Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
Lots of similar ideologies to Ciro Santilli, love it:
- sandymaguire.me/about/:
- he's an idealist
I might best be described somewhere between independent researcher and voluntarily-unemployed bum. At the ripe old age of 27 I decided to quit my highly-lucrative engineering job and decide to focus more on living than on grinding for the man. It's what you might call a work in progress.
- sandymaguire.me/blog/reaching-climbing/: don't be a pussyOne is also reminded of Gwern Branwen. Sandy is also into self-improvement stuff, so even more like Gwern. This is a point Ciro diverges on. Ciro works actively on self-worsening.
Last Friday was my final day at work. According to my facebook profile, I am now "happily retired." As of today, I don't plan to do another day of "traditional work" in my life. That's not to say that I'll be sitting idle playing tiddly winks. I want to build things, to dedicate my life to independent study, and to get really, really good with building communities. I don't have time for any of this "work" stuff that somehow pervades our entire culture, choking our inspiration and sapping our energy away from the things we'd rather be doing.
- he thinks university is useless:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/where-uni-fails/ Where University Fails (2018), mostly talking about backward design
- sandymaguire.me/blog/gatekept/ rejected from Imperial College PhD program due to grade being slightly too low for their stupid requirements, even though he had a referral already, and an amazing CV
- he likes jazz: sandymaguire.me/blog/too-smart/
Other interesting points:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/sandy-runback/ he changed his own name to Sandy because he didn't like it, he was born Alexander
- algebradriven.design/ closed source books though, ouch. At least they seem to have been made with leanpub though, could be worse.
He's a Haskell person.
Ciro Santilli lived in Santos from about the year 1998 to 2007, with a 10 month hiatus in Coventry, UK, until he went to the University of São Paulo.
Santos is the nearest beach city to São Paulo City, and for this reason:
- the largest port of Latin America in 2018, through which large chunks of the precious coffee export exited Brazil in the 19th century. There is a Coffee museum in Santos.This importance is also linked to the fact that Santos is one of the oldest european cities in Brazil, being founded in 1546. From this you can infer that it was a good port. One reason for this is obvious if you look at the map of the city: the neighbouring towns of Praia Grande and Guarujá form a large protected bay where ships may safely dock.
- a popular local tourist destination that gets crowded on hot weekends, with the beach line being fully built with tall buildings from the 60's, many of which became incredibly bent due to the inadequate technology used on such soft soil
Ciro idolizes Santos as the perfect location to live nature-wise due to its amazing wide sandy beach, in which Ciro spent endless hours walking on the sand and on the largest beachfront garden in the world (archive), meditating, and playing some soccer after school was over. Santos is also the city where Pelé first played professionally.
Ciro has visited Santos several times after leaving Brazil. Doing this gives him a weird feeling of having a separate life, in which time passes 2 weeks every few years. Of course, as your family grows, it gets harder and harder to go back home, and your family members might want to just go travel to more interesting places than just stay at your wonderful beach which you love in part due to nostalgia.
Ciro is also fond of the concept of the small public buildings near the beach garden (postos de praia), which serve different cultural activities: library, comic book store, art cinema, surf school. It is such a shame that the library and comic book ones are in such bad shape as of 2020, old books and poor people who go there to sleep a bit in the barely working air conditioning. Ciro fantasizes how those could instead be cultural hubs for the gathering of the brightest artists, and scientists, of town. Maybe they are just too small. Maybe it is not within the realm of possibility of public service. Maybe, we should focus instead in the poorer regions, far form the beach. But the dream remains.
Santos only has one natural defect: mosquitoes. By the sea it is fine because the wind is strong, and they don't like salt water. But anywhere else, you will be eaten alive, and maybe get dengue, Ciro got it once. Gene drive, please.
This instagram page has several drone videos of the region: www.instagram.com/malta.drone
Canal 5 on the beach by VicTrindade (2017)
Source. This is one of Santos 7 old canals, which are still in use and serve to reduce floodings in the city, which are caused by the strong tropical rains that fall on the city. This is particularly important to keep the mosquito population under some control. All canals were built in the first third of the 20th century, except canal 7 which is from 1968[ref]. The canals have normally very shallow water when it is not raining, and since it is rain water they are basically clean. There are other canals which are/were used for sewage, but then are not open air. The canals now serve as handy reference points and practical avenues in town, as well as being surrounded with nice trees that provide shade and drop small inedible purple fruit that will stain your car for all eternity. They do scar the beach line a bit it must be said, but it's part of the charm of the city, and they serve as good reference points for runners.Although Ciro Santilli lived in São Paulo City nominally during his studies, it would be more precise to say that he lived in University of São Paulo-land, because Ciro was cheap, didn't have a car, and did nothing but study, stay at home, go back to Santos to see his parents and the beach.
But the little he saw of the city made a deep impression on him.
The unreasonable size.
The unbearable contrasts.
Caetano's Sampa is the ultimate description of the city!
While in Brazil, Ciro Santilli used to walk through the outskirts of a small favela to get to university every day, the Favela de São Remo.
See the street view for: R. Catumbi - Vila Butantã Vila Butantã, São Paulo - State of São Paulo, Brazil, e.g. with this link.
To the left, the outer walls of a large police station, with concertina wire on top and all.
To the right, dudes selling drugs on the entry of a small corridor street, presumably to which they could easily escape to in case of need.
The cops could have identified the dealers with binoculars if they actually wanted to!!!
The drug sellers did keep the peace in their business area, and Ciro never got robbed, and would come back from university parties on foot late through the favela.
But Ciro's friends did say that things got much worse after Ciro left, for example a flash kidnapping was reported in 2015.
Wikipedia says that this favela started in the 60s and 70s as settlements of the builders of the University, and that many of the people there still work for the University.
This is consistent with the terribly old buildings Ciro saw when he was at university. They even had the building skills to build their own homes.
The state just has to either legalize those people, or give them houses somewhere else nearby. A world class University is the most important thing a poor country can have, and its image cannot be jeopardized like that.
The existence of that favela, right next to one of the most important universities in Latin America, puts Brazil's surreal social inequality into perspective. Especially considering that before extremely heavy university entry quotas were added, basically all students of the university (or at least of the courses that lead to high paying jobs) had attended private schools, and therefore were not of the poorer classes (see passage about 10 out 500 passage from Section "Free gifted education").
The janitors of the apartment block Ciro lived all lived in the favela. Yes, in poor countries lives are worth nothing, and some poorer people work by watching the entrance of buildings of less poor people 24/7 to guard it from other even more desperate poor people who might want to rob the not so poor inhabitants. They also do janitor jobs like cleaning common areas in parallel.
They were incredibly nice hard-working people, and Ciro spoke often with them. If only given the opportunity, those people could be amazing engineers or scientists obviously. Ciro was also glad to be their friends, and sat down with them quite a few times for several minutes after coming back from University parties, partly because he felt bad about them having to work at that time, but also partly because he just liked them. And they were always up to date on who had come back with a girl to the apartment or not. Ciro imagines that if it had been him, it would have been a perfect bragging opportunity ;)
They had "nothing" but were still happy. This is true wisdom, and a good reminder that all our non-transhumanist technical goals are nothing.
We must destroy social inequality.
This is an interesting initiative which has some similarities to Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook project.
The fatal flaw of the initiative in Ciro Santilli's opinion is the lack of user-generated content. We will never get there without UGC and algorithms, never.
Also as of 2021, it mostly useless business courses: learn.saylor.org unfortunately.
But it has several redeeming factors which Ciro Santilli aproves of:
- exam as a service-like
- they have a GitHub: github.com/saylordotorgo
Licensing appears to be a mixed mess between the dreaded CC BY-NC-SA and the good CC BY, e.g.:?
The founder Michael J. Saylor looks a bit crooked, Rich people who create charitable prizes are often crooked comes to mind. But maybe he's just weird.
Michael Saylor interview by Lex Fridman (2022)
Source. At the timestamp:What statement... maybe he's actually not crooked, maybe it was just an accounting mistake... God, why.
When I go, all my assets will flow into a foundation, and the foundation's mission is to make education free for everybody forever.
If only Ciro Santilli knew how to contact him and convince him that his current approach is innefective and that Ciro has something better! Michael, please Google into this page some day, Ciro Santilli needs funding for OurBigBook.com. A hopeless Tweet at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1548350114623660035. Also tried to hit his
saylor@strategy.com.More precisely, for students whose parents don't live near the school. Or alternatively, online-only courses that offer the same diploma as the presencial version. Or a compromise where the best N% students get accommodation, where N is a parameter of how decent your society is overall.
Since all the learning resources will be available online on OurBigBook.com, or through online 1-to-1 chats with mentors, it might be cheaper for students to work either from their parent's homes if their home has reasonable work conditions: a silent room with reasonable Internet access and no drug addicts in the house.
Alternatively, a public local library with free WiFi would do as well. But there would need to be a strict silence policy enforced, unlike most public libraries we see today. Ciro once saw a bird shaped noise detector that would sing if the noise went above a certain threshold, that was a good idea. Just like linting, it is easier to let machines decide deterministically on subjective questions to reduce useless arguments over who is right. Ciro has even seen libraries where the local council uses the same library open space as a citizen counsel area. What's the fucking point... these people have never done any deep work in their lives.
Then the state only needs to pay transportation and temporary accommodation to attend concentrated month-long laboratory workshop courses and week-long conferences, since the only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories. In cases where the home conditions are not good enough, the state can either pay for on-demand WeWork-like offices near the student's home, of for a full on-campus accommodation as in a boarding school. What is indispensable is that all students who pass the entry criteria must have such working conditions. Students who stay home can also earn a scholarship to help pay for their rent, food and Internet access.
Anything else is just incredibly unfair to the poor. Ciro Santilli has already witnessed two cases, in developed, and under-developed countries, where very high potential poorer students were forced to work to support themselves in parallel to a demanding degree because their parents couldn't pay their rent on a different city, and the students mental health issues due to this. In one of those cases the student had to abandon the course altogether.
It doesn't help that school has become a pure student-evaluation system, which basically implies putting studets through a lot of useless pressure.
One of the stories that Ciro Santilli's father tells is about how when they were dating, one of Ciro Santilli's mother's greatest wish for her hypotetical child would be that "they should not need to work during their studies as she had". As destiny would have it, Ciro Santilli's family had good conditions and Ciro never thought even once about money. And even then, school still sucked. Imagine without that basic, mandatory, stability!
How software engineers view science:
Science is the reverse engineering of nature.
Ciro Santilli had once assigned this as one of Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts, but he later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering ("similar to scientific research, the only difference being that scientific research is about a natural phenomenon") so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.
The guy who coded the initial version of BackRub, the first version of Google Search, but left before the company formed. TODO how did he meet Largey Brage? Why did he leave Google?
In 1997 he cofounded eGroups, a mailing list management website, together with the mysterious Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother. eGroups was sold to Yahoo! in 2000 for $432m, just before the Dot-com bubble burst.
As of 2021 his net worth was of "only" $1b, even though his original Google shares would have been worth $13b. He must have sold too much too early to do other cool stuff. archive.ph/IgkMI:Did Largey give him this nice deal as a way to thank him for helping start the company, or was it just that they had no big hopes and $800 seemed right? youtu.be/pmXDtTD6vQY?t=146 suggests the stocks were part of his compensation for 3 months of coding work. Also mentioned at: nypost.com/2021/08/20/google-founder-created-revenge-site-against-estranged-wife
When Mr. Page and Mr. Brin founded Google in 1998, Mr. Hassan bought 160,000 shares for $800. When Google went public in 2004, the shares were worth more than $200 million. The shares, now in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would be valued at more than $13 billion today [2021].
In 2001, Scott married a Vietnamese chick called Allison Huynh from university and they had three children.
In 2014 Hassan asked for a divorce, and the proceedings were a shitshow, lasting more than 7 years.
In 2004 he tried strike a $20 million[ref] post-nuptial after Google went public, which she declined, so things were already crappy back then.
Then, during the divorce, Scott even created a revenge website for her as well. He's so petty! Down as of 2024 of course. There are only some weird redirect archives now: web.archive.org/web/20210915000000*/https://allisonhuynh.com redirecting to sites.google.com/view/allisonhuynhcom
The divorce is covered in several major outlets:
- www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9912929/Billionaire-investor-helped-launch-Google-accused-divorce-terrorism-bitter-break-up.html
- www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/Scott-Hassan-Allison-Huynh-divorce.html
- www.cnbctv18.com/technology/who-is-scott-hassan-the-google-founder-accused-of-divorce-terrorism-10543641.htm
- www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2020/02/28/suitable-technologies-bankruptcy-filing-scott-hassan-allison-huynh/
To be fair, he did work on a lot of cool stuff after BackRub for which he deserves credit, not the least the company that created the Robot Operating System, which is a cool sounding open source project, which is awesome. But this divorce story is so damning! He should just own up to it, split the cash, and move on... The fact that the Google money came from an investment before marriage likely complicates things.
The fact that he does not have a Wikipedia page as of 2022 is mind blowing, especially after divorce details. Maybe Ciro Santilli will create it one day. Just no patience now. OK, done it June 2022: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hassan let's see if it lasts. The page lasted but ended up being Ciro Santilli's first Edit war, how exciting:
- December 2022: an anonymous user with IP from California removed divorce details and google share ownership details, both of which had a New York Times source: www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/Scott-Hassan-Allison-Huynh-divorce.html. Discussion at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scott_Hassan#Divorce_details_removed_as_%22poorly_sourced_material%22_by_anonymous_user_even_though_they_had_a_source_from_the_New_York_Times It feels exactly like the type of thing Scott would have done himself. And he possibly inadvertently exposed his real IP in doing so: 24.6.226.102. It is pingable, but Nmap analysis shows nothing of interest.
- June 2024: another partial revert removing the juicy divorce details by user named "ReversingWrongs". The username choice so incredibly cute and naive it makes Ciro wonder if this is from some woman that loves him (mother, child, new partner?) rather than just a Hassan sockpuppet. OK, perhaps with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#People_who_are_relatively_unknown the divorce has to be left out? It's always impossible to decide with those wikipedia things. What you can say, is not necessarily what people want to read about, even when it is incredibly well source.
Looking a the history, he just kept revealing different IPs and continuously reverting, which other people put back in. Another of his IPs:There is also an interesting edit from 2600:1700:5470:5c50:7566:9580:1b60:ab41 which mentions without source the little known factso it could be Hassan adding some actually good and interesting information to the article. That one however also has an edit to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Nagel so maybe it's not him.
- 24.234.111.66 is marked as being from Las Vegas online.
after working at Washington University's Medical Libraries Group (having been recruited out of SUNY Buffalo for the summer).
Screenshot of allisonhuynh.com by the Daily Mail
. Source. In the 2020's, this refers to writing down everything you know, usually in some graph structured way.
This is somewhat the centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers: dumping your brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
This is also the closest one can get to immortality pre full blown transhumanism.
Ciro's still looking for the restore this plaintext backup on a new body though.
It is a good question, how much of your knowledge you would be able to give to others with text and images. It is likely almost all of it, except for coordination/signal processing tasks.
His passion for braindumping like this is a big motivation behind Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook.com work.
Bibliography:
The first one Ciro Santilli managed to get working in 2022, and which has a free plan.
You can either verify your sending domain by adding 3 DNS records.
Saw the email on Gmail, but Microsoft Outlook did put it into junk though. Yahoo mail also worked fine.
100 emails a day is not insane, but it is forever and appropriate for a test, I'm happy with that.
Source code: github.com/sequelize/sequelize
Some usage examples under: Section "Sequelize example".
As of 2021, this library is extremely painful to use. It does feel semi-mature, but there are just too much horrible things going on;
- the documentation is a bit messy and misses a lot of stuff. The examples are often too short, and it is hard to understand what specific options they are talking about do because they lack clear input/expected output pairs. Examples:
- the implementation has several inelegant/unintuitive annoyances/requirements of code repetition that drive you mad.The association API feels notably bad, it took a few days for Ciro Santilli to learn to do what he considers "basic" association operations, knowledge which he dumped to: stackoverflow.com/questions/22958683/how-to-implement-many-to-many-association-in-sequelize/67973948#67973948See also: how to decide if an ORM is good?.
- bugs are piling up. It appears that many key devs left, and current maintainers are just not being able to keep up.And they have setup a stupid bot that closes every thread automatically after a few days, what's the point... valid bugs are being closed due to this, and it is impossible to distinguish what is solved and what isn't since everything gets closed.
Some glaring issues are listed at the horrors of Sequelize.
Can anyone know that clearcoins came from Serai DEX? Because if they can, exchanges could just blacklist anything coming from Serai DEX.
Ciro Santilli asked at: x.com/cirosantilli/status/1855332323405009047. They replied, and the answer is yes, it is possible to know that clearcois came from Serai: x.com/SeraiDEX/status/1855337686208516523:
Serai is fully auditable. With that is full transparency into all outputs received, and all outputs sentRemoving auditability would massively incrase complexity and force users into needing to make fraud proofs if they didn't receive coins expected, or require extreme ZK proofs