Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Seems to simulate the world in an extremely elaborate way.
Ciro can't help but to think that with a little content work, this game engine could also produce a Factorio-like (conveyor belts mentioned in passing at: discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/vehicle-unloading/10783), or a The Sims-like, or an Stardew-valley-like. E.g. even stuff like house building is already included: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnCYGSlZ1gE
They're also adding more and more allyied NPC management in "faction camps" it seems: www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/edg5y0/a_beginners_guide_to_faction_bases/ thus approaching the game further to Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld.
Ciro Santilli played this for 1 day and a half non-stop with save scumming in 2022, then he deleted his saves and uninstalled the game, and started Googling to see how end games can look like, as usual.
The problem is that it is a bit hard to find edited gameplay with highlights only, the type of people who play those games are just regular nerds right. But there is a lot of gameplay videos, just not edited ones.
Then two days later Ciro re-downloaded it and played more, just no so nonstop, the urge was too strong. Two days later, he deleted the save again after clearing out a middle sized town, and reaching a large town.
Then Ciro learned about debug menu, which is the best way to experience all buildings/weapons/abilities easily without grinding more than necessary. TODO any simple easy way to become invincible there? discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/prompt-for-certain-debug-commands/19209/5
We do not accept feature requests for the debug menu.
Lol. Found a "Debug invincibility" and "Debug invisibility" under mutations.
But a few days later he played a bit more for a day non-stop after having learnt some more techniques from YouTube, and then deleted again.
Ciro noticed that the part of this game that he likes the most is the early game. Raiding low populated areas like farms is joy. Once you get a car and stabilize, things become a bit less fun, and it is then just a matter of getting more and more powerful with a lot of routine work, which takes time. Sleeping in tents is quite tempting as well, there's a campfire overmap tile that is great. You can actually take down tents Ciro later learnt... that's awesome.
A major joy of this type of game is the ability to loot shops and homes without any moral implications since the former owners are all dead/zombified.
Another major joy is the incredible value you attach to items you discover, because they are truly life changing.
For example, Ciro was first obsessed with his duffel bag, which could carry huge volumes, and made fixing it a top priority once it got ripped!
Then he was obsessed about the 4x4 car he found, which looks like this:
fffffF
fttsfF
fttsfF
fffffF
where:
  • f: frame
  • F: reinforced frame
  • t: trunk
  • s: seat
What a great design! Enough room for a lot of loot, and also the reinforced frame to kill zombies without destroying the car, all while not being overly heavy which spends a lot of fuel, not being too wide which makes maneuvering in cities with broken cars on the road hard! Also the trunks were large enough for large water tanks, which solves your clean water supply forever.
Humvees are also good, but they are wider, have a lot of useless seats, and consume diesel, a lot of diesel, runs out very quickly. But they are even tougher than the 4x4, and have a turret that can fire at zombies.
It should be noted however that larger towns are generally just too much to use a car to clear, you will just waste too much fuel/car damage/real world time. The only way is to go at night it seems.
And then guns. The power of a guns is something to behold. Encounters that would easily be your death become one shot escapes. But of course, ammo is very limited, so you want to use each precious shot wisely! FEMA camps are a good place to get some easy powerful rifles and reasonable amount of ammo. Just drive in front of the entrance, and make the armed guards follow you out, then run them over. Try not to attract the zombie inside though, they are useless civilians without weapons, and just take up your time.
This game is also very good to learn some English if you are not a native, as you have to learn what all those bit and bobs you never needed to say before are.
The default tileset when running cataclysm-tiles is a huge improvement over the text version, but still, could be a bit higher res. Overmap tilesets were only added in 2021 it seems: www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/pxtqsn/new_overmap_tileset_available/. Edit: 0.F appears to come with the proper Ultima tileset by defualt via cataclysm-dda-data Ubuntu 22.04 package. Fantastic!
There are other built-in tiles under settings, but all of them are way too resolution for a casual gamer.
github.com/I-am-Erk/CDDA-Tilesets has a good tileset pack. To install on Ubuntu 21.10, drop the release under:
~/.local/share/cataclysm-dda/gfx/
and then select UltCa from Settings > Tiles in the main menu. It does make things much more immediately understandable. Edit: after some initial plays, Ciro had a second look at the default -tiles graphics, and they are not so bad. But still, the higher resolution is better. Edit: looks like they are going to merge it in-tree, which is great! github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/commits/master/gfx/UltimateCataclysm
No default sounds, but has a soundpacks mechanism. Sad for now default, but cool for the configurability:
Installation is similar to tilesets, but you put it under sounds/ instead of gfx/. Restart required to select the soundpack option, and another restart required for the selected option to be used, clunky.
This is the type of thing that prevents wider adoption of this game, it is just too hard to figure out things.
The other major requirement for casual players would be mouse clicking stuff with dropdown menus that show what you can do there (e.g. E and Shift + G), and better menus, everything should be also doable with a mouse in addition to the keyboard shortcuts.
Besides the zombies, it also has some high tech stuff like bionics and aliens mixed in. And mods add other stuff, e.g. cddawiki.chezzo.com/cdda_wiki/index.php?title=Magiclysm which is quite cool. The design document/lore spoilers explain that this is the actual cause of te cataclysm: cataclysmdda.org/lore-background.html
The cool thing about this type of game is that enemies are really powerful, which is so much more realistic. Even a single zombie has to be given lots of respect, especially since healing is a slow process like real life, and killing one feels like an achievement.
Some other cool points:
Tips for beginners:
  • a Reddit list: www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/hsxpco/things_you_wish_you_knew_when_you_started_playing/
  • go to town at night, zombies are even blinder than you, it is possible to sneak by massive hoards, fighting one enemy at a time, even when they are well packed together. The only possible reason to go out during the day is to smash zombies with a car without crashing.
  • favoriting items makes you not drop them by default with ,. This is fundamental so you can drop loot while keeping survival stuff on you.
  • indestructible and faster than you early game enemies, encounter means certain death: Survivor zombie, Giant cockroach, Giant wasp. Walking on trails is also potentially deadly, which is very annoying... sometimes you only see dealy enemies like wolves when you are on top of them on trails. Not sure what to do about that.
  • pick up all items from any surrounding tile: /, then on left I for inventory, on right A for area. You can also examine items with e if not everything fits, and sort by category with s. That's the most important menu in the game!
  • duffel bags are the best thing ever made, carry huge volumes, and you can craft them too!
  • smash (S) zombie corpses after you kill them, or else they will re-raise after a few hours. They will be wounded and easy to kill however.
  • just like in real life, cars are the ultimate killing machine. For some reason though, it does not smash zombie corpses. They can also carry infinite crap, after clearing up a town, you can just pick up EVERYTHING without thinking too much, just hit ,. To bulk move things into/off a car, just hold Enter until the inventory is full. So sort huge piles by category: Shift + V then S:.
    • to get fuel from other cars, you need a rubber hose that can be easily obtained by smashing a refrigerator.
    • you can just siphon directly from one vehicle to another if you stop them close by, no need to go through containers every time!
    • you will learn where are good places to find cars:
      • bridges
      • prisons
      • mine entrance parking lots
      • car refueling/repair stationsJust like in real life, bicycles are pretty good if you can't find a working car, as they don't consume fuel, just stamina. You can even go around hordes if you are crazy enough, and try to look for working cars in towns, but going on the countryside would be wiser. Just make sure you always have enough stamina to cycle out to safety if your electric motor isn't working, which is often the case!
    Electric cars can also be recharged from the sun, which means they will never run out. They are generally not very strong, so not suitable for ramming, and the battery runs out relatively soon. But great to stop out of town.
  • head encumbrance does not seem to do anything besides limit how many hats you can wear, so do ware that motorcycle helmet: www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/a5nq6c/head_encumbrance/
  • headlamps are a must
  • on the overmap m, you can fast travel with Shift + W twice. Not perfect path finding, but saves a lot of useless clicking!
  • on the EVAC shelter computer, contact us is not useless at all! It shows the nearest refugee center, and can show a lot of map because it shows the full road path there
  • climb buildings to see further out. You can start by climbing the EVAC shelter via gutter with >! But to go down pipes you have to examine it, not <, it's weird. Edit: actually, you can "climb down" any ledge, so that's why. But you can still get hurt, so don't do it unless it is really necessary. You will want to carry the telescope, or a binoculars with you at all times most likely, as it is just a huge asset. You just can't climb back up without the water pipe. Radio tower and silos are other good buildings to climb, and radio towers often contain telescopes which allow you to see very very far, climbing those is a top priority when scouting a new region. Don't jump down, even of 1 floor, as it hurts you. A bit exaggerated, but so be it.
  • you can grind fabrication easily to level 1 even without a book: www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/6r2477/best_way_to_grind_fabrication/ This is fundamental to make the all important brazier. And you'll learn that dumping things in the brazier unnecessarily burns them out, the uninsuitive "Construct" > "Firewood Source" is a must.
  • place brazier immediately outside of the EVAC shelter window, this way you avoid smoke problems, but can still cook from the inside.
  • shopping carts are the very best mechanism to carry a lot of loot in town besides a car. And there's a foldable version that can fit into cars, but you have to craft it... www.youtube.com/watch?v=kccBl7cksPY. Most important item ever.
  • there's a built-in debug menu that allows you to cheat whatever you want: spawn items, change your stats (e.g. 10000 strenght and smash through walls? no problem), learn skills, reveal map, and teleport. You have to bind a key to it before using it from ?, , is a good bind candidate. Now that's real fun, being God.
  • auto-smash mode is a must
  • you likely should look into spears: www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/7m99jb/why_melee_with_anything_besides_spears/. Reach attacks from spears are OP, as you can hit a zombie, run, wait for it to come in range, hit from afar, run, and so on. Then after killing a zombie, you wait until your stamina recovered with |. This allows to safely kill anything as fast as you without taking hits. Wooden spear is a good first one, and it is not flimsy and lasts a while, like 30-50 zombies maybe. A pitch fork is another good option if you can find one.
How a typical early day looks like for a newbie: go to down, fight 5 zombies, get some stuff from houses, and run back home because your limbs are too weak and could break. Get home 10AM, and read the hole day and night. Repeat.
A fun play style is: get a car, clear out a small town with a library, bring food and books back to the base, fill the 4 60L tanks with water and bring them on the car as well, and then just read for several days until the food runs out. Repeat. It is not super serious if you don't have a car though, as even "shallow water" pools found in every forest can fill one of them. Exploitative mechanic BTW.
Top feature requests for Ciro Santilli:
  • www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/2mni5z/can_i_store_items_in_a_backpack_and_drop_the/. As of 0.E-3-1, drop happens automatically on Take off, but then you have to pick up items that go overweight/volume one by one.
  • find items in my inventory by quality, or at least all item qualities in a single sortable table, otherwise it is too hard to know which item can do what
  • fill all empty containers with something, e.g. water from a large pool into 25 plastic bottles
  • view wound details without having to select bandage or antiseptic. @ "EFFECTS" has a summary, but it is too tiny, that stats window should be fullscreen for sure
  • realism requests. Ciro is a big fan of realism in CDDA, the more the better, and if you don't like something, just use the debug menu!
    • shitting/peeing system
    • when you wash clothes (currently important because zombie worn clothes that you pickup are generally filthy and reduce morale), make the clothes wet and require drying. There are even already some rotation clothes handers in houses, but just putting on a bench would be enough. And of course, higher temperatures mean faster drying, next to a fire would be ideal. Wearing wet clothes would of course make you cold and demoralized.
  • exercise/fitness
TODO how to create a custom non random map/scenario? Possible from JSON: discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/guide-to-adding-new-content-to-cdda-for-first-time-modders/17781/13/ ?
Their dominating Q&A communication channels are terrible, as of 2021 everything you google leads to: www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/ which suffers from online forums that lock threads after some time are evil (edit: this changed since). They've since made a discourse thankfully however: discourse.cataclysmdda.org/
Source code overview:
  • it is funny how the lang/ directory with translations is by far the largest of the repo ta 100MB, way larger than gfx, it's comical
One of the things it simulates is some level of builing stuff:
  • you can build a wooden house: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnCYGSlZ1gE including floor, roof, windows. There are also concrete walls. Of course, building is useless, what you really want is a super mega truck that doubles as a home.
  • you can dig water channels from rivers/lakes with a digging tool to bring water to your doorstep. TODO can you dig down deeper than "pit", minecraft style?
    OK, you can build a "Dig downstair" and it works. With a pickaxe you can carve stone sideways. With infinite cheated strength you can just mash the rock walls. The have salts and coal sometimes, funny. Upper floor does not collapse. TODO can't dig the second one "You cannot build here".
  • TODO can you generate power e.g. in solar cells or not, and wire it into home appliances? www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/4zm7tf/solar_panels_useless/ from 2016 says no.
    The solution would be simple... just mark the edge incoming wire from the reality bubble as a magic source that has a given voltage/max amperage/total power or total wattage available. Would be good enough. Sure, some estimates might be hard, e.g. how much sun is there in a far away location of the map, etc. but just having some average of those values would be good enough. E.g. average temperature of an off bubble tile would also be useful to calculate food rotting time.
    A related obvious application would be refrigerators. www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6B0KBJHvZs from 2021 mentions again that you can't have power without vehicles. TODO do the refrigerators in a powered 01 lab protect food?
    The fork github.com/cataclysmbnteam/Cataclysm-BN is actually trying to add an electric grid...
Video 1.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead Review by SsethTzeentach (2018)
Source. This game really is right up Seth's alley, glad he tried it out. Perhaps his review was partly what motivated Ciro Santilli to give it a try. But the other part, perhaps even more important, was the joy of trying out crappy open source video games. Ciro especially likes Seth's observation that you could just go all in Mad Max mode. Since vehicles are so powerful, you can just clean up towns with them and basic weapons, then either get a new vehicle when the old one goes bust, or at least very easily find gas. Another good observation is that crafting in this game is amazing.
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Chuck Easttom Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 2024-11-15
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ISBN: 3031664760.
Certainly he looks after his image very strictly, endlessly saying how good he is. And he is definitely a high flying bird. Perhaps it is hard to differentiate genius from mad applies.
Video 1.
EC-Council Certified Encryption Specialist (ECES) with Chuck Easttom
. Source. Check saying how amazing he is.
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Cirodance Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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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:
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
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Ciro Santilli Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli is a male human software engineer and activist born in Brazil, Earth in 1989 AD.
Quick facts:
Other people with the same name are listed at Section "Ciro Santilli's homonyms".
Figure 1.
19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong
. Source.
Sun Wukong (孙悟空) is a playful and obscenely powerful monkey Journey to the West. He protects Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, and likes eating fruit, just like Ciro. Oh, and Goku from Dragon Ball is based on him. His japanese name is "Sun Wukong" (same Chinese characters with different Japanese pronunciation) for the love. His given name "Wukong" means literally "the one who mastered the void", which is clearly a Dharma name and fucking awesome in multiple ways. This is another sad instance of a Chinese thing better known in the West as Japanese.
It is worth noting however that although Wukong is extremely charming, Ciro's favorite novel of the Four Great Classic Novels is Water Margin. Journey to the West is just a Monster of the Week for kids, but Water Margin is a fight for justice saga. Sorry Wukong!
Figure 2.
Ciro Santilli playing with a pipette at the University of Cambridge circa 2017
.
The photo was taken in an open event organized by the awesome Cambridge Synthetic Biology outreach group, more or less the same people who organize: www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Synthetic-Biology-Meetup/ and who helped organize Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it".
Taking part in such activities is what Ciro tries to do to overcome his lifelong regret of not having done more experimental stuff at university. Would he have had the patience to handle all the bullshit of the physical word without going back to the informational sciences? Maybe, maybe not. But now he will probably never know?!
Notice the orange high visibility cycling jersey under the lab coat, from someone who had just ridden in from work as fast as possible as part of his "lunch break". It is more fun when it is hard.
Figure 3.
Scribe Jean Miélot, 15th century
.
Ciro Santilli fantasises that he would have make a good scribe in the middle ages, partly due to his self diagnosed graphomania, but also appreciation for foreign languages, and his mild obsession with the natural sciences.
OurBigBook.com is Ciro's view of a modern day scriptorium, except that now the illuminations are YouTube videos.
Chill and eat your bread in peace comes to mind. A scribe, in a library, reading and writing the entire day in peace and quiet. The life!
The job of a Internet-age scribe is basically that of making knowledge more open, legally extracting it from closed copyrighted sources, and explaining your understanding of it to the wider world under Creative Commons licenses on the web. And in the process of greater openess, given a well organized system, we are able combine the knowledge of many diffferent people, and thus make things more understandable than any single/few creator closed source source could ever achieve.
Ciro once saw some cartoon on Wikipedia help pages of a turtle with a book in one hand, and typing into Wikipedia on its computer, TODO find it. That cartoon summarizes well the modern scribe life.
Another analogous version of this fantasy more in touch with Ciro's sinophily is the ideal of the Chinese scholar, notably including their stereotypical attributes such as mastery of the Four arts.
Figure 4.
Ciro Santilli piling boxes as a child
. A natural born engineer.
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Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli has a bad memory for events that happened a medium time ago, for example in order of months/years. Especially if they are one-off things that have no relation to anything else.
For example, Ciro never remembers which places he travelled to just once, and who was in each trip! He has images of several places he travelled to in his head, and would recognize them, but he just doesn't know where they were!
Another example, Ciro was looking at the carpet at their house, and asked where it came from. His wife replied immeidately: from Bercy shopping quarter in Paris about 10 years ago, and you took it on your back for a long walk until we could find the bus back home because we were concerned it wouldn't fit in the train!
The same goes for scenes from movies and passages from music, which explains why Ciro's art consumption focuses on innovative discrete "what happened" and "general gist" ideas, rather than, analog details such as colors and shapes.
Going back even further in time, Ciro starts to forget the less close friends he had, because the events start to fade away.
Paradoxically however, Ciro believes that this bad memory is one of his greatest strengths and key defining characteristics, because it leads Ciro to want to write down every interesting thing he learns, which motivated OurBigBook.com and his Stack Overflow contributions and his related Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers.
It also somewhat leads Ciro to like physics and mathematics, because in these fields you "can deduce everything" from very few base principles, so if you forget them, it does not matter that much as you can re-deduce stuff over and over. Which is somewhat where the high flying bird attitude comes from. It is hard to go deep when you have to re-prove everything every time. But the upside is that anything that sticks, does so because it has a broad net to stick to, and therefore allows Ciro to make unusual and unexpected connections that others might not.
Ciro believes that there are two types of people, and most notably software engineers, which are basically data wranglers: those with bad memory and those with good memory.
Those with bad memory, tend to focus on automating and improving their processes a lot. They take much longer to do one-off specific deep knowledge tasks however.
The downside of the good memory ones is that sooner or later they will find tasks that no matter how much memory they have, they cannot solve without automation, and they will fail at those.
Also, good memory people don't enable others to join the project efficiently as much.
This dichotomy also explains why Ciro sucks at code reviews, but is rather the person who runs the interesting patches by himself and finds some critical problems that the more theoretical code reviewers missed.
If Ciro had become a scientist, he would without doubt be an experimentalist, just like in this reality he is a GDB/runtime person rather than a "static source analysis" person. Those who have bad memory prefer to just run experiments over and over and observe system state at runtime.
Other effects of having a bad memory include:
  • code duplication, or a constant fear of it at least, because Ciro forgets that some functionality exists already
  • meeting aversion, because everything that is not recorded will fade away
  • passion for backward design, because by the time a piece of knowledge learnt in school might be useful (and 99.99% won't), it will have been long forgotten
Related: jakobschwichtenberg.com/about/ from Jakob Schwichtenberg:
I'm a physicist and I try to write down things during my own learning process.
In some sense, one of the biggest benefits I have over other people in physics is that I'm certainly not the smartest guy! I usually can't grasp complex issues very easily. So I have to break down complex ideas into smaller chunks to understand it myself. This means, whenever I describe something to others, everyone understands, because it's broken down into such simple terms.
On C2 wiki, therefore it cannot be wrong wiki.c2.com/?QuasiGreatTeacher:
Some people have learning disabilities, [... bullshit ...]. A lot of classic spiritual texts have been produced this way. Basically, the stupidest but most dogged disciple, if he has a neurotic habit of writing things down, will make the best teacher for the third and subsequent generations.
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Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro like to interpret this as him having "a creative personality" with the tradeoff of generally not being amazing at his well defined jobs.
Ciro is obsessed by that which is "quirky". This also often has a parallel with "naughty". He often fantasizes about an imaginary parallel between that feeling and Jobs and Wozniak's blue box.
Ciro's natural fight-or-flight response is to hide in a little corner, and try to solve the problem out. Then get distracted and start procrastinating. And then he tries to solve the unsolvable. Someone Ciro barely new once told him quite correctly:
In the event of war, you would be the type that hides away and makes the bombs.
This is also perhaps why Ciro likes prison decks in Magic: The Gathering. You just sit on your corner, making yourself safer and safer, until the opponent can't do you any harm and concedes.
There are of course infinitely many videos on the "entrepreneurial mindset" online, and it is impossible to know if they are bullshit, or if everyone just feels like that, but OK, just let Ciro feels that he is specially creative will you?
Video 1.
What Predicts Academic Ability? by Jordan B Peterson (2017)
Source. Good quotes:
Creative people continuously step outside of the domain of evaluation structures
and:
If you are creative and you go off on tangents all the time, there's some probability that one of those tangents is going to be exactly what is needed at the time, and you are going to become hyper-successful as a consequence
[but the probability of that being the right time and place for the idea is extraordinarily low]
The sensible thing to tell anybody is "you shouldn't do it, your probability of success is so low, that its better to just to something sensible".
But the problem with that, is that creative people can't do that, because they are creative. A creative person who isn't being creative, they just wither and die.
Which brings Here's to the crazy ones to mind.
Ciro also one heard a story, likely apocryphal, but still nonetheless resonated with him, that went something like this (TODO find source, Google wasn't helping, stuff that happened before website as usual):
The newly hired manager of some subsection of DuPont (or some other gigantic chemical company) came into the office, and found a chemical engineer, completely drunk in the middle of the day.
Outraged, the manager searched for this colleagues who explained.
Ah, don't mind John (or some other name), the guy invented Teflon (or some other substance) which accounted for 20% of our revenue last year. Even if he does not do anything else in his entire career, his salary won't make any difference compared to those gains, and we take the chance that he might invent something else later.
Ciro likes this story because although he does not drink, he feels his work mind works in a related way. Often, when there is something really hard he knows needs doing he hides, and distracts himself with less important tasks, or by watching crap on YouTube, because he knows that the hard task will hurt his mind. Then one day he wakes up and says: OK, fuck it, let's do it, and does it.
Once Ciro got a performance review from a colleague that said:
If Ciro spent as much effort on his job as he does on side projects, he'd be the most amazing worker.
This is closely related to effortless effort.
Yes, low conscientiousness, give it to me.
Video 2.
And I am not and never have been 'familiar' scene from The Big Short (2015)
. Source.
People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar. And I am not and never have been familiar.
blog.sbensu.com/posts/high-variance-management/ High Variance Management:
Like movies, software projects have parts that require high variance and parts that don't. For most projects, the logging system can be off-the-shelf and predictable. But core parts of the product that require novel design should be as good as they can be.
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Effortless effort Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli feels that all really important and productive activities come spontaneously, without being internally forced upon people.
You may say that this is because Ciro is lazy and irresponsible, but Bill thinks this isn't necessarily always bad:
I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
This is yet another manifestation of YAGNI.
As another way to put it, Ciro has very little "self-discipline", and acts very heavily based on small passions that take hold of him. Related: high flying bird vs gophers.
You may also say that Ciro is an idealist, because what to do when the food will run out and you have to hunt? To which Jesus replies at Matthew 6:25-34 "Do Not Worry" (archive):
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you - you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, "What shall we eat?" or "What shall we drink?" or "What shall we wear?" For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Also closely related: man shall not live by bread alone.
Ciro is also fond of the description of the work method of Yukio Mishima presented in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (TODO based on Mishima's self descriptions?). Ciro Santilli's father highlighted this to him, and Ciro had already watched that movie and thought it was amazing:
Quote 1
Every night I return to my desk precisely at midnight. I thoroughly analyze why I am attracted to a particular theme. I drag it into my conscious mind. I boil it into abstraction. I am constantly calculating until I sit down to write. Only then can my unconscious dreams take over.
This is perfectly complemented by him making tea, as if suggesting:
Don't rush the work. Just let it happen. Every day at midnight, I would boil a teapot of tea. I would watch the steam rise, and with it feel my consciousness deepen. Everything was pure silence. When the hand was ready, it would, by itself, pick up the brush, and writing would start.
Another good one is Hemingway's work method:
Always stop while you are going good and don't think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.
Ciro generally feels that many major developments in his life happened "by miracle", beyond his control. So when he saw the quote by Carl Jung:
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Ciro tends to do major decisions in his life due to uncontrollable passion rather than logic.
Ciro believes that this is linked to his self perceived creative personality, Because Ciro gives in to such uncontrollable passions, this leads him to do things which are more unusual/creative, because other more logical people would write such options off as weird.
Another type of laziness Ciro is to blame for is passionately seeking Instrumental goals rather than hard end goals, in order to reach the hard goals more effectively. This is well put in the quote apocryphallyref attribute to Abraham Lincoln:
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe
For example, whenever joining a new company, Ciro would first try to improve any exceedingly shitty systems, like the build system or test system, rather than doing whatever random task the manager felt like doing that week. He was somewhat fired for that actually. But in the end, if your infrastructure sucks, your project will fail, so better be fired early and go work on something that might succeed than later when the enterprise goes bankrupt.
Video 1.
Alan Watts' wuwei talk
. Source. During this talk, Alan quotes Jesus: Matthew 18:3 "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.".
Video 2.
Alan Watts' "How to turn work into play" talk
. Source.
Video 3.
Don't Try - The Philosophy of Charles Bukowski by Pursuit of Wonder (2019)
Source. www.openculture.com/2013/02/dont_try_charles_bukowskis_concise_philosophy_of_art_and_life.html
We work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told. Classes? Classes are for asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a bottle of beer.
Video 4.
Charles Bukowski Scandanavian TV interviews
. Source.
I think the magic moment is when you're walking around the house and you think: "Typewritter!". And I know, when I sit down, I never have any idea what I'm gonna write, there's nothing in my mind. And you walk in, you move toward it, and there it is, and things come out of it.
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Freeman Dyson Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli's admiration for Dyson goes beyond his "unify all the things approach", which Ciro loves, but also extends to the way he talks and the things he says. Dyson is one of Ciro's favorite physicist.
Besides this, he was also very idealistic compassionate, and supported a peaceful resolution until World War II with United Kingdom was basically inevitable. Note that this was a strategic mistake.
Dyson is "hawk nosed" as mentioned in Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) chapter "Dyson". But he wasn't when he was young, see e.g. i2.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/freemandyson_child-1.jpg?resize=768%2C1064&ssl=1 It sems that his nose just never stopped growing after puberty.
He also has some fun stories, like him practicing night climbing while at Cambridge University, and having walked from Cambridge to London (~86km!) in a day with his wheelchair bound friend.
Ciro Santilli feels that the label child prodigy applies even more so to him than to Feynman and Julian Schwinger.
Figure 1. Source.
Bibliography:
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Lie group Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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The key and central motivation for studying Lie groups and their Lie algebras appears to be to characterize symmetry in Lagrangian mechanics through Noether's theorem, just start from there.
Notably local symmetries appear to map to forces, and local means "around the identity", notably: local symmetries of the Lagrangian imply conserved currents.
The fact that there are elements arbitrarily close to the identity, which is only possible due to the group being continuous, is the key factor that simplifies the treatment of Lie groups, and follows the philosophy of continuous problems are simpler than discrete ones.
Bibliography:
Video 1.
What is Lie theory? by Mathemaniac 2023
. Source.
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Why you should give money to Ciro Santilli Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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So that he can work full time on OurBigBook.com and revolutionize advanced university-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics eduction for all ages.
Donating to Ciro is the most effective donation per dollar that you can make to:
Ciro's goal in life is to help kids as young as possible to reach, and the push, the frontiers of natural sciences human knowledge, linking it to applications that might be the the next big thing as early as possible. Because nothing is more motivating to students than that feeling of:
Hey, I can actually do something in this area that has never been done before!
rather than repeating the same crap that everyone is already learning.
To do this, Ciro wants to work in parallel both on:
Ciro believes that this rare combination of both:
produces a virtuous circle, because Ciro:
  • wants to learn and teach, so he starts to create content
  • then he notices the teaching tools are crap
  • and since he has the ability to actually improve them, he does
As explained at OurBigBook.com and high flying bird scientist, Ciro is most excited to make contributions at the "missing middle level of specialization" that lies around later undergrad and lower grad education:
  • at lower undergrad level, there is already a lot of free material out there to learn stuff
  • at upper graduate level and beyond, too few people know about each specific subject, that it becomes hard to factor things out
But on that middle sweet spot, Ciro believes that something can be done, in such as way that delivers:
  • beauty
  • power
in a way that is:
  • in your face, without requiring you to study for a year
  • but also giving enough precision to allow you to truly appreciate the beauty of the subject
    Ciro's programming skills can also be used to create educational, or actually more production-like, simulations and illustrations.
Ciro believes that today's society just keep saying over and over: "STEM is good", "STEM is good", "STEM is good" as a religious mantra, but fails miserably at providing free learning material and interaction opportunities for people to actually learn it at a deep enough level to truly appreciate why "STEM is good". This is what he wants to fix.
The following quote is ripped from Gwern Branwen's Patreon page, and it perfectly synthesizes how Ciro feels as well:
Quote 1.
Omar Khayyam's chill out quote
.
Omar Khayyam also came to the Vizier... but not to ask for title or office. 'The greatest boon you can confer on me,' he said, 'is to let me live in a corner under the shadow of your fortune, to spread wide the advantages of Science, and pray for your long life and prosperity.'
In addition to all of this, financial support also helps Ciro continue his general community support activities:
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The place for beauty in companies Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Many/most companies are unable to give any beauty to its employees.
Hiring is simply a process of "let's get this money making project working ASAP", bring people in, without considering Brooks's law.
And then when that happens, companies put people in extremely narrow knowledge areas, making them unable to see or participate in the bigger picture of things, unless they spend 10 years there and reach architect status.
This is perhaps particularly painful for high flying birds like Ciro Santilli.
Companies need a higher top to down force that attempts to actually teach the business and tech to every employee to counter the low level manager get things done now pressure.
Companies that are able to do that, will have many more employees with a sense of purpose, and with the ability to innovate. Those companies will win.
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The Playlist Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Great reports to how 2022-Ciro Santilli views how OurBigBook.com could go. Ciro can't help to feel that he is a mixture of both of the vision, tech and people guy. Not as extreme as any of them, but more like a well rounded (and less good individually) version of each. High flying bird vs gophers.
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