Incoming links: The best YouTube channels
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 a high flying bird scientist.
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: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.
In the event of war, you would be the type that hides away and makes the bombs.
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?
What Predicts Academic Ability? by Jordan B Peterson (2017)
Source. Good quotes:Creative people continuously step outside of the domain of evaluation structures
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.
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:This is closely related to effortless effort.
If Ciro spent as much effort on his job as he does on side projects, he'd be the most amazing worker.
Yes, low conscientiousness, give it to me.
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.
Ciro Santilli used to play video games when he was young. But after he reached 18 he got bored of them.
The problem is that no matter how you look at, the how to become famous in the real world game is just always more interesting and fulfilling.
Therefore adult Ciro enjoys only the following types of video game content in video form, so that other people waste their lives playing the games while you only see the highlights:
- speedrunning, including:
- tool-assisted speedrun, Ciro's favorite by far
- real-time attack speedrun
- meta breaking glitches, including in speedrunning and on PvP-games.
- Magic: The Gathering
- Video game reviews
The aspect Ciro enjoys about non-PvP games is atmosphere. Not as conveyed by useless story telling, but as conveyed by music and graphics, and the context deep idea. Legend of Zelda and Metroid come to mind.
And too many games commit the sins of dependency of dexterity, no save states, how do I skip this boring part, or jump straight to the beautiful one?
Another important point is; the perfect video game is an infinitely hard one.
It also doesn't help if you are already typing on a computer all day long on your job. Hands get tired. Eyes have an infinite capacity to consume useless YouTube videos however. Medically proved.
As a result, Ciro just watches videos about video games. Notably games he played when he was a teenager and already understand the rules for.
And things got even worse as after Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment, and he started to feel bad about playing any game that is not open source.
Five year old Ciro Santilli playing NES on a joystick
. He would get really mad because he could not finish those insanely hard games. Desperate, his parents would have to call older kids from the neighbourhood to help out. Pro tip from the future: the classic controller would almost always have been a more efficient controller. Maybe this kind of crap shapes one's future?Supercut of Doug S02E13 "Doug's Lost Weekend" (1992)
Source. Ciro Santilli used to watch Doug as kid. Of all the episodes, only this one stuck to his mind as an adult. It really drove the point home. The pain and joy of being addicted to anything really. Thankfully wheneve Ciro got addicted to a video game, he also quickly got tired of it. His last temporary addiction episode as of 2022 was Cataclysm DDA!
It is also so awesome how the episode pictures Dougs imagination while playing the video game, which is much more realistic than the actual crude graphics. The Nintendo hard reference is also clear.
Another great point of the episode is how good it is to play a single player video game taking turns with a friend on your side. Both people have to be fully engaged, and the game has to be hard. Perhaps those days are over now that everyone has their own computer and can each play together... and that is a huge shame. When playing on the couch with a friend, the one who is not playing can act as a copilot and thing more broadly as the other focuses on more specific details of execution. One is also reminded of pair programming.
Another great point is, partially when you are addicted, to play the video game at night until late, or very early in the morning. Ciro has fantastic memories of playing Zelda on the Nintendo 64 on Sunday mornings, or his emulation experiences from late weekend evenings at university: Video "Samba e Amor by Caetano Veloso (1975)".
The followup lucky hat segment is also amazing: doug.fandom.com/wiki/Doug%27s_Lucky_Hat
Looking back, the series is still extremely charming. It is interesting how Doug's best friend Skeeter Valentine is green. Ciro thought he was indian, but doug.fandom.com/wiki/Skeeter_Valentine says he's black.