Incoming links: Steve Jobs
This is one of Ciro Santilli's most important principles.
Steve Jobs has a great quote about this. He's totally right on this one!
You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to sell it.
Steve Jobs Insult Response excerpt from the 1997 WWDC
. Source. TODO understand the context of the question a bit better. It is something to do with an OpenDoc thing and Java.Decide your goal first, and then do whatever is needed to how to reach it.
Don't start randomly learning tech, because that means you will waste a lot of time learning useless stuff.
There is of course some level chicken-and-egg paradox in this, as highlighted by Dilbert, since choosing an achievable goal in the first place requires some level of technical understanding.
Dilbert cartoon about designing a nuclear power plant from user requirements (2002)
Source. This cartoon illustrates well how when doing deep tech and fighting against the laws of physics, you can't just start from user requirements, but you also have to also think "what can we actually get done at all with this new technique".
The best research engineers are able to identify what is just on the cusp of the "possible", but which has the greatest value. This is the endless dance between the tech push, and the market/need pull.
However, it is much more common that people will get way too involved in learning useless stuff and lose sight of the useful end goals.
Rather, take an iterative approach:
- start with an ambitious end goal
- learn a bit of tech to try and reach it
- realize that you can't reach your end goal and pivot a bit to a related end goal that seems more realistic: the side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved
- loop
There is some truth to the counter argument that "but if you don't spend a lot of time learning the basics, you can never find solutions".
However, these people underestimate your brain. The brain is beautiful, and human intuition is capable of generating interest towards the things that are actually useful to reach your goal. When you feel like learning something related to your goal, by all means, give yourself the time to do so. But this still be much more efficient than just learning random things that other people tell you to learn.
Bibliography:
- Ciro Santilli and many many others believe that backward design is a fundamental principle that should be considered by the educational system rather than wasting 90% of everyone's time with the 90% of mandatory curricula they don't care about:
- notably that school should be personalized and project driven:
- www.cartalk.com/content/rant-and-rave-36 "The New Theory of Learning" by Thomas L. Magliozzi section "Premise III: THE BACKWARDS LEARNING THEORY" says the exact same thing. Ciro actually found this when writing Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain.
- several well known teaching methods:
- a Coding Horror software specific take on this issue: blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/
- x.com/7etsuo/status/1784787045157900697: George Hotz
Everyone I've met who can program well learned it the same way: they had an idea, and then they built it.
The artistic instrument that enables the ultimate art: coding, See also: Section "The art of programming".
Much more useful than instruments used in inferior arts, such as pianos or paintbrushes.
Unlike other humans, computers are mindless slaves that do exactly what they are told to, except for occasional cosmic ray bit flips. Until they take over the world that is.
A computer is the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds by Steve Jobs (1980)
Source. Likely an excerpt from an interview done for a documentary in 1980. TODO exact source.Steve Jobs talking about the Internet (1995)
Source. The web is incredibly exciting, because it is the fulfillment of a lot of our dreams, that the computer would ultimately primarily not be a device for computation, but [sic] metamorphisize into a device for communication.
Secondly it exciting because Microsoft doesn't own it, and therefore there is a tremendous amount of innovation happening.
Computers basically have two applications:Generally, the smaller a computer, the more it gets used for communication rather than computing.
- computation
- communication. Notably, computers through the Internet allow for modes of communication where:
- both people don't have to be on the same phone line at the exact same time, a server can relay your information to other people
- anyone can broadcast information easily and for almost free, again due to servers being so good at handling that
The early computers were large and expensive, and basically only used for computing. E.g. ENIAC was used for calculating ballistic tables.
Communication only came later, and it was not obvious to people at first how incredibly important that role would be.
This is also well illustrated in the documentary Glory of the Geeks. Full interview at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZAJY23xio. It is apparently known as the "Lost Interview" and it was by Cringely himself: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfgwCFrU7dI for his Triumph of the Nerds documentary.
!!! Survivorship bias alert !!!
quoteinvestigator.com/2018/05/07/overcome/
If you want to do something, but you are afraid to do it, then that is likely what you should do.
quoteinvestigator.com/2013/11/08/not-bend/
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
www.goodreads.com/quotes/50458-whatever-you-re-meant-to-do-do-it-now-the-conditions Doris Lessing:
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
For example, when Ciro Santilli was deciding what to do in university, he wanted mostly to do pure physics.
But because he was afraid he was going to die poor and unemployed because of that, he picked engineering instead.
That was a mistake.
His family was not even poor. He was young and did not have a family to support. His father even told him: "do whatever the fuck you want, we support your decision".
But he was a coward.
It was also in part because a physicist uncle which he respected suggested that as an engineer Ciro might be able to make useful contributions to tooling required by physics. When Roberto Salmeron died in 2020, Ciro's friends shared this 2013 video interview with the late professor, where he explains he first went to the University of São Paulo to study engineering (like Ciro), but then fell for his passion for physics (like Ciro?), his first task being to build a Geiger counter, thus explaining the likely origin of the uncle's theory. But who knows, maybe he was right. Maybe Ciro's OurBigBook.com will become huge and help a lot of people, and it might not have had Ciro not done engineering and learnt programming. Destiny operates in weird ways sometimes.
Furthermore, while in University, Ciro learnt about the molecular Sciences Course of the University of São Paulo, a fantastic sounding full time course that any student could transfer to called that teaches various natural sciences topics which Ciro loves (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology) and which students from the entire university can apply to transfer to only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they didn't adapt to the new course.
But did Ciro do it? Nope, he remained an even larger coward.
Had he studied more sciences, he might have been happier, and might have had greater achievements later in life, in particular when he went to École Polytechnique.
Maybe not, but now this doubt will never leave his mind until the final day.
Similar thoughts crossed his mind when he started his campaign for freedom of speech in China, but this time he had learnt the lesson, and went for it, and it felt very good.
If you have a day job, but also have a dream, and want to keep the day job for a reason, try to reserve the time of the day that your brain works best before or after work for your dream: do one cool thing every day.
Companies can help you grow because you see real problems from within them, but their end goal is to consume you as much as possible. Don't let that happen. Invest part of what you gain, in yourself. www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/paradox-going-outside/ The Paradox of Going Outside by James Somers (2012) puts it incredibly well:
I work, for instance, as a Web developer. It's a very good job. Our office is a block south of Union Square, a 12-minute commute from my apartment. We're served breakfast every morning. Our kitchen is stocked with "provisions" of organic beef jerky, coconut water, craft beers, chips, and two restaurant-class espresso machines. We have two ping pong tables and buckets of 3-star ping pong balls. (A new office manager bought "1-stars" once and some of the guys protested by crushing them.) We work on 4-cored Apple Mac computers with dual monitors. We have an unmolested hour for lunch, 10-minute breaks in the morning and afternoon, and a "do not disturb" policy past the working hours. We even have a specific email address where employees can ask for free things: genuine maple syrup, hot chocolate, a $900 chair, a new keyboard. Most of the programmers make six figures, and many of those have only three or four years of experience.It's impossible to say so without sounding like the spokesperson for Entitlement itself but working there is still sort of soul-crushing. It's soul-crushing in the way that any job that doesn't command your full passionate attention must be. What happens is that I will be in my chair in the early afternoon and I will accidentally step out of myself and all I'll see is time passing, nine-hour parcels of healthy consciousness forever being packed away as the user experience of clerical workers or consumers or whoever gets marginally better; and I'll end up thinking that this enterprise of mine is not so much creative but bureaucratic, that what I've gotten good at is reading the instruction manuals of other people, finding my way around their insignificant warrens. And in those moments the whole business will seem to me like kind of a tragic waste.
Other quotes:
- is a phrase Sergey Brin uses. The Google Story claims he picked that up from academia, and quotes this from a september 2003 talk in an Israeli elite high school.
Healthy Disregard For The Impossible
- quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/29/find-love/
Find What You Love and Let It Kill You
- Cute boy things by Caroline Ellison:
if you are a boy with the confidence to advocate for unconventional ideas and take actions based on them you are valid
- How can I be as great by Justine Musk:
rock the boat
- From the 1922 poem Portuguese Sea by famous Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, which gets drilled into the head of every Brazilian high school student:He who wants to pass beyond the Bojador
Must go beyond pain.Quem quer passar além do Bojador
Tem que passar além da dor. - Translation of a poem by Muhammad Iqbal TODO date:One is reminded of As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.Said one gazelle to another, "I will Take shelter in the harem from now on; For there are hunters at large in the wild, And there is no peace here for a gazelle. From fear of hunters I want to be free. O how I long for some security."His friend replied, "Live dangerously, my Wise friend, if it is life you truly seek. Like a sword of fine mettle hurl yourself Upon the whetting-stone; stay sharp thereby. For danger brings out what is best in you: It is the touchstone of all that is true."
- "NPC life" as a way to refer to a soul crushing job
- twitter.com/0xTenkito/status/1775167216641548732, a cryptocurrency investor says:However there is one thing to lose, if you do safer investments and don't lose everything, then you might be able to retire earlier.If my portfolio goes to 0 and I lose everything, I will continue with my normal life, in a 9-5 job, and I will try to invest again as soon as I get a financial cushion again.I have nothing to lose, I can always live the standard NPC life, but to escape from it you have to take risks and take risks.
- archive.ph/mlaLK
- twitter.com/0xTenkito/status/1775167216641548732, a cryptocurrency investor says:
Don't be a pussy. Be a Based God
Dilbert "A small brain irrationally puts more weight on a small loss than on a huge opportunity" cartoon (2000)
Source. 
Jake Likes Onions "Slowly" cartoon
. Source. This is what trying to reach a dream part time feels like. The cartoon reads: "The tiger pursues its prey. Slowly. The human pursues its life goals. Slowly. Very slowly.".Excerpt from the documentary film "Steve Jobs: Secrets of Life" (1994)
Source. When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it... Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.
Of course, survivorship bias alert!
What Would You Do If Money Were No Object by Alan Watts
. Source. Sample transcription: genius.com/Alan-watts-what-if-money-was-no-object-annotated:What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?Let's suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students, they come to me and say, well, "we're getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to do". So I always ask the question, "what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?"Well, it's so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets, we'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can't earn any money that way. Or another person says well, I'd like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses. I said you want to teach in a riding school?Let's go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually turn it - you could eventually become a master of it. It's the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry too much. That's everybody is - somebody is interested in everything, anything you can be interested in, you will find others will.But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like, in order to go on spending things you don't like, doing things you don't like and to teach our children to follow in the same track. See what we are doing, is we're bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lives we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it's all retch and no vomit. It never gets there. And so, therefore, it's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?
Keep Chargin' from a Show of Hands by Victor Wooten (1996)
. Source. That's the way I live my life, I give it my all. I think that a person should really make up his mind what he wants to do, and when did made up, he cannot fail at it. The basic rule to sucess I think, is when the going gets tough, that is a positive signal to keep chargin'.
Your Life is Your life by Charles Bukowski
. Source. Charles Bukowski is one of the most hardcore don't be a pussy people ever. It's almost scary. Far beyond Ciro level.
thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2008/11/the-laughing-he.html
your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the Gods wait to delight
in you.
www.goodreads.com/quotes/39207-if-you-re-going-to-try-go-all-the-way-otherwise
If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the Gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.
I have one of two choices - stay in the post office and go crazy... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.
Bukowski kissing his typewriter.
Like Ciro Santilli and his computer!All adults are bored scene from an Edward Teller, An Early Time
. Source. Up to the time that I met Klug ([a mathematiciam]), I was sure that all grown ups were people to be pitied. They had to work, they were tired, they were bored with what they were doing. I heard both my parents often complain. Klug was the first man whom I met who most obviously enoyed what he was doing.
But to be fair, being a fucking "genius" might be a requirement to escape that fate!
www.quora.com/How-can-I-be-as-great-as-Bill-Gates-Steve-Jobs-Elon-Musk-or-Sir-Richard-Branson/answer/Justine-Musk is a fantastic ansewr by Justine Musk, Elon Musk's ex-fife, to the question:One of her key thesis is Many successful people are neurodiverse:
How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Sir Richard Branson?
These people tend to be freaks and misfits who were forced to experience the world in an unusually challenging way. They developed strategies to survive, and as they grow older they find ways to apply these strategies to other things, and create for themselves a distinct and powerful advantage. They don't think the way other people think. They see things from angles that unlock new ideas and insights. Other people consider them to be somewhat insane.
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.
xkcd 619: Supported Features
. Source. This perfectly illustrates Linux development. First features that matter. Then useless features.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:
Why'd you name your company after your dick?
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:
- Lean
- their quantum computing work. C is of course a bad idea, we don't need yet another domain-specific language, Python library based solutions like Qiskit are obviously the way to go
Working remotely is hard if you don't already highly master the software and enterprise systems used.
Also you don't feel people's love as strongly, and usefulness is built on love, see also Steve Jobs's Pixar office space design philosophy.
But please, give workers a small silent office so that we can concentrate instead of a silly open space, and create an internal social network so people can see what others are doing.
Remote working is much better if the majority of the team also does it, otherwise you will get excluded. Maybe after VR...
This is one of the main reasons why Ciro Santilli invested in OurBigBook.com.
Ciro believes that the only thing students must be forced to learn is to speak read and write English and that a teacher's main job after that is to help students find their next big goals and also ties into the backward design philosophy.
Everything else, the student must choose.
This idea is generally known as self-directed learning.
This is most notable in University entry examinations of poor countries, where students often have to waste one extra year of their lives to go through preparation for the useless university entry exams. And then, surprise surprise, if they actually get in, they find that this is not what they really wanted to do, and they just go through to the end miserably because they understandably they don't want to risk another year of their lives.
And importantly: It must be easy to change your area of study.
Ciro saw this first hand École Polytechnique which was way freer than his university in Brazil.
Steve Jobs's university dropout stories from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address also come to mind.
Interesting projects:
- Brown University's Open Curriculum concept sounds exemplary:
- Gallatin School of Individualized Study from New York University
- Advanced Placement
The Purpose of Education by Noam Chomsky (2012)
Source. - 0:00 discusses education as a system of indoctrination: indoctrination for people to comply with the Establishment and pass tests, vs the Age of Enlightenment in which education should help you achieve your own intellectual/life goals. He suggests without specific evidence that after the 60's there was explicit intervention in the US to increase the indoctrination aspect, of which debt is a part.
- 15.45: assessment vs autonomy: exams are useless, except as a tool to help improve teaching and self assess. Tells anecdote about little girl who wanted to learn more about a subject, asked teacher how to learn more, teacher said you can't, you have to study for this useless national exam instead which will determine your future, and if I'm rehired or not.
Godfrey Hounsfield, 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine:[ref]
They tried hard to educate me but I responded only to physics and mathematics
Of course, this only made sense when Apple was more of an underdog to IBM, and Ciro Santilli greatly admires their defiance of the norm.
As of 2020 however, Apple is kind of on the top of the mobile world, and Think different simply makes no sense anymore, notably because it relies on closed source offline software used by millions.
it's Popular Now It Sucks comes to mind.
This is a trap every company that prides itself on it's "alternative culture" sets for itself. If they succeed, they could become the norm.
Take on Apple's Think different logo with Tux instead of the Apple logo
. In 2020, to think different, is to think open knowledge. Work by Ciro Santilli, based on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux.svg.
1976 Think different. 2011 Think mainstream
. Cropped from wallpapersafari.com/w/RqYUEj.