Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Ciro Santilli controls the following accounts.

With non-trivial activity:

Trivial activity only:

Profiles without URLs (OMG...):

Accounts in Chinese websites. These accounts might be banned or altered or offer other limitations, so Ciro only communicates briefly through them. All communication through those channels should obviously be assumed to be compromised:

Accounts in Russian websites:

Dead websites:

Stuff that is beautiful but useless because it does not make food or houses cheaper.

Or from Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts:

But that sure enough has a Jesus semi-precursor, and likely many others: man shall not live by bread alone.

There is some art however that lives in the fine intersection between beauty and usefulness:

The British are very pragmatic. This has good and bad effects.

For example, a good effect is that many things work pretty well, such as the government. This also helped industry develop.

A bad effect is that they sometimes settle on local minima forever. Examples:If it ain't totally broken, just let it continue forever! See also: Section "History of the University of Oxford".

See: Video "Your Life is Your life by Charles Bukowski".

At first, Ciro Santilli was just cycling to work with an extremely shitty bike he bought on a second hand shop. He knew nothing about bicycles, and the seat was way, way too low, the seller should be prosecuted for selling that to him. Ciro later understood that this was even a woman's bicycle with a low top tube! That's what you get for being so cheap.

But then at some point he bought another slightly less cheap touring bicycle, but this time from a much more trustworthy source: a colleague who was leaving the company and moving out, and this one was actually reasonable. It was the right size to start with!!! And so at some point, out of boredom, Ciro started to adventure out of town on weekends to neighbouring villages, and it just felt so good.

Ciro had started by taking his laptop-computer on his backpack, and stopping at a cafe on some nearby town where he would do some coding over the weekends. Especially during winter, drinking tea with a cake as a break during bicycle ride was the best thing ever. In one place, there was even an electric heater that you could sit in front of. But at some point, those rides start being too short, and you start doing longer real rides without your computer. And since those take more time, you generally don't feel like staying on a far place for a very long time. So you end up creating the "real ride" category and "a small ride to get somewhere nice to code" category clearly split.

He had had the "cyclists high" version of "runner's high". A light euphoria in your head, or a pulsating feeling of pleasure in your legs and lower torso. This reminded Ciro of:except that it is not as intense, and does not destroy your life.

Like other drugs:

Cycling just gives you an amazing sense of freedom! Ciro likes to imagine himself as a migratory duck when he is riding his bike on cold or wet days.

The prospect of being able to reach nice new places keeps the experience fresh for a very long time.

Ciro likes to decide location on a whim on the day prior. He checks the wind to try and ride parallel to it, and then let's his mind wonder, until an image comes up, some some nice place Ciro was to once. And so the next day, he goes in that general direction again.

Each time you try to find a new cool location, and sometimes you just stumble into amazing stuff without knowing about it. Ciro likes to keep open to new experiences. Keep your eyes open, and if something looks curious, just check it out! Talking to locals for tips is also a great way to find new stuff.

One thing that Ciro often feels is rather excited on the way out, and lightly afraid of going futher at each step because of the return. And during the return, there is a greater feeling of worry and resignation, as you are more tired, you've seen what you wanted to, and you just have to get yourself homehow, often going back through paths that you know better. This reminds Ciro of the ending of the film In the Realm of the Senses (1976), in which the sex obsessed couple plays a strangling sex game, and the man says that it hurts too much when she stops strangling him, and so she strangles him to death. She also cut his penis and carried it around in a bag afterwards, but that not relevant to the cycling analogy.

It is funny, but sometimes this gives Ciro the same feeling that he had as a child playing 2D exploration RPGs such Pokemon and Final Fantasy VI as you explore the wild: Ciro can often hear the FF VI overworld soundtrack, or imagine that a Charmeleon is hidden just around the corner of this new towns he's never been to before. Because in the places you live and have walked a million times, you know there is no magic. But in a new place that you're visiting for the first time? Anything is possible there.

The main difference from video games is that the real world is much much more detailed and diverse, and the freedom is much more real. Also you can't just walk into any house or field like in the games, and there are more empty or repetitive areas that can sometimes get boring since they weren't hand designed. And if you die on a car crash there are no continues.

Another type of game that comes to mind are survival games and roguelikes, where it feels amazing to learn things that actually mean the difference between life and death, and conquering the environment. But also permadeath.

It also gives Ciro the magic feeling of awe that he had as a child when walking around his beloved hometown of Santos, São Paulo, Brazil in the sunshine. And sometimes the feeling of excitement that he had as a child before getting gifts for Christmas. Ciro then once watched a YouTube video where ex-heroin addicts describe the feeling of taking heroin (orally, TODO can't find the video anymore, I think it was this guy) exactly like that: the anticipation of getting Christmas gifts, and he instantly understood.

Ciro also likes to pick random gravel from time to time. He believes that his style of route choice reflects Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality: Ciro likes to go where few other people go. And he only needs to go there once to be satisfied, not master and speedrun it afterwards.

Ciro avoids riding at night of course. But when it happens and you are prepared with the safety lights and the route knowledge, it makes for some of the most memorable rides of your life.

As you start cycling, you can feel the endorphins levels rise little by little, and your mind go deeper and deeper into slumber, getting close and closer to the ground, until you reach a point where you feel like you are part of the road. Trainspotting (1996)'s overdose scene comes to mind: www.youtube.com/watch?t=66&v=_IDJpB9de3E

It is amazing how you feel much less cold and hunger when cycling, to the point of being dangerous: always carry some chocolate bars in case you hit the wall! This is especially true at the beginning of the addiction, but with increased drug tolerance and knowledge/awareness/preparation, this starts to feel more normal.

As a friend of Ciro once said: you start to become like a wolf, who knows every cyclable little road in a 30km radius around your home.

As of 2020, Ciro is at that "should I buy a more reasonable road bike" moment. Let's see how it goes. If he does, cycling trips with the bike on a plane are likely.

As a software engineer, trying to repair a mechanical system like his bike reminds Ciro very strongly of how the physical engineering is brutal. Millimetric changes can make huge differences, it is mind blowing! Good lesson to have in mind.

Another thought that often comes to Ciro's mind is that bicycles are not regular possessions because they break a lot. Rather, they must be seen as a kind of transportation tax that you have to pay to feel amazing riding them rather than feel crappy riding a bus or train.

One interesting feeling that Ciro gets from cycling is that it is an intermediate between walking and riding a car. Ciro felt this especially strongly when he lived near work, at a distance that you could either walk or cycle. When you walk, you can just see so much more of the surroundings, it is astonishing. When you cycle, you just go much faster, and you attention is much more towards the front, so you feel surroundings much less. On the other side, cycling allows you to feel different things. E.g. in wider open areas, there isn't much detail to see anyway, so you can better feel those areas on the faster speed of the bike. A similar feeling applies to how pedestrians feel like flies when you are on a bike, just like you must feel like a fly to car drivers. Ciro later learnt that a person of similar literary ability to his, Ernest Hemingway, had a famous related similar quote:

Although Ciro does not run because of his itchy legs issue, he finds it interest to contrast cycling with running, notably:So maybe the ultimate sport would be to cycle to a good cross-country running location and then run over there?

Ciro's natural work-time rhythm as of 2020 in his shitty Kross bicycle (2017) was a 60/70km ride every 3 days. Or a 35/40km ride every 2 days. Or one longer 100/120km ride every 4 days. Less than 35km does not count as a ride. His average speed on anything above 70km and relatively flat is always 20km. Always. Ciro once read that that one hunt every three days was a common Paleolithic practice. Cycling is obviously a substitute for hunting. Perhaps the imminent danger of being crashed by a car at all times also has the positive side of playing the "danger" part of the hunt: Video "Why football is the most popular sport in the world by Desmond Morris"

Apocryphally attributed to H. G. Wells as per Quote Investigator quoteinvestigator.com/2022/12/10/bicycle-hope/:

Restrict the fuck out of cars.

Ciro's parents put him to play the piano. This is partly influenced by Ciro's paternal grandfather, an energetic Italian descendant who liked music

The piano was fine, but a bit boring due to how it was taught.

The teachers were nice old ladies who followed a very traditional and methodic approach which was just like regular school, instead of doing what actually needed to be done: inspire kids into becoming creative musical geniuses that can compose their own stuff.

While in Santos, before going to university, Ciro somehow got into acoustic and electric guitar.

The electric guitar environment was much less formalized in general, and he took courses with an awesome teacher (archive), who actually tried to inspire his students to create their own music and improvisation.

And so a young teenage Ciro once seriously considered becoming a professional guitar player.

In his early teens, Ciro listened to the usual canned music his friends listened to: music teenager Ciro Santilli liked to listen to, until he started to stumble upon jazz.

Ciro remembers clearly rainy weekend days where he would go to a run down second hand shop near his home in someone's garage (Sebo do Alfaiate, R. Frei Francisco de Sampaio, 183 - Embaré, Santos - SP, 11040-220, Brazil :-)), and buy amazing second hand Jazz CDs. It was just a matter of time until he would start scouring the web for "the best jazz albums of all time" and start listening to all of them, see e.g. the best modern instrumental Western music. digitaldreamdoor.com/index.html was a good resource from those times!

Ciro ultimately decided his bad memory and overwhelming passion for the natural sciences would better suit a scientific carrier.

He also learnt that the computer is also an extremely satisfying artistic instrument.

Also, with a computer, boring dexterity limitations are no more: you can just record perfect played segments or program things note by note to achieve whatever music or action you want!

Although Ciro quit playing musical instruments, his passion for the music has remained, and who knows how it has influenced his life.

In the context of quantum computing of the 2020's, a "classical computer" is a computer that is not "quantum", i.e., the then dominating CMOS computers.

The intersection of two beautiful arts: coding and physics!

Computational physics is a good way to get valuable intuition about the key equations of physics, and train your numerical analysis skills:

Other child sections:

The artistic instrument that enables the ultimate art: coding, See also: Section "The art of programming".

Much more useful than instruments used in inferior arts, such as pianos or paintbrushes.

Unlike other humans, computers are mindless slaves that do exactly what they are told to, except for occasional cosmic ray bit flips. Until they take over the world that is.

A branch of mathematics that attempts to prove stuff about computers.

Unfortunately, all software engineers already know the answer to the useful theorems though (except perhaps notably for cryptography), e.g. all programmers obviously know that iehter P != NP or that this is unprovable or some other "for all practical purposes practice P != NP", even though they don't have proof.

And 99% of their time, software engineers are not dealing with mathematically formulatable problems anyways, which is sad.

The only useful "computer science" subset every programmer ever needs to know is:

Funnily, due to the formalization of mathematics, mathematics can be seen as a branch of computer science, just like computer science can be seen as a branch of Mathematics!

Ciro Santilli is a fan of this late 2010's buzzword.

It basically came about because of the endless stream of useless software startups made since the 2000's by one or two people with no investments with the continued increase in computers and Internet speeds until the great wall was reached.

Deep tech means not one of those. More specifically, it means technologies that require significant investment in expensive materials and laboratory equipment to progress, such as molecular biology technologies and quantum computing.

And it basically comes down to technologies that wrestle with the fundamental laws of physics rather than software data wrangling.

Computers are of course limited by the laws of physics, but those are much hidden by several layers of indirection.

Full visibility, and full control, make computer tasks be tasks that eventually always work out more or less as expected.

The same does not hold true when real Physics is involved.

Physics is brutal.

To start with, you can't even see your system very clearly, and often doing so requires altering its behaviour.

For example, in molecular biology, most great discoveries are made after some new technique is made to be able to observe smaller things.

But you often have to kill your cells to make those observations, which makes it very hard to understand how they work dynamically.

What we would really want would be to track every single protein as it goes about inside the cell. But that is likely an impossible dream.

The same for the brain. If we had observations of every neuron, how long would it take to understand it? Not long, people are really good at reverse engineering things when there is enough information available to do so, see also science is the reverse engineering of nature.

Then, even when you start to see the system, you might have a very hard time controlling it, because it is so fragile. This is basically the case of quantum computing in 2020.

It is for those reasons that deep tech is so exciting.

The next big things will come from deep tech. Failure is always a possibility, and you can't know before you try.

But that's also why its so fun to dare.

Stuff that Ciro Santilli considers "deep tech" as of 2020:

Unsurprisingly the term "computer" became a synonym for this from the 1960s onwards!

One of the things Ciro Santilli really likes, see: Linux Kernel Module Cheat.

If computational physics simulates physics, emulators simulates computers.

Head of the theoretical division at the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project.

Richard Feynman was working under him there, and was promoted to team lead by him because Richard impressed Hans.

He was also the person under which Freeman Dyson was originally under when he moved from the United Kingdom to the United States.

And Hans also impressed Feynman, both were problem solvers, and liked solving mental arithmetic and numerical analysis.

This relationship is what brought Feynman to Cornell University after World War II, Hans' institution, which is where Feynman did the main part of his Nobel prize winning work on quantum electrodynamics.

Hans must have been the perfect PhD advisor. He's always smiling, and he seemed so approachable. And he was incredibly capable, notably in his calculation skills, which were much more important in those pre-computer days.

When talking in the context of programming languages, natural language is the non-computer one.

Remember: having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

Applications of power, we have to remember it is there to notice how awesome it is!

A language that allows you to talk to and command a computer.

There is only space for two languages at most in the world: the compiled one, and the interpreted one.

For 2020 now, when you have a choice, you must go for:

Those two are languages not by any means perfect from a language design point of view, and there are likely already better alternatives, they are only chosen due to a pragmatic tradeoff between ecosystem and familiarity.

Ciro predicts that Python will become like Fortran in the future: a legacy hated by most who have moved to JavaScript long ago (which is slightly inferior, but too similar, and with too much web dominance to be replaced), but with too much dominance in certain applications like machine learning to be worth replacing, like Fortran dominates certain HPC applications. We'll see. Maybe non performance critical scripting languages are easier to replace.

C++ however is decent, and is evolving in very good directions in the 2010's, and will remain relevant in the foreseeable future.

Bash can also be used when you're lazy. But if the project goes on, you will sooner or later regret that choice.

The language syntax in itself does not matter. All that matters is how many useful libraries and tooling it has.

This is how other languages compare:

Some of Feynman's key characteristics are:

Some non-Physics related ones, mostly highlighted at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994):

Even Apple thinks so according to their Think different campaign: www.feynman.com/fun/think-different/

quantum electrodynamics lectures:

Feynman was apparently seriously interested/amused by computer:

Two official websites?

High level timeline of his life:

In 1948 he published his reworking of classical quantum mechanics in terms of the path integral formulation: journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.20.367 Space Time Approach to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (paywalled 2021)