Incoming links: École Polytechnique
All interests are based on fetishes.
The fetish of beauty. The fetish if intelligence. The fetish of kindness.
What's wrong with the fetish of Asianess?
Whenever Ciro's wife starts with "the Asian fetish talk", Ciro reminds her of her own claimed "tall person fetish", and they call it quits.
Asian fetish is much more than sex. It is about the culture, the history, the language. It is the same fetish that makes great mathematicians an Artists do what they do.
When Ciro Santilli was at École Polytechnique, he had to do a presentation for his stupid English courses that all students were forced to take, no matter how good their English was.
The topic was likely something like "pick a country", and Ciro was delighted when he managed to pick "China", after it had gone around a table with many many people before him.
The PowerPoint presentation Ciro made over the weekend was so amazing (and making it was actually fun to make, Ciro actually remembers it a bit!), drawing partly from stuff his wife then girlfriend showed him, that at the end the one of the other students asked him if he had lived in China.
It is a shame Ciro couldn't find the presentation when he wrote this line many many years later. Anything that is not in a BLOB-free monorepo, will disappear, heed my words. But he's certain about two things which it contained:
- century eggs
- Chinese traditional painting
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#History_of_originssubservient, passive, mysterious are understandable. But Hyper-sexual and villainous? OMG have these people never seen real Asians?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#Pornography:
In the United States, women of East and Southeast Asian descent are sometimes stereotyped as subservient, passive, mysterious, villainous in nature, and hyper-sexual.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#Pornography:
Several studies have implied that Asian women are over-represented in the American pornography industry. Asian women make up perhaps 20% of all female performers, despite being roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population. Asian men also appear to be considerably over-represented, at 10% of male actors.
Official website: www.c12qe.com/
2024 address: 26 rue des Fossés Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris
www.c12qe.com/articles/la-deeptech-c12-inaugure-sa-premiere-ligne-de-production-de-puces-quantiques-a-paris explains their choice of address: there is a hill in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, and they have a lab in a deep basement, which helps reduce vibrations from the external environment. Interesting.
Founed by two twin brothers who both studied at École Polytechnique: Pierre Desjardins and Matthieu Desjardins.
During his teenage years, Ciro created an innovative new dance style combining elements of the various corporal practices that he studied a bit of across the years:
- Kung Fu/Taichi
- Brazilian Axé and Capoeira
- Breakdance
- Yoga
- Modern dance
Ciro later called this style Cirodance.
Ciro's legendary dance style was famous during his university years, when Ciro would go to parties and dance like made while mostly unsuccessfully trying to woo girls.
Ciro has always been critical of dancing conditions in University parties, where people would always be cramped up doing boring non-creative moves. Rather, Ciro would go to to the edges of the dance floor to have enough space for his amazing moves. There is a perhaps a parallel between such tendencies and Ciro's highly innovative personality. Also perhaps being cramped would have helped wooing said girls.
Ciro later quit dancing, to a large extent because it is too hard to find suitable dancing locations outside: Europe is too cold much of the year, also ground conditions have to be perfect, and no patience to book a dance room somewhere. Kid's playgrounds are ideal, but Ciro is afraid of dancing there because kids parent's would freak out.
Therefore, all evidence of Cirodance seems to have disappeared into the depths of the Internet. There used to be a notorious video on YouTube from around June 2010 entitled "A Piriguete da Poli !!" ("Poli's bitch" in Portuguese) with comment "Sem comentarios... foi a atraçao da cervejada" (No comments... was the main attraction of the beer party) dancing the Piriguete by MC Papo Brazilian Funk carioca song. But the video was removed at some point, they were likely afraid of getting sued, the URL was www.youtube.com/watch?v=T969azGjIeE as shown at www.facebook.com/cirosantilli/posts/133333123357495, but this was before Ciro noticed that every good thing on the web goes down and became an obsessive web archiver. But in any case, the title gives an idea of the amazing style of Ciro's furor poeticus Axé performance on that day. If the video owner ever reads this message, please please restore the video, or send Ciro a copy. TODO: which channel was it on? Knowing that Ciro would be able to try and contact them.
One legendary episode linked to Cirodance was when Ciro was living in Paris and jobless around 2014 (but not destitute as he leached from his girlfriend). Cirodance was his main physical activity at the time, and Place de la République, where the skateboarders hung out due to the perfect wide concrete floor and relatively close to Bastille where Ciro lived, was the perfect place for it. One cold dark winter evening, Ciro was practicing Cirodance with his headphones and crappy clothes (dirty public square floor, remember), when someone took him for a homeless person and offered him a bowl of soup! It must be said that Place de la République had many events of giving food to the poor. Ciro was a bit stunned, declined, and continued dancing. And so that was the day when a prestigious Polytechnicien was mistaken for a homeless person. And Ciro liked that.
As of 2021, Googling "cirodance" leads to www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyvv4ddL2so "Ciro Dance" in which comedian "Ciro Priello" (no Wikipedia page at the time) participates in a comedy show with a "silly dance" (TODO this likely has a name) described in the comments as:
It's a brand new Italian format. Some comedians are grouped into a room where they have full access to different kind of items and tools. Laughing means losing. Each of them can try to make the other laugh. The winner gets some money but all of them would have give that to charity.The dancing guy, Ciro, after only 10 minutes from the start did this nonsense dance. It's silly bit fun nonetheless I guess
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!
Maybe Ciro Santilli should do something useful and remarkable so that someone might actually want to read his biography in the first place. But hey, procrastination.
Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil in the small/medium city of Rio Claro, São Paulo (~200k people in 2020) in the State of São Paulo in 1989 AD.
The family then moved to Jundiaí in 1995, and then finally to Santos, São Paulo, Brazil in 1997.
At the age of 10, Ciro Santilli spent 10 months in Coventry, United Kingdom, where he greatly improved his English.
After Coventry, Ciro's family went back to Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, which made a deep impression on Ciro, until he Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo in 2007.
In 2010, as mentioned atSection "Ciro Santilli's formal education", Ciro as admitted in a double degree program at the École Polytechnique, France, where he stayed until 2013. Going to France was a mind blowing, life changing event.
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.
~8GB,
lsblk reports 7796176 * 1KB = 7983284224 bytes.We got a handful of those from École Polytechnique at the end of studies I think.
They are shaped like bicornes, which is super cool, but also super impractical!
Markings: "AX ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE PROMOTION X2009"
20.04
gnome-disks program reports it as: "SMI USB DISK".From Ubuntu 20.04 on an ext4 formatted one:With Linux Unified Key Setup + ext4 the results are similar, maybe hdparam bypasses it?
/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 28656 MB in 1.99 seconds = 14421.31 MB/sec
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Timing buffered disk reads: 42 MB in 3.03 seconds = 13.88 MB/sec/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 28326 MB in 1.99 seconds = 14251.55 MB/sec
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Timing buffered disk reads: 38 MB in 3.11 seconds = 12.23 MB/secgnome-disks LUKS + ext4 benchmark with default params also gives about 14 MB/s.If Achilles' had his heel, Ciro had his knee.
First during University in Brazil while trying a kick up during the development of Cirodance his knee went a bit weird for a few weeks.
Then, just after arriving in France for École Polytechnique, the boys were playing indoor soccer, and to impress the girls Ciro was playing really hard, even took off his shirt, and suddenly when he was running by himself his knee snapped, he fell and it hurt like hell.
Ciro was on crutches for a few weeks, but the inflammation went away, but then he tried to play more soccer, but the knee was not as stable as before, and once he tried to run full speed, it slipped and hurt him a bit more (less severely) and so he gave up. For some reason it was not visible on the tomography made at the hospital.
Maybe Ciro should have investigated more though, certainly an experienced doctor could have done a hand pressure exam to determine which joint was damaged manually even. That was a medical failure.
So from this day on Ciro gave up on all interesting sports, and confined himself to more repetitive stuff like gym weights and cycling: Section "Ciro Santilli's sport practice". At Polytechnique he was forced to take up swimming as his mandatory sport, that was unbearably boring.
This defect is likely genetic since a close relative had similar problems.
But oh well, his then not-even girlfriend was impressed enough by the soccer or sorry enough for the sucker to marry him, so it worked out.
Firstly, in 2012, while he was at École Polytechnique, Ciro Santilli was introduced to LaTeX (thank God for French mathematical obsession), and his mind was blown:he though. Why isn't everyone doing that!
Ha, so I can write my own books, and so can anyone, for free?
One particular event stood out: Ciro made a small change to his teacher's course material, who blessed be him (dude's a legend, Ciro just noticed he has some Chinese publications with another French dude, e.g. www.amazon.co.uk/高效算法-应试与提高必修128例-克里斯托弗-Christoph-Durr/dp/B078SJQPVK "High-efficiency algorithm competitions 128 examples", did he write it the Chinese himself?? Must be of course to complement the notoriously low French professor salaries), made it available, and then Ciro gave him back the .tex file. Ciro was just a bit worried about how the teacher would be able to tell what he had changed in the file to validate the change. The teacher just said of course, "no problem, I'll just use
diff". Ciro had never heard of diff. Let alone Git of course, though yes, this was a bit early in Git's history version control systems had been around since forever of course. This was 2011 or 2012, about 4 or 5 years into a superior education curricula with various courses involving computers, some requiring quite a lot of "fill these empty functions" style programming. Education is a joke. Anyways, this was a prelude to exactly what Ciro wanted to do in OurBigBook.com. This might have been the one actually: webia.lip6.fr/~durrc/Iut/Notes580.pdfNot long afterwards, Ciro started playing with Linux. Until then, Ciro had had some contacts with the mysterious operating system at university, and was a bit puzzled what the point of it was! He clearly remembers:University should be forced to use only open source software and hardware in undergrad teaching courses by law BTW.
- at the University of São Paulo that they had some "UNIX" computers in some classes, and at the library
- at École Polytechnique, he took a course about mathematical analysis and there was a "lab" where students were supposed to use FreeFem, great initiative BTW. And Ciro distinctly remembers being paried with a nice Chilian colleague, and the guy was alreay super at ease with the shell: "cd", "ls", etc. WTF was all that!
Then came an Ubuntu live disk on his own machine, and finally a measly 40GB dual book partition in a Microsoft Windows machine on a laptop. At first, it took a lot of time to learn all the crazy new terminal stuff! Yes, at this point, Ubuntu was already usable enough without the terminal, an accomplishment actually. But as a programmer, Ciro felt obliged to learn. Many hours were spent reading man pages at the library. But it all just felt so right, and sometimes powerful... true wizardry.
And ten years later, Ciro was seriously considering buying a computer without Windows pre-installed. He had not used Windows a single tie on a personal machine even once in those ten years!
Finally, to finish things off Ciro found two websites that changed his life forever, and made be believe that there was an alternative: Stack Overflow and GitHub.
The brutal openness of it all. The raw high quality content. Ugliness and uselessness too no doubt. But definitely spark in a sea of darkness.
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
. Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions have, unsurprisingly, centered around the subjects he has worked with: systems programming and web development, and necessary tooling to get those done, such as Git, Python, Bash and Ubuntu.
His best answers are listed at: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Stack Overflow has been the initial centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, until Ciro noticed that GitHub might be potentially even more effective for it.
In Stack Overflow Ciro likes to:
- answer important questions found through Google which he needs to solve an actual problem he has right now, and for which none of the existing answers satisfied him, and close duplicates.
- monitor less known tags which very few people know a lot about and where the knowledge sharing desperately lacking, but in which Ciro specializes and therefore has some uncommon knowledge to share
In practice it also happens that Ciro:
- Googles for his own answers to remember some detail he wrote down but with slightly different terms that were closer to mind at the time, and find other similar questions for which he has the perfect answer.
- learns something new by chance, e.g. some new flashy feature of a new version of the C++ standard, thinks "this is awesome, there must be a Stack Overflow question for it", and then there is a question and he answers it
When he gets an upvote on one of his more obscure answers, Ciro often re-reads it, and often finds improvements to be made and makes them.
He doesn't like to refresh the homepage looking for easy reputation on widely known subjects. See also: online forums that lock threads after some time are evil.
The result is that Ciro ends up getting relatively a lot of reputation without much work! The term passive income, much beloved by fake investment gurus, comes to mind. But now it's "passive reputation"! And it is useless! Yay!
For this reason, Necromancer is Ciro's favorite badge (get 5 upvotes on a question older than 60 days), and as of July 2019, he became the 1 user with the most of this badge. Announcement on Twitter.
The number two at the time was VonC (see also: Section "Epic Stack Overflow users"), who had about 16 times more answers than Ciro in total! From this query: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1072396?&Date=2019-07-01&UserId=895245 it can be seen that as of July 2019, 1216 out of his 1329 answers were answered 60 days after the questions and constitute potential necromancers! Compare that to VonC's 1643 potential necromancers out of 21767 answers!
VonC eventually took back the lead in 2022, dude's a machine!!! twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1546389532014247936
Someone at Ciro's work once said something along:and this does ring true in Stack Overflow as well. When you are answering stuff, it means that you either didn't know, or that the information wasn't well available, and so your specific application is progressing slowly because of that. Once the generic prerequisites are well solved and answered, you will spend much more time on your business specific things rather than anything else that can be factored out across projects, and so you will get more "directly useful work" done, and less Stack Overflow answers. Of course, without the prior research in place, you can't get the final product done either.
The more patents a research project generates, the less actually working products it produces.
In terms of per year reputation ranks, Ciro was in the top 100 in of the 2018 ranking with 38,710 reputation gained in that year: stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2018-01-01?sort=reputationchange&page=4 (archive). He reached top 50 in 2022. Note that daily reputation is mostly capped to 200 per day, leading to a maximum 73000 per year. It is possible to overcome this limit either with bounties or accepts, and Ciro finds it amazing that some people actually break the 73k limit by far with accepts, e.g. Gordon Linoff reached 135k in 2018 (archive)! However, this is something that Ciro will never do, because it implies answering thousands and thousands of useless semi duplicate questions as fast as possible to get the accept. Ciro's reputation comes purely from upvotes on important question, and is therefore sustainable without any extra effort once achieved. Interestingly, Ciro appeared on top of the quarter SE rankings around 2019-11: web.archive.org/web/20191112100606/https://stackexchange.com/leagues but it was just a bug ;-)
There is no joy like answering an old question, and watching your better answer go up little by little until it dominates all others.
Stack Overflow reputation is of course, in itself, meaningless. People who contribute to popular subjects like web development will always have infinitely more reputation than those that contribute to low level subjects.
What happens on the specialized topics though is that you end up getting to know all the 5 users who contribute 95% of the content pretty soon as you study those subjects.
Like everything that man does, the majority of Ciro's answers are more or less superficial subjects that many people know but few have the patience to explain well, or they are updates to important questions reflecting upstream developments. But as long as they save 15 minutes from someone's life, that's fine.
There is great beauty when you are involved in a programming problem, and you suddenly remember: wait, I answered something related a few years ago! And especially so when you can go back and improve your old answer with new insight. This has great value, because when you were more newbie, you would have typed different words into Google Search than you would now. So by updating posts from when you were a newbie, you are helping other newbies more, as they are more likely to be also searching for those keywords. It is also very nice to have some head start on the answer's upvote count and not have to bootstrap yet another answer from 0 upvotes and have to go through all the competition!
For example, Ciro's most upvoted answer as of July 2019 is stackoverflow.com/questions/18875674/whats-the-difference-between-dependencies-devdependencies-and-peerdependencies/22004559#22004559 was written when he spent his first week playing with NodeJS (he was having a look at Overleaf, later merged into Overleaf, for education), which he didn't touch again for several years, and still hasn't "mastered" as of 2019! This did teach a concrete life lesson to Ciro however: it is impossible to know what is the most useful thing you can do right now very precisely. The best bet is to follow your instincts and do as much awesome stuff as you can, and then, with some luck, some of those attempts will cover an use case.
Ciro tends to take most pride on his systems programming answers, which is a subject that truly relatively few people know about. He likes it when he goes insanely deep into a subject, way beyond what OP had in mind, exposing full root causes and broader causes, see e.g.:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/1778538/how-many-gcc-optimization-levels-are-there/30308151#30308151
- stackoverflow.com/questions/34519521/why-does-gcc-create-a-shared-object-instead-of-an-executable-binary-according-to/55704865#55704865
- stackoverflow.com/questions/8352535/how-does-kernel-get-an-executable-binary-file-running-under-linux/31394861#31394861
Ciro also derives great joy from his "media related answers" (3D graphics, audio, video), which are immensely fun to write, and sometimes borderline art, see answers such as those under "OpenGL" and "Media" under the best articles by Ciro Santillis or even simpler answers such as:
There is something of greater value in perfectly presented technical knowledge, that goes beyond than simply getting something done. The pleasure of understanding and mastering something, and perhaps of the explanation itself. Sometimes when answering, Ciro feels like a tailor, where ASCII is his cloth. See also: Section "The art of programming", Section "Physics and the illusion of life".
Ciro's deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: OurBigBook.com. So it is a bit funny to think that after all time Ciro spent on the website, he actually wants to destroy it and replace it with something better. There can be no innovation without some damage. It also led to Ciro's creation of Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script.
After answering so many questions, he ended up converging to a more or less consistent style, which he formalized at:Like any other style guide, this answer style guide, once fully incorporated and memorized, allows Ciro to write answers faster, without thinking about formatting issues.
- meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18614/style-guide-for-questions-and-answers/326746#326746. Key self-quote:Intersperse paragraphs with lists, code blocks and other block elementsBeautiful text is not just text. Beautiful text is half text, and half ASCII art. There is almost a texture, or tempo, to it.
- meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903. Question title style only. After a few years later more people agreeing with that post which now had -12 votes: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422082/should-we-add-option-use-complete-sentences-to-first-answers-queue
Ciro also made a question title style guide: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903 but for some reason the Stack Overflow community prefers their semi-defined title meta-language to proper English. Go figure.
Ciro started contributing to Stack Overflow in 2012 when he was at École Polytechnique.
Like all things that end up shaping the course of one's life, Ciro started contributing without thinking too much about it.
His first answer was to the LaTeX question: Standalone diagrams with TikZ?, which reflects the fact that this happened while Ciro was reaching his Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment.
Ciro's first upvote was for his 2012 question: How to run a Python script portably without specifying its full path?
When he started contributing, Ciro was still a newbie. One early event he will never forget was when someone mentioned a "man page", and Ciro commented saying that there was a typo!
When Ciro reached 15 points and gained the ability to upvote, it felt like a major milestone, he even took a screenshot of the browser! 1k, 10k and 100k were also particularly exciting. When the 100k cup (archive) arrived in 2018, Ciro made a show-off Facebook post (archive). At some point though, your brain stops caring, and automatically filters out any upvotes you get except on the answers that you are really proud of and which don't yet have lots of upvotes. The last remaining useless gamed achievement that Ciro looked forward to was legendary (archive), and which he achieved on 2021-02-16.
Ciro Santilli with his Stack Overflow 100k reputation cup
. From the start, Ciro's motivations for contributing to Stack Overflow have been a virtuous circle of:
- save the world through free education
- It feels especially amazing when people in the real world start taking note of you, and either close friends tell you straight out that you're a Stack Overflow God, or as you slowly and indirectly find out that less close know or came to you due to your amazing contributions.
It is also amazing when you start having a repertoire of answers, and as you are writing a new answer, you remember: "hey, the knowledge of that answer would be so welcome here", and so you link to the other answer as well at the perfect point. This somewhat achieves does what OurBigBook.com aims to do: for each small section of a tutorial, gather the best answers by multiple people.
Another one is Aaron Hall, who is also very high on the necromancer list, answers in Python which is a topic Ciro cares about, and states on his profile:so another necromancer.
Follow me on Twitter and tell me what canonical questions you would like me to respond to!
Way to go.
Ciro also asks some questions on a ratio of about 1 question per 10 answers. But Ciro's questions tend to be about extremely niche that no one knows/cares about, and a high percentage of them ends up getting self answered either at asking time or after later research.
Some fun reactions to Ciro's Stack Overflow activity:
- Eric B comments[ref] on Ciro's answer to the question "What does multicore assembly language look like?":
Holy shit, Ciro made it his masters degree to write OP an answer. What a long and detailed answer, thanks!
!!! Survivorship bias alert !!!
quoteinvestigator.com/2018/05/07/overcome/
If you want to do something, but you are afraid to do it, then that is likely what you should do.
quoteinvestigator.com/2013/11/08/not-bend/
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
www.goodreads.com/quotes/50458-whatever-you-re-meant-to-do-do-it-now-the-conditions Doris Lessing:
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
For example, when Ciro Santilli was deciding what to do in university, he wanted mostly to do pure physics.
But because he was afraid he was going to die poor and unemployed because of that, he picked engineering instead.
That was a mistake.
His family was not even poor. He was young and did not have a family to support. His father even told him: "do whatever the fuck you want, we support your decision".
But he was a coward.
It was also in part because a physicist uncle which he respected suggested that as an engineer Ciro might be able to make useful contributions to tooling required by physics. When Roberto Salmeron died in 2020, Ciro's friends shared this 2013 video interview with the late professor, where he explains he first went to the University of São Paulo to study engineering (like Ciro), but then fell for his passion for physics (like Ciro?), his first task being to build a Geiger counter, thus explaining the likely origin of the uncle's theory. But who knows, maybe he was right. Maybe Ciro's OurBigBook.com will become huge and help a lot of people, and it might not have had Ciro not done engineering and learnt programming. Destiny operates in weird ways sometimes.
Furthermore, while in University, Ciro learnt about the molecular Sciences Course of the University of São Paulo, a fantastic sounding full time course that any student could transfer to called that teaches various natural sciences topics which Ciro loves (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology) and which students from the entire university can apply to transfer to only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they didn't adapt to the new course.
But did Ciro do it? Nope, he remained an even larger coward.
Had he studied more sciences, he might have been happier, and might have had greater achievements later in life, in particular when he went to École Polytechnique.
Maybe not, but now this doubt will never leave his mind until the final day.
Similar thoughts crossed his mind when he started his campaign for freedom of speech in China, but this time he had learnt the lesson, and went for it, and it felt very good.
If you have a day job, but also have a dream, and want to keep the day job for a reason, try to reserve the time of the day that your brain works best before or after work for your dream: do one cool thing every day.
Companies can help you grow because you see real problems from within them, but their end goal is to consume you as much as possible. Don't let that happen. Invest part of what you gain, in yourself. www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/paradox-going-outside/ The Paradox of Going Outside by James Somers (2012) puts it incredibly well:
I work, for instance, as a Web developer. It's a very good job. Our office is a block south of Union Square, a 12-minute commute from my apartment. We're served breakfast every morning. Our kitchen is stocked with "provisions" of organic beef jerky, coconut water, craft beers, chips, and two restaurant-class espresso machines. We have two ping pong tables and buckets of 3-star ping pong balls. (A new office manager bought "1-stars" once and some of the guys protested by crushing them.) We work on 4-cored Apple Mac computers with dual monitors. We have an unmolested hour for lunch, 10-minute breaks in the morning and afternoon, and a "do not disturb" policy past the working hours. We even have a specific email address where employees can ask for free things: genuine maple syrup, hot chocolate, a $900 chair, a new keyboard. Most of the programmers make six figures, and many of those have only three or four years of experience.It's impossible to say so without sounding like the spokesperson for Entitlement itself but working there is still sort of soul-crushing. It's soul-crushing in the way that any job that doesn't command your full passionate attention must be. What happens is that I will be in my chair in the early afternoon and I will accidentally step out of myself and all I'll see is time passing, nine-hour parcels of healthy consciousness forever being packed away as the user experience of clerical workers or consumers or whoever gets marginally better; and I'll end up thinking that this enterprise of mine is not so much creative but bureaucratic, that what I've gotten good at is reading the instruction manuals of other people, finding my way around their insignificant warrens. And in those moments the whole business will seem to me like kind of a tragic waste.
Other quotes:
- is a phrase Sergey Brin uses. The Google Story claims he picked that up from academia, and quotes this from a september 2003 talk in an Israeli elite high school.
Healthy Disregard For The Impossible
- quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/29/find-love/
Find What You Love and Let It Kill You
- Cute boy things by Caroline Ellison:
if you are a boy with the confidence to advocate for unconventional ideas and take actions based on them you are valid
- How can I be as great by Justine Musk:
rock the boat
- From the 1922 poem Portuguese Sea by famous Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, which gets drilled into the head of every Brazilian high school student:He who wants to pass beyond the Bojador
Must go beyond pain.Quem quer passar além do Bojador
Tem que passar além da dor. - Translation of a poem by Muhammad Iqbal TODO date:One is reminded of As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.Said one gazelle to another, "I will Take shelter in the harem from now on; For there are hunters at large in the wild, And there is no peace here for a gazelle. From fear of hunters I want to be free. O how I long for some security."His friend replied, "Live dangerously, my Wise friend, if it is life you truly seek. Like a sword of fine mettle hurl yourself Upon the whetting-stone; stay sharp thereby. For danger brings out what is best in you: It is the touchstone of all that is true."
- "NPC life" as a way to refer to a soul crushing job
- twitter.com/0xTenkito/status/1775167216641548732, a cryptocurrency investor says:However there is one thing to lose, if you do safer investments and don't lose everything, then you might be able to retire earlier.If my portfolio goes to 0 and I lose everything, I will continue with my normal life, in a 9-5 job, and I will try to invest again as soon as I get a financial cushion again.I have nothing to lose, I can always live the standard NPC life, but to escape from it you have to take risks and take risks.
- archive.ph/mlaLK
- twitter.com/0xTenkito/status/1775167216641548732, a cryptocurrency investor says:
Don't be a pussy. Be a Based God
Dilbert "A small brain irrationally puts more weight on a small loss than on a huge opportunity" cartoon (2000)
Source. 
Jake Likes Onions "Slowly" cartoon
. Source. This is what trying to reach a dream part time feels like. The cartoon reads: "The tiger pursues its prey. Slowly. The human pursues its life goals. Slowly. Very slowly.".Excerpt from the documentary film "Steve Jobs: Secrets of Life" (1994)
Source. When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it... Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.
Of course, survivorship bias alert!
What Would You Do If Money Were No Object by Alan Watts
. Source. Sample transcription: genius.com/Alan-watts-what-if-money-was-no-object-annotated:What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?Let's suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students, they come to me and say, well, "we're getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to do". So I always ask the question, "what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?"Well, it's so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets, we'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can't earn any money that way. Or another person says well, I'd like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses. I said you want to teach in a riding school?Let's go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually turn it - you could eventually become a master of it. It's the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry too much. That's everybody is - somebody is interested in everything, anything you can be interested in, you will find others will.But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like, in order to go on spending things you don't like, doing things you don't like and to teach our children to follow in the same track. See what we are doing, is we're bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lives we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it's all retch and no vomit. It never gets there. And so, therefore, it's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?
Keep Chargin' from a Show of Hands by Victor Wooten (1996)
. Source. That's the way I live my life, I give it my all. I think that a person should really make up his mind what he wants to do, and when did made up, he cannot fail at it. The basic rule to sucess I think, is when the going gets tough, that is a positive signal to keep chargin'.
Your Life is Your life by Charles Bukowski
. Source. Charles Bukowski is one of the most hardcore don't be a pussy people ever. It's almost scary. Far beyond Ciro level.
thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2008/11/the-laughing-he.html
your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the Gods wait to delight
in you.
www.goodreads.com/quotes/39207-if-you-re-going-to-try-go-all-the-way-otherwise
If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the Gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.
I have one of two choices - stay in the post office and go crazy... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.
Bukowski kissing his typewriter.
Like Ciro Santilli and his computer!All adults are bored scene from an Edward Teller, An Early Time
. Source. Up to the time that I met Klug ([a mathematiciam]), I was sure that all grown ups were people to be pitied. They had to work, they were tired, they were bored with what they were doing. I heard both my parents often complain. Klug was the first man whom I met who most obviously enoyed what he was doing.
But to be fair, being a fucking "genius" might be a requirement to escape that fate!
The "most prestigious French engineering school". Only 3 Nobels though as of 2019, the scientists are mostly at École normale supérieure (Paris). A gazillion CEOs ad politicians however.
Ciro Santilli studied there from 2010 to 2013.
Ciro considers him entering at Polytechnique a small miracle. First, on his second year of University in Brazil, he first had to fail to join the also good but not as good École centrales, which really annoyed him as he saw the "other good students" who wanted to go out get their wish. This also explains why there are so few students from his university going to Polytechnique in the late 2010's: most already went to other locations! Then, on his third year, he tried Polytechnique and got in despite feeling that the others who got in knew much more mathematics and physics than him. Rather, Ciro believes that he got in chiefly due to his intense passion for the sciences which he showed during the interview.
The miracle would have been even greater if it had happened in 2020. At this time, out of 10 Brazilians, 9 are from ITA, the "hardest to get into" university in Brazil, and also military like Polytechnique. Make no mistake, those students are amazing and deserve it without any doubt. But there is more to the story. It could be argued that many of them only go because they don't have any other choice of exchange program. Remember: Ciro had to fail applications on previous universities before getting into Polytech. Also, they don't get any Brazilian degree because ITA has no agreements with Polytechnique, and are therefore extremely likely to never come back. Not that Ciro thinks this is particularly bad for Brazil though, but it does make for a better deal for France overall as well. They also happen to have closer ties across cohorts of different years, and have managed to maintain a Google Doc with scanned past examinations (as of 2020 however, some/all of those examinations have been uploaded publicly, big kudos to them). Also almost all of them are software engineers, which is one of the few disciplines given at the relatively small ITA. This lack of diversity might not be ideal: if I were France, I would rather fish around all top Brazilian schools for "the best".
Besides the amazing funding/opportunities/alumni/staff loop which you can read about elsewhere, Polytechnique is amazing because you can choose what you will study every year to a very large extent.
This is in huge contrast to the crappy systems Ciro had seen e.g. in Brazil's Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, where students have to decide basically all their courses in huge packages, either at university entry (thus when they are completely clueless), or at a single point inside the university studies, changes being much harder.
Life quality was also amazing. Good free accommodation on campus and at the time a no-obligations scholarship for every foreign student great sport facilities. It seems that after Ciro left however more restrictions are added to the scholarships, what a shame! As of 2020 not everyone gets scholarships anymore it seems, mostly only loans that have to be paid back later. And those who are not poor have to pay Polytechnique scholarship fees on top of their living costs. And thus French austerity measures are undermining the greatest long term investment a country can possibly make: that of importing the very best students from other countries into yours. This after their host country has already spent 20 years raising and selecting them. And you won't even pay them 2 years of frugal existence to steal some of them them. Even if those students move away from your country later on, the contacts they made in your country mean they are much more likely to bring businesses over. But some will stay. Basically, France is becoming more like the United States.
This also makes it much more difficult for those students to do a PhD afterwards, where they would get paid very little, and are unable to pay their student debts. A PhD would be where they would possibly bring more of the next big thing to your country. Instead, they are much more likely to just go work for some big American company data wrangling and bring nothing to your country but their student debt dividends instead, which they will be pay to pay for in one year with those amazing salaries. And unsurprisingly many go to into banks. What a big time fail, France.
Sport was mandatory due to the military nature of the school. This did have the upside of getting students together more, although Ciro is against all forms of forced intellectual of physical activities for students. If you liked your sport it would be really cool though. But due to Section "Ciro Santilli's knee", he was forced to give up his first beloved choice which was soccer... life can be cruel. If only Ciro had known cycling at at the time, and if only that had been one of the sports you could choose (but of course it isn't, no school will want the bad reputation of when one of their students gets killed in a car accident).
There were also some useless "military exercises", or special situations in which you had to wear the useless school uniform as a formal "respect social clothing". Ciro Santilli is completely against all that meaningless bullshit, this his just a form of theatrical masturbation to nostalgically remember the good old days of Napoleon when France still ruled the world, and before they tortured the Algerians, see also: Video 4. "Gérard Fuchs interview from Ils racontent la Guerre d'Algérie (1982)". If you are going to do military-like stuff, then at least teach students how to shoot modern rifles and modern warfare tactics (which some of the French students actually do in the pre-school mandatory internship), and not this 18th century bullshit. Ciro favours of course the hoodie-wearing, "I only care about your abilities meritocracy" culture of Silicon Valley. And without the political correctness now associated with it in the 2020s. And no shooting people if possible.
During the time Ciro was at Polytechnique in early 2010's, the school was really isolated in the Plateau de Saclay, there were no shops in 10 minute walking distance! You either had to climb 300 steps to go down to the nearest village, Lozère, or take a bus to the nearest town, Massy. The fact that Times Higher Education ranked it as the second best university in the world in 2019 (archive) makes it good justice, given the small 500 student body. Things started to change a bit after Ciro left however, with the creation of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris, which is bringing other schools to the Lozere area. This is for the best, as it might improve the global rankings of Polytechnique. Also it is a waste to have so few students at a technopole. But it will reduce the mystique of the place. You can't have everything in life.
Before 1976, Polytechnique was actually in the center of Paris at the Latin Quarter, so the Lozère mystique is not a traditional thing. But even when in Paris, students were in theory restricted to school grounds a most of the time. Although there are famous stories of a certain tree that could be used to climb the fence to go to Parisian parties when they couldn't stand it anymore. The tree was somewhat intentionally overlooked by school administrators. Polytechnique was drawn to Saclay no doubt because of the gravity of the CEA Paris-Saclay, France's analog to the United States Department of Energy national laboratories.
This made for some good memories though. The isolation favored concentration, and gave the place a mystical feeling. And then when you went to eat amazing Chinese food in Paris it just felt even more special and magic since you were so limited during the week. It was also under those magical circumstances in which Ciro met his wife, another student of the school, see also: Section "The main function of university is sexual selection".
Ciro also agonized about passing courses to get useless grades though! Polytechnique is hard for most Brazilians, specially if you select the more mathematics oriented courses, because the French students were math brainwashed for two years before joining.
Ciro's favorite spots/activities:
- hide in top corner desk of the library to learn some science. Ciro loves libraries.
- weekend days in his awesome room learning Chinese
Figure 1. The room also has a bed and toilet, it was great, and it was free back in those days! Only the kitchen was shared, which is good for meeting people. And for getting your password keylogged in the shared supplies buying system. This actually happened while Ciro was at in Polytechnique, but the keylogger operator was caught, and the semi-secret-unknown-participants-Gestapo-like-but-mostly-head-of-school-approved student association "Khômiss" broke their door (which leads to an internal corridor) with a fire axe, their traditional way of saying that someone fucked up. All students live on campus, which is great for concentration. - sit next to the lake in a warm day to relax
Figure 2. Just imagine this in a perfect sunny weekend day with pure silence, it was just perfect. The lake also has a long area where rowing is practiced. - randomly go study at night in one of the small 20 person classrooms that were used in the day and left open at night
Figure 3. A typical small classroom at École Polytechnique. Source. The tables are shown in the usual course configuration. Imagine that at night, in pure silence, with some of your best friends studying on a nearby room. The usual course configuration was first a course by the main teacher in a large amphitheater, and then break down into small groups with tutors, known in French as "Petites classes" (PC). In some English-speaking world traditions, such small class system is known as recitation class. While those small classes are a reasonable approach, Ciro Santilli's slow brain would rather just have a book and an online forum where tutors answer questions instead.
Horny Polytechnicienne mural by Binet BD
. Edit: Ciro noticed this mural had been removed as of 2023. Of course it was removed! TODO removal date. TODO photo of the new art that took its place, it seems to be a boring image of R5-D4. Fucking political correctness zealots. A perfectly fine piece of erotica artwork lost forever except for this photo of it. Thanks to Ciro's kinky friend, Mr. F. for in his infinite insight insisting on taking a picture of it.
Every year, student organizations, the binets, get to compete for student elections, and they are allowed to make murals in the school to advertise themselves.
They kinky people from the 1996 Cartoon Binet (BD == Band Dessiné == Cartoon in French) decided to take it to the next level, with the depiction of a horny polytechnicienne, on the corridor near the student bar, the Bôbar, in front of the cartoon library of the Binet BD.
Good old 1996, this would never be allowed in 2019 due to political correctness.
As an engineering school, Polytechnique students were predominantly male up as of 2019.
Let's see how much longer it will last.
How about adding a sexy male polytechnicien suggestively holding his theatrical sword (nicknamed the "tangente") with shirt open instead of removing the lady???
In 2022, sexual aggression accusations at Polytechnique surfaced, will the mural survive them?
Ciro heard of two other mural censorship events orally from younger students during a visit in 2023:
- there was a sexy girl from Judo also censored since
- Judo (again) also apparently used a red resing sun symbol that some Chinese students felt was too close to the Japanese war flag: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_Flag. This made Ciro feel a strong urge to advertise his mirror of github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship at gitlab.binets.fr/ciro.duran-santilli/china-dictatorship just to test the supposed French obsession with freedom of speech!
Related information on the École Polytechnique internal student wiki: wikix.binets.fr/Fresque
Polytechnicienne by Ecole polytechnique
. Source. Promotional documentary in French showing the situation of women at Polytechnique. Ciro couldn't resist putting it next to the horny polytechnicienne.
Of particular note is is the footage of the first year in which women were accepted, 1972: youtu.be/IA1kSC_d4R8?t=298, shortly before Polytechnique moved from central Paris to Lozère in 1976.
www.mondedesgrandesecoles.fr/egalite-femmes-hommes-polytechnique-et-sa-communaute-sengagent claims that as of 2019 only 14% of the students were women.
The fact that Ciro managed to find a wife in this conditions is a statement to his Brazilian seduction skills.
The following promotional videos give an idea of how the school looks like, although they fundamentally miss the little corners that Ciro really loved in that the place and which made it magic:
Video 2. Pourquoi choisir l'Ecole polytechnique by École Polytechnique (2013)Source.Video 3. Rentrée des élèves de la promotion 2017 du cycle ingénieur by École Polytechnique (2017)Source.
And a one second Ciro Santilli appearance from a 2016 video made during the annual Brazilian barbecue (or as close as you an get to it) which many ex-Brazilian students attend able: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndX_-A2Rjpo&t=189 wearing a Ring t-shirt.
Gérard Fuchs interview from Ils racontent la Guerre d'Algérie (1982)
Source. French. Title translation: "they tell the story War in Algeria". In this segment at this timestamp, French politician and ancient Polytechnician tells of his experience in Algeria, to which all Polytechnicians were sent for 2 years after graduating as part of their mandatory service to the French state. He is not notable enough to have an English Wiki page however unfortunately.
He mentions that the huge scale military operations they did were useless, they enemies could easily notice and escape before they had closed in. He then chose a job in intelligence, the alternative being special operations, without fully knowing what it was going to be. He then once walked into his colleague during an interrogation where torture had obviously been used. He claims however that he managed to forbid torture under his command. He was then gravely shot, but survived.
He then mentions that when he came back and started digesting the experience, he felt that democracy was not enough, and that to actually stop wars people needed to be better informed and have a more direct democracy (a point Ciro Santilli agrees with), and that kind of made him want to become a politician. He looks like a nice guy.
On a related note, the exact same "Maquis"/"Maquisard" is used in French to describe both French WWII Resistance fighters, as well as the Algerian revolutionaries, as the south of France has a somewhat similiar dry bushy region where the revolutionaries would hide. And the French were like the Gestapo in Algeria.
Creator of QEMU and FFmpeg, both of which Ciro Santilli deeply respects. And a bunch other random stuff.
What is shocking about Fabrice this is that both are insanely important software that Ciro Santilli really likes, and both seem to be completely unrelated subjects!
Google made billions on top of this dude:
- FFmpeg is the backend of YouTube
- QEMU is the default emulator for Android Studio as of 2019, which Android developers use by default under the hood to develop Android Apps on their desktop without the need for a real device.
At last but not least, Fabrice also studied in the same school that Ciro Santilli studied in France, École Polytechnique.
It is a shame that he keeps such a low profile, there are no videos of him on the web, and he declines interviews.
Another surprising fact is that Fabrice has not worked for the "Big Tech Companies" as far as can be publicly seen, but rather mostly on smaller companies that he co-founded: www.quora.com/Computer-Programmers/Computer-Programmers-Where-is-Fabrice-Bellard-employed
And he's also into some completely random projcts unsurprisingly:
- www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/ Computer Scientist Fabrice Bellard Announces Computing Pi to Record Number of Digits
Bibliography:
- smartbear.com/de/blog/2011/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-pro/ contains a list of his projects as of 2011
Fabrice Bellard in 2007
. Source. At a restaurant with the author apparently. Plus Miguel De Icaza who was in Paris for some conference, which they all presumably attended.
Fabrice Bellard with light
. There are no in-focus images of Fabrice on the Internet.Most notable example: gallium arsenide, see also: gallium arsenide vs silicon.
An important class of semiconductors, e.g. there is a dedicated III-V lab at: École Polytechnique: www.3-5lab.fr/contactus.php
Molecular Sciences Course of the University of São Paulo Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Good Portuguese overview: www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1806-11172017000300301&lng=pt&tlng=pt
A fantastic sounding full time 4-year course that any student could transfer to called that teaches various natural science topics, notably mathematics, physics, chemistry and molecular biology.
Many past students Ciro talked to however share a common frustration with the course: in the first 2 years at least, the "basic cycle", you have infinitely many courses, and no time to study, and no choice of what to study, it is only in the latter 2 years (the advanced cycle) that you get the choices.
Also, if you get low grades in a single subject, your out. And exams are useless of course.
Here's a Quora question in Portuguese about the course: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP, the only decent answer so far being: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP/answer/Victor-Soares-31. Very disappointing to hear.
On the advanced cycle, you have a lot of academic freedom. You are basically supposed to pick a research project with an advisor and go for it, with a small amount of mandatory course hours. Ciro was told in 2022 that you can even have advisors from other universities or industry, and that it is perfectly feasible to take courses in another university and validate the course hours later on. Fantastic!!!
Students from the entire University of São Paulo can apply to transfer to it only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they don't adapt to the new course, which is great!
Not doing it is one of Ciro Santilli's regrets in life, see also: don't be a pussy.
Around 2007, they were in a really shady building of the University, but when Ciro checked in 2021, they had apparently moved to a shiny new entrepreneurship-focused building. Fantastic news!!!
One of the Brazilians who came to École Polytechnique together with Ciro was from this course. The fact that he is one of the most intelligent people Ciro knows gave further credit to that course in his eyes.
The general and ideal user acquisition is of course organic Googling:
- user does not understand his teacher's explanation of a subject
- user Googles into rare specific subject
- looks around, then login/create account with OAuth to leaves a comment or upvote
- notice that you can fork anything
- mind = KABOOM
However, before that point, it is very likely that Ciro will have to physically do some very hard and specific user acquisition work at some University. Maybe there is a more virtual way of achieving this.
This work will involve going through some open set of university lecture notes, and creating a superior version of them on OurBigBook.com, and somehow getting students to notice it and use it as a superior alternative to their crappy lecture notes.
Another very promising route is publishing the answers to old examination questions on the website. It is likely that we will be able to overcome any copyright issues by uploading only the answers to numbered questions. There is a minor risk that these would be considered derivative works of the copyrighted questions. But universities would have to be very anal to enforce a DMCA for that!!!
Getting in contact with students is an epic challenge, as an incredibly deep chasm separates us:
- it is basically impossible to try and approach teachers: how to convince teachers to use CC BY-SA
- and on the other hand, how will you get university students to trust you are not a pedophile and that you actually want to help them?The missing aspect is how to join their main "class communication group", e.g. a WhatsApp or Discord chat they have. That would be the perfect entry point to communicate with the end users. But that entry point is also generally closed exclusively for students, and sometimes lecturers, and will not accept anyone external.Perhaps Ciro would be able to do something with one of the two Universities he attended in the past: École Polytechnique or University of São Paulo. But there was no clear channel in those institutions for that. There is either an "infinitely noisy Facebook with everyone that bothered" or silence, deathly silence and isolation of no contact. The key hard part is getting a per-course granularity chat. Discord Student Hubs are a fantastic initiative in that area. Shame that Discord is an unusable mess with zero ways to select which notifications you care about: Section "Discord email notifications"!One approach method that shows some promise is to follow the Student societies, which often host open events of interest outside of work hours.
Walking with advertisement t-shirts mentioning specific course names in some university location is something Ciro seriously considers, that's how desperate things are. Watch out: docs.ourbigbook.com/#public-relations for T-shirt news!
Examples under python.
Ciro Santilli's wife was studying a bit of basic Python for some job interviews, when she noticed:Damn right, girl, damn right.
Wow,inis so powerful! You can dofor x in list,for x in dictandif x in dictall with that single word!
Ciro remembers hearing about Python online briefly. It seemed like a distant thing from the Java/C dominated (and outdated) university courses. Then some teaching assistant mentioned during some course when Ciro was at École Polytechnique that Python was a great integration tool. That sounded cool.
Then finally, when the École Polytechnique mathematics department didn't let Ciro Santilli do his internship of choice due to grades and Ciro was at an useless last moment backup internship, he learned more Python instead of doing his internship job, and was hooked.