Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Weight: heavy.

MIDI support is kind of secondary: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnkJ0uYXMG8, e.g. how to export MIDI? discourse.ardour.org/t/export-an-entire-project-into-a-midi-file/88116

Ardour vmpk input: askubuntu.com/questions/709673/save-as-midi-when-playing-from-vmpk-qsynth/1298231#1298231

Ciro Santilli's energy throughout the day varies as follows:

Ciro has low tolerance to sleep deprivation which makes him very irritable, and low ability to sleep if there is any light. It must have to do with those damned ganglion cell photoreceptors. On the other hand, Ciro Santilli's wife can sleep without any problems with some morning light! It is definitely genetic. Ciro conjectures that people from very Northern parts of the world must have a gene that allows them to sleep even if there is some light, while more equatorial people don't. Maybe: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33049062/

Ciro has mild olfactory synesthesia for star anise (八角, bajiao), which is widely used in Chinese cuisine and makes Ciro think uncontrollably of the color blue. Ciro does not have any other known synesthesias. He is also prone to nerd sniping form time to time.

Ciro is a reptilian-like being with cold hands and feet and low blood pressure. For this reason he believes that he will die of cancer or some respiratory problem. If the Chinese government doesn't get him first that is. This also partly explains why Ciro is not a big fan of swimming.

Besides Chinese food, Ciro really likes eating fruits and roasted nuts, maybe partly because he was born in Brazil, and partly because of monkey nature, see his Chinese name. At home he is known as "水果大王" (the big king of the fruits). Ciro is also a sucker for yoghurt (natural without added sugars and full fat, fat-tree yoghurt is terrible, often eaten with fruits). Ciro's "favorite drink" could be tonic water with freshly squeezed lemon. Tied with fresh fruit juices. Chocolate-wise, although not a huge fanatic, a Lindt dark chocolate with whole hazelnut pieces bar will do the job.

Ciro does not like receiving or giving gifts on expected social situations like birthdays or Christmas. Ciro believes that every day is equally precious, and can be a day to give, be it through awesome open source software contributions, or if you find something that your friend will like

Ciro has some respiratory allergies. When he was around 5, he had relatively serious asthma crisis which scared his parents to death. Throughout his life, he appears to be allergic at an intermediate level to: mold or dust mites (or whatever it is that old books/pillows have), cats (itching on touch), hay fever (in May in the UK, likely grass pollen). But even outside of hayfever season, Ciro's nose is constantly either running in the cold, or often partially blocked while sleeping throughout the year. Ciro believes however that this also gives him higher resistance to viral infections, since it has been many many years since he had a cold/flu, and when everyone in the office is going down with it, he's just fine. Ciro wonders if his active immune system will actually kill off cancers early, which he ranks as his most likely causes of death, along with respiratory and gastro-intestinal problems. Ciro has low blood pressure and cannot get fat, so cardio vascular problems seem much less likely.

Ciro is generally democrat due to his high compassion level. He believes that politics is highly genetically determined, and that just like you enter a room full of people and immediately like some and dislike others, the same goes for politics. People just vote for whoever they want to see more of because their way of speaking makes them feel good. There is not rationality involved in it at all.

Ciro self diagnoses a slight graphomania in the early 2020's. This is largely what led him to create OurBigBook.com, and contribute to Stack Overflow. Literature Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz also suffers from the condition however, so maybe good can also come out of it:

When Ciro was quite young, maybe around 7-10, when he got very angry or sad for some stupid reason (bullying perhaps? Ciro forgot), he would have a psychosomatic manifestation: his spine would become visibly curved sideways (scoliosis). While writing this paragraph, Ciro Googled it, and found e.g. medium.com/@michaelrosen_94192/the-root-cause-of-scoliosis-5c461002b634 that describes:so it is a somewhat well known thing! Incredible. Can you imagine the level of the passions that lead to such physical deformations? But of course, it was all for nothing.

Just enough money to raise 3 kids in a rich country without having to work (so he can focus on whatever project he wants) and no more. Then maximize fame.

Fame is slightly convertible into money with generally little liquidity, but is more valuable if money becomes useless in a TEOTWAWKI.

Of course, in the end, one just does whatever seems cool and useful, and the Gods decide what proportion of fame/money/power they will get. Due to Ciro's love of open source software however, a higher fame percentage seems more likely than money.

Ciro Santilli's full name is quite unique and already dominated by this Ciro Santilli.

Searching just for just "Santilli" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits. The name appears to be a minor variation of the much more common "Santini". Since the name is not that common, it is possible to go over all noteworthy hits. Some relevant ones are shown at: interesting members of the Santilli family.

Searching just for just "Ciro" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits, mostly some smaller brands that could be beaten, this is Ciro's main initial fame metric goal. Reaching it would require doing things known much beyond the programming community however, as Ciro has done until of 2019. ciro.com is from an electromechanics consultancy as of 2019, so it's not bad, let them be.

At the next useless gamified level, an honorary OBE and more ambitiously ForMemRS from the Royal Society post nominal letters would be nice.

The ultimate dream however would be to beat Cyrus the Great himself on Google searches ("Ciro" == "Cyrus" in Portuguese), maybe becoming "Cyrus the Greater"? That one will be a bit harder though. Maybe if Falung Gong becomes the dominant religion in 2000 years like Christianism did, catapulting the Judaism benefactor Cyrus into greater fame, then there is some hope for Ciro as well.

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).

The opposite of open source software.

ISO is the main culprit of this bullshit, some notable examples related to open source software:

The only low level thing that escaped this was OpenGL via Khronos, what heroes those people are.

How the hell are you supposed to develop an open source implementation of something that has a closed standard?

Not to mention open source test suites, that would be way too much to ask for, those always end up being made by some shady small companies that go bankrupt from time to time, see e.g. .

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.

Open source software reviews:

Open source software reviews:

A more precise term for those in the know: open source software that also has a liberal license, for some definition of liberal.

Ciro Santilli defines liberal as: "can be commercialized without paying anything back" (but possibly subject to other restrictions).

He therefore does not consider Creative Commons licenses with NC to be FOSS.

For the newbs, the term open source software is good enough, since most open source software is also FOSS.

But when it's not, it's crucial to know.

If your kids are about to starve, fine, do it.

But otherwise, Ciro Santilli will not, ever, spend his time drilling programmer competition problems to join a company, life is too short for that.

Life is too short for that. Companies must either notice that you can make amazing open source software projects or contributions, and hire you for that, or they must fuck off.

Companies must either notice that you can make amazing projects or contributions, and hire you for that, or they must fuck off.

The key content previously on this page was moved to the following sections:

E.g. International Mathematical Olympiad, International Physics Olympiad, competitive programming, etc.

Events that trick young kids into thinking that they are making progress, but only serve to distract them from what really matters, which is to dominate a state of the art as fast as possible, contact researches in the area, and publish truly novel results.

Financially backed by high schools trying to make ads showing how they will turn your kids into geniuses (but also passionate teachers who fell into this hellish system), or companies who hire machines rather than entrepreneurs.

The most triggering thing possible is when programming competitions don't release their benchmarks as open source software afterwards: at least like that they might help someone to solve their real world problems. Maybe.

On a related note, hackathons are also mostly useless. Instead of announcing a hackathon, just announce a web forum where people with similar interests can talk to one another instead, and let them code it out on GitHub if they want to. Restricting intensive development to a few days tends to produce crappy code and not reach real goals.

Some irrelevant people highlight that knowledge Olympiads can have good effects, because they are "an opportunity to meet university teachers and their research organizations". Ciro's argument is just that there are much more efficient ways to achieve those goals.

As an alternative way to get into university, this is not 100% horrible however, e.g. the University of São Paulo accepted students from olympiads in 2019 and then again 2023: jornal.usp.br/institucional/usp-oferece-200-vagas-em-mais-de-100-cursos-de-graduacao-para-alunos-participantes-de-olimpiadas-do-conhecimento/?a

It ain't perfect, but it's decent enough.

From a technical point of view, it can do anything that Microsoft Windows can. Except being forcefully installed on every non-MacOS 2019 computer you can buy.

Ciro Santilli's conversion to Linux happened around 2012, and was a central part of Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment, since it fundamentally enables the discovery and contribution to open source software. Because what awesome open source person would waste time porting their amazing projects to closed source OSes?

Ciro's modest nature can be seen as he likes to compare this event Buddha's Great Renunciation.

Linux should track glibc and POSIX command line utilities in-tree like BSD Operating System, otherwise people have no way to get the thing running in the first place without blobs or large out-of-tree scripts! Another enlightened soul who agrees.

Particularly interesting in the history of Linux is how it won out over the open competitors that were coming up in the time: MINIX (see the chat) and BSD Operating System that got legally bogged down at the critical growth moment.

You must watch this: truth Happens advertisement by Red Hat.

Open source software engine created for and used by Wikipedia.

Basic must haves:

Other cool stuff:

Missing:

Previously missing:

TODO what's the fucking official discussion/feature request forum?

Feature overview:

Open source software reviews by Ciro Santilli:reviewing mostly the following software:

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: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:

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:But on that middle sweet spot, Ciro believes that something can be done, in such as way that delivers:in a way that is:

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:

In addition to all of this, financial support also helps Ciro continue his general community support activities: