Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Big companies like Google are able to publish white papers as peer reviewed papers just due to their reputation, e.g. without giving any source code that is central for the article.

It is insane.

E.g.: AlphaGo is closed source but published as www.nature.com/articles/natnure16961 in 2016 on Nature.

Programming is hard. To Ciro Santilli, it's almost masochistic.

What makes Ciro especially mad when programming is not the hard things.

It is the things that should be easy, but aren't, and which take up a lot of your programming time.

Especially when you are already a few levels of "simple problems" down from your original goal, and another one of them shows up.

This is basically the cause of Hofstadter's law.

But of course, it is because it is hard that it feels amazing when you achieve your goal.

Putting a complex and useful program together is like composing a symphony, or reaching the summit of a hard rock climbing proble.

Programming can be an art form. There can be great beauty in code and what it does. It is a shame that this is hard to see from within the walls of most companies, where you are stuck doing a small specific task as fast as possible.

If you are a pussy and work a soul crushing job, this is one way to lie to yourself that your life is still worth living: do one cool thing every day.

Find a time in which your mind hasn't yet been destroyed by useless work, usually in the morning before work, and do one thing you actually like in life.

Work a little less well for you boss, and a little better for yourself. Ross Ulbricht:Selling drugs online is not advisable however.

Even better, try to reach an official agreement with your employer to work 20% less than the standard work week. For example, you could work one day less every week, and do whatever you want on that day. It is not possible to push your passion to weekends, because your brain is too tired. "You keep all non-company-related IP you develop on that time" is a key clause obviously.

On a related note, good employers must allow employees to do whichever the fuck "crazy projects", "needed refactorings or other efficiency gains" and "learn things deeply" at least 20% of their time if employees want that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20%25_Project. Employees must choose if they want to do it one day a week or two hours per day. One day per month initiatives are bullshit. Another related name: genius hour.

Highly relevant on this topic: Video "What Predicts Academic Ability? by Jordan B Peterson (2017)".

Maybe you will be fired, but long term, having tried, or even succeeded your dream, or a one of its side effects, will be infinitely more satisfying.

The same goes for school, and maybe even more so because your parents can still support you there. Some Gods who actually followed this advice and didn't end up living under a bridge:

Gandhi TODO source:

What big companies have been created in Europe after World War II, that have not been bought or utterly defeated by American or Japanese companies?Because of all these failures, much fanfare was made as Spotify reached a $50B market capitalization in 2020. An art company, so cute!

As of 2023, the LVMH was the most valuable company in Europe by market capitalization^[ref]. Luxury goods. An area of industry that borders between the useless and the evil.

Europe has basically become an outsourcing hub for the United States. The fact that its starts are all sold if they become large enough just means that R&D is also outsourced.

ASML, and perhaps more maeaningfully its parent/predecessor ASM International from 1964 is perhaps the biggest exception.

The key problem is that there are so many small countries in Europe, that any startup has to deal with too many incompatible legislation and cannot easily sell to the hole of Europe and scale. So then a larger company from a more uniform country comes and eats it up!

Talent mobility is another issue:

So why can't Europe unify its laws?

Because the countries are still essentially walled off by languages. Europe is the perfect example of why having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

There isn't true mobility of people between countries.

You just can't go study or work in any other country (except for the UK, when it was still in the EU) without putting a huge effort into learning its language first.

Without this, there isn't enough mixing to truly make cultures more uniform, and therefore allow the laws to be more uniform.

Europe can't even unify basic things like:

Equally so, it can't force little fiscal paradises who effectively benefit from being in Europe like Ireland, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland ("not European", but should that be allowed?) and Cyprus (the EU can't even maintain its territorial integrity, let alone fiscal) to not offer ridiculously low taxes and incentives which make them entry points for foreign companies to rape Europe.

For this reason, Europe will only continue to go downhill with the years, and the United Kingdom will continue to try and endosymbiose into a state of the United States (although at times it seems that it would rather endosymbiose with China instead).

Historically, this disunion is partly due to the European balance of power, whereby countries would form alliances with old enemies to prevent another country from taking over. Also linked are failed military unification attempts by Napoleon and Hitler, though we are likely better off without the latter succeeding!!! Though those also partly failed due to wider balance of power issues involving the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and USA, not only due to internal balance. Of course, none of that matters anymore after World War II, where other more unified Europe-sized potencies rose, first the USA and the Soviet Union, and then China, and now European disunion is nothing but a burden.

Evidence such as those makes it clear that the European Union is a failure.

One thing must be said in favour of Europe's mess however: it favours international collaboration in huge projects as a more neutral middle ground. This can be seen more clearly in the ITER and the fiasco that was the Superconducting Super Collider that was cancelled a couple of billion dollars in partly because it failed to attract any foreign investment, compared to the Large Hadron Collider which went on to find the Higgs boson as mentioned at www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supercollider-that-never-was/.

Bibliography:

Europe has made good regulations to limit the absolute power of immoral companies. Partly because it does not have any companies anymore, but so be it.

But the law that forces every fucking website to show a message "Do you consent to cookies?" is not one of them.

Ciro cannot stand fucking clicking the "I consent" button anymore.

Please stop, for the love of God.

At most, there must be a standardized API that allows your browser to say "I agree or I disagree" automatically to all of them, e.g. an HTTP header.

2021: United Kingdom is considering it post-Brexit: techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/after-years-of-inaction-against-adtech-uks-ico-calls-for-browser-level-controls-to-fix-cookie-fatigue/. Something good might actually come out of Brexit!

In 2016 Ciro made a script downloaded Facebook profile pictures.

This was possible at the time without any login by using a 2010 profile ID dump from originally announced at: blog.skullsecurity.org/2010/return-of-the-facebook-snatchers since profile picture access was not authenticated.

The profile ID dump was downloadable through a BitTorrent named fbdata.torrent of about 2.8GB, mostly compressed. Doing:on Ubuntu 20.04 gives:This dump widely reported e.g. on Hacker News at: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554558.

At some point however, Facebook finally started to require tokens to view public profile pictures, thus making such further collection impossible, e.g. as of 2021: developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v9.0/user/picture mentions:This is also mentioned e.g. at: stackoverflow.com/questions/11442442/get-user-profile-picture-by-id. This major privacy flaw was therefore finally addressed at some point, making it impossible to reproduce this project.

Ciro downloaded 10 thousand of those pictures, and did facial extraction with: stackoverflow.com/questions/13211745/detect-face-then-autocrop-pictures/37501314#37501314

He then created single a video by joining 10 thousand of those cropped faces which can be uploaded e.g. to YouTube. Ciro later decided it was better to make those videos private however, as sooner later he'd lose his account for it.

Companies like YouTube blocking this kind of content is the type of thing that makes companies take longer to fix such gaping privacy issues, and is a bit like security through obscurity. A video makes it clear to everyone that there is a privacy issue very effectively. But people prefer to hide and look away, and then 99% of people who know nothing about tech get their privacy busted by actual criminals/government spies and never learn about it.

But now that Facebook finally fixed it, it's fine, no need for the video anymore.

Companies are getting too much power to distort regulations and destroy privacy.

Taxes pay for the physical car roads, so why shouldn't they also pay for the "online roads" of today?

The following services are obvious picks because they are so simple:

Other less simple ones that might also be feasible:

All of them should have strong privacy enabled by default: end-to-end encryption, logless, etc. Governments are not going to like this part.

And then if you ever forget a password or lose a multi-factor authentication token, you can just go to an ID center with your ID to recover it.

If your kids are about to starve, fine, do it.

But otherwise, Ciro Santilli will not, ever, spend his time drilling programmer competition problems to join a company, life is too short for that.

Life is too short for that. Companies must either notice that you can make amazing open source software projects or contributions, and hire you for that, or they must fuck off.

Companies must either notice that you can make amazing projects or contributions, and hire you for that, or they must fuck off.

Chat programs that don't have a proper web-only operation and force you to have a mobile phone, e.g. WhatsApp.

Heck, even Signal, which is supposed to be super secure and good for your privacy, forces you to disclose your freaking cell phone to all contacts! lifehacker.com/how-to-use-signal-without-revealing-your-private-phone-1818996580

What is my phone breaks? What if I don't want to have a fucking phone? What if I move countries and have to change the fucking number? Also evil but less because done by all: chat programs that can't send you an email if you don't see the message in X minutes.

European Union, time to force those evil companies to use support open standards like XMPP?

The solution to "how to prevent spam" is simple: your ID is a public key that you own the private key for. If you start getting spammed, generate a new public key, and send it to all contacts, and dump the previous ID.

Companies have been really slow to support SVG features in their browsers, and that is very saddening: medium.com/@michaelmangial1/introduction-to-scalable-vector-graphics-6450c03e8d2e

You can't drop SVG support for canvas until there's a way to run untrusted JavaScript on the browser!

SVG does have some compatibility annoyances, notably SVG fonts. But we should as a society work to standardize and implement a fix those, the benefits of SVG are just too great!

Examples:

Many of the student exchange programs Ciro witnessed in the 2010's in Brazil were inefficient because they were requiring students to come back immediately after university or PhD in fear that those students will never come back.

This is useless, because you don't learn anything unique during university: the truly valuable knowledge is obtained when you work for several years as a postdoc in a world class research laboratory or as an engineer in a world class company.

Therefore, Brazil should learn from the Chinese exchange system, which lets students go do whatever they want, and once they are Gods of the domain, entices them back with great positions and pay as heads of laboratory back in China. Just don't do fraudulent stuff like this like China did, or else you will get a bad rep.

To help this university collaboration happen, we should create communication channels between exchange students and professors of the origin country who work on the same domain so that they can discuss the subject. For example, once Ciro Santilli wanted to contact some of his former teachers at the University of São Paulo about "advanced" topics he had been exposed to as part of his job. However, they didn't even reply to his email, and Ciro didn't know who else to contact. This must never happen. We need a way to informally contact several professors of a given domain informally, to increase the chances that at least one might be interested. It is pointless to just let students loose abroad and hope that they will bring things back to their home country: a more cohesive infrastructure is needed to nurture that.

There is basically one sane way to achieve these goals: the exchange programs must be organized at a national level, not in an ad-hoc per-university manner.

Another good idea is to have taxes that depend on your nationality alone and which only start collecting when you reach a very high amount of net worth. So e.g. if someone leaves the country and makes it big, then and only then does the Government starts clawing back the benefits of its investments in the person. Furthermore, such taxes could be reduced if the person brings some of the business back to the country. And mandatory taxes should be charged if the person decides to drop their nationality at some point.

The above points would also be greatly eased by having a national-level exchange program. E.g. in Brazil in the 2010's which Ciro experience, every university had different terms and conditions, which made everything a mess. Exchange programs must be treated as a unified federal policy.

Ciro actually had to return for just six months from the École Polytechnique to the University of São Paulo, to finish a course he had only done the generic Maths/Physics introduction to. Students from other Brazilian universities were forced to return for up to 3 years even to get their Brazilian diplomas! Ciro was lucky that his teachers understood the situation, and allowed him to develop online learning projects instead of his supposed control engineering projects, which hopefully will have led to changing the world with motivation one day. And for this, Ciro is eternally thankful.

This shows the complete and total lack of any Brazilian strategy to send its students abroad to really learn valuable things and then come back. There is no strategy at all. Things have just reached an equilibrium point of bureaucracies, Brazilian universities trying to bring students back to validate useless diploma pieces of paper, and foreign universities no caring about that, and just wanting the students to say abroad forever.

Ciro was once talking about why so few Brazilians go study abroad compared to the Chinese. Besides the likely true "there are a lot of Chinese" argument, his wife made another: good point Brazil is not so bad to live in, because you have good food and freedom, while China only has good food.

But Ciro still fells bad that so few of his University of São Paulo colleagues, who learnt automation and control engineering, are doing deep tech. Nor physical engineering. They have all basically become computer people like Ciro.

This is not their fault. They basically don't have a choice: all physical science and technology is done in rich countries.

Yes, someone has to implement the newest tech to improve local country efficiency in projects that will never spread abroad.

But who will be left then for the next big thing problems that would really make Brazil richer? 6 out of 30 person class ended up working on a gaming company at one point, even though they were not crazy passionate about the field! What could possibly be a worst investment for society?

This lack of technological innovation can also be clearly seen when you research investment options available in Brazil. Huge emphasis is put on fixed return financial products (often inflation adjusted) linked to base non-tech business such as housing market and agriculture. And when you look to the returns of the stock market on s&P 500-analogue backed exchange-traded funds, they do not seem obviously better, especially considering inflation and taxation benefits that exist for some of the other investment possibilities.

When the companies of a country are not clearly the best investment, you know that something is wrong. They are highly specialized money making machines, remember! And housing and agriculture are not such innovative markets where people can hugely influence efficiency.

When it is best to send students is a good question. Undergrad studies could be easily reproduced in poor countries if they had any intelligence at all, since even in rich countries laboratory usage is always limited. Masters and PhD are generally more valuable moments to send people out. The question is if the students will actually have a fighting chance without having been out, in particular in terms of language skills. Ciro feels that Masters are a good focus point for entry, as that is where PhD links are more actively done.