Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
Ciro Santilli has enjoyed doing projects dealing with with lots of data! They usually have a large overlap with Ciro Santilli's naughty projects, but not always!
Ciro Santilli has the power to document stuff in a way that makes using them awesome, as evidenced by his his Stack Overflow contributions (notably those in the best articles by Ciro Santillis), and other online contributions.
If your project does something awesome, hiring Ciro means that more people will be able to notice that it is actually awesome, and use it.
He likes to do this in parallel to contributing new features, quickly switching between his "developer" and "technical documentor" hats.
This means of course that he will develop new features a bit slower than others, but he feel it is more valuable if end users can actually use your project in the first place.
His technique is to provide upfront extremely interactive and reproducible getting started setups that immediately show the key value of the project to users.
He backs those setups with:A prime example of kind of setup is Ciro's Linux Kernel Module Cheat.
- scripts that automate the setup much as possible to make things enjoyable and reproducible
- a detailed description of the environment in which he tested: which OS, version of key software, etc.
- a detailed description of what is expected to happen when you take an action, including known bugs with links to bug reports
- theory and rationale on the sections after the initial getting started, but always finely interspersed with concrete examples
- all docs contained in a Git-tracked repo, with the ability to render to a single HTML with one TOC
- short sentences and paragraphs, interspersed with many headers, lists and code blocks
While he create this setup, he inevitably start to notice and fix:
- bugs
- annoyances on the public interface of the project
- the devs were using 50 different local scripts to do similar things, all of them semi-broken and limited. Every new hire was copying one of those local scripts, and hacking it up further.
- your crappy build / test / version control setup
Exploiting this skill, however, requires you to trust him.
When he tells to managers that he's good at documenting, they always say: great, we need better documentation! But then, one of the following may happen:
- managers forget that they wanted good documentation and just tell him to code new features as fast as possible
- they don't let him own the getting started page, but rather and expect him to try and fix the existing crappy unfixable existing getting started, without stepping on anyone's pride in the process >:-)This makes him tired, and less likely to do a good job.Good documentation requires a large number of small iterative reviews, and detailed review of every line is not always feasible.Too many cooks.
Ciro's passion for documentation and tooling has the effect that if you have crappy documentation and tooling and don't want them to be fixed, Ciro will end up trying to fix those tools instead of doing what you tell him to do anyways, which might lead to him quitting because he can't stand the tools, or you firing him because he's not doing the job you think I should be doing. So please, don't bother hiring Ciro if you have crappy documentation and tooling.
Psychological analysis of why Ciro has this gift: How Ciro Santilli manages to write so much.
Ciro often has the following metaphor in his mind:
New discoveries are like very rough trails where you have to cut through heavy bushes (an original research paper).After a brave explorer goes through this rough path for the first time and charts it, it does become much easier for others to follow it later on, but it still requires a lot of effort to go through them, because there are still a lot of rough bushes and some parts of the map are not very clear (reading and reproducing the research paper to further advance the state of the art).As enough people start going through, the probability that someone with a bad memory ends up walking it increases, and that person ends up pounding the earth into a beaten track and increasing the trail clearance of the beginning of the trail at least (review paper).There finally comes a point when even the local government starts to notice this trail is important, and pays someone to add some stone pavement and rails on the most exposed parts of the trail (post and undergrad education).And at last, Ciro Santilli comes with a bulldozer and creates an autoroute that thousands of people can cruise at high speed without any effort (Q&A, open knowledge HTML websites).
Ciro's documenation obsession is partly part of his braindumping effort of dumping his brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
Ciro Santilli's dreams almost all include the following aspect: Ciro is trying to do something mundane, like climbing a hill, walking across town, etc. but doing so it extremely difficult. The hill is too steep, he gets lost, and things which are easy to use in real life are impossibly hard to use in the dream.
So they are a bit like nightmares, but not that bad. Just really annoying and tiresome. Still, Ciro does enjoy o visiting the semi-real places those dreams bring him to, much for the same reasons he enjoys cycling.
Ciro attributes this type of dream to his occupation as a software engineer, because that's basically the feeling you get all day from it: why isn't this working!!! It is so basic!!!
Ciro Santilli never did any illegal drugs, because he:so don't expect any amazing stories here.
- doesn't want to help fund organized crime. Notably, Ciro is for complete legalization of drugs of all drugs
- already has better more sustainable drugs like love, cycling, learning the natural sciences and fame. He (or more realistically, the world) chose life for him.
Like LDS believers, Ciro never drinks coffee nor smokes, and only drinks alcohol and tea sparingly, because they are all addictive drugs and bring no net increase of energy and concentration.
Ciro prefers to only enjoy a glass of tea when going out cycling on a cold day (Earl gray, with milk, no sugar), or get a half pint of beer when going out with friends to a pub.
Ciro only got reasonably drunk twice on his life:
- once when he was quite young, likely pre-10 years old, while visiting an uncle's home, and adults were having a very nice sweet and thick type of alcoholic cocktail, and Ciro drank a bit too much and that made him really really stupid
- once while studying at University of São Paulo, somehow someone was giving free beers at one of the parties (at which Ciro practiced Cirodance). And since Ciro had always been a cheap-ass, he thought, hey, this is a good chance to try it out. Ciro remembers that this made him a bit euphoric, active, very stupid, and a bit horny (though of course, he got no pussy as usual).
Later in life, around the time of his wedding, there were guests around all the time, and he was drinking beer with them all the time. Then one day, during lunch, Ciro felt a weirdly strong desire to drink one more pint. It was at this point that Ciro realised first-hand what mild, but real, alcohol addiction felt like, and he didn't get that drink, and swore from then on to never drink more than one glass a week, and only with friends at a bar after work. Richard Feynman tells a very similar story on his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!, see: Section "Richard Feynman's drug use".
These are people which Ciro never met personally, and who might not know that Ciro exists, or might never had any direct 1-2-1 online contact with Ciro, but Ciro is convinced are his brothers in some other dimension due to how many opinions or behaviours he feels they share:
- Dan Dascalescu due to articles such as:
- English as a universal language by Dan Dascalescu (2008)
- www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/9oujwf/why_archiving_old_threads_is_a_bigger_problem/ see also online forums that lock threads after some time are evil
- web.archive.org/web/20130922192354/http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/reviews/online_services/web_page_archiving see also web archiving
- random posts on OpenStreetMap, and about China: help.openstreetmap.org/questions/29300/legality-status-of-mapping-activity-in-china?page=1&focusedAnswerId=42167#42167
- kenorb see also Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions
- Gwern Branwen
Some other idealists that are a bit further out but with some similarities:
Ciro Santilli also things of those people as being part of his 108 Stars of Destiny troupe.
Ciro sometimes ponders why is it so hard to find people online that you truly love and admire. Maybe it is for similar reasons why it is also hard in the real world: the great variety of human interest, and the great limitation of our attention spans. But online, where we have access to "everyone", shouldn't it should be easier? Not naturally finding such people is perhaps one of the greatest failings of our education system.
Ciro Santilli has already watched all the best films in history, and as a result any of those new movies that is full of clichés and has no innovative aspect at all (99.99999% of all modern movies) makes Ciro want to puke and to start Googling TV Tropes to classify as many clichés as possible.
Good movies are those that teach you mechanisms of the real world. Willing suspension of disbelief must be maintained at all costs.
Or of what could happen a world where a single sci-fi element is added and explored to its limits.
Love is not an interesting aspect of the world. You solve your love life at university, Tinder or Tango.
The actually interesting aspects of the world are:
- business film
- war
- crime
- government
- science
Movies with a lot of action scenes, with exception of some war movies, are shit.
The Sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism must be close to Cynicism max at all times. Movies with pure good and pure bad are shit.
Knowing spoilers has no effect in the film's enjoyment. The interest of storyline concepts is all that matters, visuals and acting are useless.
In a multi-language film, when two foreign characters speak English to each other when they obviously would have spoken their native language, that is a crime. Original language + subtitles is a must!
Ciro Santilli participated in a double degree program, so he obtained have engineering degrees in both:
- 2010 - 2014: École PolytechniqueMaster 2 degree in applied mathematics.Best French engineering schools in the Times Ranking 2013 (archive)
- Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo
See also further remarks on Ciro Santilli's LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli/
Despite studying in great institutions with great teachers, Ciro feels that:
- most of what he knows came from the Internet, man pages, books and his parents
- actual projects matter much more than those pieces of paper called Diplomas. You should not do like Ciro who basically did nothing but school mandated work, but instead grow some balls and focus much more or entirely on your projects
This motivated Ciro to work on OurBigBook.com.
"Ciro" is "Cyrus" from Cyrus the Great in both Portuguese and Italian (although with very different pronunciations), thus doubly appropriate given that Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil, and has Italian ancestry.
After he conquered Babylon in 539 BC from the hands Neo-Babylonian Empire, Cyrus the Great did a great service to the Hebrews by allowing war prisoners that were held in Babylon to back to their home Judea, thus terminating the Babylonian captivity. These Jews were imprisoned because they had previously fought a war or revolted against the Neo-Babylonian Empire and lost. As Wikipedia puts it:He is therefore viewed extremely positively in the good old book. Ciro was quite happy about this name choice by his father, given the human rights connotations of the figure and Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.
According to Isaiah 45:1 of the Hebrew Bible, God anointed Cyrus for this task, even referring to him as a messiah (lit. 'anointed one'); Cyrus is the only non-Jewish figure in the Bible to be revered in this capacity.
Particularly fun things related to modern Cyrus are:
Because it belongs to some relatively obscure character of the Bible, the name it has been mostly passed on by writing to every single Christian country, and every single language came up with different way of saying it, because the only place they would possibly hear that name said out loud would be in Church!
As of 2020, the country in which the name is most popular in undoubtedly Italy. In Brazil, it is definitely not common, but also not completely unheard of either, e.g. Ciro Gomes is a notable Brazilian politician.
And Ciro responds to all the versions of the name that he knows of. These include:and glad to add any new ones as they come.
- English:
- direct English reading of "Ciro" as "See Roll". Not the most cultured, but its what things tend to converge to, especially in highly international environments where it would be impossible to try and learn the origin of everyone's name! So it's fine. Slightly too close to "zero" for comfort.
- Cyrus, the actual English version of the name. Ciro was so happy when his elderly English neighbour who went to Eton College, upon recognizing what Ciro was, immediately said: "Ah, Cyrus the Great!" He was the cutest, and he had some culture. Many/most English speaking people can't or won't be very sure about the spelling, but the sound of the name has a distinctly exotic feel to it, and the sounds are immediately recognized without sound ambiguity (unlike Ciro vs Zero).
- French:
- direct French reading of "Ciro" as "See Rho" with accent on Rho. This sounds exactly like "Sirop", i.e. Syrup in French, which can be good or bad depending on how you look at it.
- Cyrus, the actual version of the name in French. Similar remarks to those of English apply.
- Portuguese: "See Ru" with accent on See, and rolling r, and very weak "u". Some people might have some doubt of how to spell it and will ask for confirmation if needed, though many/most will get it right. Not particularly exotic like it is for English speakers.
- Italian: "Chee Ro" with accent on Chee and rolling r. Widely understood and correctly spelled, more than in any other language. Not exotic at all, could be any random dude from Naples.
- "fratm Ciruzzo": reserved for the Napolitan mates. It means "my bro little Ciro" in Napolitan. The "m" in fratm is a possessive inflection ("my", "mio", but on the same word), and "frat" is of course something like he standard Italian fratello (brother).
- www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fratm. "Fratello" is the Italian standard for "brother". "Fra'" appears to be a variant.
- Ciruzzo means "little Ciro", i.e. it is a diminutive of Ciro, or more precisely a term of endearment. In Italian the correct name is "Vezzeggiativi":
- "fratm Ciruzzo": reserved for the Napolitan mates. It means "my bro little Ciro" in Napolitan. The "m" in fratm is a possessive inflection ("my", "mio", but on the same word), and "frat" is of course something like he standard Italian fratello (brother).
- German: Kyrus. Because Cyrus the Great is known Kyrus II. (Cyrus the Second, his grandfather was also called Cyrus), Ciro once joked to a German friend that he should call him Kyrus III! He liked that.
- Persian (spoken in 2020s Iran): something like Kurush. Likely the closest sound one to the original, though not sure how certain we can be of this.
He is actually quite happy when people use the name in their own language, because that means they understand the origin of the name.
Some Ciro's of interest:
- it is unclear if the usage of Cyrus in family names, e.g. the dread Miley Cyrus. www.houseofnames.com/cyrus-history mentions it may be of Greek origin.
Similar to: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B013AV45IS
2019: broke with sign number 6. Ciro Santilli opened it up a bit destructively.
How to open: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Lf68mAB0Vk
Bought: November 2023 during Black Friday sale for £1,323.00 to be Ciro Santilli's main personal laptop.
Six years after, and we are 2x on every key spec (except processor Hz ;-) at about 1/2 the price and 1/2 the weight (though smaller 14" screen for greater portability), so not bad! Customized to max out each hardware spec:
Specs:
- Processor: AMD Ryzen™ 7 PRO 7840U Processor (3.30 GHz up to 5.10 GHz)
- Operating System: No Operating Systemselected upgrade
- Operating System Language: No Operating System Languageselected upgrade
- Microsoft Productivity Software: None
- Memory: 64 GB LPDDR5X-6400MHz (Soldered)selected upgrade. Specs at: www.lenovo.com/gb/en/p/accessories-and-software/memory-and-storage/memory-and-storage-hard-drives/4xb1d04758 quotes "64 Gbps", i.e. 8 GB/s.
dd count=1M if=/dev/zero of=tmpgives only 255 MB/s however. - Solid State Drive: 2 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 Performance TLC Opalselected upgrade
- Display: 14" WUXGA (1920 x 1200), IPS, Anti-Glare, Touch, 45%NTSC, 300 nits, 60Hz
- Graphic Card: Integrated GraphicsThe Ubuntu 23.10 "About system GUI describes its graphics as: Radeon 780M Graphics × 16, which e.g. www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-780m.c4020 documents as running the RDNA 3 microarchitecture.
- Camera: 1080P FHD RGB/IR Hybrid with Microphone
- Color: Thunder Black
- Factory Color Calibration: No Factory Color Calibration
- Wireless: Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6E NFA725A 2x2 AX & Bluetooth® 5.1 or above
- Integrated Mobile Broadband: No Wireless WAN
- Ethernet: Wired Ethernet
- Near Field Communication: No NFC
- Fingerprint Reader: Fingerprint Reader
- Keyboard: Black - English (EU)selected upgrade
- Battery: 4 Cell Li-Polymer 52.5Whselected upgrade
- Power Cord: 65W USB-C Slim 90% PCC 3pin AC Adapter - UKselected upgrade
- Electronic Privacy Filter: No ePrivacy Filter
- Adobe Elements: None
- Adobe Acrobat: None
- Adobe Creative Cloud: None
- Security Software: None
- Cloud Security Software: No Cloud Security Software
- Warranty: 3 Year Courier or Carry-in
Identifiers:
- Ethernet MAC address: fc:5c:ee:24:fb:b4
- Wi-Fi MAC address: 04:7b:cb:cc:1b:10
Upon arrival:
- Weight: 1490 g
- Charger weight: 323 g
- Firmware according to
sudo dmidecode -t bios:Vendor: LENOVO Version: R2FET33W (1.13 ) Release Date: 09/08/2023
Buy research:
- www.phoronix.com/review/thinkpad-p14s-gen4 says Ubuntu running fine
- Intel vs amd: the Intel ones could come with a discrete rtx A500 GPU. GPU likely makes laptop heavier and less power efficient. And both have basically the same benchmark which is crazy:So the only downside is not being able to run CUDA.
- thought about Yoga or other Ultrabook options, but 2x price at same specs, so nah...
Log:
2024-01-17: firmware update:Actually fixed performance mode: askubuntu.com/questions/604720/setting-to-high-performance/1343879#1343879
Vendor: LENOVO
Version: R2FET36W (1.16 )
Release Date: 10/24/2023Bought: 2017 for approximately 2400 pounds to be Ciro Santilli's main personal laptop.
Specs:
- screen: 15.6 inches, 16:9
- weight: 2691g (self weight in 2023)
- charger weight: 700g (self weight in 2023)
Identifiers:
- Ethernet MAC address: 54:e1:ad:b5:5b:08
- Wi-Fi MAC address: 44:03:2c:a2:27:81
If any of you ever read this, do send me an email to Ciro Santilli saying hi and we can agree on a clear separation of usernames.
Although if you are just starting out, maybe you should just go from scratch with a unique Internet alias.
A younger unrelated Argentinian homonym who likes soccer that can be found through Google:Ciro used to like playing soccer too! :-)
- twitter.com/ciro_santilli
- www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009065024069
- www.instagram.com/ciro.santilli/ contains a few cool-sexy-boy-selfies as of 2025 when he hit that stage
- www.youtube.com/@cirosantilli9603
- www.linkedin.com/in/ciro-santilli-bb77b72b7
www.ancestry.com.au/genealogy/records/ciro-santilli-24-bkmssg documents a "Ciro Santilli" born 31 Jan 1887 at Castelvécchio in Subéquo, L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo region, just like Ciro Santilli's ancestors. Parents Francesco Santilli and Anna Silveri. The page also mentions:
- Ciro Santilli found in New York, Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820-1957
- Ciro Santilli found in Oregon, Naturalization Records 1865-1991
Ciro Santilli is a collector at heart. But a collector of knowledge.
His uncle, which Ciro rassembles in many ways, was like that. But he collected physical objects such as wines and stamps. Or even worse, objects that were meant to be collected such Panini soccer sticker albums! This Ciro looks down on.
With computers, knowledge takes no physical space and can be immediately shared with the hole world, and there is great beauty to that, as you can just keep collecting forever without filling up your house.
But of course, physical or not, all attachments futile.
Like other types collecting, once Ciro decides that "he must know everything about a given subject", he will keep coming back to that subject over and over. Not in a systematic way of course, since Ciro is a lazy bastard, but he will keep coming back for a very long time, and eventually become an expert at it.
This compulsive hoarding, together with Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory, are the fundamental reasons for OurBigBook.com.
Ciro Santilli has an undiagnozed condition where his upper legs and lower torso often start to itch when he runs, to the point of being extremely annoying and removing all pleasure form the activity.
If some doctor knows why this could be, please tell him!!!
The problem is a bit hard to reproduce however, and Ciro hasn't been able to determine which exact condition triggers it: temperature, nutrition, something else?
Ciro believes that this is not chiefly due to transpiration, but rather to the impact motion that running does on the muscles, as he has felt something similar on his arms some times while cycling in very rough terrain, which made his arms shake in a similar fashion. or for example if he has a water bottle on a tightly tied backpack that rubs his back, then the back itches at that point.
Also, running on a threadmill is not a problem at all. Ciro believes that this is because the threadmill is better amortized, and therefore does not cause the same mechanical stress required to create the itching as running on pavement.
Interestingly, Ciro didn't feel that at all when he played soccer enthusiastically as a child, and he was one of the fastest runners of the group for sure at that time. So he's not sure if it started when he got older, or if it is just because the difference in workloads between soccer and running.
Found: www.healthline.com/health/fitness/runners-itch which names "runner's itch".
youtu.be/PNgYW5N95z8?t=945 "My back itches" after riding on a bumpy makeshift motorcycle.
Major projects can be seen at: Section "The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli".
These are some smaller projects that Ciro Santilli carried out. They are all either for fun, or misguided use of his time done by an younger self:
- small naughty stuff is listed at: Section "Ciro Santilli's naughty projects"
- Because Ciro cares about education, around 2014 he looked into markup languages and version control for books, before he noticed that this approach was useless and that ranking algorithms are all that matter:
- He implemented some large features and several smaller improvements.GitLab sent Ciro a free swag bottle later after they got funding on to thank him for his contributions: Figure 1. "Ciro Santilli in a dune lake in Jericoacoara, Brazil, with his GitLab bottle". He had to pay for the beach trip though.
Figure 1. Ciro Santilli in a dune lake in Jericoacoara, Brazil, with his GitLab bottle. - Markdown Style Guide
- karlcow/markdown-testsuite improvements: Ciro has implemented the test runner a few months before CommonMark left stealth mode and killed it instantaneously.At least MacFarlane was able to reuse part of the HTML normalizer he wrote, and he extracted the multi-engine comparison to: CommonMark Implementation Compare.Playing with this project has led Ciro to find and report many Markdown bugs/bad behavior on other software, e.g. GitHub and MultiMarkdown-4.
- isaacs/github public unofficial GitHub issue tracker: he has commented there so often that he was made a collaborator
- Node Express Sequelize Next.js realworld example app
- VCDVCD: value change dump command-line pretty printer!!! The type of thing that a billion dollar EDA tool vendor will never implement ;-)
0 time 1 counter_tb.clock 2 counter_tb.enable 3 counter_tb.out[1:0] 4 counter_tb.reset 5 counter_tb.top.out[1:0] 0 1 2 3 4 5 =========== 0 1 0 x 0 x 1 0 0 x 1 x 2 1 0 0 1 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 4 1 0 0 0 0 5 0 1 0 0 0 - Vim: sometimes Ciro want crazy and wasted his time with Vimscript:
- Vim Markdown: the owner
plasticboywas really nice and made Ciro a collaborator for his contributions, notably a live ToC outline and the header mappings - Vundle Plugin Tester, which he used to start the testing system of Vim Markdown
- Vim Markdown: the owner
- Breakthrough Message: aliens!!! Creative/media project, powered by some Python scripts.
- making Google Maps reviews of places he's visited to help other people. Ciro's photos reached 1 million views in 2019: www.google.com/maps/contrib/106598607405640635523/photos (archive)
The old lady was arrested in 2015 for a few days for doing Falun Gong, which was an important motivation to Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China.
If Ciro Santilli weren't a natural born activist, he chould have made an excellent intelligence analyst! See also: Section "Being naughty and creative are correlated".
- Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script
- GitHub makes Ciro feel especially naughty:
- All GitHub Commit Emails: he extracted (almost) all Git commit emails from GitHub with Google BigQuery
Figure 1. All GitHub Commit Emails repo before takedown. Screenshot from archive.is. - A repository with 1 million commits: likely the live repo with the most commits as of 2017
- An 100 year GitHub streak, likely longest ever when that existed. It was consuming too much server resources however, which led to GitHub admins manually turning off his contribution history.
Figure 2. Screenshot of Ciro Santilli's GitHub profile with an 100 year streak visible. Source. - A repository with a 100k commit Git octopus merge. Now that is a true Cthulhu merge.
Figure 3. Screenshot of a commit with 100k parents on GitHub. URL: github.com/cirosantilli/test-octopus-100k/commit/07fdcceb20ac3626a07c08166d0c410707b1cb9b - 500 on adoc infinite header xref recursion: that was fun while it lasted
Outside this website: