Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Closed source on offline products used by millions of people is evil, when you could just have those for free with open source software! Thus Ciro's hatred for Microsoft Windows and MacOS (at least userland, maybe).

Open source development model in which developers develop in private, and only release code to the public during releases.

Notable example project: Android Open Source Project.

This development model basically makes reporting bugs and sending patches a waste of time, because many of them will already have been solved, which is why this development model is evil.

All companies with investors are evil, make no mistake.

They may have nice looking save the world charity campaigns, but once you get even close to affecting their revenue stream, the axe falls. The charity is only a publicity stunt to reduce wages.

Some level of government intervention is needed to control investor's greed.

It is just a question of business model: some business models are eviler than others. Making people pay for operating systems being possible the most evil of all.

One thing must be said however. You can learn a lot by working in a good company, because it ends up putting you in contact with practical real problems that you wouldn't otherwise see by just doing your own random low-tech startup. This is especially valuable if said company is also enlightened enough to use and contribute back to open source software, thus improving the world and paying back the moral debt of using other people's work for free.

Another important point to consider is who in the company is evil. In a sane tech company, the lowly engineers are going to be non-evil. And then the more you go up the management chain, the more aligned you have to be with investors, and thus the more and more evil you get. HR is just evil from the bottom though, it's just the nature of their job.

As if Chinese character weren't evil enough, their fast hand written form is even more unintelligible. It is like Hell within Hell.

It is also very beautiful it must be said.

Evil. Just use Python instead for software, and a well known data file format for data, please.

Euphemisms are evil bullshit.

Just say what you mean to say,

Don't be a pussy.

If you've been fired, say you been fired, not "let go".

If someone died, say they died, not "passed away".

One of the least evil of the big tech companies of the early 21st century, partly because Sergey Brin's parents fled from the Soviet Union and so he is anti censorship, although they have been tempted by it.

Google only succeeds at highly algorithmic tasks or at giving infinite storage to users to then mine their data.

It is incapable however of adding any obvious useful end user features to most of its products, most of which get terminated and cannot be relied on:

This also seems to extend to business-to-business: twitter.com/MohapatraHemant/status/1343969802080030720 ex-Googler tells how they lost the cloud to Amazon.

More mentions of that:

Too many genius engineers. They need some dumber people like Ciro Santilli who need to write documentation to learn stuff.

Ciro Santilli actually attempted two interviews to work at Google in the early 2010's but very quickly failed both on the first phase, because you have to be a fast well trained coding machine to pass that interview.

Ciro later felt better about himself by fantasizing how he would actually do more important things outside of Google and that they would beg to buy him instead.

He was also happy that he wouldn't have to use Google crazy internal tools: someone once said that Google's tools make easy tasks middle hard, and they also make impossible tasks middle hard. TODO source.

But whatever the case: Ciro will not, ever, spend his time drilling programmer competition problems to join a company.

www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-ends-its-culture-of-openness/ "GOOGLE TGIF 1999 video". TGIF is the weekly all hands meeting abolished in 2019: www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-ends-its-culture-of-openness/

While this has some of the metrics features that Ciro Santilli wants to implement for OurBigBook.com, it limits the number of articles your readeres can read.

How the fuck can you publish on a website that limits the number of views for your articles?!?! When all it has is static pages + some metrics?!?!

Evil. Just learn to use GitHub Pages for God's sake.

They are evil because they produce closed source offline software used by millions: Microsoft Windows.

And also their monopolistic practices: United States v. Microsoft Corp.

So, as put in Video "Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs by Epic Rap Battles of History (2012)" by fake Steve Jobs to fake Bill Gates:

However, like all big tech companies with infinite money, they do end up doing some cool things in their research department, Microsoft Research, notably for Ciro Santilli being:

Evil company that desecrated the beauty created by Sun Microsystems, and was trying to bury Java once and or all in the 2010's.

Their database is already matched by open source e.g. PostgreSQL, and ERP and CRM specific systems are boring.

Oracle basically grew out of selling one of the first SQL implementations in the late 70's, and notably to the United States Government and particularly the CIA. They did deliver a lot of value in those early pre-internet days, but now open source is and will supplant them entirely.

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:

Somewhare around 2021, they started allowing subs to not autolock all posts if the mods want to allow it, thus leaving the evil list of Online forums that lock threads after some time!

TODO find official announcement:

Co-founder of Apple.

Is Jobs evil? Is he interesting? Undoubtedly.

www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&characters=Steve%20Jobs has some good anecdotes about him.

Ciro Santilli is especially fond of: Jobs and Wozniak's blue box.

Good quotes:

You must watch this: Video "Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs by Epic Rap Battles of History (2012)".

Evil deeds:

When Ciro Santilli was very young, about 6, he was a fatty, and other evil boys picked on him.

Ciro was even more stupid than as of 2020, and continued to try and hang out with those evil kids to show them he was cool too or that he was strong, and so continued to get hurt.

Advice to his children: stay away from evil people.

The bullied sometimes feels an almost masochistic desire to overcome the bullies' contempt, and to try and either become friends with the bullies, or to overpower them.

You must never give into those thoughts.

If you come across evil people, smile a fake smile to them, and walk away, but never give your back to them, and always be ready to fight.

If they laugh at you, know that you are shit like everyone else, pretend to laugh with them, take their post and repost it on your public profile, and silently stay away from those idiots.

Never show any weakness.

If a fight is likely, always be ready, always have your friends nearby, be as well armed as the enemy, and never be outnumbered.

On the Internet, never care about e-bully posts, either block them immediately, and anyone that likes their posts, or follow Ciro's reply policy.

Call parents or other authorities as soon as there is risk of physical harm. Better a living free pussy than dead or in youth detention for murder. Similar advice applies if you are going to jail I guess.

If a physical fight is inevitable however, ignore Jesus this once and don't give the other face, but rather follow the Talmud and fight all out on the beaches:References:

The Sikh knife, the Kirpan, which Sikhs must carry at all times as a religious obligation, also comes to mind. The Sikh must have been bullied out of the their minds at some point in history, Ciro understands.

Non-violence only works when you have bodies to spare from your followers.

Perhaps it was good to learn those lessons early, before the stakes were too high. Adults fake it much better, and therefore it is harder to learn those lessons from them, but they are still just as evil on the inside.

These experiences might have contributed to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.

Ciro Santilli believes that there is a positive correlation between being a software engineer and liking Buddhist-like things.

Maybe it is linked to minimalism and DRY, which software engineers value so greatly.

Even Ciro had to try an unoriginal Buddhist joke intro in one of this Stack Overflow answers.

Ciro also feels that his "minimal reproducible example" scientific language/concept learning method obsession of breaking things into tiny sub-problems has a strong link with Koans.

Some notable Buddhism/programmer examples:

Another thing that points the correlation out is the existence of wattsalan.github.io/ on a github.io about Alan Watts.

The ruler of the 1950-2020 world by Dollar and nuke count.

Capable of evil like any other country, and somewhat merciless to its poor and overly egocentric, but not nearly as evil as any dictatorship.

Has the huge advantage of being one large country which speaks English.

Countries of the world have only two choices as of 2019: either rally behind the US and support democracy, or rally behind China and support dictatorship. The choice is up to you, voters. The more you deal with China, the more you lose your democracy and freedom. All dictatorships have no doubt that they must stick together.

And Americans, please stop that America Number 1 bullshit. Obviously everyone has to strive to be the best, so when you say it like that, it sounds like "even if at the expense of everyone else". The motto has to be "democracy number 1" or else you will scare off all allies. If all other countries sell out to China, you are fucked.

When Ciro Santilli first learnt the old Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory and the idea of formal proofs, his teenager mind was completely blown.

Finally, there it was: a proper and precise definition of mathematics, including a definition of integers, reals and limits!

Theorems are strings, proofs are string manipulations, and axioms are the initial strings that you can use.

Once proved, press a button on your computer, and the proof is automatically verified. No messy complicated "group of savants" reading it for 4 years and looking for flaws!

There are a few proof assistant systems with several theorems in their Git tracked standard library. The hottest ones circa 2020 are:

And here are some more interesting links:

However, as expressed by the QED manifesto, is unbelievable that there isn't one awesome and dominating website, that hosts all those proofs, possibly an on the browser editor, and which all mathematicians in the world use as the one golden reference of mathematics to rule them all!

Just imagine the impact.

Standard library maintainers don't have to deal with the impossible question of what is "beautiful" or "useful" enough mathematics to deserve merged: users just push content to the online database, and star what they like!

We then just use GitHub-like namespaces for each person's theorem, e.g. "cirosantilli/fundmaental-theorem-of-calculus" or "johndoe/fundmaental-theorem-of-calculus" so that each person owns their own preferred definition IDs, which others can reuse.

No more endless bikeshedding over what insane level of generality do your analysis theorems need to be (Ciro Santilli attended at talk about Lean where the speaker mentioned this was a problem)!

This would move things more out of the "pull request and Git tracked code" approach, into a more "database with entries" version of things.

Furthermore, it is just a matter of time until the "single standard library" approach starts to break down, as the git clone becomes impossibly large. At this point, people have to start publishing separate packages. And when this happens, you would need to retest every package that you add to your project. This is why a centralized database is just inevitable at some point, it just scales better.

Interested in a conjecture? No problem: just subscribe to its formal statement + all known equivalents, and get an email on your inbox when it gets proved!

Are you a garage mathematician and have managed to prove a hard theorem, but no "real" mathematician will read your proof because your unknown? Fuck that, just publish it on the system and let it get auto verified. Overnight fame awaits.

Notation incompatibility hell? A thing of the past, just automatically convert to your preferred representation.

Such a system would be the perfect companion to OurBigBook.com. Just like computer code offers the backbone of Linux Kernel Module Cheat Linux kernel tutorials, a formal proof system website would be the backbone of mathematics tutorials! You know what, if OurBigBook.com becomes insanely successful, Ciro is going to add this to it later on.

Furthermore, it would not be too hard to achieve this system!

All we would need would be something analogous to a package registry like PyPI or NodeJS' registry.

Then, each person can publish packages containing proofs.

Packages can rely on other packages that contain pre-requisites definition or theorem.

Packages are just regular git repos, with some metadata. One notable metadata would be a human readable description of the theorems the package provides.

The package registry would then in addition to most package registries have a CI server in it, that checks the correctness of all proofs, generates a web-page showing each theorem.

All proofs can be conditional: the package registry simply shows clearly what axiom set a theorem is based on.

This is a close as we can get to Erdős' book.

Maybe Ciro will just stuff this into OurBigBook.com once that takes over the world.

This project could be seen as a more automated/less moderated version of ProofWiki.

Bibliography: