Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
Notably, given the domain name, it is clear that he likes formalization of mathematics-stuff, like Ciro Santilli.
At first glance, looks a bit dry though, not many examples.
Uses Redux, while reactjs/react-rails appears to do that more manually
Lots of focus on Heroku deployability, which is fantastic: shakacode.gitbooks.io/react-on-rails/content/docs/additional-reading/heroku-deployment.html
Live instance: www.reactrails.com/ with source at: github.com/shakacode/react-webpack-rails-tutorial Not the most advanced web-app (a gothinkster/realworld-level would be ideal). Also has clear dependency description, which is nice.
Trying at github.com/shakacode/react-webpack-rails-tutorial/tree/8e656f97d7a311bbe999ceceb9463b8479fef9e2 on Ubuntu 20.10. Got some failures: github.com/shakacode/react-webpack-rails-tutorial/issues/488 Finally got a version of it working at: github.com/shakacode/react-webpack-rails-tutorial/issues/488#issuecomment-812506821
Oh, and the guy behind that project lives in Hawaii (Ciro Santilli's ideal city to live in), has an Asian-mixed son, and two Kinesis Advantage 2 keyboards as seen at twitter.com/railsonmaui/status/1377515748910755851, Ciro Santilli was jealous of him.
This company is a bit like Sun Microsystems, you can hear a note of awe in the voice of those who knew it at its peak. This was a bit before Ciro Santilli's awakening.
Both of them and Sun kind of died in the same way, unable to move from the workstation to the personal computer fast enough, and just got killed by the scale of competitors who did, notably Nvidia for graphics cards.
Some/all Nintendo 64 games were developed on it, e.g. it is well known that this was the case for Super Mario 64.
Also they were a big UNIX vendor, which is another kudos to the company.
Silicon Graphics Promo (1987)
Source. Highlights that this was one of the first widely available options for professional engineers/designers to do real-time 3D rendering for their designs. Presumably before it, you had to do use scripting to CPU render and do any changes incrementally by modifying the script.John Thompson's Guqin website.
Holy crap amazing list of Guqin pieces by the guy for MP3 download! www.silkqin.com/06hear.htm And the explanations are insane. What a dude. Ciro Santilli's hero.
Download all MP3:
wget -r -np -l 1 -A mp3 http://www.silkqin.com/06hear.htmCiro Santilli Contacted John by email in 2019 telling him to put his stuff on YouTube and offering help, and he replied, but nothing came of it unfortunately. Edit: he uploaded a bunch of videos of him playing live in 2020! www.youtube.com/user/silkqin/videos
John focuses on playing the tunes in a "historically informed performance", in particular using silk strings rather than metal ones which are used by most modern artists: www.silkqin.com/08anal/hip.htm
Dialog between Fisherman and Woodcutter performed by John Thompson (2020)
Source. Ciro Santilli has become slightly obsessed with this story, and the main mastermind Ross Ulbricht.
Ross Ulbricht's open laptop shortly after his arrest at the Francisco Public Library
. Source. He was running some GNOME based distro, could be Ubuntu from that photo, and likely is given that Ross once recommended Ubuntu to his flatmate.The best article available so far is: www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/29/how_i_caught_silk_road_mastermind (archive) which summarizes what one of the investigators said in a 2019 French computer security conference.
The key living posts are:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-connect-to-a-tor-hidden-service-using-curl-in-php (archive) which was originally asked under the real name, and then the username was changed to "Frosty", which matches one of the server's logins after the laptop was captured
- altoid early Silk Road mention: bitcointalk.org/?topic=175.70;wap2 (archive)
The big question is of course how libertarian free market ideologically motivated the website was, and how purely criminal greed it was.
The magnitude of the early operational security mistakes does make Ciro think that Ross did it "because he could" and "for the lolz" in a real world Breaking Bad way.
The entry in Ross' diary does resonate a lot with Ciro and any entrepreneur, full diary at: www.wired.com/2015/01/heres-secret-silk-road-journal-laptop-ross-ulbricht/ (archive).
[i]n 2011," [I believe I will be] "creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before,Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator."
Having this kind of feeling, is the greatest thing any human can have, and what motivates all great things.
Capitalizing in illegal things though is a cheat, big things take longer than a few years to reach, but reaching them is that much more satisfying as well.
Other interesting quotes:which Ciro also feels, see don't be a pussy, and:
I hated working for someone else and trading my time for money with no investment in myself.
Everyone knows I am working on a bitcoin exchange. I always thought honesty was the best policy and now I didn't know what to do. I should have just told everyone I am a freelance programmer or something, but I had to tell half truths. It felt wrong to lie completely so I tried to tell the truth without revealing the bad part, but now I am in a jam. Everyone knows too much. Dammit.
Also very worth reading is the San Francisco flat mate account: www.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3q8g/my-roommate-the-darknet-drug-lord (archive).
The murder for hire allegations are also interesting: mashable.com/2013/10/03/silk-road-hits, he paid 80k dollars to undercover DEA agents!
Except for the fact that Ross was an 80 million Dollar drug lord, those accounts sound exactly like what you would expect from any other nerdy startup founder! The:
- "just do it" strategy effectively going to a minimal viable product (manual transaction management!), while making many mistakes along the way, including hiring mistakes and successes when scaling is needed
- the hardship of self bootstrapping your own social network (here with some kilos of mushrooms)
- the variety of periods, from relatively calm, to hair pulling stress during big changes
It is also amusing to see very concretely the obvious fact that the FBI can get a subpoena for all accounts you ever had, e.g. they knew his laptop model from Amazon and brought a corresponding power cable to the arrest! If you are going to be a cyber criminal, don't use your real name, ever!
Should justice be blind? Maybe. But it does hurt for mere non-blind men to see it sometimes. Especially when drug liberalization is involved.
This is a really good project. So fun to play around with. Low level IO part only like drawing to screen and handling keyboard inputs.
Ciro Santilli has:
- a few answers on Stack Overflow: stackoverflow.com/search?tab=votes&q=user%3a895245%20%5bsdl%5d
- a small cheatsheet on: github.com/cirosantilli/cpp-cheat/tree/09cb7c9fc1ee4a8bee421f12d0596b81cfd836bd/sdl
Ciro Santilli is fond of cynicism, see also ciro Santilli's film tastes.
Quite good, Ciro Santilli played this a lot in 2021/2022, his user ID: ofo5fNy7wRNC1Cw94YVB4KMOW5f2.
The physics not as good as the original Mario Kart 64, and it is notably missing jump gliding, and generally not as sharp! But it is really not bad.
Some of the weapons were too useless that you are just better firing them straight away at wall immediately to get something better, they could have a little better balancing there. I'm talking about you gatling that takes 10 seconds to finish firing, and does not kill enemies immediately. You are better off just firing that gun immediately when you get it to be able to get another gun ASAP. They seem to have done some balancing there however.
It had no chat option, but in a way it was cool to be forced to communicate non-verbally with people whose usernames you got familiar with. Funny you can love people like that, without ever talking to them. The best way of doing so being tea-bagging by going back and forth on a player after winning.
Performance was sometimes a problem. When Ciro tried it again on December 2022, it was unplayable due to the impossibly large lag. Tiings were much better again in 2023 however it seems.
This is perhaps slightly worse than the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but still amazing.
Some difficult points:
- how did the general deduce that the old woman's daughter had a link to Karla? It must be linked to the fact that the Russian agent who made the offer was a Karla-man.
- some things are hard to understand without having seen the previous Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, e.g. they say nothing clearly who Toby Esterhase is, he now works on art sales
- but others are inconsistent, e.g. they changed the actor for Peter Guillam...
Smiley's letter to Karla scene from Smiley's People 1982 BBC miniseries John le Carré adaptation EP6o
. Source. Fan-uplod by Ciro Santilli, one of the greatest television scenes ever. Blocked in the UK.Ciro Santilli defines "Smooth Jazz" simply as jazz that he can leave on the background to work without being particularly distracted.
It does not mean that the music is bad in any way. Just not particularly distracting.
Ciro Santilli's "Soft Jazz" YouTube playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcZOZrP1P_V4Sxz8y1JLKLbZOv3GLb_Xf
List:
- Page One by Joe Henderson (1963)
Ciro Santilli is extremely passionate about this issue, partly due to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.
Ciro Santilli's main approaches to reduce it:
One of Ciro's most direct experiences with social inequality is described at: São Remo, the favela next to USP.
We have to be careful not to make everyone poorer when trying to reduce inequality.
But as things stand as of 2020, increasing taxes on the very richest, and notably wealth tax, and investing it in free gifted education, seems like a safe bet to achieve any meaningful level of equal opportunity and meritocracy.
Ciro Santilli thinks that maybe the government does not need to provide those, but it needs to regulate the fuck out of them, notably control over censorship in those platforms: the deplatforming of Donald Trump.
Related:
Some of the software-based artificial life simulators can be used as AI training game.
Ciro Santilli just always feels that what can be classified as "artificial life" simulators have too much focus on beating more continuous population mechanics, and lack the discrete elements which he feels could be important to AGI: Section "The missing link between continuous and discrete AI".
There is great interest in this direction of research however quite clearly.
Poet warriors monkeys? Or Code peasants (码农) according to the Chinese.
Ciro Santilli claims to be one of them.
Much like a pianist plays his piano, a software engineer plays his computer.
Ciro Santilli's TODO there:
- robotics simulation with control theory focus, and in particular with a model of uncertainty of measurements and commands. For example, imagine making a robot that plays golf, with the terrain fully known. And it is harder as you cannot control the arm with 100% precision.
Sometimes you can debug software by staring at the code for long enough Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Once upon a time, when Ciro Santilli had a job, he had a programming problem.
A senior developer came over, and rather than trying to run and modify the code like an idiot, which is what Ciro Santilli usually does (see also experimentalism remarks at Section "Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory"), he just stared at the code for about 10 minutes.
We knew that the problem was likely in a particular function, but it was really hard to see why things were going wrong.
After the 10 minutes of examining every line in minute detail, he said:and truly, that was the cause.
I think this function call has such or such weird edge case
And so, Ciro was enlightened.