The best modern sung Western music of all time by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
You have to know the language to appreciate them.
The 60's and 70's were the days, those great proxy wars and CIA dictatorships allowed hippies to make awesome freedom music without too imminent a fear of death.
Songs making fun of things or that are pure Brazil nostalgia are also accepted. No love songs, ever. Except some by Caetano, but that's it!
English:
- 1967 Red Telephone track from the Forever Changes (1967) album by Love
- 1967 White Rabbit track from the Surrealistic Pillow (1967) album by Jefferson Airplane
French:
- Emmenez-moi (wiki) from the album Entre Deux Rêves (1967) by Charles Aznavour
A recurring narrative device, i.e. a cliche that has been used endless across stories.
Science makes progress funeral by funeral by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
From Scientific Autobiography by Max Planck translated by Frank Gaynor (1949):
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
The best example to look at first is the penalty kick left right Nash equilibrium.
Then, a much more interesting example is choosing a deck of a TCG competition: Magic: The Gathering meta-based deck choice is a bimatrix game, which is the exact same, but each player has N choices rather than 2.
The next case that should be analyzed is the prisoner's dilemma.
The key idea is that:
- imagine that the game will be played many times between two players
- if one player always chooses one deck, the other player will adapt by choosing the anti-deck
- therefore, the best strategy for both players, is to pick decks randomly, each with a certain probability. This type of probabilistic approach is called a mixed strategy
- if any player deviates from the equilibrium probability, then the other player can add more of the anti-deck to the deck that the other player deviated, and gain an edgeTherefore, using equilibrium probabilities is the optimal way to play
Set of ordered pairs. That's it! This is illustrated at: math.stackexchange.com/questions/1480651/is-fx-x-1-x-2-a-function/1481099#1481099
What poor countries have to do to get richer by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Like all poor countries, Brazil's lack of money and scientific culture severely limit its ability to make technological and scientific advances.
While this sounds obvious, Ciro Santilli has felt it first hand since he moved from Brazil to Europe, and it is just shocking.
In the city of Santos for example, despite being a dream place from the natural point of view, it would be completely impossible to achieve any deep tech technical advance that impacts the world. In Europe however, there are several several places where this can happen.
Unmigrated sections of the old version of Ciro Santilli's website by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
It is interesting to see how your own ideas shift with time, and Ciro Santilli doesn't think the following are very important anymore, so he was lazy to migrate them.
When he did the original website Ciro was in a "I must show off my skills to get a job mindset", but then after he landed a few jobs he moved to a "CV websites are useless, just do amazing projects and showcase them on your website to help them succeed" mindset.
Mathematics typesetting setup of Ciro Santilli's website by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
KaTeX is automatically used in OurBigBook Markup.
Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli has a bad memory for events that happened a medium time ago, for example in order of months/years. Especially if they are one-off things that have no relation to anything else.
For example, Ciro never remembers which places he travelled to just once, and who was in each trip! He has images of several places he travelled to in his head, and would recognize them, but he just doesn't know where they were!
Another example, Ciro was looking at the carpet at their house, and asked where it came from. His wife replied immeidately: from Bercy shopping quarter in Paris about 10 years ago, and you took it on your back for a long walk until we could find the bus back home because we were concerned it wouldn't fit in the train!
The same goes for scenes from movies and passages from music, which explains why Ciro's art consumption focuses on innovative discrete "what happened" and "general gist" ideas, rather than, analog details such as colors and shapes.
Going back even further in time, Ciro starts to forget the less close friends he had, because the events start to fade away.
Paradoxically however, Ciro believes that this bad memory is one of his greatest strengths and key defining characteristics, because it leads Ciro to want to write down every interesting thing he learns, which motivated OurBigBook.com and his Stack Overflow contributions and his related Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers.
It also somewhat leads Ciro to like physics and mathematics, because in these fields you "can deduce everything" from very few base principles, so if you forget them, it does not matter that much as you can re-deduce stuff over and over. Which is somewhat where the high flying bird attitude comes from. It is hard to go deep when you have to re-prove everything every time. But the upside is that anything that sticks, does so because it has a broad net to stick to, and therefore allows Ciro to make unusual and unexpected connections that others might not.
Ciro believes that there are two types of people, and most notably software engineers, which are basically data wranglers: those with bad memory and those with good memory.
Those with bad memory, tend to focus on automating and improving their processes a lot. They take much longer to do one-off specific deep knowledge tasks however.
The downside of the good memory ones is that sooner or later they will find tasks that no matter how much memory they have, they cannot solve without automation, and they will fail at those.
Also, good memory people don't enable others to join the project efficiently as much.
This dichotomy also explains why Ciro sucks at code reviews, but is rather the person who runs the interesting patches by himself and finds some critical problems that the more theoretical code reviewers missed.
If Ciro had become a scientist, he would without doubt be an experimentalist, just like in this reality he is a GDB/runtime person rather than a "static source analysis" person. Those who have bad memory prefer to just run experiments over and over and observe system state at runtime.
Other effects of having a bad memory include:
- code duplication, or a constant fear of it at least, because Ciro forgets that some functionality exists already
- meeting aversion, because everything that is not recorded will fade away
- passion for backward design, because by the time a piece of knowledge learnt in school might be useful (and 99.99% won't), it will have been long forgotten
Related: jakobschwichtenberg.com/about/ from Jakob Schwichtenberg:
I'm a physicist and I try to write down things during my own learning process.In some sense, one of the biggest benefits I have over other people in physics is that I'm certainly not the smartest guy! I usually can't grasp complex issues very easily. So I have to break down complex ideas into smaller chunks to understand it myself. This means, whenever I describe something to others, everyone understands, because it's broken down into such simple terms.
On C2 wiki, therefore it cannot be wrong wiki.c2.com/?QuasiGreatTeacher:
Some people have learning disabilities, [... bullshit ...]. A lot of classic spiritual texts have been produced this way. Basically, the stupidest but most dogged disciple, if he has a neurotic habit of writing things down, will make the best teacher for the third and subsequent generations.
When Ciro was a teenager, he was extremely cheap e.g. for clothes, food and video games even tough his family didn't have bad financial conditions.
This was mostly to save the world by not wasting resources that other people in need could use, and to save money so he could have more money to do more of whatever he wanted without the obligation to work.
But Ciro admits that shocking people with the incredible level of low quality goods was also fun.
Ciro changed after he came to Europe, especially in regards to food, perhaps corrupted by the fact that now the best chocolates, cheeses and breads in the world were not much more expensive than the cheapest brand you could buy. He still hates clothes that are just to look good like costumes though.
Living close to a small favela, São Remo, the favela next to USP, helped Ciro get frighteningly cheap goods on the shop frequented by the favela neighbours.
One legendary story is that of when his flatmate dropped some past on the kitchen floor, and the bowl broke, but Ciro prevented the flatmate from throwing it away and ate some of it nevertheless. What spooked them out the most was Ciro's statement that the pasta now had a crunchy glass shard texture to it.
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