Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Ciro Santilli is a fan of this late 2010's buzzword.

It basically came about because of the endless stream of useless software startups made since the 2000's by one or two people with no investments with the continued increase in computers and Internet speeds until the great wall was reached.

Deep tech means not one of those. More specifically, it means technologies that require significant investment in expensive materials and laboratory equipment to progress, such as molecular biology technologies and quantum computing.

And it basically comes down to technologies that wrestle with the fundamental laws of physics rather than software data wrangling.

Computers are of course limited by the laws of physics, but those are much hidden by several layers of indirection.

Full visibility, and full control, make computer tasks be tasks that eventually always work out more or less as expected.

The same does not hold true when real Physics is involved.

Physics is brutal.

To start with, you can't even see your system very clearly, and often doing so requires altering its behaviour.

For example, in molecular biology, most great discoveries are made after some new technique is made to be able to observe smaller things.

But you often have to kill your cells to make those observations, which makes it very hard to understand how they work dynamically.

What we would really want would be to track every single protein as it goes about inside the cell. But that is likely an impossible dream.

The same for the brain. If we had observations of every neuron, how long would it take to understand it? Not long, people are really good at reverse engineering things when there is enough information available to do so, see also science is the reverse engineering of nature.

Then, even when you start to see the system, you might have a very hard time controlling it, because it is so fragile. This is basically the case of quantum computing in 2020.

It is for those reasons that deep tech is so exciting.

The next big things will come from deep tech. Failure is always a possibility, and you can't know before you try.

But that's also why its so fun to dare.

Stuff that Ciro Santilli considers "deep tech" as of 2020:

FFmpeg is likely the backend of YouTube through reverse engineering: streaminglearningcenter.com/blogs/youtube-uses-ffmpeg-for-encoding.html (archive)

On Quora: www.quora.com/What-does-YouTube-use-for-encoding-video/answer/Ciro-Santilli

Ciro Santilli's raison d'etre, one of his attempts: OurBigBook.com.

The outcome of closed knowledge is reverse engineering.

What happens when the underdogs get together and try to factor out their efforts to beat some evil dominant power, sometimes victoriously.

Or when startups use the cheapest stuff available and randomly become the next big thing, and decide to keep maintaining the open stuff to get features for free from other companies, or because they are forced by the Holy GPL.

Open source frees employees. When you change jobs, a large part of the specific knowledge you acquired about closed source a project with your blood and tears goes to the trash. When companies get bought, projects get shut down, and closed source code goes to the trash. What sane non desperate person would sell their life energy into such closed source projects that could die at any moment? Working on open source is the single most important non money perk a company can have to attract the best employees.

Open source is worth more than the mere pragmatic financial value of not having to pay for software or the ability to freely add new features.

Its greatest value is perhaps the fact that it allows people study it, to appreciate the beauty of the code, and feel empowered by being able to add the features that they want.

That is why Ciro Santilli thought:

But quoting Ciro's colleague S.:

And "can reverse engineer the undocumented GPU hardware APIs", Ciro would add.

While software is the most developed open source technology available in the 2010's, due to the "zero cost" of copying it over the Internet, Ciro also believes that the world would benefit enormously from open source knowledge in all areas on science and engineering, for the same reasons as open source.

Lists:

Why would anyone ever waste time playing a closed source game, when this will inevitably lead to endless hours of decompilation down the line when you want to:

Those who devote their time to the useless development of open source video games, before we even have decent open source development tooling, will, without a doubt, have their place in Heaven.

YouTube review channels:

How software engineers view science:

Ciro Santilli had once assigned this as one of Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts, but he later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering ("similar to scientific research, the only difference being that scientific research is about a natural phenomenon") so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.