Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

One of the least evil of the big tech companies of the early 21st century, partly because Sergey Brin's parents fled from the Soviet Union and so he is anti censorship, although they have been tempted by it.

Google only succeeds at highly algorithmic tasks or at giving infinite storage to users to then mine their data.

It is incapable however of adding any obvious useful end user features to most of its products, most of which get terminated and cannot be relied on:

This also seems to extend to business-to-business: twitter.com/MohapatraHemant/status/1343969802080030720 ex-Googler tells how they lost the cloud to Amazon.

More mentions of that:

Too many genius engineers. They need some dumber people like Ciro Santilli who need to write documentation to learn stuff.

Ciro Santilli actually attempted two interviews to work at Google in the early 2010's but very quickly failed both on the first phase, because you have to be a fast well trained coding machine to pass that interview.

Ciro later felt better about himself by fantasizing how he would actually do more important things outside of Google and that they would beg to buy him instead.

He was also happy that he wouldn't have to use Google crazy internal tools: someone once said that Google's tools make easy tasks middle hard, and they also make impossible tasks middle hard. TODO source.

But whatever the case: Ciro will not, ever, spend his time drilling programmer competition problems to join a company.

www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-ends-its-culture-of-openness/ "GOOGLE TGIF 1999 video". TGIF is the weekly all hands meeting abolished in 2019: www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-ends-its-culture-of-openness/

Magazine of the Institute of Physics.

Haven't found the one yet:

Optional but really ideal:

The state of messaging is ridiculous as of 2020.

Internet Relay Chat vs XMPP: stackoverflow.com/questions/4149380/whats-the-best-open-protocol-for-chat-room-software

This one has students must have a flexible choice of what to learn on the name! Sounds interesting!

Good Portuguese overview: www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1806-11172017000300301&lng=pt&tlng=pt

A fantastic sounding full time 4-year course that any student could transfer to called that teaches various natural science topics, notably mathematics, physics, chemistry and molecular biology.

Many past students Ciro talked to however share a common frustration with the course: in the first 2 years at least, the "basic cycle", you have infinitely many courses, and no time to study, and no choice of what to study, it is only in the latter 2 years (the advanced cycle) that you get the choices.

Also, if you get low grades in a single subject, your out. And exams are useless of course.

Here's a Quora question in Portuguese about the course: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP, the only decent answer so far being: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP/answer/Victor-Soares-31. Very disappointing to hear.

On the advanced cycle, you have a lot of academic freedom. You are basically supposed to pick a research project with an advisor and go for it, with a small amount of mandatory course hours. Ciro was told in 2022 that you can even have advisors from other universities or industry, and that it is perfectly feasible to take courses in another university and validate the course hours later on. Fantastic!!!

Students from the entire University of São Paulo can apply to transfer to it only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they don't adapt to the new course, which is great!

Not doing it is one of Ciro Santilli's regrets in life, see also: don't be a pussy.

Around 2007, they were in a really shady building of the University, but when Ciro checked in 2021, they had apparently moved to a shiny new entrepreneurship-focused building. Fantastic news!!!

This place has one of the best changes of spawning the first Brazilian Nobel Prize or unicorn.

One of the Brazilians who came to École Polytechnique together with Ciro was from this course. The fact that he is one of the most intelligent people Ciro knows gave further credit to that course in his eyes.

Amazing self-directed learning direction:

world.hey.com/gwyn/no-excuses-bc4152fb mentions that the founder was inspired by other schools: High Tech High and Expeditionary Learning.

Lots of focus on showcase student work.

The founder Gwyn ap Harri is quite dirty mouthed, which is also cool.

Ciro Santilli tried to contact them in 2021 at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1448924419016036353 and on website contact form to see if we could do some project together, but no reply.

Appears to be analogous to the dot product, but also defined for infinite dimensions.

No teachers, no courses, no tuition fees. Yes please!!! By Xavier Niel.