Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

The premise that "we can't make AGI, but we know enough about the human brain to upload on to a computer" is flawed. Edit: after reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014), Ciro Santilli was convinced otherwise. What is flawed is of course just the "extracting connectome with macroscopic probes part". A post mortem connectome extraction with microtome is much more believable. But of course they weren't going to show fake slices of Jonny Depp's brain, are they? Famous actor bodies are sacred! What a huge lost opportunity. On the other hand however, the scale of the first connectome extraction would be arguably too huge to be undertaken by a random pair of rogue researchers. The same would also likely apply to any first time human brain connectome. It would much more likely be a huge public effort, much like the Human Genome Project.

But this film does have the merit of exploring how an AGI might act to take over the AGI might act to take over the world once created, notably by creating its own physical research laboratory. Though it doesn't feel likely that it could go under the radar for 2 years given the energetic requirements of the research. Even the terrorists find it before the FBI!

I also wish they had shown the dildo (or more likely, direct stimulation!) computerized Jonny Depp used to use with his wife before he managed to re-synthesized his body. But you know, 18+ would cut too much profits. Ah, what a shame.

Turing machine regex tape notation is Ciro Santilli's made up name for the notation used e.g. at:Most of it is just regular regular expression notation, with a few differences:

This notation is very useful, as it helps compress long repeated sequences of Turing machine tape and extract higher level patterns from them, which is how you go about understanding a Turing machine in order to apply Turing machine acceleration.

Ciro Santilli's accounts: Section "Ciro Santilli's Twitter accounts".

TypeScript is good. It does find errors in your JavaScript. But it is a form of "turd polishing". But Ciro Santilli would rather have a polished turd than a non-polished one.

Part of the reason TypeScript became popular is due to the universality of asset bundlers. Once you are already using an asset bundler, changing the .js extension into .ts to get a less shitty experience is an easy choice.

The other big reason is that JavaScript is so lose with type conversions, notably undefined happily converting to strings without problems, and any missing properties of Object happily being undefined. We should actually use ES6 Map everywhere instead of using Objects as maps.

Since TypeScript is not the default form of the language however, it inevitably happens that you need to add external types for a gazillion projects that are using raw JavaScript, and sometimes fight a lot to get things to work. And so we have: github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped. Not sure if this is beautiful, or frightening.

But in the end, as with other type of static linters, TypeScript generally transforms a few hard to debug runtime issues, into a bunch of stupid to solve compile time issues, which is generally a good thing.

The fact that this it parses comments JSDoc comments in JavaScript files is quite amazing.

Examples under typescript. Run each one of them with:Helper:

Some major annoyances of TypeScript:

Ciro Santilli's Linux distro of choice as of 2019.

It ain't perfect, but it's decent enough.

The greatest advantage of it being that it has the likely largest desktop user base, and therefore the highest likelihood that your problems are solved on Ask Ubuntu, and goes together with Ciro's philosophy that "people should do everything in the same way to factor stuff out", especially the open source losers.

Ciro considers that the killer flaw of Ubuntu, and most desktop distros of 2020, is that no one under the Sun knows how to build them fully from source: Linux distribution buildable from source. This is why Ciro based the Linux Kernel Module Cheat on Buildroot, see also: Linux distribution buildable from source.

Ciro Santilli reproduced on Dell Inspiron 15 3520 with factory defaults. This bug prevents "wipe windows" installation without workarounds, one of which is to disable encryption in Windows.

Unconditional basic income is Ciro Santilli's ultimate non-transhumanist technological dream: to reach a state of technological advancement and distribution of resources so high that everyone gets money for doing nothing, enough for:

Once a person has that, they can "learn, teach" and create whatever they want. Or play video games all day long if they wish.

Ciro Santilli will not live to see this, and is content with helping it happen faster by increasing the efficiency of the world as. And having at least two well educated kids to carry on the project after he dies :-)

Technologies which would help a lot towards unconditional basic income, and might be strictly required required are:

So in the worst case we can just grow brainless bodies and replace the cavity hole with a computer that controls the body, possibly with high level decisions coming from a remote building-sized genetically engineered biological AGI brain.

Of course, it is all about costs. A human costs about 130k 2010 USD/year. So how cheap can we make the AGI / robot human equivalent / year for a given task?

AGI + humanoid robots likely implies AI takeover though. It would then come down to human loving bots vs human hating bots fighting it out. It will be both terrifying and fun to watch.

AGI alone would be very dangerous, in case it can get control of our nuclear arsenals through software zero days or social engineering. Although some claim that is unlikely.

Humanity's best bet to achieve silicon AGI today is to work on: Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games.

By Charles Bukowski mentioned e.g. at tatyanany.medium.com/slavery-was-never-abolished-it-was-only-extended-to-include-all-the-colors-6ca21d586e7e:

Bibliography:

As of 2020, university has the following very important applications:Notably, Education is an IQ test, not a way to learn useful and beautiful things.

One major issue is that teachers don't have the right incentive to, nor are selected to, teach well. Thus the existence of Rate My Professors! But we can do better...

Which is why Ciro Santilli wants to destroy its current format with OurBigBook.com. He believes that we can find a more efficient organization to achieve both the social and research functions of university, by first doing as much as possible online

Ciro's university experiences are mentioned at: Ciro Santilli's formal education.

Ciro Santilli is against affirmative action university entry quotas that reserve spaces e.g. for students from discriminated races or poor families. Instead, he believes that affirmative action should take place on earlier stages of education as described at: free gifted education.

Notably, Brazil has implemented a very heavy university entry quota system after Ciro had left university there: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23862676

This is of course easy for a white male from a privileged background to say, and infinite debate has already been had on this matter, but here goes again.

First, in defense to the personal attack, Ciro raises the fact that he has dedicated large chunks (all?) of his life to open source software and knowledge in general, which Ciro believes is the only way to actually make the world fairer to poor countries. His money (time) is where his mouth is.

One good argument in favor of the Brazilian quota system, is that the kids who enter university because of quotas do just as well as those who don't.

Ciro has actually believes that this is possible, and offers the following possible explanation: most of pre-university knowledge is useless, and university selection system is crap, and Ciro wants to destroy it with a system in which anyone can learn university stuff from home.

Both the top end of the quota and non-quota kids are basically equally capable of doing useful stuff therefore.

Only a tiny fraction of what you learn in high school is useful for university or your career.

And possibly more importantly than knowledge, Ciro saw many of his colleagues (basically all of which were from relatively privileged backgrounds) "do badly" in university, because of lack of motivation, because they had chosen a course only to find that they were not interested in it because the existing high school educational system is crap and does not help them find what they love and because it costs you several years of your life to change your choice in most universities (long live École Polytechnique).

Maybe the fact that poor kids know that they are fucked if they fail, and so they have to succeed at any cost, might also help with motivation. Which is a terrible terrible thing, because only those who have to leeway to take risks end up taking them and making the the next big thing.

Ciro believes instead that only once kids have learnt university level stuff in their area of interest for free on the Internet should they go through selection based on that specific and much more concentrated useful knowledge.

And this competition must only be used to distribute resources which you can't learn from fucking computers:

Once this point knowledge is reached however, it starts to become unclear if a single "everyone takes the same test to avoid discrimination" test is feasible anymore, and we start entering the much more relevant (and potentially discriminatory) "I am a teacher trying to advance the state of the art, and I need a person mildly skilled in the art to do some slave labor for me", which is PhDs selection work.

If quota are in place, what will happen is that parents of the rich kids will start investing less in education, and possibly just put their kids in high schools, and do home schooling instead. This would therefore reduce the total investments the country makes in education!

Outside of the obvious technical evolution proposed, Ciro is a huge proponent of free gifted education. Or closely related, creating scholarships that focus on poor students. The entry requirements should be the same, but once you qualify, everyone should have enough money to lead a decent life during their studies.

Then let those kids pass exactly the same university entry exams, and watch them crush the average privileged kids.

This advice is similar to what is mentioned at: what poor countries have to do to get richer. When you don't have money to do everything, you must select a few good bets and focus on them. You can't pay a lot to every public school teacher, so you must select a few select places that need it the most. As those smart bets pay off, you start to have more and more money to expand the system further.

Ciro Santilli's general feeling is that university should not own IP, it should belong to the researchers. Instead, university should help researchers make their startups, so they can become big, and then we can tax them and reinvest in the universities.

Of course, this goes through the nonprofit impact measurement difficulty. Maybe we could instead limit the IP to some reasonably small percentage, like 10%?

But still, as of 2020, if feels like universities are way too greedy.

www.uopeople.edu/.

Online and free. Pay only for exams, i.e. exam as a service. Almost perfect according to Ciro Santilli's idea.

TODO is teaching material open or not?Asked: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1687865554722562048

As of 2020s and much earlier, Ciro Santilli believes that undergrad studies were fundamentally broken (considering the Information Age which completely changed what would be possible) because university had only two goals, with the exception of a few enlightened professors:As a result, most students, who would not go on to do a PhD essentially do a simple trade: all their time, and possibly some money, in exchange for imbuing themselves with the incredible name of a respected institution so they can get better jobs later on.

Beauty, deep understanding, and learning awesome things comes basically as a second thought.

It is interesting to see how your own ideas shift with time, and Ciro Santilli doesn't think the following are very important anymore, so he was lazy to migrate them.

When he did the original website Ciro was in a "I must show off my skills to get a job mindset", but then after he landed a few jobs he moved to a "CV websites are useless, just do amazing projects and showcase them on your website to help them succeed" mindset.

This section contains the a list of cool things Ciro Santilli has been up to in chronological order, including small quick ones. Many/most of those are also posted on Ciro Santilli's accounts such as:

For a more theme-oriented version of the best results see: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".

For OurBigBook Project updates see: docs.ourbigbook.com/news

I edited the VOD of the talk Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects about the CIA 2010 covert communication websites a bit and published it at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFfuzZC5Qpc.

Announcements:

I finally took a day to edit the Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain section from Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects into a proper YouTube video. The amount of effort that goes into every minute of video editing never ceases to amaze me.

Announcements:

In 2024 I was user #25 with the most reputation gained on Stack Overflow.

This is up from #38 in 2023 is even though I have answered less questions than before.

This is likely because LLMs have killed users that just answered lots of easy new questions, and favored those like me who only answer more important questions found through Google.

I was #13 on the last quarter, so this is likely to go even higher in 2025. More details at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions"

Announcements: