Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Magic is the best card game of all time. Ciro Santilli agrees with this fact, and this has nothing to do with the nostalgia factor of having played it while being a teenager.

It is also the one with the most cumbersome name possible, containing even a bloody colon punctuation in it!

However, besides that, Magic has another major flaw: the cards of old formats (Legacy and Modern), which are the only really interesting ones, are fucking expensive: Section "Magic: The Gathering is too expensive".

Like in mathematics, the most beautiful decks are those that do crazy things:All of this comes to a certain extent from the deep asymmetry that permeates the game.

It is also really interesting to watch as new sets as spoiled and try to guess if certain cards will have any impact on the Modern or Legacy metagame.

Here are some cool decks:

If Ciro were to ever overcome his cheapness and play the legacy forma (which will never happen), he would likely play one of the following decks when trying to be able to win at all:Both of this decks focus on cheating a huge creature into play in one go, and both have combo protection methods (discard for turbo depths, and counterspells for sneak and show). Ciro believes that those decks reflect his personality well, notably Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality. Related decks that don't appeal as much to Ciro:And above all, Ciro would never play a fair deck. Grinding victories is not for him. He'd rather quickly decide win/lose status and move on.

Competitive commander is also interesting, although matches tend to be much more random so the format is harder to digest, see for example this channel; Playing With Power MTG channel.

In Ciro's mind, Urza's block is the most epic of all, followed by the masques block. Those sets had a ridiculous power level and epic art, and they happened just before Ciro Santilli started playing during Invasion, which had an extremely low power level in comparison. So Ciro saw some cards from those slightly older formats floating around, but not many, and they felt so mystical and awesome.

ChannelFireball is one of the best Legacy resources out there, but they have too much crap filling in between legacy videos unfortunately.

The following creators share many of Ciro's interests and output large quantities of interesting content covering all memes/overpowered combos of new sets:

Ciro was pleased when he learnt that Steve Wozniak plays magic the gathering.

Magic's competitive play became a mess in the late 2010's. They had a clear tournament structure, but they decided to start changing things every 6 months, and give tournaments meaningless names like "Mythic championship", and it just became impossible to follow what is what.

The mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Card_frame#Original_frame is the best, much more epic all others (notably since 2003 update) ware bullshit, good overview medium.com/@raphaelaleixo/the-graphic-design-for-magic-the-gathering-card-frames-b3b6da4cd003

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hk3IOQiisg Crazy MTG Scandals That Changed The Game by Nikachu (2021). Good list:

Paraprasing a friend of Ciro Santilli:

Luckily, early teens Ciro Santilli was partly protected from this by Ciro Santilli's cheapness.

But Ciro distinctly remembers one day in his early teens that he couldn't sleep very well, and he got up, and the was decided that he would become the greatest Magic: The Gathering player who ever lived. Can you imagine the incredible loss that this would have been to humankind? And talk about the incredible lack of development opportunity present in poor countries, related:

Ciro thinks this is idiotic, and that Wizards should sell all cards individually with unlimited supply and all with the same prices, especially online where there are no printing costs. But because Wizards made the silly promise never to reprint certain cards with the reserved list in 1994, they can't even correct this mistake legally! (TODO maybe, see further discussion at: www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/contract-from-below-promissory-estoppel-and-the-reserved-list). There is however one simple solution: create and promote a new no reserve list format, and let reserve list formats rot away:One interesting outcome of this would be to have card cost limited formats. Penny Dreadful puts a super low limit, on individual cards, but it would be cool to have a max cost per deck version of it.

A cool thing is when they printed Garth One-Eye, which allows you to make imaginary copies of some of those restricted list cards during play. This is the type of "flirting with the rules", that Ciro Santilli admires. The introduction of online-only cards such as XXX has pushed that even further as of 2021.

This was especially insane when Ciro was young and the Internet was not very widely available in Brazil yet, and Ciro did not know how to check the values of cards on online markets, and would trade cards with older much more knowledgable teenagers, based solely on his appraisal of a card's strength! Can you imagine how many young Timmys got ripped off in this manner, trading useless one million mana spells for ultra expensive black lotuses?

Another option we could pursue would be to make governments consider TCG pack opening a form of gambling, which it obviously is:

There is however one good solution to Magic's insane cost: watch people who have nothing better to do in their lives play on YouTube.

And as Internet formats dominate more and more, if they have any brains at will they will migrate to a subscription model where you pay to play for a given period of time, and have immediate access to all cards. It could even be a tiered access, with older formats being more expensive (more bugs to fix on different cards), but you must get access to all cards of a format at once.

Once again, relies on superconductivity to reach insane magnetic fields. Superconductivity is just so important.

Ciro Santilli saw a good presentation about it once circa 2020, it seems that the main difficulty of the time was turbulence messing things up. They have some nice simulations with cross section pictures e.g. at: www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/937941.

It boggles Ciro Santilli's mind that people use mailing list to collaborate on projects!

The only explanation is that the dinosaurs who created the projects are unable to adapt to new superior technologies.

Yes, Ciro is talking to you, big fundamental projects from last century: Linux kernel, GNU Compiler Collection (gcc.gnu.org/lists.html), Binutils (sourceware.org/binutils/), etc.

Some of you are already using Bugzilla for the bugs, so kudos. But if you've seen their benefit, why you still use the mailing list for patches?

Advantages of mailing lists:

Disadvantages: everything else:

Not sure:

Smart people who agree with Ciro:

The relatively large Sainsbury's located at 42-45 Sidney St, Cambridge CB2 3HX. Existed in late 2010's and early 2020's Ciro Santilli witnessed.

Being the only relatively large grocery shop in central Cambridge near several colleges, where manu students live, makes this one of the most popular grocery shopping location for many of the students.

The Oxford equivalent has to be the Tesco Express on Magdalen St, Oxford OX1 3AD, but not sure if there's a name for it.

Bibliography:

This incredibly foul mouthed band was incredibly funny.

Ciro Santilli was a bit young to understand the songs at the time, but the older boys were singing them, and he sang along. So maybe there is a nostalgia factor in play.

But it can't be just that. They are just too funny and brutal, even when Ciro re-listens to it as of 2020.

Many Brazilian religious cranks in were really happy when their plane crashed and killed all of them in 1996.

Official YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCPmfP5LNbxYwlN0k6C3F_6w

Best songs:

Ciro Santilli really liked the battle mode on this.

Covert Lab lead.

Ciro Santilli really likes this dude, because Ciro really likes simulation.

It is hard to decide what makes Ciro Santilli more sad: the usage of Greek letters, the invention of new symbols, or the fifty million alternative font styles used.

Only Chinese characters could be worse than that!

Poet, scientists and warriors all in one? Conquerors of the useless.

A wise teacher from University of São Paulo once told the class Ciro Santilli attended an anecdote about his life:It turned out that, about 10 years later, Ciro ended up following this advice, unwittingly.

Survey by Ciro Santilli: math.stackexchange.com/questions/1985/software-for-drawing-geometry-diagrams/3938216#3938216

Many plotting software can be used to create mathematics illustrations. They just tend to have more data-oriented rather than explanatory-oriented output.

In 2019, a paper proved that MTG is Turing complete with a legacy legal deck. Live demo with some hand waving: Video "I Built a COMPUTER in Magic: The Gathering by Because Science (2019)". As Ciro Santilli comments at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/42 this was an interest addition to the previous "indefinite infinite loop" e.g. as found in a Four Horsemen combo deck

It does a huge percentage of what you want easily, and from the language that you want to use.

Tends to be Ciro's pick if gnuplot can't handle the use case, or if the project is really really serious.

Couldn't handle exploration of large datasets though: Survey of open source interactive plotting software with a 10 million point scatter plot benchmark by Ciro Santilli

Examples:

Tested on Python 3.10.4, Ubuntu 22.04.

About 50k subscribers on 2021, which feels way too little for the video quality and quantity.

Ciro Santilli believes that this channel will go very far, certainly achieving 1M subscribers in they keep it for one or two more years. Update: it didn't, as of 2024, shame.

They are Utah-based, and they do many many amazing weekend trips. They mostly drive from home to some trailhead, and then climb up and down it the entire day.

No technical rock climbing, only bouldering, but they still manage to reach many amazing places, and there is a level of danger in many of their ascents.

They also often ski down the mountains when there is snow.

The cool thing about this channel is that as the name suggests, they are not professionals, and what they do can be done by anyone without working full time on it, as long as you have adequate preparation.

While this has some of the metrics features that Ciro Santilli wants to implement for OurBigBook.com, it limits the number of articles your readeres can read.

How the fuck can you publish on a website that limits the number of views for your articles?!?! When all it has is static pages + some metrics?!?!

Evil. Just learn to use GitHub Pages for God's sake.

The idea is cool. It really unifies front-and back end.

But Ciro Santilli feels the approach proposed by FeathersJS of being a glue between bigger third-party Front-end web frameworks like React and backend (object-relational mapping) is more promising and flexible.

Interesting dude, with some interest overlaps with Ciro Santilli, like Quantum computing:

This is the most plausible way of obtaining a full connectome looking from 2020 forward. Then you'd observe the slices with an electron microscope + appropriate Staining. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) really opened Ciro Santilli's eyes to this possibility.

Once this is done for a human, it will be one of the greatest milestone of humanities, coparable perhaps to the Human Genome Project. BUt of course, privacy issues are incrediby pressing in this case, even more than in the human genome project, as we would essentially be able to read the brain of the person after their death.

As of 2022, the Drosophila connectome had been almost fully extracted.

This is also a possible path towards post-mortem brain reading.