Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

While listening to endless hours of vaporwave while coding, Ciro Santilli spotted some amazing Buddhist-like voice samples, and eventually found that they were by Allan Watts.

Self-help? Maybe. Cult leader? Maybe. But at least it is one that Ciro buys into.

Is there a correlation between software engineers and Buddhism and liking the dude? Because this exists: wattsalan.github.io

Other good talks:

This dude looks like a God. Ciro Santilli does not understand his stuff, but just based on the names of his theories, e.g. "Yoga of anabelian algebraic geometry", and on his eccentric lifestyle, it is obvious that he was in fact a God.

Draft by Ciro Santilli with cross language input/output test cases: github.com/cirosantilli/algorithm-cheat

By others:

In this project Ciro Santilli extracted (almost) all Git commit emails from GitHub with Google BigQuery! The repo was later taken down by GitHub. Newbs, censoring publicly available data!

Ciro also created a beautifully named variant with one email per commit: github.com/cirosantilli/imagine-all-the-people. True art. It also had the effect of breaking this "what's my first commit tracker": twitter.com/NachoSoto/status/1761873362706698469

Is is possible or impossible?

Some threads suggest that there is a setting, but Ciro Santilli can't find settings that make www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli/ visible in a incognito window.

Asked by Ciro Santilli:

Bibliography:

Superset of force public university teachers to publish their teaching material with an open license.

One particularly obscene case Ciro Santilli encountered was: all DVSA materials should be free.

As of 2021, Ciro Santilli feels strongly that Amazon originals are so much sillier compared to Netflix ones in average.

Of course, everything pales in comparison to The Criterion Collection.

Too many fun skit videos for Ciro Santilli's taste, but does have some serious derivations in quantum electrodynamics.

Proponent of evergreen notes.

He's also curious about quantum computing: quantum.country/ like Ciro Santilli. Some crazy overlaps we get.

Ciro Santilli invented this term, it refers to mechanisms in which you put an animal in a virtual world that the animal can control, and where you can measure the animal's outputs.

Ciro Santilli has mixed feelings about animal rights.

On one hand, his irrational side wants of course all animals to be happy.

On the other, he does not care about this enough to not kill and eat them, even though he believes that you could live off plants relatively well.

His more rational side says: humans are sacred. Either because you believe in the soul, or because your built-in empathy behaviours. If it is not a human, do whatever you want to it. Killing is already undoubtedly the greatest sin. It is not OK to kill a human painlessly is it? So if torturing it brings humans good, then do it.

Of course, this does get use close and closer to "the what is a human" question, which is more relevant than ever in the awakening of genetics: all species are after all a continuum right?

And Ciro does not have a simple solution to this problem, besides that in 99.9999% the answer is obvious to 99.9999% of the people, and for the others cases, we have to do it like the law and make flawed rules to cover the remaining 0.000099999% cases and let juries decide the rest.

The only other sensible sacredness barrier is the common vegetarian "nervous systems are sacred" one. But how can you believe that if you also follow the religion of physics, where everything is just made of atoms?

Is it evil to take one neuron and torture it? What does that even mean? It will be fun when pain and pleasure are fully understood.

And you are going to have a really hard time when mosquitoes start transmitting deadly diseases that kill your family.

Laws in most 2020 Western modern societies have converged to a hypocritical balance between not offending people too much by hiding the killing and minimizing the pain when possible at low cost. Killing animals painlessly is basically always fine if it brings any "non sadistic" pleasure to humans. And torturing animals is fine with approval e.g. to make medicines.

This has the downside of increasing costs for society. Maybe there are practical benefits besides people feeling bad about animals? Maybe we would have more serial killers if people were free to torture animals? Maybe people in butcher shops would become depressive if their bosses weren't forced to use more expensive painless killing methods? Neither of those seems like huge arguments though.

It eventually comes down to: "how much more is a human life worth than that of an animal" which brings Jesus's Matthew 6:25-34 "Do Not Worry" (archive) quote to mind:

Non-vegetarian pets owners also baffle Ciro, as most of them basically extend the sacred human line further arbitrarily to certain other cute looking animals like dogs, cats or rabbits, but will gladly kill a cow indirectly by paying someone to pay someone to pay someone to cut it into small pieces. Or they believe that certain specific individuals are sacred. Admittedly, the latter is more rational, and looks a lot of how we treat our own families well, and can accept that other families are not doing so well.

Ciro's even more rational evil side says: the real reason why humans are sacred is a practical one: people have families that love them, and they come to kill you if you kill them, and this starts endless chains of violence that make society unbearable.

While animals feel pain when their children are killed, their memory and logic is just not good enough to fully understand that humans in general have an evil plot to it, and they don't have a method to communicate between themselves and fight back.

For similar reasons, Ciro is pro-abortion.

Futurama's S02E15 "The Problem With Popplers" episode blew Ciro's mind so much.

Ciro should stop discussing topics in which infinite argument has already been had. Sometimes he writes things down so he can stop caring the next time the subject comes up, as there's no need to say it again once it is written.

Nothing makes the fact that your life is an illusion clearer than animations of molecular biology processes. You just have no idea what is going on inside your own body right now!

And don't get Ciro Santilli started on the brain and the impossibility of free will.

And yet, we live, oblivious to all of it.

Amazing creators:

This is very widely used in courses as of 2020, it became kind of the default book.

Unfortunately, this approach bores Ciro Santilli to death. Or perhaps is too just advanced for him to appreciate. Either of those.

800+ pages.

OMG, Ciro Santilli only learned about this in 2021 after: twitter.com/ryancdotorg/status/1375484757916672000

The key difficulties of cryptocurrencies are:

Until those problems are solved, the only real applications of cryptocurrency will by illegal activities, notably buying drugs, paying for ransomware. But also paying for anti-censorship services from inside dictatorships. Illegal activity can be good when governments are bad, and arguably selling drugs should be legal.

For this reason Ciro Santilli believes that privacy coins like Monero are currently the most useful cryptocurrencies. Also, people concerned with their privacy are likely to more naturally make fewer larger payments to reduce exposure rather than a bunch of small separate ones, and therefore transaction fees matter less, and can be seen as a reasonable privacy tax. Also drugs are expensive, just have a look at any uncensored Onion service search engine, so individual transactions tend to be large.

Hedgint against inflation due to money creation in fiat currencies is a another valid argument for cryptocurrencies. Money printing is a bad form of tax. But why not just instead invest in bonds or stocks, which actually have a specific intrinsic value and should therefore increase your capital and beat inflation? Even if crypto did take over, its value would eventually become constant, and just holding it would lose out to stocks and bonds. And pre-crypto, salaries should adjust relatively quickly to new inflation levels as they come, though there is always some delay. Also, without anonymity, governments will sooner or later find a way to regulate and pervert it. If you want to do things without anonymity, then what you really have to fight for is to change government itself, perhaps with a DAO-like approach, or pushing for a more direct democracy.

If crypto really takes off, 99.99% of people will only ever use it through some cryptocurrency exchange (unless scalability problems are solved, and they replace fiat currencies entirely), so the experience will be very similar to PayPal, and without "true" decentralization.

For those reasons, Ciro Santilli instead believes that governments should issue electronic money, and maintain an open API that all can access instead. The centralized service will always be cheaper for society to maintain than any distributed service, and it will still allow for proper taxation.

Ciro believes that it is easy for people to be seduced by the idealistic promise that "cryptocurrency will make the world more fair and equal by giving everyone equal opportunities, away from the corruption of Governments". Such optimism that new technologies will solve certain key social problems without the need for constant government intervention and management is not new, as shown e.g. at HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis (2016) when he talks about the cyberspace (when the Internet was just beginning): youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU?t=2375. Technologies can make our lives better. But in general, some of them also have to be managed.

In any case, cryptocurrencies are bullshit, the true currency of the future is going to be Magic: The Gathering cards. And Cirocoin.

One closely related thing that Ciro Santilli does think could be interesting exploring right now however, notably when having Monero-like anonymity in mind, would be anonymous electronic voting, which is a pre-requisite to make direct democracy convenient so people can vote more often.

TODO evaluate the possible application of cryptocurrency for international transfers:Of course, the ideal solution would be for governments to just allow for people from other countries to create accounts in their country, and use the centralized API just like citizens. Having an account of some sort is of course fundamental to avoid money laundering/tax evasion, be it on the API, or when you are going to cash out the crypto into fiat. So then the question becomes: suppose that governments are shit and never make such APIs, are international transfers just because traditional banks are inefficient/greedy? Or is it because of the inevitable cost of auditing transfers? E.g. how does TransferWise compare to Bitcoin these days? And if cryptocurrency is more desirable, why wouldn't TransferWise just use it as their backend, and reach very similar fees?

This is where they moved the Chicago Pile-1 after they decided it might be a bad idea to run highly experimental nuclear reactions right in the middle of one of the most populous cities of the United States.

After it was reassembled, the Chicago Pile-1 was renamed as Chicago Pile 2 (CP2).

So more precisely, it is a continuation of the Metallurgical Laboratory.

It's still not that far though, only about 20 kilometers, and today is also a populated area.

Ciro Santilli maintains that they chose the site because the name is so cool. Wikipedia says it is derived from the Forest of Argonne, maybe it even shared etymology with the element argon.