The CSS of Ciro Santilli's website looks broken by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01That which does not exist, cannot be broken.
And of course:
How to develop Ciro Santilli's website before the OurBigBook migration by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01The 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:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io
cd cirosantilli.github.io
bundle install
npm install
./runSource:
./run.The website will be visible at: localhost:4000.
Tested on the latest Ubuntu.
Publish changes to GitHub Pages:
git add -u
git commit -m 'make yourself look sillier'
./publishSource:
./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:
bundle update
git add Gemfile.lock
git commit -m 'update gems'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:
- Ciro will want some unsupported extensions, notably mathematics, likely with KaTeX server side:
- github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/pull/3338
- stackoverflow.com/questions/11256433/how-to-show-math-equations-in-general-githubs-markdownnot-githubs-blog
- g14n.info/2014/09/math-on-github-pages/
- stackoverflow.com/questions/11256433/how-to-show-math-equations-in-general-githubs-markdownnot-githubs-blog
- www.quora.com/How-can-I-combine-latex-and-markdown-in-GitHub
- when GitHub dies, Ciro's website URL still lives and retains the PageRank!
Ciro Santilli's ideal city to live in by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01Ciro's ideal city to live in contains the following in order of decreasing importance:
- high tech
- beach and warm weather, influenced by Ciro's love for the City of Santos where he once lived
- enough recent Chinese immigrants to sustain Chinese cuisine
Could California be Ciro's Mecca?
These are people which Ciro never met personally, and who might not know that Ciro exists, or might never had any direct 1-2-1 online contact with Ciro, but Ciro is convinced are his brothers in some other dimension due to how many opinions or behaviours he feels they share:
- Dan Dascalescu due to articles such as:
- English as a universal language by Dan Dascalescu (2008)
- www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/9oujwf/why_archiving_old_threads_is_a_bigger_problem/ see also online forums that lock threads after some time are evil
- web.archive.org/web/20130922192354/http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/reviews/online_services/web_page_archiving see also web archiving
- random posts on OpenStreetMap, and about China: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/29300/legality-status-of-mapping-activity-in-china?page=1&focusedAnswerId=42167#42167
- kenorb see also Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions
- Gwern Branwen
Some other idealists that are a bit further out but with some similarities:
- Sylvain Poirier
- Gabriel Staples
- gabrielstaples.com/#gsc.tab=0
- github.com/ElectricRCAircraftGuy
- stackoverflow.com/users/4561887/gabriel-staplesYes, sir.
Working hard to make the Internet more complete.
At github.com/sponsors/ElectricRCAircraftGuy:I'd really like to work on open source projects more, but the need for a full-time job makes that difficult. If you can sponsor me, you help me get one step closer to my dream of not having to work a traditional "day job" anymore, so I can contribute more to the open source community, do more to educate, and do more to confront new and challenging ideas.
Ciro Santilli also things of those people as being part of his 108 Stars of Destiny troupe.
Ciro sometimes ponders why is it so hard to find people online that you truly love and admire. Maybe it is for similar reasons why it is also hard in the real world: the great variety of human interest, and the great limitation of our attention spans. But online, where we have access to "everyone", shouldn't it should be easier? Not naturally finding such people is perhaps one of the greatest failings of our education system.
In the field of Love and Friendship, Ciro is a big believer in the merciless application of tit for tat. Never desire someone's love if you give and what comes back is not proportional. Cut your attempts to reach out immediately in such cases.
Never tell a woman you like her before she is in your bed.
If someone likes you and you don't like them as much, make that clear to them. Don't put this off, be it for compassion, curiosity, loneliness, or narcissism.
youtu.be/Sb0VHGnhX4M?t=174 from Video "Charles Bukowski Scandanavian TV interviews":
The way to get a woman is not to have money, not to look nice, not to have a nice personality. The way to get a woman, is to always be available, night or day. Any time you phone, you're there, or you're at the bar. They know that you are available at all times. It is very, very important to a woman.
See also: Section "Ciro Santilli's wife".
30L tall pedal bin light blue. Liner type: "Tall Bin Liners 30 L".
For sizing see also: Ciro Santilli's body.
Ciro's parents put him to play the piano. This is partly influenced by Ciro's paternal grandfather, an energetic Italian descendant who liked music
The piano was fine, but a bit boring due to how it was taught.
The teachers were nice old ladies who followed a very traditional and methodic approach which was just like regular school, instead of doing what actually needed to be done: inspire kids into becoming creative musical geniuses that can compose their own stuff.
While in Santos, before going to university, Ciro somehow got into acoustic and electric guitar.
The electric guitar environment was much less formalized in general, and he took courses with an awesome teacher (archive), who actually tried to inspire his students to create their own music and improvisation.
And so a young teenage Ciro once seriously considered becoming a professional guitar player.
In his early teens, Ciro listened to the usual canned music his friends listened to: music teenager Ciro Santilli liked to listen to, until he started to stumble upon jazz.
Ciro remembers clearly rainy weekend days where he would go to a run down second hand shop near his home in someone's garage (Sebo do Alfaiate, R. Frei Francisco de Sampaio, 183 - Embaré, Santos - SP, 11040-220, Brazil :-)), and buy amazing second hand Jazz CDs. It was just a matter of time until he would start scouring the web for "the best jazz albums of all time" and start listening to all of them, see e.g. the best modern instrumental Western music. digitaldreamdoor.com/index.html was a good resource from those times!
Ciro ultimately decided his bad memory and overwhelming passion for the natural sciences would better suit a scientific carrier.
He also learnt that the computer is also an extremely satisfying artistic instrument.
Also, with a computer, boring dexterity limitations are no more: you can just record perfect played segments or program things note by note to achieve whatever music or action you want!
Although Ciro quit playing musical instruments, his passion for the music has remained, and who knows how it has influenced his life.
This is one of Ciro Santilli's most important principles.
Steve Jobs has a great quote about this. He's totally right on this one!
You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to sell it.
Steve Jobs Insult Response excerpt from the 1997 WWDC
. Source. TODO understand the context of the question a bit better. It is something to do with an OpenDoc thing and Java.Decide your goal first, and then do whatever is needed to how to reach it.
Don't start randomly learning tech, because that means you will waste a lot of time learning useless stuff.
There is of course some level chicken-and-egg paradox in this, as highlighted by Dilbert, since choosing an achievable goal in the first place requires some level of technical understanding.
Dilbert cartoon about designing a nuclear power plant from user requirements (2002)
Source. This cartoon illustrates well how when doing deep tech and fighting against the laws of physics, you can't just start from user requirements, but you also have to also think "what can we actually get done at all with this new technique".
The best research engineers are able to identify what is just on the cusp of the "possible", but which has the greatest value. This is the endless dance between the tech push, and the market/need pull.
However, it is much more common that people will get way too involved in learning useless stuff and lose sight of the useful end goals.
Rather, take an iterative approach:
- start with an ambitious end goal
- learn a bit of tech to try and reach it
- realize that you can't reach your end goal and pivot a bit to a related end goal that seems more realistic: the side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved
- loop
There is some truth to the counter argument that "but if you don't spend a lot of time learning the basics, you can never find solutions".
However, these people underestimate your brain. The brain is beautiful, and human intuition is capable of generating interest towards the things that are actually useful to reach your goal. When you feel like learning something related to your goal, by all means, give yourself the time to do so. But this still be much more efficient than just learning random things that other people tell you to learn.
Bibliography:
- Ciro Santilli and many many others believe that backward design is a fundamental principle that should be considered by the educational system rather than wasting 90% of everyone's time with the 90% of mandatory curricula they don't care about:
- notably that school should be personalized and project driven:
- www.cartalk.com/content/rant-and-rave-36 "The New Theory of Learning" by Thomas L. Magliozzi section "Premise III: THE BACKWARDS LEARNING THEORY" says the exact same thing. Ciro actually found this when writing Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain.
- several well known teaching methods:
- a Coding Horror software specific take on this issue: blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/
- x.com/7etsuo/status/1784787045157900697: George Hotz
Everyone I've met who can program well learned it the same way: they had an idea, and then they built it.
Ciro Santilli is against affirmative action university entry quotas that reserve spaces e.g. for students from discriminated races or poor families. Instead, he believes that affirmative action should take place on earlier stages of education as described at: free gifted education.
Notably, Brazil has implemented a very heavy university entry quota system after Ciro had left university there: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23862676
This is of course easy for a white male from a privileged background to say, and infinite debate has already been had on this matter, but here goes again.
First, in defense to the personal attack, Ciro raises the fact that he has dedicated large chunks (all?) of his life to open source software and knowledge in general, which Ciro believes is the only way to actually make the world fairer to poor countries. His money (time) is where his mouth is.
One good argument in favor of the Brazilian quota system, is that the kids who enter university because of quotas do just as well as those who don't.
Ciro has actually believes that this is possible, and offers the following possible explanation: most of pre-university knowledge is useless, and university selection system is crap, and Ciro wants to destroy it with a system in which anyone can learn university stuff from home.
Both the top end of the quota and non-quota kids are basically equally capable of doing useful stuff therefore.
Only a tiny fraction of what you learn in high school is useful for university or your career.
And possibly more importantly than knowledge, Ciro saw many of his colleagues (basically all of which were from relatively privileged backgrounds) "do badly" in university, because of lack of motivation, because they had chosen a course only to find that they were not interested in it because the existing high school educational system is crap and does not help them find what they love and because it costs you several years of your life to change your choice in most universities (long live École Polytechnique).
Maybe the fact that poor kids know that they are fucked if they fail, and so they have to succeed at any cost, might also help with motivation. Which is a terrible terrible thing, because only those who have to leeway to take risks end up taking them and making the the next big thing.
Ciro believes instead that only once kids have learnt university level stuff in their area of interest for free on the Internet should they go through selection based on that specific and much more concentrated useful knowledge.
And this competition must only be used to distribute resources which you can't learn from fucking computers:
- laboratories. Actually, one of Ciro's most important advices to kids nowadays is: when in doubt, choose the course that has the most experimental work
- one to one mentorship on advanced master thesis/PhD level projects
Once this point knowledge is reached however, it starts to become unclear if a single "everyone takes the same test to avoid discrimination" test is feasible anymore, and we start entering the much more relevant (and potentially discriminatory) "I am a teacher trying to advance the state of the art, and I need a person mildly skilled in the art to do some slave labor for me", which is PhDs selection work.
If quota are in place, what will happen is that parents of the rich kids will start investing less in education, and possibly just put their kids in high schools, and do home schooling instead. This would therefore reduce the total investments the country makes in education!
Outside of the obvious technical evolution proposed, Ciro is a huge proponent of free gifted education. Or closely related, creating scholarships that focus on poor students. The entry requirements should be the same, but once you qualify, everyone should have enough money to lead a decent life during their studies.
Then let those kids pass exactly the same university entry exams, and watch them crush the average privileged kids.
This advice is similar to what is mentioned at: what poor countries have to do to get richer. When you don't have money to do everything, you must select a few good bets and focus on them. You can't pay a lot to every public school teacher, so you must select a few select places that need it the most. As those smart bets pay off, you start to have more and more money to expand the system further.
Inside Westside Barbell by Vice News (2018)
Source. One sentence of this nice documentary about the notorious Westside Barbell gym where the openly pro-performance-enhancing-drug powerlifting legend leader and cult-leader-like personality Louis Simmons teaches just stuck to Ciro Santilli's mind. His top tenant and manager Tom Barry talks about Louis:Ciro admires this level of focus, directness and meritocracy. Just don't take drugs, children. Louis' creation of a cult-like training atmosphere is another interesting aspect, see also: Section "Group students by interest, not by age".
The man [Louis] lives in his own world, and he just rejects everything outside of it, it doesn't matter. Like: "what's your name"? He doesn't care. If you lift numbers, he cares about that, that's more important.
Ciro wonders if Louis is a white supremacist though, this was asked here but is inconclusive. But being composed almost exclusively of a bunch of white bald ex-prisoners in the US makes it a bit suspicious. Racism is bad BTW.
Cirocoins are the most valuable form of currency that exists at any point.
Cirocoins can only be issued by Ciro Santilli.
Cirocoins are strictly nominal, and cannot be traded by recipients with anyone but Ciro, i.e. they are extremely illiquid.
Cirocoins can be removed from recipients at any point if they commit non-Cirist acts.
It is not possible to give a precise number to how many Cirocoins anyone owns. This is decided on a transaction by transaction basis. Ciro can therefore only inform you if your Cirocoin balance increased or decreased, but any attached number has no value, and thus are equivalent to expressions of type "you gained/lost a Cirocoin".
The following inferior currencies come to mind:
The surprising thing is that a bunch of results are simpler in complex analysis!
Mostly video games of course.
First when he was really young, about 5, Ciro played a lot of NES, but he doesn't remember things from that era very well. Contra, Ninja Turtles, Battle Tanks, Duck Hunt, and some modern "real world jet" top to bottom rail shooter (TODO identify) are definitely some of the games he clearly remembers playing, see also: Figure "Five year old Ciro Santilli playing NES on a joystick". Nintendo hard was truly a thing back then.
As an honorable mention, Ciro remembers his teenage/young adult neighbours in Jundiaí playing some DOS games on their computer, notably there was a 3D racing one. This must have been around 1995/1997, so using some of the very earliest GPUs. Those games felt so incredibly advanced, including the required setup to play them, which required some command-line commands. It felt like some kind of black magic! But Ciro didn't really play them however.
Ciro then skipped the SNES and handhelds, which he played only through friends because he was cheap (but also because Brazil is a poor country remember, and imports are pretty expensive). He clearly remembers playing Super Mario World for the SNES and Pokemon on friends' Gameboys of course.
Ciro then went straight to 5th generation with the Nintendo 64 in 1994 which his parents bought for him during a trip to the United States. Once again, because he was cheap, the only game he bought was Super Mario 64, which likely came with the console? He played that game to death.
Then came Ocarina of Time, which blew everyone's minds, and Ciro would go to Blockbuster to rent it for the weekend, and again play to death with his friends. You had to arrive early at Blockbuster to rent it, otherwise other people would rent all copies!!!
The only time Ciro got robbed as of 2020 was when an older teenager stopped his bicycle in front of Ciro and took his rented Golden Eye 64 copy away from his hand, and run off. Poor drug addict.
Ciro always felt that the PS1 had a much uglier aesthetics than the N64, and didn't like the console. Playing a bit of Final Fantasy VI on his memory did stick deeply to his mind however. Ciro later played all good PS1 RPGs on emulation during University of São Paulo during amazing solitary nights.
And on the PC, Ciro was particularly touched by Age of Empires II and Diablo II.
As a young teenager Ciro would also play Counter-Strike with his friends at LAN houses. Playing that game would make Ciro extremely anxious, his hands got all cold, and it was a lot of fun.
After this Ciro grew up and notice that the only fun game is that of becoming become rich and famous in the real world.
This explains however Ciro's tool-assisted speedrun interests.
Outside of video games, Ciro got midly addicted to Magic: The Gathering in his early teens.
Types:
- chemical explosive. Almost a synonym for explosive in most contexts.
We just use "Abstract algebra" as a synonym for algebra.
This is what society gets for not using open knowledge: some of its best minds will be bound to waste endless hours reversing some useless technology.
With that said, even when you do have the source code, reading run logs and using debuggers are a sort of reverse engineering at heart.
One of the most jaw dropping reverse engineering projects Ciro has ever seen is the Super Mario 64 reverse engineering project.
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