Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

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:

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. Things were much better again in 2023 however it seems.

Looking for related games:

This is perhaps slightly worse than the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but still amazing.

Some difficult points:

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:

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.

More info at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/unjust-social-media-censorship-in-the-west

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:

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.

And so, Ciro was enlightened.

"Sources and methods" seems to be an official CIA/NSA terminology to talk about the main categories things that whistleblowers were not supposed to whistleblow.

It came to Ciro Santilli's attention in the Reality film about Reality Winner, and are words she apparently used extensively and which are quoted e.g. at www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/25/reality-winner-leaked-file-on-russia-election-hacking-because-public-was-being-lied-to

The term is more broadly used however outside of the NSA, e.g. it is also present on this website which talks about the CIA 2010 covert communication websites fiasco.

Open source software reviews by Ciro Santilli:reviewing mostly the following software:

Ciro Santilli's preferred visualization of the real projective plane is a small variant of the standard "lines through origin in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$".

Take a open half sphere e.g. a sphere but only the points with $z>0$.

Each point in the half sphere identifies a unique line through the origin.

Then, the only lines missing are the lines in the x-y plane itself.

For those sphere points in the circle on the x-y plane, you should think of them as magic poins that are identified with the corresponding antipodal point, also on the x-y, but on the other side of the origin. So basically you you can teleport from one of those to the other side, and you are still in the same point.

Ciro likes this model because then all the magic is confined just to the $z=0$ part of the model, and everything else looks exactly like the sphere.

It is useful to contrast this with the sphere itself. In the sphere, all points in the circle $z=0$ are the same point. But this is not the case for the projective plane. You cannot instantly go to any other point on the $z=0$ by just moving a little bit, you have to walk around that circle.

Ciro Santilli is actively looking for donations and contracts so he can continue to work full time on OurBigBook.com sustainably, and develop free hardcore university-level STEM education for all ages!

For 400k USD I will quit my job or not get a new job and work on OurBigBook full time for a second year to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. Status: ~44k / 300k USD. At 4M USD I retire and work on open STEM forever. More realistically perhaps would something like 800k USD for four years like the MacArthur fellowship wink.

I first quit my job 1st June 2024 to work on the project for 1 year after I reached my initial 100k goal mostly via a 1000 Monero donation. In this first year I improved project tech, but didn't go and solve university courses to create super targeted content, and didn't obtain a single contributing user except myself, see a summary at Section "OurBigBook Project Update March 2025". My last day job total compensation as of 2024 was about 150k USD/year.

For a followup, it would be an interesting experiment to spend on year full time solving as many courses as I can from a world class university in the city where I live in the UK, and adding that as content to the platform to see if that would attract interest, and reaching out directly to course takers at their university environment to try and help them. I intended to do that in year one but my got distracted by tech. It is quite possible that no one has ever done that before in history: a highly motivated technical person with the time and opportunity to do one single thing: help top university students learn their STEM courses better and have more fun doing so. I have in particular identified one course where this would be particularly feasible: the mathematics course, given that much of their course materials, and also their building are quite open. I do sometimes wonder if doing this would be just a waste of my life. But part of me tells me it could generate big interest and is worth a try. It would also be fun for you to watch me continue to commit career seppuku.

For a second follow up year, I increased my requirement to 400k USD to give me more peace of mind. So the total donation so far is 344k, and if I reach a total of 400k USD, then I'll work on the project for a second year.

At 4M USD I retire and work on open STEM projects forever. At these timelines, I can't guarantee it will be specifically on education technology specifically all the way, but I guarantee that whatever it is it will be open and extremely well explained as usual.

Total donations to date ~244k USD. Donation breakdown:More details: Section "Accounting method"

How to give:And if you have a different preferred payment mechanism not listed above, please contact Ciro, and he will set it up.

Ciro's current ambitions require him to remain in developed countries, because Ciro wants to document advanced science and technology by liaising with top universities, and there is not nearly as much high technology in poor countries. Remaining in developed countries is also a required due to family reasons.

Note to potential anonymous crypto donors: I live in the UK, and after some messy back and forth that included freezing my account at one point, Barclays finally decided that they do not allow me to receive anonymous donations. And I'm pretty sure that the same would happen on any other British bank sooner or later. Therefore, while I continue to accept anonymous donations, they will not count towards my "if I get X I do Y"-type donation goals, since I can't reliably spend that money. If you want to donate in crypto, and clearly give me your real identity and an explanation of how you got the money, then that is fine, it can count. Just be warned that I will need to give that information to my bank and clear it with them beforehand, and if they are still not happy with it, I'll just give it all back. Your identity does not have to be publicly disclosed, only the dates and amounts. But my bank has to know.

If you would like public acknowledgement for your support, Ciro will very gladly give it, just let Ciro know how you'd prefer it. Due to Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, many supporters have chosen to be anonymous, and that is totally fine, not everyone is interested in politics, or has a situation where going public is acceptable, so we don't have a standard setup yet, let's build it together. A acknowledgement section at the bottom of this page would be a minimum, but I for larger donations we could add a your advertisement in a locations such as: