Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Ciro Santilli has already watched all the best films in history, and as a result any of those new movies that is full of clichés and has no innovative aspect at all (99.99999% of all modern movies) makes Ciro want to puke and to start Googling TV Tropes to classify as many clichés as possible.

Good movies are those that teach you mechanisms of the real world. Willing suspension of disbelief must be maintained at all costs.

Or of what could happen a world where a single sci-fi element is added and explored to its limits.

Love is not an interesting aspect of the world. You solve your love life at university, Tinder or Tango.

The actually interesting aspects of the world are:

Movies with a lot of action scenes, with exception of some war movies, are shit.

The Sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism must be close to Cynicism max at all times. Movies with pure good and pure bad are shit.

Knowing spoilers has no effect in the film's enjoyment. The interest of storyline concepts is all that matters, visuals and acting are useless.

In a multi-language film, when two foreign characters speak English to each other when they obviously would have spoken their native language, that is a crime. Original language + subtitles is a must!

Ciro Santilli participated in a double degree program, so he obtained have engineering degrees in both:

See also further remarks on Ciro Santilli's LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli/

Despite studying in great institutions with great teachers, Ciro feels that:

This motivated Ciro to work on OurBigBook.com.

"Ciro" is "Cyrus" from Cyrus the Great in both Portuguese and Italian (although with very different pronunciations), thus doubly appropriate given that Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil, and has Italian ancestry.

After he conquered Babylon in 539 BC from the hands Neo-Babylonian Empire, Cyrus the Great did a great service to the Hebrews by allowing war prisoners that were held in Babylon to back to their home Judea, thus terminating the Babylonian captivity. These Jews were imprisoned because they had previously fought a war or revolted against the Neo-Babylonian Empire and lost. As Wikipedia puts it:He is therefore viewed extremely positively in the good old book. Ciro was quite happy about this name choice by his father, given the human rights connotations of the figure and Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.

Particularly fun things related to modern Cyrus are:

Because it belongs to some relatively obscure character of the Bible, the name it has been mostly passed on by writing to every single Christian country, and every single language came up with different way of saying it, because the only place they would possibly hear that name said out loud would be in Church!

As of 2020, the country in which the name is most popular in undoubtedly Italy. In Brazil, it is definitely not common, but also not completely unheard of either, e.g. Ciro Gomes is a notable Brazilian politician.

And Ciro responds to all the versions of the name that he knows of. These include:and glad to add any new ones as they come.

He is actually quite happy when people use the name in their own language, because that means they understand the origin of the name.

Some Ciro's of interest:

Similar to: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B013AV45IS

2019: broke with sign number 6. Ciro Santilli opened it up a bit destructively.

How to open: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Lf68mAB0Vk

Bought: November 2023 during Black Friday sale for £1,323.00 to be Ciro Santilli's main personal laptop.

Six years after, and we are 2x on every key spec (except processor Hz ;-) at about 1/2 the price and 1/2 the weight (though smaller 14" screen for greater portability), so not bad! Customized to max out each hardware spec:

Specs:

Identifiers:

Upon arrival:

Buy research:

Log:

2024-01-17: firmware update:Actually fixed performance mode: askubuntu.com/questions/604720/setting-to-high-performance/1343879#1343879

Bought: 2017 for approximately 2400 pounds to be Ciro Santilli's main personal laptop.

Specs:

Identifiers:

If any of you ever read this, do send me an email to Ciro Santilli saying hi and we can agree on a clear separation of usernames.

Although if you are just starting out, maybe you should just go from scratch with a unique Internet alias.

A younger unrelated Argentinian homonym who likes soccer that can be found through Google:Ciro used to like playing soccer too! :-)

www.ancestry.com.au/genealogy/records/ciro-santilli-24-bkmssg documents a "Ciro Santilli" born 31 Jan 1887 at Castelvécchio in Subéquo, L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo region, just like Ciro Santilli's ancestors. Parents Francesco Santilli and Anna Silveri. The page also mentions:

Unknown:

Ciro Santilli is a collector at heart. But a collector of knowledge.

His uncle, which Ciro rassembles in many ways, was like that. But he collected physical objects such as wines and stamps. Or even worse, objects that were meant to be collected such Panini soccer sticker albums! This Ciro looks down on.

With computers, knowledge takes no physical space and can be immediately shared with the hole world, and there is great beauty to that, as you can just keep collecting forever without filling up your house.

But of course, physical or not, all attachments futile.

Like other types collecting, once Ciro decides that "he must know everything about a given subject", he will keep coming back to that subject over and over. Not in a systematic way of course, since Ciro is a lazy bastard, but he will keep coming back for a very long time, and eventually become an expert at it.

This compulsive hoarding, together with Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory, are the fundamental reasons for OurBigBook.com.

Ciro Santilli has an undiagnozed condition where his upper legs and lower torso often start to itch when he runs, to the point of being extremely annoying and removing all pleasure form the activity.

If some doctor knows why this could be, please tell him!!!

The problem is a bit hard to reproduce however, and Ciro hasn't been able to determine which exact condition triggers it: temperature, nutrition, something else?

Ciro believes that this is not chiefly due to transpiration, but rather to the impact motion that running does on the muscles, as he has felt something similar on his arms some times while cycling in very rough terrain, which made his arms shake in a similar fashion. or for example if he has a water bottle on a tightly tied backpack that rubs his back, then the back itches at that point.

Also, running on a threadmill is not a problem at all. Ciro believes that this is because the threadmill is better amortized, and therefore does not cause the same mechanical stress required to create the itching as running on pavement.

Interestingly, Ciro didn't feel that at all when he played soccer enthusiastically as a child, and he was one of the fastest runners of the group for sure at that time. So he's not sure if it started when he got older, or if it is just because the difference in workloads between soccer and running.

Found: www.healthline.com/health/fitness/runners-itch which names "runner's itch".

youtu.be/PNgYW5N95z8?t=945 "My back itches" after riding on a bumpy makeshift motorcycle.

Major projects can be seen at: Section "The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli".

These are some smaller projects that Ciro Santilli carried out. They are all either for fun, or misguided use of his time done by an younger self:

The old lady was arrested in 2015 for a few days for doing Falun Gong, which was an important motivation to Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China.

If Ciro Santilli weren't a natural born activist, he chould have made an excellent intelligence analyst! See also: Section "Being naughty and creative are correlated".

Outside this website:

Firstly, in 2012, while he was at École Polytechnique, Ciro Santilli was introduced to LaTeX (thank God for French mathematical obsession), and his mind was blown:he though. Why isn't everyone doing that!

One particular event stood out: Ciro made a small change to his teacher's course material, who blessed be him (dude's a legend, Ciro just noticed he has some Chinese publications with another French dude, e.g. www.amazon.co.uk/高效算法-应试与提高必修128例-克里斯托弗-Christoph-Durr/dp/B078SJQPVK "High-efficiency algorithm competitions 128 examples", did he write it the Chinese himself?? Must be of course to complement the notoriously low French professor salaries), made it available, and then Ciro gave him back the .tex file. Ciro was just a bit worried about how the teacher would be able to tell what he had changed in the file to validate the change. The teacher just said of course, "no problem, I'll just use diff". Ciro had never heard of diff. Let alone Git of course, though yes, this was a bit early in Git's history version control systems had been around since forever of course. This was 2011 or 2012, about 4 or 5 years into a superior education curricula with various courses involving computers, some requiring quite a lot of "fill these empty functions" style programming. Education is a joke. Anyways, this was a prelude to exactly what Ciro wanted to do in OurBigBook.com. This might have been the one actually: webia.lip6.fr/~durrc/Iut/Notes580.pdf

Not long afterwards, Ciro started playing with Linux. Until then, Ciro had had some contacts with the mysterious operating system at university, and was a bit puzzled what the point of it was! He clearly remembers:University should be forced to use only open source software and hardware in undergrad teaching courses by law BTW.

Then came an Ubuntu live disk on his own machine, and finally a measly 40GB dual book partition in a Microsoft Windows machine on a laptop. At first, it took a lot of time to learn all the crazy new terminal stuff! Yes, at this point, Ubuntu was already usable enough without the terminal, an accomplishment actually. But as a programmer, Ciro felt obliged to learn. Many hours were spent reading man pages at the library. But it all just felt so right, and sometimes powerful... true wizardry.

And ten years later, Ciro was seriously considering buying a computer without Windows pre-installed. He had not used Windows a single tie on a personal machine even once in those ten years!

Finally, to finish things off Ciro found two websites that changed his life forever, and made be believe that there was an alternative: Stack Overflow and GitHub.

The brutal openness of it all. The raw high quality content. Ugliness and uselessness too no doubt. But definitely spark in a sea of darkness.

Ciro Santilli's energy throughout the day varies as follows:

Ciro has low tolerance to sleep deprivation which makes him very irritable, and low ability to sleep if there is any light. It must have to do with those damned ganglion cell photoreceptors. On the other hand, Ciro Santilli's wife can sleep without any problems with some morning light! It is definitely genetic. Ciro conjectures that people from very Northern parts of the world must have a gene that allows them to sleep even if there is some light, while more equatorial people don't. Maybe: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33049062/

Ciro has mild olfactory synesthesia for star anise (八角, bajiao), which is widely used in Chinese cuisine and makes Ciro think uncontrollably of the color blue. Ciro does not have any other known synesthesias. He is also prone to nerd sniping form time to time.

Ciro is a reptilian-like being with cold hands and feet and low blood pressure. For this reason he believes that he will die of cancer or some respiratory problem. If the Chinese government doesn't get him first that is. This also partly explains why Ciro is not a big fan of swimming.

Besides Chinese food, Ciro really likes eating fruits and roasted nuts, maybe partly because he was born in Brazil, and partly because of monkey nature, see his Chinese name. At home he is known as "水果大王" (the big king of the fruits). Ciro is also a sucker for yoghurt (natural without added sugars and full fat, fat-tree yoghurt is terrible, often eaten with fruits). Ciro's "favorite drink" could be tonic water with freshly squeezed lemon. Tied with fresh fruit juices. Chocolate-wise, although not a huge fanatic, a Lindt dark chocolate with whole hazelnut pieces bar will do the job.

Ciro does not like receiving or giving gifts on expected social situations like birthdays or Christmas. Ciro believes that every day is equally precious, and can be a day to give, be it through awesome open source software contributions, or if you find something that your friend will like

Ciro has some respiratory allergies. When he was around 5, he had relatively serious asthma crisis which scared his parents to death. Throughout his life, he appears to be allergic at an intermediate level to: mold or dust mites (or whatever it is that old books/pillows have), cats (itching on touch), hay fever (in May in the UK, likely grass pollen). But even outside of hayfever season, Ciro's nose is constantly either running in the cold, or often partially blocked while sleeping throughout the year. Ciro believes however that this also gives him higher resistance to viral infections, since it has been many many years since he had a cold/flu, and when everyone in the office is going down with it, he's just fine. Ciro wonders if his active immune system will actually kill off cancers early, which he ranks as his most likely causes of death, along with respiratory and gastro-intestinal problems. Ciro has low blood pressure and cannot get fat, so cardio vascular problems seem much less likely.

Ciro is generally democrat due to his high compassion level. He believes that politics is highly genetically determined, and that just like you enter a room full of people and immediately like some and dislike others, the same goes for politics. People just vote for whoever they want to see more of because their way of speaking makes them feel good. There is not rationality involved in it at all.

Ciro self diagnoses a slight graphomania in the early 2020's. This is largely what led him to create OurBigBook.com, and contribute to Stack Overflow. Literature Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz also suffers from the condition however, so maybe good can also come out of it:

When Ciro was quite young, maybe around 7-10, when he got very angry or sad for some stupid reason (bullying perhaps? Ciro forgot), he would have a psychosomatic manifestation: his spine would become visibly curved sideways (scoliosis). While writing this paragraph, Ciro Googled it, and found e.g. medium.com/@michaelrosen_94192/the-root-cause-of-scoliosis-5c461002b634 that describes:so it is a somewhat well known thing! Incredible. Can you imagine the level of the passions that lead to such physical deformations? But of course, it was all for nothing.

Just enough money to raise 3 kids in a rich country without having to work (so he can focus on whatever project he wants) and no more. Then maximize fame.

Fame is slightly convertible into money with generally little liquidity, but is more valuable if money becomes useless in a TEOTWAWKI.

Of course, in the end, one just does whatever seems cool and useful, and the Gods decide what proportion of fame/money/power they will get. Due to Ciro's love of open source software however, a higher fame percentage seems more likely than money.

Ciro Santilli's full name is quite unique and already dominated by this Ciro Santilli.

Searching just for just "Santilli" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits. The name appears to be a minor variation of the much more common "Santini". Since the name is not that common, it is possible to go over all noteworthy hits. Some relevant ones are shown at: interesting members of the Santilli family.

Searching just for just "Ciro" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits, mostly some smaller brands that could be beaten, this is Ciro's main initial fame metric goal. Reaching it would require doing things known much beyond the programming community however, as Ciro has done until of 2019. ciro.com is from an electromechanics consultancy as of 2019, so it's not bad, let them be.

At the next useless gamified level, an honorary OBE and more ambitiously ForMemRS from the Royal Society post nominal letters would be nice.

The ultimate dream however would be to beat Cyrus the Great himself on Google searches ("Ciro" == "Cyrus" in Portuguese), maybe becoming "Cyrus the Greater"? That one will be a bit harder though. Maybe if Falung Gong becomes the dominant religion in 2000 years like Christianism did, catapulting the Judaism benefactor Cyrus into greater fame, then there is some hope for Ciro as well.

Ciro Santilli fantasizes that he is more compassionate than average.

He feels that this manifests itself notably through his desire/ability to create amazing documentation content and notably for free.

Also related is Ciro's worry about social inequality and how to reduce it.

In school, especially before university, Ciro felt that he always treated "the ugly/unpopular" (it is horrifying that such perception of a person exists! but true) girls really well, which led some of them to like him romantically. In part this was de to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality and enter through the narrow gate approach to life. But was also partly Ciro's fault, he should have been clearer that he was not truly interested, but he was also lonely, curious about how it was like having girlfriend, and it feels good to have someone like you. This was a sin.

He also feels like he treated working class employees (and don't forget, this is Brazil, e.g. his building janitors in São Paulo lived in the nearby favela!) with extreme equality, sometimes even better, than other richer people.

One thing Ciro does not do however is give money to beggars on the street. Those beggars do make Ciro feel extremely bad for not giving, but he feels that they must be drug addicts to be out on the street like that, and that this money would be better invested in OurBigBook.com. But maybe this is just wrong. How fucked up the world is, how far away are we from unconditional basic income???

Once Ciro was hanging out with one of his father's on a group tourist, and she was a lesbian borderline/actually activist social reform person, and she promptly gave to a beggar without batting an eye, and that made a big impression on Ciro, making him feel even worse about himself.

It must be said that at times this compassion can be a weakness see Ciro's trip to the Municipal Market of São Paulo.

Two things come to mind when Ciro Santilli thinks about his sinohpilia.

There is a strong "Ciro Santilli's knowledge hoarding" side to it. Ciro has decided that he has to know EVERYTHING about China. It's culture. It's people. It's art. And so once that has been decided, it becomes inevitable.

But of course, there is also the "which part of Ciro's inner being led to that hoarding decision" part of things. Mishima's quote often comes to mind:

Exoticism is undoubtedly part of it.

Maybe it has something to do with growing up observing 5th+ generation Japanese Brazilians immigrants, well, being Asians and crushing it academically. But also being quiet people, and sometimes misfits. I.e., nerds.

Maybe there is also something to do with the influence Japanese anime, highly popular during Ciro's childhood in Brazil. Ciro, unlike many of his friends, left that relatively early, as he got into the deeper pleasures of natural sciences and then more traditional Asian culture. But still.

And finally perhaps the correlation between sofware engineers and Asian fetish and the correlation between software engineers and Buddhism.

Related on github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/why-does-ciro-santilli-love-china-so-much