Git index file

. From: What does the git index contain EXACTLY?

tree {tree_sha}
{parents}
author {author_name} <{author_email}> {author_date_seconds} {author_date_timezone}
committer {committer_name} <{committer_email}> {committer_date_seconds} {committer_date_timezone}

{commit message}

Code 4.

Description of the Git commit object binary data structure

. From: What is the file format of a git commit object data structure?

How do I clone a subdirectory only of a Git repository?

Python
- What is the difference between old style and new style classes in Python?
- What is a mixin in Python, and why are they useful?
- What are the differences between threads and processes in Python?
  Figure 6.
  Python Threads vs Processes with 8 hyperthreads
  . Source.
Web technology
- What does enctype='multipart/form-data' mean?
- JavaScript
  - How does JavaScript .prototype work?
  - What is the difference between .prop() vs .attr() in JavaScript?
OpenGL
- Figure 7.
  OpenGL rendering output dumped to a GIF file
  . Source. From: How to use GLUT/OpenGL to render to a file?
- Figure 8.
  Example of a texture atlas containing glyphs
  . Source.
  Image by Nicolas P. Rougier, author of Freetype GL.
  Used on Ciro Santilli's answer: How to draw text using only OpenGL methods?
- Figure 9.
  OpenGL glFrustrum vs glOrtho
  . Source. From: How to use glOrtho() in OpenGL?
- What are shaders in OpenGL?
- Why do we use 4x4 matrices to transform things in 3D?
- Figure 10.
  Sinusoidal circular wave heatmap generated with an OpenGL shader at 60 FPS on SDL
  . Source.
  From: Is it possible to build a heatmap from point data at 60 times per second?
  Compared CPU vs GPU shaders.
- Image Processing with GLSL shaders? Compared the CPU and GPU for a simple blur algorithm.
  Figure 11. Source.
  Video 1.
  OpenGL GPU GLSL fragment shader real time v4l2 Linux webcam computer vision box blur vs CPU
  . Source.
Node.js
- What's the difference between dependencies, devDependencies and peerDependencies in npm package.json file?
Ruby on Rails
- What is the difference between +<%+, +<%=+, +<%#+ and +-%>+ in ERB in Rails?
POSIX
- What is POSIX? Huge classified overview of the most important things that POSIX specifies.

Systems programming

What do the terms "CPU bound" and "I/O bound" mean?
Figure 12.
Plot of "real", "user" and "sys" mean times of the output of time for CPU-bound workload with 8 threads
. Source. From: What do 'real', 'user' and 'sys' mean in the output of time?

+--------+                  +------------+       +------+
| device |>---------------->| function 0 |>----->| BAR0 |
|        |                  |            |       +------+
|        |>------------+    |            |
|        |             |    |            |       +------+
   ...        ...      |    |            |>----->| BAR1 |
|        |             |    |            |       +------+
|        |>--------+   |    |            |
+--------+         |   |         ...        ...    ...
                   |   |    |            |
                   |   |    |            |       +------+
                   |   |    |            |>----->| BAR5 |
                   |   |    +------------+       +------+
                   |   |
                   |   |
                   |   |    +------------+       +------+
                   |   +--->| function 1 |>----->| BAR0 |
                   |        |            |       +------+
                   |        |            |
                   |        |            |       +------+
                   |        |            |>----->| BAR1 |
                   |        |            |       +------+
                   |        |            |
                   |             ...        ...    ...
                   |        |            |
                   |        |            |       +------+
                   |        |            |>----->| BAR5 |
                   |        +------------+       +------+
                   |
                   |
                   |             ...
                   |
                   |
                   |        +------------+       +------+
                   +------->| function 7 |>----->| BAR0 |
                            |            |       +------+
                            |            |
                            |            |       +------+
                            |            |>----->| BAR1 |
                            |            |       +------+
                            |            |
                                 ...        ...    ...
                            |            |
                            |            |       +------+
                            |            |>----->| BAR5 |
                            +------------+       +------+

Code 5.

Logical struture PCIe device, functions and BARs

. From: What is the Base Address Register (BAR) in PCIe?

Electronics
- Raspberry Pi
  - Figure 13.
    Raspberry Pi 2 directly connected to a laptop with an Ethernet cable
    . Image from answer to: How to hook up a Raspberry Pi via Ethernet to a laptop without a router?
    Figure 14.
    Raspberry Pi 2 connected to a laptop with an USB UART adapter
    . Image from answer to: How to hook up a Raspberry Pi via Ethernet to a laptop without a router?
    Figure 15.
    Raspberry Pi OS being emulated on QEMU 2.5.0 on Ubuntu 16.04 with a modified kernel
    . Image from answer to: How to emulate the Raspberry Pi 2 on QEMU?
    Figure 16.
    Bare metal LED blinker program running on a Raspberry Pi 2
    . Image from answer to: How to run a C program with no OS on the Raspberry Pi?
Computer security
- Why is the same origin policy so important?
Media
- Video 2.
  Canon in D in C
  . Source.
  From: How is audio represented with numbers in computers?.
  The original question was deleted, lol...: How to programmatically synthesize music?
- How to resize a picture using ffmpeg's sws_scale()?
- Is there any decent speech recognition software for Linux? ran a few examples manually on vosk-api and compared to ground truth.
Eclipse
- How to set up the Eclipse for remote C debugging with gdbserver?
Computer hardware
- Are there good open source standard cell libraries to learn IC synthesis with EDA tools?
Scientific visualization software
- Figure 17.
  VisIt zoom in 10 million straight line plot with some manually marked points
  . Source. From: Section "Survey of open source interactive plotting software with a 10 million point scatter plot benchmark by Ciro Santilli"
Numerical analysis
- Video 3.
  Real-time heat equation OpenGL visualization with interactive mouse cursor using relaxation method by Ciro Santilli (2016)
  Source.
Computational physics
- Figure 18.
  gnuplot plot of the y position of a sphere bouncing on a plane simulated in Bullet Physics
  . Source. From: What is the simplest collision example possible in a Bullet Physics simulation?
Register transfer level languages like Verilog and VHDL
- Verilog:
  Figure 19.
  Interacgive ASDF-controlled demo with core logic written in Verilog using Verilator
  .
  From: Is it possible to do interactive user input and output simulation in VHDL or Verilog?
  See also: Section "Verilator interactive example"
Android
- Figure 20. Source. From: How to compile the Android AOSP kernel and test it with the Android Emulator?
- Video 4.
  Android screen showing live on an Ubuntu laptop through ADB
  . Source. From: How to see the Android screen live on an Ubuntu desktop through ADB?
Debugging
Program optimization
- What is tail call optimization?
- Figure 21.
  gprof2dot image generated from the gprof data of a simple test program
  . Source.
  From: How can I profile C++ code running on Linux?
  The answer compares gprof, valgrind callgrind, perf and gperftools on a single simple executable.
Data
- Figure 22.
  Mathematics dump of Wikipedia CatTree
  . Source.
Mathematics
- Figure 23.
  Diagram of the fundamental theorem on homomorphisms by Ciro Santilli (2020)
  
  Shows the relationship between group homomorphisms and normal subgroups.
  From: What is the intuition behind normal subgroups?
- Section "Formalization of mathematics": some early thoughts that could be expanded. Ciro almost had a stroke when he understood this stuff in his teens.
- Figure 24.
  Simple example of the Discrete Fourier transform
  . Source. That was missing from Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_Fourier_transform!
Network programming
- How to make an HTTP get request in C without libcurl?
Physics
- What is the difference between plutonium and uranium?
- Figure 25.
  Spacetime diagram illustrating how faster-than-light travel implies time travel
  . From: Does faster than light travel imply travelling back in time?
Biology
- Figure 26.
  Top view of an open Oxford Nanopore MinION
  . Source. From: Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it"
- Figure 27.
  Mass fractions in a minimal growth medium vs an amino acid cut in a simulation of the E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab
  . Source. From: Section "E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab"
Quantum computing
- Section "Quantum computing is just matrix multiplication"
- Figure 28.
  Visualization of the continuous deformation of states as we walk around the Bloch sphere represented as photon polarization arrows
  . From: Understanding the Bloch sphere.
Bitcoin
- Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain"
GIMP
- Figure 29.
  GIMP screenshot part of how to combine two images side-by-side in GIMP?
  .
Home DIY
- Figure 30.
  Total_Blackout_Cassette_Roller_Blind_With_Curtains.
  Source. From: Section "How to blackout your window without drilling"
China
- What would happen if I walked around Beijing with a t-shirt that said "freedom of speech is pretty great"?

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How to contact Ciro Santilli  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Ciro Santilli is very happy to meet people with related interests, he really loves his like-minded online friends. Even if you don't have something a specific goal in mind for the contact, please just say hi.

To contact Ciro publicly about any general subject that is not covered in a more specific GitHub repository, including saying hi or suggestions about his website either:

create a GitHub issue at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/new or Giscus thread
at mention Ciro's main Twitter account

For comments about China, first read:

and then create a GitHub issue at: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/new

Publicly viewable contact is preferred if possible to more effectively share Ciro's wisdom with the world.

But if you feel more comfortable with private contact, no problem, either:

email: cirosantilli with provider ProtonMail which has domain name proton.me. All lowercase and removing the placeholder characters < and >. Note that Ciro also controls the Gmail address with that same username, and keep in mind that dots are ignored in Gmail addresses. But ProtonMail preferred because why should we give our private minds to the CIA by default? Push notifications disabled.
Signal: username cirosantilli.89 signal.me/#eu/BuJjV0enXYTOnFFc1FZV5LFcWodL1a2Oy9VZ5uyQU7xrYxqw+npIcaHBqghWudrI. 89 is a reference to Ciro Santilli's birth year 1989. Push notifications enabled, but treat like email unless we are actively chatting back and forth.

For other less good methods that will also work, use direct messages of the following profiles from under Section "Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli":

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli
Reddit: www.reddit.com/user/cirosantilli
Facebook: www.facebook.com/cirosantilli
Telegram: telegram.me/cirosantilli. Note that end-to-end encryption is present on secret chats only, which don't have device sync. Ridiculous.

If you are a privacy freak or are going to tell Ciro state secrets Ciro has this GNU Privacy Guard public key: pubkey.gpg.

Disqus comments were removed from his website in 2019-05-04, a manual dump is available here, removal rationale at: why Ciro Santilli removed Disqus comments from his website in 2019-05-04.

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Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Ciro Santilli controls the following accounts.

With non-trivial activity:

github.com/cirosantilli on GitHub
stackoverflow.com/users/895245 on Stack Overflow
www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli on LinkedIn
www.youtube.com/c/CiroSantilli on YouTube
Twitter: see Section "Ciro Santilli's Twitter accounts"
archive.org/details/@cirosantilli2 on the Internet Archive. Was archive.org/details/@cirosantilli but got deleted due to an "admin error" and the old username cannot be restored!^[ref]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cirosantilli2 and commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cirosantilli2: Ciro tries to upload all educational CC content he creates to Wikimedia Commons as an extra backup and sometimes to use in Wikipedia pages
www.facebook.com/cirosantilli/ Ciro accepts all friend requests there, but expect a few non-technical posts. Unless you look like a massive honeypot account, please send context in advance in that case.
www.quora.com/profile/Ciro-Santilli
www.reddit.com/user/cirosantilli/ is Ciro's Reddit account, mostly computer and China topics
maps.app.goo.gl/npV35XTppSBTmNqC8: Google Maps. Ciro Santilli likes to make additions to certain niche topics that are missing, having reached Local Guide Level 6 as of 2024. He can't do as much as he'd like so as to not reveal his current city however.

Trivial activity only:

Profiles without URLs (OMG...):

Discord: username cirosantilli, previously cirosantilli#8921

Accounts in Chinese websites. These accounts might be banned or altered or offer other limitations, so Ciro only communicates briefly through them. All communication through those channels should obviously be assumed to be compromised:

bbs.nibaedu.com/index.php?m=space&uid=70
www.renren.com/338003848/profile
www.tianya.cn/109285544 (can't post, no cell phone)
hacpai.com/member/cirosantilli unable to login as of 2019-10-12, reason unclear, either ban or website too crappy.
pincong.rocks/people/cirosantilli Lost account tested as of 2022-11 and likely much earlier. Last existing password not working, and there doesn't seem to be a reset password button. Creating cirosantilli2
pincong.rocks/people/cirosantilli2
tieba.baidu.com/home/main?id=5cd56369726f73616e74696c6c69c944
v2ex.com/member/cirosantilli: Ciro was blocked and or account deleted on 2020-07-23: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/v2ex
- v2ex.com/member/cirosantilli2: was created by someone else most likely and cannot be re-registered. Also blocked.
- v2ex.com/member/cirosantilli3: Ciro created this new account November 2023, let's see how long it lasts.
www.zhihu.com/people/cirosantilli. Ciro was prevented from posting in 2018-06-25, and the account and all content mentioning him were taken down in 2019-11-03.
www.weibo.com/p/1005055601627311: started requiring a cell phone to login in 2020, and Ciro didn't want to give his cell phone number to the CCP and didn't have the patience to manage a secondary phone number, so he is not logging in for now. The account was blocked in 2021: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/ciro-santillis-weibo-block

Accounts in Russian websites:

vk.com/id595305194

Dead websites:

www.citeulike.org/user/cirosantilli (2019-05)

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Cirism  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Welcome to the wonderful world of Cirism!

Followers of Cirism call themselves Cirists, and their primary goal in life is to obtain Cirocoins.

Cirism is totally not a cult, has been officially verified to be compatible with all major world religions.

Enlightened Cirists donate money to the cause at: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". It is totally optional of course, your soul will just be eternally damned if you don't.

Ciro Santilli once proclaimed:

Thou shalt eat thy watermelon in the morning, and thy melon in the evening. Thou shalt not eat thy watermelon in the evening, nor shalt thou eat thy melon in the morning.

Figure 1.

Ciro Santilli's "Learn, Teach, Apply" logo

. This is the Sacred symbol of Cirism.

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cirosantilli.com  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Ciro Santilli's website is a dump of his brain, see also: braindumping.

However it won't remain like that for long, because it will be migrated to OurBigBook.com, and therefore become a brain dump of society itself.

Video 1.

Who Wants To Live Forever by Queen (1986)

Source.

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Ciro Santilli's skills  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Ciro Santilli's psychology and physiology  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Ciro Santilli's energy throughout the day varies as follows:

morning: highest
11AM: peak exercise performance
after lunch: brain death. Possibly due to Ciro's partial Spanish descent?
late afternoon and evening: can do some stuff

Ciro has low tolerance to sleep deprivation which makes him very irritable, and low ability to sleep if there is any light. It must have to do with those damned ganglion cell photoreceptors. On the other hand, Ciro Santilli's wife can sleep without any problems with some morning light! It is definitely genetic. Ciro conjectures that people from very Northern parts of the world must have a gene that allows them to sleep even if there is some light, while more equatorial people don't. Maybe: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33049062/

Ciro has mild olfactory synesthesia for star anise (八角, bajiao), which is widely used in Chinese cuisine and makes Ciro think uncontrollably of the color blue. Ciro does not have any other known synesthesias. He is also prone to nerd sniping form time to time.

Ciro is a reptilian-like being with cold hands and feet and low blood pressure. For this reason he believes that he will die of cancer or some respiratory problem. If the Chinese government doesn't get him first that is. This also partly explains why Ciro is not a big fan of swimming.

Besides Chinese food, Ciro really likes eating fruits and roasted nuts, maybe partly because he was born in Brazil, and partly because of monkey nature, see his Chinese name. At home he is known as "水果大王" (the big king of the fruits). Ciro is also a sucker for yoghurt (natural without added sugars and full fat, fat-tree yoghurt is terrible, often eaten with fruits). Ciro's "favorite drink" could be tonic water with freshly squeezed lemon. Tied with fresh fruit juices. Chocolate-wise, although not a huge fanatic, a Lindt dark chocolate with whole hazelnut pieces bar will do the job.

Ciro does not like receiving or giving gifts on expected social situations like birthdays or Christmas. Ciro believes that every day is equally precious, and can be a day to give, be it through awesome open source software contributions, or if you find something that your friend will like

Ciro has some respiratory allergies. When he was around 5, he had relatively serious asthma crisis which scared his parents to death. Throughout his life, he appears to be allergic at an intermediate level to: mold or dust mites (or whatever it is that old books/pillows have), cats (itching on touch), hay fever (in May in the UK, likely grass pollen). But even outside of hayfever season, Ciro's nose is constantly either running in the cold, or often partially blocked while sleeping throughout the year. Ciro believes however that this also gives him higher resistance to viral infections, since it has been many many years since he had a cold/flu, and when everyone in the office is going down with it, he's just fine. Ciro wonders if his active immune system will actually kill off cancers early, which he ranks as his most likely causes of death, along with respiratory and gastro-intestinal problems. Ciro has low blood pressure and cannot get fat, so cardio vascular problems seem much less likely.

Ciro is generally democrat due to his high compassion level. He believes that politics is highly genetically determined, and that just like you enter a room full of people and immediately like some and dislike others, the same goes for politics. People just vote for whoever they want to see more of because their way of speaking makes them feel good. There is not rationality involved in it at all.

Ciro self diagnoses a slight graphomania in the early 2020's. This is largely what led him to create OurBigBook.com, and contribute to Stack Overflow. Literature Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz also suffers from the condition however, so maybe good can also come out of it:

If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.

When Ciro was quite young, maybe around 7-10, when he got very angry or sad for some stupid reason (bullying perhaps? Ciro forgot), he would have a psychosomatic manifestation: his spine would become visibly curved sideways (scoliosis). While writing this paragraph, Ciro Googled it, and found e.g. medium.com/@michaelrosen_94192/the-root-cause-of-scoliosis-5c461002b634 that describes:

The Root Cause of Idiopathic Scoliosis
It is proposed that Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) is a condition created by emotional stress. Evidence is presented that unresolved emotional stress can cause unbalanced tensions in the fascia and growing muscles that gradually deform the spinal column.

so it is a somewhat well known thing! Incredible. Can you imagine the level of the passions that lead to such physical deformations? But of course, it was all for nothing.

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Ciro Santilli's drug experiences  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Ciro Santilli never did any illegal drugs, because he:

doesn't want to help fund organized crime. Notably, Ciro is for complete legalization of drugs of all drugs
already has better more sustainable drugs like love, cycling, learning the natural sciences and fame. He (or more realistically, the world) chose life for him.

so don't expect any amazing stories here.

Like LDS believers, Ciro never drinks coffee nor smokes, and only drinks alcohol and tea sparingly, because they are all addictive drugs and bring no net increase of energy and concentration.

Ciro prefers to only enjoy a glass of tea when going out cycling on a cold day (Earl gray, with milk, no sugar), or get a half pint of beer when going out with friends to a pub.

Ciro only got reasonably drunk twice on his life:

once when he was quite young, likely pre-10 years old, while visiting an uncle's home, and adults were having a very nice sweet and thick type of alcoholic cocktail, and Ciro drank a bit too much and that made him really really stupid
once while studying at University of São Paulo, somehow someone was giving free beers at one of the parties (at which Ciro practiced Cirodance). And since Ciro had always been a cheap-ass, he thought, hey, this is a good chance to try it out. Ciro remembers that this made him a bit euphoric, active, very stupid, and a bit horny (though of course, he got no pussy as usual).

Later in life, around the time of his wedding, there were guests around all the time, and he was drinking beer with them all the time. Then one day, during lunch, Ciro felt a weirdly strong desire to drink one more pint. It was at this point that Ciro realised first-hand what mild, but real, alcohol addiction felt like, and he didn't get that drink, and swore from then on to never drink more than one glass a week, and only with friends at a bar after work. Richard Feynman tells a very similar story on his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!, see: Section "Richard Feynman's drug use".

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Ciro Santilli's biography  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Maybe Ciro Santilli should do something useful and remarkable so that someone might actually want to read his biography in the first place. But hey, procrastination.

Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil in the small/medium city of Rio Claro, São Paulo (~200k people in 2020) in the State of São Paulo in 1989 AD.

The family then moved to Jundiaí in 1995, and then finally to Santos, São Paulo, Brazil in 1997.

At the age of 10, Ciro Santilli spent 10 months in Coventry, United Kingdom, where he greatly improved his English.

After Coventry, Ciro's family went back to Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, which made a deep impression on Ciro, until he Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo in 2007.

In 2010, as mentioned atSection "Ciro Santilli's formal education", Ciro as admitted in a double degree program at the École Polytechnique, France, where he stayed until 2013. Going to France was a mind blowing, life changing event.

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Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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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:

Ha, so I can write my own books, and so can anyone, for free?

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:

at the University of São Paulo that they had some "UNIX" computers in some classes, and at the library
at École Polytechnique, he took a course about mathematical analysis and there was a "lab" where students were supposed to use FreeFem, great initiative BTW. And Ciro distinctly remembers being paried with a nice Chilian colleague, and the guy was alreay super at ease with the shell: "cd", "ls", etc. WTF was all that!

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.

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Ciro Santilli's projects  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Major projects can be seen at: Section "The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli".

A summary of minor projects is given at: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.

This section is a dump for anything else, to keep those sacred first sections that show on the top of the homepage clean.

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Updates  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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This section contains the a list of cool things Ciro Santilli has been up to in chronological order, including small quick ones. Many/most of those are also posted on Ciro Santilli's accounts controlled by Ciro Santillis such as:

For a more theme-oriented version of the best results see: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".

For OurBigBook Project updates see: docs.ourbigbook.com/news

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Essays by Ciro Santilli  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Ciro Santilli's hardware  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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One day, someone will invent a way to take the hash of a piece of hardware and see its history log, like software engineers do with version control. Until then, this is as close as you can get.

Ciro one day guessed that hardware would certainly be a slang for something naughty, and yup, here we are: www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hardware, drug paraphernelia. Read on!

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Ciro Santilli's cooking  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

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Update from Ciro Santilli  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 2024-08-10

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Main article: Section "Updates"

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Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

 Children: Ciro Santilli