Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

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:

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.

Remember: having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

Ciro Santilli intends to move his beauty list here little by little: github.com/cirosantilli/mathematics/blob/master/beauty.md

The most beautiful things in mathematics are results that are:

Good lists of such problems Lists of mathematical problems.

Whenever Ciro Santilli learns a bit of mathematics, he always wonders to himself:Unfortunately, due to how man books are written, it is not really possible to reach insight without first doing a bit of memorization. The better the book, the more insight is spread out, and less you have to learn before reaching each insight.

Techniques to get numerical approximations to numeric mathematical problems.

The entire field comes down to estimating the true values with a known error bound, and creating algorithms that make those error bounds asymptotically smaller.

Not the most beautiful field of pure mathematics, but fundamentally useful since we can't solve almost any useful equation without computers!

The solution visualizations can also provide valuable intuition however.

Important numerical analysis problems include solving:

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".

Ciro Santilli controls the following accounts.

With non-trivial activity:

Trivial or no activity:

Profiles without URLs (OMG...):

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:

Accounts in Russian websites:

Dead websites:

Ciro Santilli never did any illegal drugs, because he: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:

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 realized 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".

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!

Stuff that is beautiful but useless because it does not make food or houses cheaper.

Or from Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts:

But that sure enough has a Jesus semi-precursor, and likely many others: man shall not live by bread alone.

There is some art however that lives in the fine intersection between beauty and usefulness: