Bitcoin whitepaper Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Released by Satoshi Nakamoto on the early mailing list discussions where Bitcoin was announced.
More conveniently available on bitcoin.org: bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf nowadays, except when it was down for a few years due to our master Craig Steven Wright.
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Carl Victor Page, Jr. Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Larry Pages's older brother.
It is hard to find information on this little bugger! Not a single photo online!
As suggested by the "Jr.", he is named after Larry's father, Carl Victor Page.
Carl Jr. is mentioned in a few places in the book The Google Story. The full name "Carl Victor Page Jr." is never given in that source, only "Carl Page Jr." is used. These crazy Anglo-Saxons and their semi-optional middle names!
The Google Story does not cite its sources, but it likely got much of its insider information through interviews, e.g. Chapter 2. "When Larry Met Sergey":
Carl Jr. recalls Larry as an inquisitive younger brother with wide-ranging interests
which suggests the authors actually interviewed Carl Jr., since interviews with Carl Jr. cannot be found anywhere else on the Internet. It would be interesting to know more how they got that level of access.
Chapter 2 mentions that Carl Jr. is nine years older than Larry. Therefore, he must have been born in 1963 or 1964. It also states that Carl studied at the University of Michigan, like his father and like Larry would also do later on:
He also enjoyed helping Carl Jr. - who was nine years older - with his college computer homework when Carl came home from the University of Michigan during breaks.Their father was a professor at the Michigan State University, which is a different university from the University of Michigan, and not in the same city, so by breaks they mean term breaks.
Chapter 2 also mentions that he was working in Silicon Valley by the time their father died in 1996:
Despite his grief [for the death of their father at the early age of 58], Larry remained enrolled at Stanford. It helped that his older brother, Carl Jr., lived and worked in Silicon Valley. They had each other, so Larry wasn't left to bear the loss alone, and the two spent time together, fondly recalling their dad and reflecting on their childhood memories.
In 1997, Carl co-founded the mailing list management website eGroups together with Scott Hassan, programmer of an early version of Google when he was a research assistant at Stanford University. Carl and Scott presumably met through Larry, but we don't have a source. The company was sold to Yahoo! in 2000. The Google Story Chapter 8. "A Trickle" mentions:
Google's deal with Yahoo!] had special significance for Larry Page, since his brother, Carl Jr., also was in serious negotiations with Yahoo! over a major business transaction. The following day, June 27, Yahoo announced plans to buy eGroups, a technology firm that Carl Page had co-founded, for $413 million.
Carl is listed as a co-founder in the SEC filing: www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105102/0000950149-00-000584.txt as "Carl Page". He does not appear on the 5% stockholders however, poor Carl.
In 2006, he brought a company he founded called "Handheld Entertainment" public through a reverse merger with a shell company: archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/brother-of-google-co-founder-uses-shell-company-for-handheld-start-up/. "Handheld Entertainment" made an iPod competitor apparently. SEC filing: www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1309710/000095013606009480/file1.htm.
Wikidata entry: www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15791098
September 27, 2023 marked Google's 25 th aniversary and the page cirosantilli.com/carl-victor-page-jr had a small surge of views according to Google Analytics. On that day, this page was one of the top Google search results for "Carl Victor Page, Jr."[ref]. Wikipedia also had a large bump in searches for "Larry Page" on the same day: pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2023-09-11&end=2023-10-01&pages=Cat|Dog|Larry_Page which must be the root cause, Larry actually managed to beat "Cat" and "Dog" on that day.
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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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Protests against larger block sizes Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Protesters were posting large chunks of text multiple times into the blockchain as a way to protest against the controversial increase of block size.
tx 08893442680a20c4d0548dec2c8c421fa43336528b4e274dbf2652774f9c9f2d has the first copy of:
I like big blocks and I can not lie
which is the first line of a parody on:
I like big butts and I cannot lie
from the Baby Got Back hip-hop song.
tx 52159222289cd0a5afe0644150d0e23d5d272a57365627d5e869fdb458289858 has the first copy of:
Time to roll out bigger blocks
which is likely a copy of an email from the bitcoin development mailing list. This message is repeated dozens of times in other transactions.
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Evil Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Things that are not nice such as:
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Mailing list Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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It boggles Ciro Santilli's mind that people use mailing list to collaborate on projects!
The only explanation is that the dinosaurs who created the projects are unable to adapt to new superior technologies.
Yes, Ciro is talking to you, big fundamental projects from last century: Linux kernel, GNU Compiler Collection (gcc.gnu.org/lists.html), Binutils (sourceware.org/binutils/), etc.
Some of you are already using Bugzilla for the bugs, so kudos. But if you've seen their benefit, why you still use the mailing list for patches?
Advantages of mailing lists:
Disadvantages: everything else:
  • cannot subscribed to a single thread. Which forces you to create an email filter for each one of them you subscribe to.
  • no metadata, notably the notion of closing / merging, but also upvotes
    You have to read thirty messages before you can know if the bug was solved or not.
  • it is insanely hard to reply to messages from before you were subscribed: webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/23197/reply-to-mailman-archived-message/115088#115088
    This forces everyone to subscribe to all lists, and then set up email filters to not be flooded with emails.
  • Unless they use Patchwork, which adds one more website on top of the mess.
    And then Gmail corrupts your patches, and you are forced to use git send-email, which does not work on some network configurations: stackoverflow.com/questions/28038662/how-to-solve-unable-to-initialize-smtp-properly-when-using-using-git-send-ema or setup ThunderBird.
  • often have to subscribe to post at all, thus cluttering your inbox further
  • you can edit posts to make them clearer.
    Yes, people could vandalize their answers when they get mad, and threads might stop making sense after edits. But this can be solved with an undeletable post history like Stack Overflow has (but not any other tracker does).
    Or archive.org :-)
    In any case, what do you think will happen more often and have greater impact:
    • people vandalize their posts
    • people fix their silly typos and improve content
  • searchable by author, keyword, etc. without Google. Yes, mailing list trackers could have decent implementations to overcome that. But no, GNU Mailman which everyone uses does not have it. Google barely indexes it.
    And I don't think Google properly indexes many of the mailing list archives for some reason: I never get hits for my own posts a week later, while I often do on GitHub issues.
  • people have to learn about top posting vs inline posting, and this requires infinite education of new users
  • Line comments in code reviews like GitHub and GitLab.
    On mailing lists: either put a comment in the middle of a huge patch and let other people find it, or (more likely) copy paste the part of the patch that you are talking about.
  • most mail web UIs suck.
    OK, this is not an unsolvable or intrinsic problem, but still a problem.
    E.g.: ezmlm it is not possible to see the entire content in a single page: gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2015-07/threads.html.
    Unless you like reading threads backwards and with 4 levels of > quotations.
    The alternative: do like LLVM and send attachments. Yes, I we all love opening up attachments on our browsers.
    The real solution: everyone can create branches and pull requests. Also has the benefit of running CI on the pull requests.
Not sure:
  • you can have infinitely many trackers to replicate data in case apocalypse happens in some part of the world.
    Although I'm not sure this is an advantage, as you don't know anymore which one is the canonical trackers an advantage, as you don't know anymore which one is the canonical tracker.
    And all web interfaces already have an API to export messages, and someone has already scripted it to import from any web UI to any web UI for you.
    And GitHub offers infinite precise history transparently on its API.
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Scott Hassan Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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The guy who coded the initial version of BackRub, the first version of Google Search, but left before the company formed. TODO how did he meet Largey Brage? Why did he leave Google?
In 1997 he cofounded eGroups, a mailing list management website, together with the mysterious Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother. eGroups was sold to Yahoo! in 2000 for $432m, just before the Dot-com bubble burst.
As of 2021 his net worth was of "only" $1b, even though his original Google shares would have been worth $13b. He must have sold too much too early to do other cool stuff. archive.ph/IgkMI:
When Mr. Page and Mr. Brin founded Google in 1998, Mr. Hassan bought 160,000 shares for $800. When Google went public in 2004, the shares were worth more than $200 million. The shares, now in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would be valued at more than $13 billion today [2021].
Did Largey give him this nice deal as a way to thank him for helping start the company, or was it just that they had no big hopes and $800 seemed right? youtu.be/pmXDtTD6vQY?t=146 suggests the stocks were part of his compensation for 3 months of coding work. Also mentioned at: nypost.com/2021/08/20/google-founder-created-revenge-site-against-estranged-wife
Figure 1. Source.
In 2001, Scott married a Vietnamese chick called Allison Huynh from university and they had three children.
In 2014 Hassan asked for a divorce, and the proceedings were a shitshow, lasting more than 7 years.
In 2004 he tried strike a $20 million[ref] post-nuptial after Google went public, which she declined, so things were already crappy back then.
Then, during the divorce, Scott even created a revenge website for her as well. He's so petty! Down as of 2024 of course. There are only some weird redirect archives now: web.archive.org/web/20210915000000*/https://allisonhuynh.com redirecting to sites.google.com/view/allisonhuynhcom
To be fair, he did work on a lot of cool stuff after BackRub for which he deserves credit, not the least the company that created the Robot Operating System, which is a cool sounding open source project, which is awesome. But this divorce story is so damning! He should just own up to it, split the cash, and move on... The fact that the Google money came from an investment before marriage likely complicates things.
The fact that he does not have a Wikipedia page as of 2022 is mind blowing, especially after divorce details. Maybe Ciro Santilli will create it one day. Just no patience now. OK, done it June 2022: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hassan let's see if it lasts. The page lasted but ended up being Ciro Santilli's first Edit war, how exciting:
Looking a the history, he just kept revealing different IPs and continuously reverting, which other people put back in. Another of his IPs:
  • 24.234.111.66 is marked as being from Las Vegas online.
There is also an interesting edit from 2600:1700:5470:5c50:7566:9580:1b60:ab41 which mentions without source the little known fact
after working at Washington University's Medical Libraries Group (having been recruited out of SUNY Buffalo for the summer).
so it could be Hassan adding some actually good and interesting information to the article. That one however also has an edit to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Nagel so maybe it's not him.
Figure 2.
Scott Hassan and Allison Huynh posing with a green screen in 2001
. Source. Oh, to be young and feel love's keen sting.
Figure 3.
Screenshot of allisonhuynh.com by the Daily Mail
. Source.
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