Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Intro/docs: www.jonmsterling.com/jms-005P.xml. It is very hard to find information in that system however, largely because they don't seem to have a proper recursive cross file table of contents.

This is the project with the closest philosophy to OurBigBook that Ciro Santilli has ever found. It just tends to be even more idealistic than, OurBigBook in general, which is insane!

Source code: sr.ht/~jonsterling/forester. Not on GitHub, too much idealism for that.

"Docs" at: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-jms-005P.xml Sample repo at: github.com/jonsterling/forest but all parts of interest are in submodules on the authors private Git server.

Example:

Author's main social media account seems to be: mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling e.g. mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling/111359099228291730 His home page:

They have \Include like OurBigBook, nice: www.jonmsterling.com/jms-007L.xml, but OMG that name \transclude{xxx-NNNN}!! It seems to be possible to have human readable IDs too if you want: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-armaëlguéneau.xml is under trees/public/roladex/armaëlguéneau.tree.

Headers have open/close:OurBigBook considered this, but went with parent= instead finally to avoid huge lists of close parenthesis at the end of deep nodes.

One really cool thing is that the headers render internal links as clickable, which brings it all closer to the "knowledge base as a formal ontology" approach.

Does not encourage human readable IDs, uses stuff like jms-00YG.

The markup has relatively few insane constructs, notably you need explicit open paragraphs everywhere \p{}?! OMG, too idealistic, not enough pragmatism. There are however a few insane constructs:The markup is documented at: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-jms-007N.xml

Jon has some very good theory of personal knowledge base, rationalizing several points that Ciro Santilli had in his mind but hadn't fully put into words, which is quite cool.

OCaml dependency is not so bad, but it relies on actually LaTeX for maths, which is bad. Maybe using JavaScript for OurBigBook wasn't such a bad choice after all, KaTeX just works.

Viewing the generated output HTML directly requires security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy which is sad, but using a local server solves it. So it appears to actually pull pieces together with JavaScript? Also output files have .xml extension, the idealism! They are reconsidering that though: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-jms-005P.xml#tree-8720.

The Ctrl+K article dropdown search navigation is quite cool.

\rel and \meta allows for arbitrary ontologies between nodes as semantic triples. But they suffer from one fatal flaw: the relations are headers in themselves. We often want to explain why a relation is true, give intuition to it, and refer to it from other nodes. This is obviously how the brain works: relations are nodes just like objects.

They do appear to be putting full trees on every toplevel regardless how deep and with JavaScript turned off e.g.:which is cool but will take lots of storage. In OurBigBook Ciro Santilli only does that on OurBigBook Web where each page can be dynamically generated.

The cool thing about this notation is that is showed to Ciro Santilli that there is more state to a chess game than just the board itself! Notably:plus some other boring draw rules counters.

France is obviously a fine rich place to live, Ciro Santilli lived there for a few years.

A more precise term for those in the know: open source software that also has a liberal license, for some definition of liberal.

Ciro Santilli defines liberal as: "can be commercialized without paying anything back" (but possibly subject to other restrictions).

He therefore does not consider Creative Commons licenses with NC to be FOSS.

For the newbs, the term open source software is good enough, since most open source software is also FOSS.

But when it's not, it's crucial to know.

For Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China: Section "github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship".

Ciro has the radical opinion that absolute freedom of speech must be guaranteed by law for anyone to talk about absolutely anything, anonymously if they wish, with the exception only of copyright-related infringement.

And Ciro believes that there should be no age restriction of access to any information.

People should be only be punished for actions that they actually do in the real world. Not even purportedly planning those actions must be punished. Access and ability to publish information must be completely and totally free.

If you don't like someone, you should just block them, or start your own campaign to prepare a counter for whatever it is that they are want to do.

This freedom does not need to apply to citizens and organizations of other countries, only to citizens of the country in question, since foreign governments can create influence campaigns to affect the rights of your citizens. More info at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/mark-government-controlled-social-media

Limiting foreign influence therefore requires some kind of nationality check, which could harm anonymity. But Ciro believes that almost certainly such checks can be carried out in anonymous blockchain consensus based mechanisms. Governments would issues nationality tokens, and tokens are used for anonymous confirmations of rights in a way that only the token owner, not even the government, can determine who used the token. E.g. something a bit like what Monero does. Rights could be checked on a once per account basis, or yearly basis, so transaction costs should not be a big issue. Maybe expensive proof-of-work systems can be completely bypassed to the existence of this central token authority?

Some people believe that freedom of speech means "freedom of speech that I agree with". Those people should move to China or some other dictatorship.

Related: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/hate-speech

This term was invented by Ciro Santilli, and similar ideas certainly already exists with different names by other people. As the name suggests, it basically involves combining free education and gifted education, but with other more specific aspects crammed in that would make a precise name too long to read, as descried below.

Government must create selective, K-12 and university-level teaching institutions that are completely free.

As mentioned at pick few good bets and invest enough on thems, these do not need to be given to all students: what we have to do is to ensure that the top N-percent of the best students will get in, and that none of them will pay. Where N is as large as the budget society decides to put into this project, the larger the better. Therefore, perhaps "gifted education" is not the ideal name for this idea, as it generally implies very small N (1%?), while this project hopes for larger N, maybe 10%. But a minimal level of quality must be attained, it is pointless to dissolve the resources too much, if we only have enough for 1%, then so be it, start with 1%.

School must offer free accommodation for students.

These institutions must start from the very first school year, and go all the way up through K-12 to the end of university. It is useless to start at university-level only otherwise only the rich students will have a chance of getting in, like Ciro Santilli saw in Brazil at the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo in the late 2000's: one day all students were gathered in the amphitheater, and they asked the students who had only gone through free government K-12 schools to raise their hands. Those were notably worse than the corresponding private schools, and the situation is inverted in university, where the best schools are the government ones. Out of about 500 people, at most 10 raised their hands!

These institutions should not have affirmative action entry quotas, including most importantly at the university level. Both rich and poor should be able to apply. Passing the selection criteria is all that matters. We just must ensure that the schools are widely advertised amongst disadvantaged communities, so that they will at least get their children to try to apply from an early age. This way, even if the rich always have an advantage due to better overall conditions, the poor are so much more numerous that the majority of students accepted will still be poor.

The school should follow the basic principles of how to teach, notably:

These schools must pay mentors as much as the average good non-free schools so you actually get comparably good teachers. Mentor selection would also be highly competitive, just as that of the students.

Once admitted, students will have guaranteed access to the school resources for a few years. This way, they won't need to worry about passing useless exams every three months.

All that matters is that they are progressing in their development plan. Rather than exams, students will do regular progress report sessions with their advisors, and will get periodic reviews from other advisors with similar interests.

Such projects could be funded by much needed wealth tax or other measures to tax the rich, which the people should claim through Referendum, that would be come more common with the adoption of electronic voting. Because the politicians are simply not being able to do it.

Related:

Ciro Santilli's admiration for Dyson goes beyond his "unify all the things approach", which Ciro loves, but also extends to the way he talks and the things he says. Dyson is one of Ciro's favorite physicist.

Besides this, he was also very idealistic compassionate, and supported a peaceful resolution until World War II with United Kingdom was basically inevitable. Note that this was a strategic mistake.

Dyson is "hawk nosed" as mentioned in Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) chapter "Dyson". But he wasn't when he was young, see e.g. i2.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/freemandyson_child-1.jpg?resize=768%2C1064&ssl=1 It sems that his nose just never stopped growing after puberty.

He also has some fun stories, like him practicing night climbing while at Cambridge University, and having walked from Cambridge to London (~86km!) in a day with his wheelchair bound friend.

Ciro Santilli feels that the label child prodigy applies even more so to him than to Feynman and Julian Schwinger.

Bibliography:

Ciro Santilli does not believe in free will of course because he is an agnostic and he believes that brains are controlled by the laws of physics, see also: physics and the illusion of life.

Ciro Santilli thinks imperative programming is just a superset of functional programming where you can have state.

C and C++: OK, you're old before the Internet and compiled, forgiven.

Python: OMG, please, just make it work!!! Your are interpreted!!! You are a hot web technology!!! Node.js and Ruby are doing just fine, and Ruby is not newer than you!!! See also: pip.

Ultimate explanation by Ciro Santilli: math.stackexchange.com/questions/776039/intuition-behind-normal-subgroups/3732426#3732426

Links group homomorphism and the quotient group via normal subgroups.

It is a bit hard to decide if those people are serious or not. Sometimes it feels scammy, but sometimes it feels fun and right!

Particularly concerning is the fact that they are not a not-for-profit entity, and it is hard to understand how they might make money.

Charles Simon, the founder, is pretty focused in how natural neurons work vs artificial neural network models. He has some good explanations of that, and one major focus of the project is their semi open source spiking neuron simulator BrainSimII. While Ciro Santilli believes that there might be insight in that, he also has doubts if certain modules of the brain wouldn't be more suitable coded directly in regular programming languages with greater ease and performance.

FutureAI appears to be Charles' retirement for fun project, he is likely independently wealthy. Well done.

This is a good project. Limited scope to 2D card-like games, but very good within that scope.

Ciro Santilli used it for the 2D version of his Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games.

This is not a label that Ciro Santilli likes to give lightly. But maybe sometimes, it is inevitable.

Bibliography:

Ciro Santilli tried to add this example to Wikipedia, but it was reverted, so here we are, see also: Section "Deletionism on Wikipedia".

This is a good first example of a field of a finite field of non-prime order, this one is a prime power order instead.

$4=2^2$, so one way to represent the elements of the field will be the to use the 4 polynomials of degree 1 over GF(2):

Note that we refer in this definition to anther field, but that is fine, because we only refer to fields of prime order such as GF(2), because we are dealing with prime powers only. And we have already defined fields of prime order easily previously with modular arithmetic.

Over GF(2), there is only one irreducible polynomial of degree 2:

Addition is defined element-wise with modular arithmetic modulo 2 as defined over GF(2), e.g.:

Multiplication is done modulo $X^2+X+1$, which ensures that the result is also of degree 1.

For example first we do a regular multiplication:

Without modulo, that would not be one of the elements of the field anymore due to the $1X^2$!

So we take the modulo, we note that:and by the definition of modulo:which is the final result of the multiplication.

TODO show how taking a reducible polynomial for modulo fails. Presumably it is for a similar reason to why things fail for the prime case.

Gilberto is definitely the most psychedelic/tribal one of the The Holy Trinity of popular Brazilian music, though he also has a boyish quality to his soul.

He is also perhaps the one that impresses Ciro Santilli the most, at times he can't help but feel:

It's not super easy to use at first.

And it sometimes says that the basic drawing thing you want to do is off the project's scope.

But as you learn more about it and further generalize the concepts, there are often reasonable reasons for those design choices.

And the UI looks good :-)

Examples:

Some answers by Ciro Santilli:

This is where Ciro Santilli stored his code since he started coding nonstop in 2013.

He does not like the closed source aspect of it, but hey, there are more important things to worry about, the network effect is just too strong.