Wife of Marc Verdiell.
d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/core/core-2019.pdf lists "Marc and Lori Verdiell" as donors to the Computer History Museum, and therefore confirms her identity beyond doubt as his wife as of 2019.
www.whitepages.com/name/Lori-Verdiell gives a possible middle name starting with H giving "Lori H Verdiell". It also lists possible daughters Aurelie T Verdiell and Apolline T Verdiell.
www.linkedin.com/in/lori-verdiell-9373a5128/ is her likely profile where she describes herself as Retired Research Asssociate at PPD, a contract research organization, and as being from Atherton, California.
Ciro Santilli believes that "Lori" is an Western pseudonym of East Asian person and that her real legal name is Hoang Oanh Verdiell.
www.officialusa.com/names/Jean_marc-Verdiell/ lists her email as
verdiell.lori@gmail.com
, and phone (650) 493-9259.One of the things Ciro Santilli most deeply despises.
Real luxury is to understand quantum field theory and number theory.
The main reason Ciro Santilli never touched it is that it feels that every public data set has already been fully mined or has already had the most interesting algorithms developed for it, so you can't do much outside of big companies.
This is why Ciro started Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games to generate synthetic data and thus reduce the cost of data.
The other reason is that it is ugly.
Nice looking and expensive operating system by Apple. Ciro Santilli believes that:
- if you want to be ripped off, just use Microsoft Windows which has more software available
- or if you want to attain Enlightenment, just use Linux, which is free and open source
Ciro Santilli wonders how legal it is. They very explicitly do not mention the words Magic: The Gathering anywhere.
No online play.
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.
- infinite combos
- semi-infinite combos that allow you to likely draw your entire deck or deal 20 damage
- all-in decks that either win or lose on turn two
- and lands
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:
- Cheerios, Modern. Meryn MTG, 2019
- Lands, Legacy. Channel Mengucci, 2019
- Belcher, Legacy, Jeff Hoogland, 2019, Channel Mengucci, 2017
- Ops All Spells
- Gyruda Cannon - Legacy - April 18th, 2020 www.youtube.com/watch?v=PefRTsRRi6w
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.
- reanimator: you have to worry about graveyard hate all the time, worrying is bad
- storm: you have to play too many spells, it's tiring. Ciro would rather put a fattie into play and swing once.
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:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u5yzmta2oA BoshNRoll (Brian Coval) is basically Ciro Santilli's favorite MTG streamer of the early 2020's very good Legacy focused content, with occasional Modern and Pauper, good spicy deck selection. And he says nice and intelligent things the hole time, it's the type of person Ciro would be good friends with in real life. It sometimes makes Ciro said to see such a person wasting their lives with Magic. Twitter: twitter.com/BoshNRoll
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eKSg5HAfC4 UNDEFEATED BRAIN POWER! Legacy Hive Mind Combo 5-0 Trophy! Sudden Substitution Show and Tell. That's fire!
- Magic Aids
- Squa Chief. He does a lot of cool decks.
- Jeff Hoogland. Not Ciro's favorite personality though, too rambly/matter-of-fact. Also was going too much into MTGA.
- www.youtube.com/channel/UC2hkmJr2x--IiMfozqj6VdQ Meryn MTG. She's too much on the jank side for Ciro's taste, but for that reason she covers some decks of interest that others don't. She's cute, and a Timmy at heart. Which makes you feel really sorry for her as she gets crushed by more competitive decks.
- CalebD. Legacy and Modern. Too much drafting in the middle of actual videos. Sometimes decks slightly too janky/experimental. Amazing channel soundtrack.
- Nikachu has some decent commentary. His endlessly rambly persona is a bit annoying, but the content of the commentary is still good.
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.
- www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/disorganized-play-and-the-magic-pro-league
- mtg.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_PT_events
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXUHaXiZ0HI The Moment Professional Magic Came to an End by Nikachu MTG (2021) has a good perspective. Magic is never going to have enough viewers to actually allow pros to make consistent ammounts money. And Magic's variability is just way too high for anyone to consistently win few large prizes on annual contests. Therefore they just killed such contests.
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:
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.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIq0NWSLAJA Magic TV - A Look at Non Reserve List Legacy by ChannelFireball (2015). Notably, they suggest the workaround of printing very slightly differently functional reprints, e.g. "Snow covered duals". Genius.
- www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/8gtoj4/no_reserve_list_legacy/
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.
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:
- threaded replies, which almost no issue tracker has. GitHub feature request: github.com/isaacs/github/issues/837
Disadvantages: everything else:
- cannot subscribed to a single thread. Which forces you to create an email filter for each one of them you subscribe to.
- no metadata, notably the notion of closing / merging, but also upvotesYou have to read thirty messages before you can know if the bug was solved or not.
- it is insanely hard to reply to messages from before you were subscribed: webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/23197/reply-to-mailman-archived-message/115088#115088
- hard to apply patches locally to test them out: stackoverflow.com/questions/5062389/how-to-use-git-am-to-apply-patches-from-email-messages/49082916#49082916Unless they use Patchwork, which adds one more website on top of the mess.And then Gmail corrupts your patches, and you are forced to use
git send-email
, which does not work on some network configurations: stackoverflow.com/questions/28038662/how-to-solve-unable-to-initialize-smtp-properly-when-using-using-git-send-ema or setup ThunderBird. - often have to subscribe to post at all, thus cluttering your inbox further
- you can edit posts to make them clearer.Yes, people could vandalize their answers when they get mad, and threads might stop making sense after edits. But this can be solved with an undeletable post history like Stack Overflow has (but not any other tracker does).Or archive.org :-)In any case, what do you think will happen more often and have greater impact:
- people vandalize their posts
- people fix their silly typos and improve content
- searchable by author, keyword, etc. without Google. Yes, mailing list trackers could have decent implementations to overcome that. But no, GNU Mailman which everyone uses does not have it. Google barely indexes it.
- people have to learn about top posting vs inline posting, and this requires infinite education of new users
- On mailing lists: either put a comment in the middle of a huge patch and let other people find it, or (more likely) copy paste the part of the patch that you are talking about.
- most mail web UIs suck.OK, this is not an unsolvable or intrinsic problem, but still a problem.E.g.:
ezmlm
it is not possible to see the entire content in a single page: gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2015-07/threads.html.The alternative: do like LLVM and send attachments. Yes, I we all love opening up attachments on our browsers.The real solution: everyone can create branches and pull requests. Also has the benefit of running CI on the pull requests.
Not sure:
- you can have infinitely many trackers to replicate data in case apocalypse happens in some part of the world.Although I'm not sure this is an advantage, as you don't know anymore which one is the canonical trackers an advantage, as you don't know anymore which one is the canonical tracker.And all web interfaces already have an API to export messages, and someone has already scripted it to import from any web UI to any web UI for you.
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.
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:
- Pelados Em Santos (1995). Not too amazing, they only try to be funny by making fun of the North-Eastern accent of Brazil, which is considered somewhat funny in São Paulo, and they fail at being funny.But it talks about Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, Ciro's idolized city, so let's hear it. They didn't live in Santos apparently, but being from São Paulo City, they would have been familiar with that popular local beach location.
Marc Verdiell is a French electrical engineer born in 1963 or 1964[ref] and best known for being the creator and host of the CuriousMarc YouTube channel where he does mind blowing repairs and reverse engineering of vintage computers and other electronic equipment.
Marc made $58.4m from the sale of LightLogic, an optoelectronics company he founded, to Intel in April 2001. This was just after the dot-com crash, but Intel apparently still correctly believed that the networking and the Internet would continue to grow and was investing in the area. His associate Frank Shum sued claiming he should be credited for some of the inventions sold but lost and Marc got it all.[ref][ref][ref]. Marc was then almost immediately appointed an Intel fellow at the extremelly early age of 37, and then stayed for a few years at Intel until 2006 according to his LinkedIn.[ref][ref]
Marc's full name is actualy Jean-Marc Verdiell, but Ciro Santilli remembers there was one YouTube video where he mentions he gave up on "Jean" partly because anglophones would murder its pronounciation all the time.
ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/20160274316 also suggests he may have a seldom used middle name "André", though that would be unusual in French custom
Marc's PhD thesis is listed at: theses.fr/1990PA112048 and it is entitled:which is translated into English as:but the full text is not available online.
Phase locking of semiconductor laser arrays
Profile of Marc Verdiell by Gizmodo (2018)
Source. youtu.be/tJ2-kkhghD4?t=74 gives his house's location Atherton, California, part of Silicon Valley. youtu.be/tJ2-kkhghD4?t=279 shows his amazing garden a bit more.
And a person who makes open educational content like Marc, truly deserves it.
radaris.com/p/Jean-Marc/Verdiell/ and many other sources list the exact address as:On Google Maps: maps.app.goo.gl/LM2iN9fz6YBteggp8
48 Linden Ave, Atherton, CA 94027
www.realtyhop.com/property-records/search/hoang-oanh-verdiell mentions that the property was bought on 2013-11-07 for $8,650,000 and lists other properties they've bought and sold and possibly inhabited:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEcnjh0lSsY give a tour of the house given by the real state agent Ken DeLeon. The dude has a very suspicious Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_DeLeon He is mentioend e.g. at www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/12/20/ken-deleon-top-silicon-valley-sales-agent-why-chinese-buyers-love-palo-alto/ as selling a lot to the Chinese.
A quick look on Google Maps show that that area is full of some incredible mansions. They managed to keep the entire place green and every house has a pool. Wikipedia comments web.archive.org/web/20220906010554/https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/most-expensive-zip-codes-us/:and Forbes confirms it for 2022: web.archive.org/web/20220906010554/https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/most-expensive-zip-codes-us/, by far on top.
Atherton is known for its wealth; in 1990 and 2019, Atherton was ranked as having the highest per capita income among U.S. towns with a population between 2,500 and 9,999, and it is regularly ranked as the most expensive ZIP Code in the United States [(94027)]. The town has very restricting zoning, only permitting one single-family home per acre and no sidewalks. The inhabitants have strongly opposed proposals to permit more housing construction
Starting in 2016, Marc appears to be have had a small court battle with some building contractors led by the Yip family, Cynthia Yip and Wai Yip, as Javelin Construction Inc. for selling them "a brand-new but defective home for $9m. The Verdiells then spent $5.3m further renewing it."[ref]. After endless back-and-forth, the Verdiell's won $1.2m in 2024.[ref]
The timestamp youtu.be/HKsjwT53yXw?t=580 mentions that his wife is called "Lori", and that she escaped the Soviet Union, and two of her brothers went to jail in the escape process.
The name is kind of hard to hear, but Google resolves it for us e.g. she and Marc were donnors to the Computer History Museum d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/core/core-2019.pdf
Ciro Santilli really liked the battle mode on this.
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.
I used to want to learn Mathematics.But it was very hard.So in the end, I became an engineer, and found an engineering solution to the problem, and married a Mathematician instead.