Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
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.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. By Esther Wojcicki, Sergey Brin's ex-mother-in-law:So basically strong focus on self-directed learning.
A moonshot classroom is a fundamental shift to give students more autonomy and agency in the classroom and entrusts them with greater ownership of their learning outcomes.
Also:so along the lines of project-based learning. Ciro Santilli specifically likes the "authentic audience" part, related: Section "Projects must aim for novelty"
Real World Work. Students must produce learning projects with real world applications and an authentic audience.
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
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.
Ciro Santilli often wonders to himself, how much of the natural sciences can one learn in a lifetime? Certainly, a very strong basis, with concrete experimental and physics, chemistry and biology should be attainable to all? How much Ciro manages to learning and teach in those areas is a kind of success metric of Ciro's life.
Article likely written by him: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/feb/22/home-schooling-register-families
“Especially my father. He was doing most of it and he is a savoury, strong character. He has strong beliefs about the world and in himself, and he was helping me a lot, even when I was at university as an undergraduate.”An only child, Arran was born in 1995 in Glasgow, where his parents were studying at the time. His father has Spanish lineage, having a great grandfather who was a sailor who moved from Spain to St Vincent in the Carribean. A son later left the islands for the UK where he married an English woman. Arran’s mother is Norwegian.
One of the articles says his father has a PhD. TODO where did he work? What's his PhD on? Photo: www.topfoto.co.uk/asset/1357880/
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-everyday-genius-pxsq5c50kt9:
Very very good. Those nice pre-Dot-com bubble vibes.
Might be freely watchable? Wikipedia links to:
But they do start with an FBI warning about copyright. So... erm.
Part 1 - Networking The Nerds talks about the TCP/IP and early machines implementing it:
- 21:00: shows inside The Pentagon. The way the dude who works there opens a his locked office door with an electric switch is just amazing. Cringely also mentions that there's an actual official speed limit in the corridors as he rides a carrier bike slowly through them.
- 21:45: the universities weren't enthusiastic, because people from other locations would be able to use your precious computer time. But finally ARPA forced the universities' hands, and they joined.
- 24:24 mentions that some of the guys who created ARPANET were actually previously counting cards at Casinos in Las Vegas, just like in the 21 (2008) film
- one of the centerpieces of development was at UCLA. The other was the BBN company. 33:55 shows the first router, then called them Interface Message Processor
- the first message was from UCLA to Stanford University. He was trying to write "Login", and it crashed at the 'g'. Epic. They later debugged it.
- towards the end talks about ALOHAnet, the first wireless computer communication done
Part 2 - Serving the Suits
- Robert Metcalfe. He's nice. Xerox PARC. Ethernet.
- Explains what is a "Workstation", notably showing one by Sun Microsystems. This is now an obscure "passé" thing in 2020 that young people like Ciro Santilli have only heard of in legend (or in outdated university computer labs!). Funny to think that so many people have had this idea before, including e.g. the Chromebook
- 10:46 mentions that all of Cisco, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems and where founded at Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460, at Stanford University.
- he then talks a lot about Sun. Sun became dominant in Wall Street.
- 19:05: Novell, from Utah. How they almost went bust, but were saved at the last moment by Ray Noorda, who refocused them to their NetWare product which was under recent development. It allowed file and printer sharing in IBM PCs. 22:55 shows how they had a live radio host for people waiting on customer support calls!
- 33:56 mentions how The Grateful Dead had in impact on the Internet, as people wanted computers to be able to access The WELL online forum. They still own the domain as of 2022: www.well.com/. It is interesting how Larry Page also liked The Grateful Dead as mentioned at The Google Story, his dad would take him to shows. Larry is a bit younger of course than the people in this documentary.
- 37 show McAfee
- 43:56: fantastic portrait of Cisco
Part 3 - Wiring the World:
- Berners-Lee at CERN and the invention of the URL.
- 1992: US Government allow commerce on the Internet
- Web browser history, Mosaic and Marc Andresseeen.
- 20:45: America Online
- 23:29: search engines and Excite. Google was a bit too small to be on his radar!
- 25:50: porn
- 27: The Motley Fool and advertising
- 30: Planet U grocery shopping
- 31:50: Amazon
- 33:00: immigrant workers, Indians playing cricket, outsourcing, Wipro Systems
- 41:25: Java
- 46:30: Microsoft joins the Internet. The Internet Tidal Wave Internet memo. Pearl Harbour day talk.
- 56:40: Excite Tour. If they had survived, they would have been Google with their quirky offices.
An IBM made/pushed term, but that matches Ciro Santilli's general view of how we should move forward AGI.
Framework built on top of React.
gothinkster/realworld blog example by Ciro Santilli: node Express Sequelize Next.js realworld example app.
Basically what this does is to get server-side rendering just working by React, including hydration, which is a good thing.
Next.js sends the first pre-rendered HTML page along with the JavaScript code. Then, JavaScript page switches just load the API data.
Next.js does this nicely by forcing you to provide page data in a serialized JSON format, even when rendering server-side (e.g. the return value of
getServerSideProps). This way, it is also able to provide either the full HTML, or just the JSON.Some general downsides:
- it does feel like they don't document deployment very well however, especially non-Vercel options, which is the company behind Next.js. I'm unable to find how to use a non Vercel CDN with ISR supposing that is possible.
- Next.js is very opinionated, and like any opinionated library it is sometimes hard to know why something is/isn't happening, and sometimes it is hard/impossible to do what you want with it unless they add support. They have done good progress, but even as of 2022, some aspects just feel so immature, some major-looking use cases are not very well done.
In theory, Next.js could be the "ultimate frontend framework". It does have a lot of development difficulties that need to be ironed out, but the general concepts, and things it tries to integrate, including e.g. webpack, TypeScript, etc. are good. Maybe the question is when will someone put it together with an amazing backend library and dominate and finally put an end to the infinite number of Js Frameworks!
In-tree examples at: github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples
In order to offer its amazing features, Next.js is also extremely opinionated, which means that if something wasn't designed to be possible, it basically isn't.
No prerender with custom server? It forces you to write your API with next as well? Or does it mean something else?
TODO can it statically generate pages that are created at runtime? E.g. if I create a new blog post, will it automatically upload a static page? It seems that yes, and that this is exactly what Incremental Static Regeneration means:However, Ciro can't find any mention of how to specify where the pages are uploaded to... this is pat of the non-Vercel deployment problem.
- github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/25410
- vercel.com/docs/next.js/incremental-static-regeneration
- github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/17711
- www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/mvvhym/a_complete_guide_to_incremental_static/
- github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/11552#discussioncomment-115595
- stackoverflow.com/questions/62105756/how-to-use-aws-with-next-js
- github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/17080
- github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/16852
Can't ISR prerenter by URL query parameters:
That plus the requirement to have one page per file under
pages/ leads to a lot of useless duplication, because then you are forced to place the URL parameters on the pathnames."Module not found: Can't resolve 'fs'" Hell. The main reason this happens seems to be the that in a higher order component, webpack can't determine if callbacks use the require or not to remove it from frontend code. Fully investigated and solved at:
Overviews:
- www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/8evy5d/what_are_the_downsides_to_nextjs/ 2017 What are the downsides to Next.js?
This is the one that hit Ciro Santilli the hardest, coming in at the point in which he started to discern between games and the real world a little better. His parents bought it for him during a trip to Disney World in Florida in 1996 (?), since electronics were much cheaper in the USA.
So as Ciro became older, and turned into a software engineer, he started to become more and more morbidly curious about "N64 internals": tool-assisted speedrun, how the devkit looks like, how games were developed for it, hardware leaks, etc.
Luckily Ciro's mind is not interested enough by that useless shit for Ciro to seriously study it himself. But that's what YouTube is for, right? Why do useless stuff when other more useless people can do it for you?
No-Nonsense Quantum Field Theory by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2020) Updated 2025-04-18 +Created 1970-01-01
This book really tries to recall basic things to ensure that the reader will be able to understand the more advanced ones.
But Ciro Santilli really prefers it when authors error on the side of obvious.
Term invented by Ciro Santilli, it refers to Richard Feynman, after helping to build the atomic bomb:
Ciro Santilli once visited the chemistry department of a world leading university, and the chemists there were obsessed with NMR. They had small benchtop NMR machines. They had larger machines. They had a room full of huge machines. They had them in corridors and on desk tops. Chemists really love that stuff. More precisely, these are used for NMR spectroscopy, which helps identify what a sample is made of.
Introduction to NMR by Allery Chemistry
. Source. - only works with an odd number of nucleons
- apply strong magnetic field, this separates the energy of up and down spins. Most spins align with field.
- send radio waves into sample to make nucleons go to upper energy level. We can see that the energy difference is small since we are talking about radio waves, low frequency.
- when nucleon goes back down, it re-emits radio waves, and we detect that. TODO: how do we not get that confused with the input wave, which is presumably at the same frequency? It appears to send pulses, and then wait for the response.
How to Prepare and Run a NMR Sample by University of Bath (2017)
Source. This is a more direct howto, cool to see. Uses a Bruker Corporation 300. They have a robotic arm add-on. Shows spectrum on computer screen at the end. Shame no molecule identification after that!This video has the merit of showing real equipment usage, including sample preparation.
Says clearly that NMR is the most important way to identify organic compounds.
- youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=41 lists some of the most common targets, including hydrogen and carbon-13
- youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=124 ethanol example
- youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=251 they use solvents where all protium is replaced by deuterium to not affect results. Genius.
- youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=354 usually they do 16 radio wave pulses
NMR spectroscopy visualized by ScienceSketch
. Source. 2020. Decent explanation with animation. Could go into a bit more numbers, but OK.
A weapons-grade ring of electrorefined plutonium, typical of the rings refined at Los Alamos and sent to Rocky Flats for fabrication
. Source. The ring has a purity of 99.96%, weighs 5.3 kg, and is approx 11 cm in diameter. It is enough plutonium for one bomb core. Which city shall we blow up today?
Ciro Santilli is mildly obsessed by nuclear reactions, because they are so quirky. How can a little ball destroy a city? How can putting too much of it together produce criticality and kill people like in the Slotin accident or the Tokaimura criticality accident. It is mind blowing really.
More fun nuclear stuff to watch:
- Dr. Strangelove (1964)
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)
- The World Of Enrico Fermi by Harvard Project Physics (1970)
- Fat Man and Little Boy (1987) shows a possibly reasonably realistic of the history of the development of the Trinity
The Ultimate Guide to Nuclear Weapons by hypohystericalhistory (2022)
Source. Good overall summary. Some interesting points:- youtu.be/8uIPQBOCJ64?t=2946 talks about the difference between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons
- youtu.be/8uIPQBOCJ64?t=3291 mentions variable yield devices, this is the main new thing Ciro Santilli learned from this video
- youtu.be/8uIPQBOCJ64?t=3416 discusses if a strategic nuclear weapon usage would inevitably lead to tactical nuclear weapon escalation. It then mentions one case in which a possibly comparable escalation didn't happen: the abstinence of using chemical weapon during World War II.