Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
Porn vlog Updated 2025-07-16
This is a porn style defined by Ciro Santilli as:
Ciro believes that this is an interesting type of pornography, as it feels more natural and humane than all the horrible trash that comes out of horrendous professional mainstream porn industry.
Yes, it could go down the YouTube/Instagram alley, and lead the vloggers to do things they wouldn't normally do because of the audience. But who is to say that Ciro Santilli doesn't do the same on Stack Overflow to some extent?
That type of porn requires some big courage to make. Or balls if you will. Kudos to those creators, as it is so taboo it could greatly impact their future job prospects.
The travel sex vlog appears to be the most popular way to do it. Presuamably the reason being that you would not be able to interact with people in a normal job, so to keep things interesting you need to go to some random places.
Examples:
- lunaokko.com/social-media/ Luna Okko. French sex vlogger, basically a super normal travel vlog with sex scenes with her boyfriend added in, see e.g. the series "Luna's Journey".Perhaps the travel porn vlog is the simplest way to do it. A sex vlog is much like a cooking flog in some way, except it is hard to get new ingredients, so changing the scenery is the easiest way to get some diversity.Some day some nymphomaniac should actually make a sex vlog fucking a different man each time, that would be amazing, even from a scientific point of view, so we can see how different men fuck, a bit like an open version of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Sex.2022 interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGcWrpXXtuQ
- twitter.com/JamesWithLola also a travel sex vlog, also French. Hum.
Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) Updated 2025-07-16
All pages below are from the second edition from 2018. It seems that there weren't any changes in the text, the updated preface mentions
As it happens, nearly 15 years have passed since the 1st edition of Power, Sex, Suicide was published, and I am resisting the temptation to make any lame revisions. Some say that even Darwin lessened the power of his arguments in the Origin of Species through his multiple revisions, in which he dealt with criticisms and sometimes shifted his views in the wrong direction. I prefer my original to speak for itself, even if it turns out to be wrong.
This is partly addressed in the preface of the second edition from 2018.
Central thesis:
- there are two sexes because of mitochondria
- the acquisition of mitochondria was one of the most important steps in the evolution of eukaryotes.There are no known eukaryotes which never had mitochondria. Having mitochondria appears to be a requisite for being an eukaryote.Contrast this for example with multicellularity, which is highly polyphyletic.
- Apoptosis is largely regulated by mitochondria
- there are two main theories for how the mitochondria endosymbiosis started:
- parsitic hypothesis of mitochondrial endosymbiosis: a parasitic option rather than cooperative
- hydrogen hypothesis: a cooperative option rather than parasitic
Smaller points:
- 10% of our body weight (dry presumably?) is mitochondria. Also quoted at: www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/mighty_mitochondria. TODO confirm.
- eukaryotes can do phatocytosis due to their cytoskeleton
- paints a colorful picture of Peter Mitchell. Some Wikipedia edits are warranted!
- it is hard for complex organisms to evolve because longer DNA means longer replication time
- cancer is natural selection gone wrong
- multicellular organisms are not utopias where every cell lives happily. Rather, they are dictatorships, where any dissident is forced to commit seppuku. Lu Xun's petition quote comes to mind.
Nitpicks:
- the book calls ATP synthase "ATPase" in several points, which is confusing because -ase means "something that breaks", and in 2020 parlance, there are ATPases which actually break ATP: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPase. The book itself acknowledges that on page 135:
The ATPase is freely reversible. Under some circumstances it can go into reverse, whereupon it splits ATP, and uses the energy released to pump protons up the drive shaft, back across the membrane against the pressure of the reservoir. In fact the very name ATPase (rather than ATP synthase) signifies this action, which was discovered first. This bizarre trait hides a deep secret of life, and we’ll return to it in a moment.
Some criticisms:
- some of the later chapters are a bit more boring, like the stuff about warm-blooded animals. Perhaps is it that Ciro Santilli is more interested in the molecular aspects than macro
- the author talks about some very recent research at the time. While this does highlight his expertise, some of the points mentioned might still be in a state of flow. This is acknowledged by the author himself on the 2018 updated preface however.
Princeton Application Repository for Shared-Memory Computers Created 2024-07-29 Updated 2025-07-16
Prize Updated 2025-07-16
Generally, prizes that pay big lumps of money to well established individuals are a bit useless, it would be better to pay smaller sums to struggling beginners in the field, of which there are aplenty.
The most important part about prizes should not be the money, nor the recognition, but rather explaining better what the laureates did. In this, most prizes fail. Thus Ciro Santilli's project idea: Project to explain each Nobel Prize better.
Procrastination Updated 2025-07-16
Project Xanadu Updated 2025-07-16
Crazy overlaps with Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook Project, Wikipedia states:
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
PROMYS Europe Created 2024-07-12 Updated 2025-07-16
Strongly against giving answer to problem sets... sad, as of 2024: promys-europe.org/students/faq (archive):and:It does not seem to be the case for the American version however after a quick look: promys.org/programs/promys/for-students/faq/. Sad to see.
When do I get the solutions to the problems on the problem sets?When you discover them for yourself: on your own or collaborating with other students. Returning students and counsellors and faculty will support and encourage you, but not by giving you the answers (hint: they don't even give hints). What PROMYS Europe does is offer you the tools and structure to enable you to be a creative mathematician.
What rules are there at PROMYS Europe?
Also participants are strongly forbidden from sharing the problem sheets with anyone from outside the program. Ciro Santilli asked a participant face to face if he could take a look, but was told that they are not allowed to share it. So it is a very clear and strict order. Truly sad.
PROMYS Europe 2024 problem set Set 2 Created 2024-07-12 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli got his hands on this one. But he was unable to obtain the others. Solving them here would also pose a serious DMCA risk, so perhaps it's just not worth it.
ProtonMail asks for login every time in the browser Updated 2025-07-16
It is fucking annoying!
- www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/pn21dn/have_to_log_in_every_time_i_restart_the_browser/
- www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/6qwm9w/automatic_login_to_protonmail_from_browser/
- protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/945460-general-ideas/suggestions/48228635-mail-proton-me-should-automatically-login-to-last
Not just on browser close. Whenever Ciro Santilli pastes proton.me/ on the browser bar and click enter. Chromium 123.
More precisely: pasting mail.proton.me on the browser bar redirects to account.proton.me/switch each time. From there, selecting different accounts leads to different mail.proton.me/u/<UID>/inbox, e.g. mail.proton.me/u/41/inbox is my main one. If I paste mail.proton.me/u/41/inbox on the browser, then it works directly.
Python version virtualization Created 2025-02-22 Updated 2025-07-16
Answers by Ciro Santilli:
- unix.stackexchange.com/questions/9711/what-is-the-proper-way-to-manage-multiple-python-versions/556519#556519
- stackoverflow.com/questions/10960805/apt-get-install-for-different-python-versions/59268046#59268046
- askubuntu.com/questions/682869/how-do-i-install-a-different-python-version-using-apt-get/1195153#1195153
- "inside project" question:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/2547554/multiple-python-versions-on-the-same-machine/79448734#79448734
- www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/uf4i6w/comment/mdfuyrj/
QED manifesto Updated 2025-07-16
If Ciro Santilli ever becomes rich, he's going to solve this with: website front-end for a mathematical formal proof system, promise.
QEMU Updated 2025-07-16
Great way to understand how operating systems work, which Ciro Santilli used extensively in his Linux Kernel Module Cheat.
Ciro Santilli has some good related articles listed under: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Qualcomm Updated 2025-07-16
Quantization as an Eigenvalue Problem Updated 2025-07-16
This paper appears to calculate the Schrödinger equation solution for the hydrogen atom.
TODO is this the original paper on the Schrödinger equation?
Published on Annalen der Physik in 1926.
Open access in German at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/andp.19263840404 which gives volume 384, Issue 4, Pages 361-376. Kudos to Wiley for that. E.g. Nature did not have similar policies as of 2023.
This paper may have fallen into the public domain in the US in 2022! On the Internet Archive we can see scans of the journal that contains it at: ia903403.us.archive.org/29/items/sim_annalen-der-physik_1926_79_contents/sim_annalen-der-physik_1926_79_contents.pdf. Ciro Santilli extracted just the paper to: commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AQuantisierung_als_Eigenwertproblem.pdf. It is not as well processed as the Wiley one, but it is of 100% guaranteed clean public domain provenance! TODO: hmmm, it may be public domain in the USA but not Germany, where 70 years after author deaths rules, and Schrodinger died in 1961, so it may be up to 2031 in that country... messy stuff. There's also the question of wether copyright is was tranferred to AdP at publication or not.
Quantum computing Updated 2025-07-16
Quantum is getting hot in 2019, and even Ciro Santilli got a bit excited: quantum computing could be the next big thing.
No useful algorithm has been economically accelerated by quantum yet as of 2019, only useless ones, but the bets are on, big time.
To get a feeling of this, just have a look at the insane number of startups that are already developing quantum algorithms for hardware that doesn't/barely exists! quantumcomputingreport.com/players/privatestartup (archive). Some feared we might be in a bubble: Are we in a quantum computing bubble?
To get a basic idea of what programming a quantum computer looks like start by reading: Section "Quantum computing is just matrix multiplication".
Some people have their doubts, and that is not unreasonable, it might truly not work out. We could be on the verge of an AI winter of quantum computing. But Ciro Santilli feels that it is genuinely impossible to tell as of 2020 if something will work out or not. We really just have to try it out and see. There must have been skeptics before every single next big thing.
Quantum computing could be the next big thing Updated 2025-07-16
But recent developments are making it too exciting to ignore.
Quantum electrodynamics Updated 2025-07-16
Theory that describes electrons and photons really well, and as Feynman puts it "accounts very precisely for all physical phenomena we have ever observed, except for gravity and nuclear physics" ("including the laughter of the crowd" ;-)).
While Ciro acknowledges that QED is intrinsically challenging due to the wide range or requirements (quantum mechanics, special relativity and electromagnetism), Ciro feels that there is a glaring gap in this moneyless market for a learning material that follows the Middle Way as mentioned at: the missing link between basic and advanced. Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979) is one of the best attempts so far, but it falls a bit too close to the superficial side of things, if only Feynman hadn't assumed that the audience doesn't know any mathematics...
The funny thing is that when Ciro Santilli's mother retired, learning it (or as she put it: "how photons and electrons interact") was also one of her retirement plans. She is a pharmacist by training, and doesn't know much mathematics, and her English was somewhat limited. Oh, she also wanted to learn how photosynthesis works (possibly not fully understood by science as that time, 2020). Ambitious old lady!!!
Combines special relativity with more classical quantum mechanics, but further generalizing the Dirac equation, which also does that: Dirac equation vs quantum electrodynamics. The name "relativistic" likely doesn't need to appear on the title of QED because Maxwell's equations require special relativity, so just having "electro-" in the title is enough.
Before QED, the most advanced theory was that of the Dirac equation, which was already relativistic but TODO what was missing there exactly?
As summarized at: youtube.com/watch?v=_AZdvtf6hPU?t=305 Quantum Field Theory lecture at the African Summer Theory Institute 1 of 4 by Anthony Zee (2004):
- classical mechanics describes large and slow objects
- special relativity describes large and fast objects (they are getting close to the speed of light, so we have to consider relativity)
- classical quantum mechanics describes small and slow objects.
- QED describes objects that are both small and fast
That video also mentions the interesting idea that:Therefore, for small timescales, energy can vary a lot. But mass is equivalent to energy. Therefore, for small time scale, particles can appear and disappear wildly.
- in special relativity, we have the mass-energy equivalence
- in quantum mechanics, thinking along the time-energy uncertainty principle,
QED is the first quantum field theory fully developed. That framework was later extended to also include the weak interaction and strong interaction. As a result, it is perhaps easier to just Google for "Quantum Field Theory" if you want to learn QED, since QFT is more general and has more resources available generally.
Like in more general quantum field theory, there is on field for each particle type. In quantum field theory, there are only two fields to worry about:
- photon field
- electromagnetism field
Lecture 01 | Overview of Quantum Field Theory by Markus Luty (2013)
Source. This takes quite a direct approach, one cool thing he says is how we have to be careful with adding special relativity to the Schrödinger equation to avoid faster-than-light information.