Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Good luck.

Many of the student exchange programs Ciro witnessed in the 2010's in Brazil were inefficient because they were requiring students to come back immediately after university or PhD in fear that those students will never come back.

This is useless, because you don't learn anything unique during university: the truly valuable knowledge is obtained when you work for several years as a postdoc in a world class research laboratory or as an engineer in a world class company.

Therefore, Brazil should learn from the Chinese exchange system, which lets students go do whatever they want, and once they are Gods of the domain, entices them back with great positions and pay as heads of laboratory back in China. Just don't do fraudulent stuff like this like China did, or else you will get a bad rep.

To help this university collaboration happen, we should create communication channels between exchange students and professors of the origin country who work on the same domain so that they can discuss the subject. For example, once Ciro Santilli wanted to contact some of his former teachers at the University of São Paulo about "advanced" topics he had been exposed to as part of his job. However, they didn't even reply to his email, and Ciro didn't know who else to contact. This must never happen. We need a way to informally contact several professors of a given domain informally, to increase the chances that at least one might be interested. It is pointless to just let students loose abroad and hope that they will bring things back to their home country: a more cohesive infrastructure is needed to nurture that.

There is basically one sane way to achieve these goals: the exchange programs must be organized at a national level, not in an ad-hoc per-university manner.

Another good idea is to have taxes that depend on your nationality alone and which only start collecting when you reach a very high amount of net worth. So e.g. if someone leaves the country and makes it big, then and only then does the Government starts clawing back the benefits of its investments in the person. Furthermore, such taxes could be reduced if the person brings some of the business back to the country. And mandatory taxes should be charged if the person decides to drop their nationality at some point.

The above points would also be greatly eased by having a national-level exchange program. E.g. in Brazil in the 2010's which Ciro experience, every university had different terms and conditions, which made everything a mess. Exchange programs must be treated as a unified federal policy.

Ciro actually had to return for just six months from the École Polytechnique to the University of São Paulo, to finish a course he had only done the generic Maths/Physics introduction to. Students from other Brazilian universities were forced to return for up to 3 years even to get their Brazilian diplomas! Ciro was lucky that his teachers understood the situation, and allowed him to develop online learning projects instead of his supposed control engineering projects, which hopefully will have led to changing the world with motivation one day. And for this, Ciro is eternally thankful.

This shows the complete and total lack of any Brazilian strategy to send its students abroad to really learn valuable things and then come back. There is no strategy at all. Things have just reached an equilibrium point of bureaucracies, Brazilian universities trying to bring students back to validate useless diploma pieces of paper, and foreign universities no caring about that, and just wanting the students to say abroad forever.

Ciro was once talking about why so few Brazilians go study abroad compared to the Chinese. Besides the likely true "there are a lot of Chinese" argument, his wife made another: good point Brazil is not so bad to live in, because you have good food and freedom, while China only has good food.

But Ciro still fells bad that so few of his University of São Paulo colleagues, who learnt automation and control engineering, are doing deep tech. Nor physical engineering. They have all basically become computer people like Ciro.

This is not their fault. They basically don't have a choice: all physical science and technology is done in rich countries.

Yes, someone has to implement the newest tech to improve local country efficiency in projects that will never spread abroad.

But who will be left then for the next big thing problems that would really make Brazil richer? 6 out of 30 person class ended up working on a gaming company at one point, even though they were not crazy passionate about the field! What could possibly be a worst investment for society?

This lack of technological innovation can also be clearly seen when you research investment options available in Brazil. Huge emphasis is put on fixed return financial products (often inflation adjusted) linked to base non-tech business such as housing market and agriculture. And when you look to the returns of the stock market on s&P 500-analogue backed exchange-traded funds, they do not seem obviously better, especially considering inflation and taxation benefits that exist for some of the other investment possibilities.

When the companies of a country are not clearly the best investment, you know that something is wrong. They are highly specialized money making machines, remember! And housing and agriculture are not such innovative markets where people can hugely influence efficiency.

When it is best to send students is a good question. Undergrad studies could be easily reproduced in poor countries if they had any intelligence at all, since even in rich countries laboratory usage is always limited. Masters and PhD are generally more valuable moments to send people out. The question is if the students will actually have a fighting chance without having been out, in particular in terms of language skills. Ciro feels that Masters are a good focus point for entry, as that is where PhD links are more actively done.

Some of their archiving accounts:

Lists:

Why would anyone ever waste time playing a closed source game, when this will inevitably lead to endless hours of decompilation down the line when you want to:

Those who devote their time to the useless development of open source video games, before we even have decent open source development tooling, will, without a doubt, have their place in Heaven.

YouTube review channels:

Some that Ciro Santilli likes:

The ultimate computer user-interface!

Brain-computer interfaces could be the next big thing.

And life extension? worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112022/would-an-invasive-spinal-cord-brain-computer-interface-allow-healthy-individuals

Most of them use titles from TV Tropes.

Host: Ben Krasnow.

Deals with materials, chemistry, microscopy, electronics.

Uber practical, well described setups deep science stuff, he is awesome and has been at Google since 2014: www.linkedin.com/in/ben-krasnow-6796a94/

Ben studied at University of California, Santa Barbara.

26 parameters of the Standard model on the blackboard. If one of those parameters should happen to be erased, 25 parameters of the Standard model on the blackboard....

But certainly, mathematics is not a part of.

I had meant to make an update earlier, but I wanted to try and add some more "visible end-user changes" to OurBigBook.com.

Just noticed BTW that signup on the website is broken. Facepalm. Not that it matters much since it is not very useful in the current state, but still. Going to fix that soon. EDIT: nevermind, it wasn't broken, I just had JavaScript disabled on that website with an extension to test if pages are visible without JavaScript, and yes, they are perfectly visible, you can't tell the difference! But you can't login without JavaScript either!

I still haven't the user visible ones I wanted, but I've hit major milestones, and it feels like time for an update.

I have now finished all the OurBigBook CLI features that I wanted for 1.0, all of which will be automatically reused in ourbigbook.com.

The two big things since last email were the following:

A secondary but also important advance was: further improvements to the website's base technology.

I knew I was going to do them for several months now, and I knew they were going to hurt, and they did, but I did them.

These change caused two big bugs that I will solve next, one them infinite recursion in the database recursive query, but they shouldn't be too hard.