Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
They are evil because they produce closed source offline software used by millions: Microsoft Windows.
And also their monopolistic practices: United States v. Microsoft Corp.
So, as put in Video "Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs by Epic Rap Battles of History (2012)" by fake Steve Jobs to fake Bill Gates:
Why'd you name your company after your dick?
However, like all big tech companies with infinite money, they do end up doing some cool things in their research department, Microsoft Research, notably for Ciro Santilli being:
- Lean
- their quantum computing work. C is of course a bad idea, we don't need yet another domain-specific language, Python library based solutions like Qiskit are obviously the way to go
A monopolistic operating system that only exists in the 2010's because of the IBM-linked historical lock-in and constant useless changes of the Microsoft Word document format to prevent cross operability.
It offers no technical advantages over free Linux distros in the late 2010's, and it is barely impossible to buy a non-Mac computer without paying for it, which should be illegal. European Union, time to use your regulatory powers.
The following anecdote illustrates Windows' pervasiveness. Ciro Santilli was once tutoring a high school student in Brazil, and decided to try and get her into programming. When the "Windows is not free" subject came up, the high school student was shocked: "I paid 100 dollars for this?". She never even knew it was there. To her, it was "just a computer".
Laws should really be passed forcing OEMs to allow you to not buy Microsoft Windows when buying a computer, European Union, why have you failed me in 2016??? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/ I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower Than Other Operating Systems. Here Is Why. by Marc Bevand (2013) has some interesting remarks:
There's also little incentive to create changes in the first place. On linux-kernel, if you improve the performance of directory traversal by a consistent 5%, you're praised and thanked. Here, if you do that and you're not on the object manager team, then even if you do get your code past the Ob owners and into the tree, your own management doesn't care. Yes, making a massive improvement will get you noticed by senior people and could be a boon for your career, but the improvement has to be very large to attract that kind of attention.
Bomb disposal robot by The IT Crowd
. Source. Micro means "small wavelength compared to radio waves", not micron-sized.
Microwave production and detection is incredibly important in many modern applications:
- telecommunications, e.g. being used in
- Wi-Fi
- satellite communicationsyoutu.be/EYovBJR6l5U?list=PL-_93BVApb58SXL-BCv4rVHL-8GuC2WGb&t=27 from CuriousMarc comments on some piece of Apollo equipment they were restoring/reversing:Ah, Ciro Santilli really wishes he knew what that meant more precisely. Sounds so cool!
These are the boxes that brought you voice, data and live TV from the moon, and should be early masterpieces of microwave electronics, the blackest of black arts in analog electronics.
- 4G and other cellular network standards
- radar. As an example, 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Julian Schwinger did some notable work in the area in World War II, while most other physicists went to the Manhattan Project instead.This is well highlighted in QED and the men who made itby Silvan Schweber (1994). Designing the cavity wasn't easy. One of the key initial experiments of quantum electrodynamics, the Lamb-Retherford experiment from 1947, fundamental for modern physics, was a direct consequence of post-radar research by physicists who started to apply wartime developments to their scientific search.Wikipedia also mentions en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microwave&oldid=1093188913#Radar_2:
The first modern silicon and germanium diodes were developed as microwave detectors in the 1930s, and the principles of semiconductor physics learned during their development led to semiconductor electronics after the war.
- microwave is the natural frequency of several important Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics phenomena, and has been used extensively in quantum computing applications, including completely different types of quantum computer type:Likely part of the appeal of microwaves is that they are non-ionizing, so you don't destroy stuff. But at the same time, they are much more compatible with atomic scale energies than radio waves, which have way way too little energy.
- trapped ion quantum computer; Video "Trapping Ions for Quantum Computing by Diana Craik (2019)"
- superconducting quantum computer; e.g. this Junior Microwave Design Engineer job accouncement from Alice&Bob: archive.ph/wip/4wGPJ
This is notably what the United States emerged to be after World War II. But it was likely what Nazi Germany also was, and many other superpowers.
Ciro Santilli feels that much more relevant would be to also include academia as in "military-industrial-academic" complex, the Wikipedia page actually mentions precedents to this idea.
The addition of congress/politicians is also relevant.
But hey, the name wouldn't sound so slick with three parts.
It is basically in this context that American science and technology flourished after World War II, including notably the development of quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman being a prototypical example, having previously worked on the Manhattan Project.
Ciro Santilli would like to fully understand the statements and motivations of each the problems!
Easy to understand the motivation:
- Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness is basically the only problem that is really easy to understand the statement and motivation :-)
- p versus NP problem
Hard to understand the motivation!
- Riemann hypothesis: a bunch of results on prime numbers, and therefore possible applications to cryptographyOf course, everything of interest has already been proved conditionally on it, and the likely "true" result will in itself not have any immediate applications.As is often the case, the only usefulness would be possible new ideas from the proof technique, and people being more willing to prove stuff based on it without the risk of the hypothesis being false.
- Yang-Mills existence and mass gap: this one has to do with finding/proving the existence of a more decent formalization of quantum field theory that does not resort to tricks like perturbation theory and effective field theory with a random cutoff valueThis is important because the best theory of light and electrons (and therefore chemistry and material science) that we have today, quantum electrodynamics, is a quantum field theory.
The Universe I, II & III | Tim and Eric Awesome Show by Adult Swim UK (2017)
Source. This amazing video contains the best mind blown meme ever, Ciro Santilli almost shat himself when he first watched it.The musical study of software engineering.
Ciro Santilli is obsessed by those in order to learn any new concept, not just for bug reporting.
This includes to learn more theoretical subjects like physics and mathematics.
Ciro Santilli believes that molecular biology technologies will be a large part of the next big things as shown at: Section "Molecular biology technologies".
Bibliography:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS563_Teges&list=PLQbPquAyEw4dQ3zOLrdS1eF_KJJbUUyBx Biophysical Techniques Course 2022 by the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Holy crap that playlist is a tour de force of molecular biology techniques in 2022!
Whenever Ciro Santilli learns about molecular biology, he can't help but to feel that it feels like programming, and notably systems programming and computer hardware design.
In some sense, the comparison is obvious: DNA is clearly a programmable medium like any assembly language, but still, systems programming did give Ciro some further feelings.
- The most important analogy perhaps is observability, or more precisely the lack of it. For the computer, this is described at: The lower level you go into a computer, the harder it is to observe things.And then, when Ciro started learning a bit about biology techniques, he started to feel the exact same thing.For example when he played with E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab, the main thing Ciro felt was: it is going to be hard to verify any of this data, because it is hard/impossible to know the concentration of each element in a cell as a function of time.More generally of course, this is exactly why making any biology discovery is so hard: we can't easily see what's going on inside the cell, and have to resort to indirect ways of doing so..This exact idea was highlighted by I should have loved biology by James Somers:
For a computer scientist, a biologist's methods can seem insane; the trouble comes from the fact that cells are too small, too numerous, too complex to analyze the way a programmer would, say in a step-by-step debugger.
And then just like in software, some of the methods biologists use to overcome the lack of visibility have direct software analogues:- add instrumentation to cells, e.g. GFP tagging comes to mind
- emulation, e.g. E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab
- The boot process is another one. E.g. in x86 the way that you start in 16-bit mode, largely compatible into the 70's, then move to 32-bit and finally 64, does feel a lot the way a earlier stages of embryo development looks more and more like more ancient animals.
Ciro likes to think that maybe that is why a hardcore systems programmer like Bert Hubert got into molecular biology.
Some other people who mention similar things:
- I should have loved biology by James Somers highlights the computer abstraction layer analogy between the two:
As of 2019, the silicon industry is ending, and molecular biology technology is one of the most promising and growing field of engineering.
42 years of microprocessor trend data by Karl Rupp
. Source. Only transistor count increases, which also pushes core counts up. But what you gonna do when atomic limits are reached? The separation between two silicon atoms is 0.23nm and 2019 technology is at 5nm scale.Such advances could one day lead to both biological super-AGI and immortality.
Ciro Santilli is especially excited about DNA-related technologies, because DNA is the centerpiece of biology, and it is programmable.
First, during the 2000's, the cost of DNA sequencing fell to about 1000 USD per genome in the end of the 2010's: Figure 2. "Cost per genome vs Moore's law from 2000 to 2019", largely due to "Illumina's" technology.
The medical consequences of this revolution are still trickling down towards medical applications of 2019, inevitably, but somewhat slowly due to tight privacy control of medical records.
Ciro Santilli predicts that when the 100 dollar mark is reached, every person of the First world will have their genome sequenced, and then medical applications will be closer at hand than ever.
But even 100 dollars is not enough. Sequencing power is like computing power: humankind can never have enough. Sequencing is not a one per person thing. For example, as of 2019 tumors are already being sequenced to help understand and treat them, and scientists/doctors will sequence as many tumor cells as budget allows.
Then, in the 2010's, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing started opening up the way to actually modifying the genome that we could now see through sequencing.
What's next?
Ciro believes that the next step in the revolution could be could be: de novo DNA synthesis.
This technology could be the key to the one of the ultimate dream of biologists: cheap programmable biology with push-button organism bootstrap!
Just imagine this: at the comfort of your own garage, you take some model organism of interest, maybe start humble with Escherichia coli. Then you modify its DNA to your liking, and upload it to a 3D printer sized machine on your workbench, which automatically synthesizes the DNA, and injects into a bootstrapped cell.
You then make experiments to check if the modified cell achieves your desired new properties, e.g. production of some protein, and if not reiterate, just like a software engineer.
Of course, even if we were able to do the bootstrap, the debugging process then becomes key, as visibility is the key limitation of biology, maybe we need other cheap technologies to come in at that point.
This a place point we see the beauty of evolution the brightest: evolution does not require observability. But it also implies that if your changes to the organism make it less fit, then your mutation will also likely be lost. This has to be one of the considerations done when designing your organism.
Other cool topic include:
- computational biology: simulations of cell metabolism, protein and small molecule, including computational protein folding and chemical reactions. This is basically the simulation part of omics.If we could only simulate those, we would basically "solve molecular biology". Just imagine, instead of experimenting for a hole year, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine could have been won from a few hours on a supercomputer to determine which protein had the desired properties, using just DNA sequencing as a starting point!
- microscopy: crystallography, cryoEM
- analytical chemistry: mass spectroscopy, single cell analysis (Single-cell RNA sequencing)
It's weird, cells feel a lot like embedded systems: small, complex, hard to observe, and profound.
Ciro is sad that by the time he dies, humanity won't have understood the human brain, maybe not even a measly Escherichia coli... Heck, even key molecular biology events are not yet fully understood, see e.g. transcription regulation.
One of the most exciting aspects of molecular biology technologies is their relatively low entry cost, compared for example to other areas such as fusion energy and quantum computing.
Molecular Sciences Course of the University of São Paulo Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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!!!
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.
Cryptocurrency with focus on anonymity. Was almost certainly the leading privacy coin since its inception until as of writing in the 2020s.
Ciro Santilli has received and held considerable quantities of Monero, notably 1000 Monero donation. so bias alert.
As mentioned at Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?", Ciro Santilli believes that anonymity is the most valuable feature that really matters on crypto coins, and therefore if he were to invest in crypto, he would invest in Monero or some other privacy coin.
localmonero.co/knowledge/monero-stealth-addresses?language=en gives an overview of the privacy mechanisms:
- ring signatures, which hide the true output (sender)localmonero.co/knowledge/ring-signatures Gives an overview. Mentions that it is prone to heuristic attacks.Uses a system of decoys, that adds 10 fake possible previous outputs as inputs, in addition to the actual input.So the network only knows/verifies that one of those 11 previous outputs was used, but it does not know which one.It's a bit like having a built-in cryptocurrency tumbler in every transaction.TODO so how do you know which previous outputs were spent or not?
- RingCT which hides the amounts.
- stealth addresses, which hides who you send toThis forces receivers to scan try and unlock every single transaction in the chain to see if it is theirs or not.The sender therefore can know when the money is spent, but once again, not to whom it is being sent.
Based on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoNote and like Satoshi Nakamoto created by under the pseudonym "Nicolas van Saberhagen" www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7v2obe/offering_a_bounty_for_a_video_of_the_speech_by/
Coinbase has actually stayed away from trading it even as of 2019 when Monero was the third largest market capitalization crypto because of fear of regulatory slashback: decrypt.co/36731/heres-why-coinbase-still-hasnt-listed-monero. Although it must be said, the value of privacy crypto is greatly reduced when everyone is trading it on exchanges, which require a passport upload to work.
To Ciro Santilli, a key observation is:Clearly the rich will be much, much more shielded by keeping large parts of their wealth in shares... from this point of view, it is insane to print money!!! Tax the rich instead...
The rich are more easily able to avoid the harm than poor and middle-class people [...] they are more likely to have large amounts of non-cash assets to shield themselves from inflation.
The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
. Source. When a young Ciro Santilli played Worms Armageddon, he almost shat himself of laughter when he first threw a Holy Grenade. Little did he know it was actually a Monty Python reference.Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
. Source. The Insulting Frenchman scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
. Source. Execution in Russia by Monty Python
. Source. No, they are basically not-for-profits, or more precisely in british legal terms, "charities". By taking government funding (directly or indirectly through subsiding enrolment fees?), they have to follow some government rules, and all major ones do it seems: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/49187/in-what-sense-are-uk-universities-public/49188
A similar confusing naming pattern appears to apply to Public school.
In the University of Cambridge for example, all MA degree holders or higher appear to have some voting power: www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/how-the-university-and-colleges-work/governance (archive)
This adds an extra layer of difficulty for the average taxpayer to make changes to university policy, e.g. making universities publish all material with Creative Commons licenses. At most, voters could require this indirectly through the government funding requisites. It is a mess.
Not even the Open University seems to be very open!
Ciro Santilli once attended a round table in the early 2020s where a University of Oxford official from the IP licensing department. The University of Oxford took a 20% equity on spin-off companies, not an uncommon University IP ownership policy at the time. At one point, the officer clearly justified this along the following very official sounding lines (paraphrased):While noble sounding, this immediately reminded Ciro of Instrumental convergence, in the field of AGI philosophy. Or in other words, of course the best approach to maximize education and research outcomes of society is to first take over the world, and then implement those goals from there! See also Why Not Just: Think of AGI Like a Corporation? by Robert Miles (2018)
The university is a charity with the goal of promoting education and research. All money obtained is reinvested in furthering education and research.
Notably, the University of Oxford was extremely protective of its learning material at that time, which was highly paywalled behind university logins, presumably with the rationale of having unique learning materials to enroll more paying undergrads. How can giving out free information to all not be the optimal way to "promoting education and research" is very hard to envision.
Bibliography:
- www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/06/07/most-universities-are-charities-so-what/ Most universities are charities: so what? by Mary Synge (2023) on the
After learning this term, Ciro Santilli finally understood that his actual major was MR, and not bullshit like applied mathematics or control theory.
Ciro Santilli's jaw dropped when he learned about this concept. A Small Talent for War, are you sure?
Ciro Santilli took courses once upon a time, maybe that has influenced his passion? Ciro Santilli's musical education.