Being Brazilian, Ciro Santilli was particularly curious about the existence of a Brazil-focused mentioned in the Reuters article, as well as in other democracies.
WTF the CIA was doing in Brazil in the early 2010s! Wasn't helping to install the Military dictatorship in Brazil enough!
It is worth noting that democracies represent just a small minority of the websites found. The Middle East, and Spanish language sites (presumably for Venezuela + war on drugs countries?) were the huge majority. But Americans have to understand that democracies have to work together and build mutual trust, and not spy on one another. Even some of the enlightened people from Hacker News seem to not grasp this point. The USA cannot single handedly maintain world order as it once could. Collaboration based on trust is the only way.
Snowden's 2013 revelations particularly shocked USA "allies" with the fact that they were being spied upon, and as of the 2020's, everybody knows this and has "stopped caring", and or moved to end-to-end encryption by default. This is beautifully illustrated in the 2016 film "Snowden" when Snowden talks about his time in Japan working for Dell as an undercover NSA operative:
NSA wanted to impress the Japanese. Show them our reach. They loved the live video from drones. This is Pakistan right now [video shows American agents demonstrating drone footage to Japanese officials]. They were not as excited about that we wanted their help to spy on the Japanese population. They said it was against their laws.
Of course we tapped the entire country anyway.
And we did not stop there. Once we owned their communications systems, we started going after the physical infrastructure.
We'd slip these little sleeper programs into power grids, dams, hospitals. The idea was that if the day came when Japan was no longer an ally, it would be "lights out".
And it wasn't just the Japanese. We were planting malware in Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Austria.
I mean, China, I can understand. Russia. Iran. Venezuela, okay.
But Austria?!
[shows footage of cow on an idyllic Alpine mountain grazing field, suggesting that there is nothing in Austria to spy on]
Video 1.
But Austria?! scene from Snowden (2016)
Source.
Another noteworthy scene from that movie is Video 2. "Aptitude test on communication networks scene from the 2016 Snowden film", where a bunch of new CIA recruits are told that:
Each of you is going to build a covert communications network in your home city [i.e. their fictitious foreign target location written on each person's desk such as Berlin, Istanbul and Bangkok, not necessarily where they were actually born], you're going to deploy it, backup your site, destroy it, and restore it again.
thus somewhat mirroring what actually happened with these real world websites.
Video 2.
Aptitude test on communication networks scene from the 2016 Snowden film
. Source.
Cirism Updated 2025-07-16
Welcome to the wonderful world of Cirism!
Followers of Cirism call themselves Cirists, and their primary goal in life is to obtain Cirocoins.
Enlightened Cirists donate money to the cause at: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". It is totally optional of course, your soul will just be eternally damned if you don't.
Ciro Santilli once proclaimed:
Thou shalt eat thy watermelon in the morning, and thy melon in the evening. Thou shalt not eat thy watermelon in the evening, nor shalt thou eat thy melon in the morning.
Cirocoin Updated 2025-07-16
Good pious Cirists earn Cirocoins.
Cirocoins are the most valuable form of currency that exists at any point.
Cirocoins can only be issued by Ciro Santilli.
Cirocoins are strictly nominal, and cannot be traded by recipients with anyone but Ciro, i.e. they are extremely illiquid.
Cirocoins can be removed from recipients at any point if they commit non-Cirist acts.
It is not possible to give a precise number to how many Cirocoins anyone owns. This is decided on a transaction by transaction basis. Ciro can therefore only inform you if your Cirocoin balance increased or decreased, but any attached number has no value, and thus are equivalent to expressions of type "you gained/lost a Cirocoin".
The following inferior currencies come to mind:
Ciro Duran Santilli Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli's full birth name is "Ciro Duran Santilli", with mother's last name "Duran" in the middle as per Brazilian tradition.
But Ciro's usage of "Duran" got gradually dropped to "Ciro Santilli", Ciro's official Italian name, as Ciro moved more and more definitively to Europe.
It can still however be seen in certain online places where Ciro didn't have the patience or power to change it e.g. some old École Polytechnique stuff: gitlab.binets.fr/ciro.duran-santilli/china-dictatorship
Also, don't have multiple names if you can avoid it, it is confusing!
Video 1.
Top Down 2D Continuous Game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)
Source. Source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/Urho3D-cheat.
Figure 1.
Screenshot of the basketball stage of Ciro's 2D continuous game
. Source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/rl-game-2d-grid. Big kudos to game-icons.net for the sprites.
Less good discrete prototype: github.com/cirosantilli/rl-game-2d-grid YouTube demo: Video 1. "Top Down 2D Continuous Game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)".
Video 2.
Top Down 2D Discrete Tile Based Game with C++ SDL and Boost R-Tree for Reinforcement Learning by Ciro Santilli (2017)
Source.
The goal of this project is to reach artificial general intelligence.
A few initiatives have created reasonable sets of robotics-like games for the purposes of AI development, most notably: OpenAI and DeepMind.
However, all projects so far have only created sets of unrelated games, or worse: focused on closed games designed for humans!
What is really needed is to create a single cohesive game world, designed specifically for this purpose, and with a very large number of game mechanics.
Notably, by "game mechanic" is meant "a magic aspect of the game world, which cannot be explained by object's location and inertia alone" in order to test the the missing link between continuous and discrete AI.
Much in the spirit of gvgai, we have to do the following loop:
  • create an initial game that a human can solve
  • find an AI that beats it well
  • study the AI, and add a new mechanic that breaks the AI, but does not break a human!
The question then becomes: do we have enough computational power to simulation a game worlds that is analogous enough to the real world, so that our AI algorithms will also apply to the real world?
To reduce computation requirements, it is better to focus on a 2D world at first. Such world with the right mechanics can break any AI, while still being faster to simulate than a 3D world.
The initial prototype uses the Urho3D open source game engine, and that is a reasonable project, but a raw Simple DirectMedia Layer + Box2D + OpenGL solution from scratch would be faster to develop for this use case, since Urho3D has a lot of human-gaming features that are not needed, and because 2019 Urho3D lead developers disagree with the China censored keyword attack.
Simulations such as these can be viewed as a form of synthetic data generation procedure, where the goal is to use computer worlds to reduce the costs of experiments and to improve reproducibility.
Ciro has always had a feeling that AI research in the 2020's is too unambitious. How many teams are actually aiming for AGI? When he then read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) it said the same. AGI research has become a taboo in the early 21st century.
Related projects:
Video 3.
DeepMind Has A Superhuman Level Quake 3 AI Team by Two Minute Papers (2018)
Source. Commentary of DeepMind's 2019 Capture the Flag paper. DeepMind does some similar simulations to what Ciro wants, but TODO do they publish source code for all of them? If not Ciro calls bullshit on non-reproducible research. Does this repo contain everything?
Video 4.
OpenAI Plays Hide and Seek... and Breaks The Game! by Two Minute Papers (2019)
Source. Commentary of OpenAi's 2019 hide and seek paper. OpenAI does some similar simulations to what Ciro wants, but TODO do they publish source code for all of them? If not Ciro calls bullshit on non-reproducible research, and even worse due to the fake "Open" in the name. Does this repo contain everything?
Video 5.
Much bigger simulation, AIs learn Phalanx by Pezzza's Work (2022)
Source. 2d agents with vision. Simple prey/predator scenario.
Ciro Santilli Updated 2025-07-16
Quick facts:
Other people with the same name are listed at Section "Ciro Santilli's homonyms".
Figure 1.
19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong
. Source.
Sun Wukong (孙悟空) is a playful and obscenely powerful monkey Journey to the West. He protects Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, and likes eating fruit, just like Ciro. Oh, and Goku from Dragon Ball is based on him. His japanese name is "Sun Wukong" (same Chinese characters with different Japanese pronunciation) for the love. His given name "Wukong" means literally "the one who mastered the void", which is clearly a Dharma name and fucking awesome in multiple ways. This is another sad instance of a Chinese thing better known in the West as Japanese.
It is worth noting however that although Wukong is extremely charming, Ciro's favorite novel of the Four Great Classic Novels is Water Margin. Journey to the West is just a monster of the week for kids, but Water Margin is a fight for justice saga. Sorry Wukong!
Figure 2.
Ciro Santilli playing with a pipette at the University of Cambridge circa 2017
.
The photo was taken in an open event organized by the awesome Cambridge Synthetic Biology outreach group, more or less the same people who organize: www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Synthetic-Biology-Meetup/ and who helped organize Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it".
Taking part in such activities is what Ciro tries to do to overcome his lifelong regret of not having done more experimental stuff at university. Would he have had the patience to handle all the bullshit of the physical word without going back to the informational sciences? Maybe, maybe not. But now he will probably never know?!
Notice the orange high visibility cycling jersey under the lab coat, from someone who had just ridden in from work as fast as possible as part of his "lunch break". It is more fun when it is hard.
Figure 3.
Scribe Jean Miélot, 15th century
.
Ciro Santilli fantasizes that he would have make a good scribe in the middle ages, partly due to his self diagnosed graphomania, but also appreciation for foreign languages, and his mild obsession with the natural sciences.
OurBigBook.com is Ciro's view of a modern day scriptorium, except that now the illuminations are YouTube videos.
The job of a Internet-age scribe is basically that of making knowledge more open, legally extracting it from closed copyrighted sources, and explaining your understanding of it to the wider world under Creative Commons licenses on the web. And in the process of greater openness, given a well organized system, we are able combine the knowledge of many different people, and thus make things more understandable than any single/few creator closed source source could ever achieve.
Ciro once saw some cartoon on Wikipedia help pages of a turtle with a book in one hand, and typing into Wikipedia on its computer, TODO find it. That cartoon summarizes well the modern scribe life.
Another analogous version of this fantasy more in touch with Ciro's sinophily is the ideal of the Chinese scholar, notably including their stereotypical attributes such as mastery of the Four arts.
Figure 4.
Ciro Santilli piling boxes as a child
. A natural born engineer.
Figure 5.
Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared.
More info at: Figure "Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared".
This is how Ciro Santilli evaluates himself on the Big Five personality traits:
cirosantilli.com Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli's website is a dump of his brain, see also: braindumping.
However it won't remain like that for long, because it will be migrated to OurBigBook.com, and therefore become a brain dump of society itself.
Video 1.
Who Wants To Live Forever by Queen (1986)
Source.
Ciro Santilli feels that Ciro Santilli Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is much more random/hard to determine than the Big Five personality traits
Upon a quick look Ciro Santilli evaluates himself as INTJ.
cirosantilli/parsec-benchmark Created 2024-07-29 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli's fork of PARSEC. This fork was made to improve the build system and better support newer targets, including newer Ubuntu and Buildroot.
After the PARSEC website died in 2023, Ciro Santilli also uploaded the test data to GitHub.
Which two persons are hard to satisfy?:
He who stores up whatever he gets and he who gives away whatever he gets - these two persons are hard to satisfy.
In a way, Ciro Santilli is both. In Ciro Santilli's knowledge hoarding, he both:
  • stores every knowledge he admires
  • and also gives it away for all to read
Worse of both worlds!
Ciro Santilli's ancestors Updated 2025-07-16
Where most of Ciro Santilli's ancestors came from, and why Ciro has the Italian nationality as well as Brazilian.
More specifically his paternal line comes from Gissi in the Abruzzo region.
Ciro feels really bad by the fact that he does not speak Italian and has never visited Gissi as of 2020.
He would likely be able to learn Italian in like 3 months because it is so similar to Portuguese and French which he already speaks.
For what it is worth though, Ciro Santilli does honestly love Europe, and feels a strong desire to make it even awesomer, along with the rest of the world. Despite this being a hopeless attempt due to having more than one natural language is bad for the world.